Crimes Against Liberty (23 page)

Despite the media’s rank sycophancy, Obama’s scapegoating eventually lost its glimmer. A FOX News poll in April 2010 showed that 66 percent of American voters believed it was time for Obama to take responsibility for his own actions and quit blaming Bush.
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PART II

OFFENSES AGAINST AMERICAN INSTITUTIONS

Chapter Six

THE DICTATOR

CRIMES AGAINST THE CONSTITUTION, RULE OF LAW, AND CIVIL SOCIETY, PART 1

I
n the past year and a half, we’ve seen Obama cram ObamaCare through Congress against the will of the people. We’ve seen Health and Human Services secretary Sebelius summon insurance executives to the White House so she and President Obama could lecture them on their greed-born resistance to ObamaCare. We witnessed them browbeat insurance executives over the premiums they charge. And we saw the administration send a threatening letter to Humana and other companies threatening legal action for expressing their opinion that under ObamaCare some seniors would lose coverage.

We’ve observed how Obama has surrounded himself with numerous radical “czars”—those powerful advisers who are not confirmed by the Senate and thus not accountable to the legislative branch. We saw him appoint leftist activist judges. His most recent Supreme Court nominee, Elena Kagan, in her undergraduate thesis at Princeton, lamented the decline of socialism in the United States as “sad” for those who desire to “change America.”
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When clerking for Justice Thurgood Marshall, Kagan argued the Constitution confers “positive” rights to government aid, as opposed to being solely an instrument of limitation that protects liberty against governmental interference
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—an odious position to all who believe the Constitution means what it actually says.

Moreover, many of Obama’s appointees were corrupt, ranging from tax cheats to those involved in shady business dealings—which didn’t seem to matter a whit to Obama, as long as they could help him advance his agenda. The
Washington Post
acknowledged the administration’s willingness to appoint ethically challenged people “when an appointee’s qualifications appeared to trump other concerns,” from auto task force czar Steve Rattner, to Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, to Health and Human Services nominee Tom Daschle.
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The administration is steeped in an end-justifies-the-means culture, committed to doing whatever it takes to advance their agenda, details like the Constitution or legislative rules be damned. When criticized for resorting to secrecy, political bribery, intimidation, and other legislative shenanigans to enact ObamaCare, Obama advisor David Axelrod said the American people didn’t much care about the legislative process—they just wanted results. Axelrod had long subscribed to this cynical view; eight months earlier he said, “Ultimately, this is not about a process, it’s about results. If we’re going to get this thing done, obviously time is a-wasting.”
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In dismissing as mere “process” the kind of transparent, honest governance he had promised on the campaign trail, President Obama has exercised significantly greater power than our constitutional framers intended in his quest to transform America from free enterprise to socialism, from a nation primarily of earners to one primarily of dependents. Along those lines, Obama’s congressional ally Nancy Pelosi, speaking of ObamaCare, said, “We see it as an entrepreneurial bill, a bill that says to someone, if you want to be creative and be a musician or whatever, you can leave your work, focus on your talent, your skill, your passion, your aspirations because you will have health care.”
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In other words
, don’t worry about your healthcare bills, someone else will pay them.

Obama and his team are liberal ideologues who believe their mission is to impose on the rest of us—by whatever means available—their vision of a virtuous society. They view the Constitution, as originally understood, as an impediment, but reinterpreted, as a marvelous vehicle for transforming society in their image, which is the same way they regard the rule of law. But the rule of law is blind to ideology, a concept so foreign to the Obamites as to be unintelligible. As veteran conservative columnist George Will wrote, “Anyone could govern as boldly as their whims decreed, were it not for the skeletal structure that keeps civil society civil—the rule of law. The Obama administration is . . . careless regarding constitutional values and is acquiring a tincture of lawlessness.”
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“JUST LIKE YOUR TEENAGE KIDS”

A key reason why this administration feels justified in flouting the rule of law is that they see themselves as benevolent tutors who cannot let trivial technicalities like the Constitution impede their mission to enlighten the unwashed American masses. At a seminar on reconstructing America’s electrical grid, Secretary of Energy Steven Chu commented, “The American public, just like your teenage kids, aren’t acting in a way that they should act. The American public has to really understand in their core how important [energy conservation] is.” Chu has incorporated that patronizing attitude into the administration’s energy policy. As the
Wall Street Journal
’s Ian Talley observed, “The administration aims to teach [the American public]—literally.” Translating this outlook into practice, the Environmental Protection Agency is going to partner with the Parent Teacher Organization on a cross-country tour of 6,000 schools to teach (read: indoctrinate) actual children about climate change and energy efficiency. “We’re showing people across the country how energy efficiency can be part of what they do every day. Confronting climate change, saving money on our utility bills, and reducing our use of heavily-polluting energy can be as easy as making a few small changes.”
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After Chu’s patronizing comments were publicized, Energy Department spokesman Dan Leistikow assured us Chu was not comparing the public to teenagers, but merely insisting we need to educate teenagers about ways to save energy.
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Since they believe the Constitution doesn’t mean what it says, it’s unsurprising the administration would insist Chu’s actual words—that Americans were acting improperly “just like your teenage kids”—are infinitely flexible as well.

GOING WHERE NO MODERN PRESIDENT HAS GONE BEFORE

Obama’s lawless tendencies are starkly evident in his dealings with NASA and the space program, which he has subordinated to environmental projects like developing alternative energy—an effort he suggested should be our “next Apollo Program.”
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First, some background: during the Democratic primary, Obama indicated his $18 billion education plan (including his misguided ambition to federalize preschool) would be funded, in part, by delaying for five years NASA’s Constellation program, which would return humans to the moon.
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This plan stoked criticism about the futility of defunding one of the federal government’s greatest investments in math and science in the name of renewing its investment in math and science education. There are also national security implications: Obama’s plan could leave the United States unable to send people into space for a decade absent the aid of foreign nations, such as Russia and China; we might not be able to service the International Space Station; and we risk falling behind China, which could beat us back to the moon.
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After coming under sustained criticism, Obama attempted to “clarify” his plan, vowing to continue developing the next generation of space vehicles and complete the international space station. He said he “endorses the goal of sending human missions to the moon by 2020, as a precursor in an orderly progression to missions to more distant destinations, including Mars.”
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He also declared, naturally, that global warming monitoring would have to be a major part of the space program.
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Upon taking office, however, Obama made it clear space exploration was not a high priority. In addition to delaying any return to the moon and abandoning the manned space program, he showed a preference for largely turning over space travel to the private sector. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that when Obama finally found a government program he wanted to leave to the private sector, it would be one of the few that is best controlled by the government, because of its national security implications.

It also follows he would abandon a program that has long symbolized American exceptionalism, a concept Obama rejected with his famous comment, “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.” As one blogger noted, “From now on, whenever we remember with pride the courage and sacrifice of the Mercury astronauts, or Neil Armstrong taking ‘One small step for a man, one giant step for mankind,’ or Jim Lovell and the crew of Apollo 13 calmly tinkering with the duct tape to repair their capsule, we’ll quickly deflate with the afterthought: ‘Oh yeah. Now the Russians do that. We don’t.’”
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Once he was elected, Obama’s funeral plans for Constellation quickly became clear, notwithstanding his campaign promises to retain the program. Office of Management and Budget director Peter Orszag announced, “We are proposing canceling the program, not delaying it.” The
New York Times
reported Obama had no other space exploration mission planned to replace the moon voyage. “What the administration calls a ‘bold new initiative’ does not spell out a next destination or timetable for getting there,” the
Times
noted, adding Obama’s NASA would be “fundamentally different” from today’s NASA. It would cease to “operate its own spacecraft, but essentially buy tickets for its astronauts.”
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All too typically, the Obama administration skirted the law in implementing its new space policy. Obama’s proposed 2011 budget envisioned canceling Constellation and its Ares rockets and Orion crew capsule. So NASA notified bidders, including Boeing and United Space Alliance, that it was withdrawing a 2009 bid for work on the Constellation program.
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This angered Congressman Bill Posey, who argued the “administration’s unilateral decision to cancel contracts associated with the Constellation program absent congressional consent is a direct violation of the law and of congressional intent.... Congress has not directed the administration to cancel the Constellation program, in fact it has done just the opposite in recent legislation.”
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Posey was referring to “The Consolidated Appropriations for Fiscal Year 2010,” which expressly prohibits the “termination or elimination of any program, project or activity of the architecture for the Constellation program.”

Posey joined with some thirty congressmen in sending a letter to NASA administrator Charles Bolden accusing the administration of further violating the law by forming five “tiger teams” and setting aside FY2010 Constellation funds to shut down Constellation and “transition to the new program” without congressional approval. NASA administrator Bolden fired a letter back to Congress claiming NASA had not broken the law because it was only
looking into
canceling the program, but had not actually canceled it yet.
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This was hard to take seriously, since NASA had already canceled Constellation’s bidding process.

A month later, six Republican senators began an effort to save Constellation. Citing Congress’s rightful authority over the space program, Senator George LeMieux declared the program’s cancellation “would reverse nearly 50 years of U.S. space policy and would effectively end the United States’ leadership role in space.”
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It turns out the senators’ concerns were not exaggerated. By June, NASA had begun to wind down construction of the rockets and spacecraft that would have transported our astronauts back to the moon, dismantling the program in defiance of the congressional ban on canceling it.
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Obama’s unilateral decision would “force as many as 30,000 irreplaceable engineers and managers out of the space industry,” and the “human exploration program, one of the most inspirational tools to promote science, technology, engineering and math to our young people,” would be “reduced to mediocrity,” according to an open letter signed by former NASA administrator Michael Griffin, legendary flight director Gene Kranz, and several NASA astronauts.
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Lockheed Martin issued a statement saying the program’s elimination would cause the loss of “significant investment [that] has already been made by the nation and private industry.”
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The administration gave short shrift to planning how private firms would take over the program, to attendant safety concerns, and to the poor record of commercially oriented NASA programs. Indeed, it is remarkable how casually Obama approached such a crucial decision that could, according to Democratic congresswoman Donna Edwards of Maryland, “essentially decimate America’s human space-flight capacity.”
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