Crimes Against Liberty (28 page)

Then there was Senator Bernie Sanders, who secured $10 billion in new funding for community health centers for Vermont, though he denied it was a “sweetheart deal.” Nebraska’s Senator Nelson and Michigan senator Carl Levin also secured an exemption for non-profit insurers in their respective states from a significant excise tax, which will be borne by the other forty-eight states. Pennsylvania, New York, and Florida received special protections for their Medicare Advantage beneficiaries when the program was making nationwide cuts.
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Senator Chris Dodd received $100 million in funding for a university hospital—not that his vote was ever in doubt. Vermont and Massachusetts will receive federal subsides for their Medicaid expansion costs.
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Obama silenced Big Pharma’s opposition by agreeing not to further cut Medicare’s payments to them and by abandoning his campaign promise to push for importing drugs from Canada. He allegedly won the support of the American Medical Association by agreeing to cancel all or part of the 21 percent cut in physicians’ reimbursements (the “doc fix”). He seduced AARP with a promise to eliminate subsidies for Medicare Advantage, which was eating into AARP’s side business, the Medi-gap insurance program, which supplements Medicare coverage.
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In exchange for its support and in keeping with Obama’s unsavory alliance with unions, Big Labor earned an exemption from the new Cadillac tax on high-cost insurance coverage.
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But one industry wouldn’t give in to Obama: the medical device industry, which rejected Obama’s Godfather-like offer to cut costs in exchange for his promise not to impose even worse cuts.
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Now those crucial, life-saving companies are facing a 2.3 percent excise tax on sales of medical devices, which is expected to raise $20 billion over ten years to help fund ObamaCare. Industry experts fear the tax will destroy jobs, innovation, and small companies with thin profit margins.
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It will also likely increase the cost, and thus reduce the availability, of such devices as automatic external defibrillators (AEDs), whose wide availability, according to research reported by the
New England Journal of Medicine,
could significantly improve the survival rates of cardiac arrest patients .
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Perhaps even more disturbing were indications Obama’s parade of bribes and threats at times may have descended into illegality. For example, there was widespread speculation that Obama offered judgeships to secure healthcare votes.
The Weekly Standard
reported that in March 2010 Obama hosted ten House Democrats who had voted against the House bill the previous November. One of the ten was Utah’s Jim Matheson, whose brother Scott M. Matheson, Jr., was nominated by Obama
that very day
to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit.
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Along the same lines,
Human Events
reported a “rumor” that two retiring Democratic congressmen from Tennessee, Bart Gordon and John Tanner, were promised positions as NASA administrator and U.S. Ambassador to NATO, respectively, in exchange for their ObamaCare votes.
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(Gordon ultimately voted for ObamaCare, while Tanner opposed it.) And perhaps most inglorious in this sordid process was Obama’s last minute promise to Congressman Bart Stupak and other allegedly pro-life Democrats, as previously mentioned, to issue a counterfeit executive order denying federal funding for abortion in exchange for their “yes” votes.

In addition to all this, Democrats reportedly threatened to strip Connecticut senator Joe Lieberman of his chairmanship of the Homeland Security Committee for opposing Obama’s public option.

Taking in the full ugliness and corruption of this process, Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell said, “This bill is a monstrosity, a 2,100-page monstrosity full of special deals for people who are willing to vote for it. And they’re playing these kind of games with the nation’s health care. This is an outrage.”
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And indeed it is.

“TARP IS NOT A PIGGY BANK”

Obama has shown a similar disregard for the rule of law in his handling of TARP bailout funds. Obama brags about how much TARP monies have been repaid (notwithstanding his refusal to allow some banks to pay their loans back and his plans to immediately spend recovered funds on yet more quixotic jobs creation programs).
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But it’s hard to take seriously his pledges to safeguard these funds when he frequently treats them as his personal stash.

One particularly egregious example was the administration’s effort to transfer $30 billion of repaid TARP money to a new small-business credit program. Senator Judd Gregg upbraided OMB director Peter Orszag over what would have been an illegal act. Holding up a copy of the TARP bill, Gregg declared, “Let me read to you again, because you don’t appear to understand the law. The law is very clear. The monies recouped from TARP shall be paid into the general fund of the Treasury for the reduction of the public debt.” TARP, said Gregg, is not “a piggy bank.” Heritage Foundation senior legal policy analyst Andrew Grossman agreed. “The administration,” said Grossman, “lacks legal authority” to use TARP monies for anything it chooses outside the bill’s specific intent. “If the authority is as broad as the administration and some lawmakers say, then it is unconstitutional. Congress cannot pass the buck and give unlimited power to the executive.”
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BIG BROTHER

In light of their intolerance of criticism, their belief in behavior modification, and their cavalier rejection of the rule of law, it’s unsurprising this administration sometimes seems like it comes straight out of
1984
. For example, one Big Brother
-
sounding post on the White House blog read as though the administration had declared a private war on U.S. citizens—the ones who opposed ObamaCare, at any rate—and was recruiting “spies” to snitch on the offenders. The post, by White House “new media director” Macon Phillips, said,

Scary chain e-mails and videos are starting to percolate on the Internet, breathlessly claiming, for example, to “uncover” the truth about the President’s health insurance reform positions.... There is a lot of information about health insurance reform out there, spanning from control of personal finances to end of life care. These rumors often travel just below the surface via chain e-mails or through casual conversation. Since we can’t keep track of all of them here at the White House, we’re asking for your help. If you get an e-mail or something on the web about health insurance reform that seems fishy, send it to [email protected].
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The blog entry brought fire from conservatives. Senator John Barrasso declared, “If you get an e-mail from your neighbor and it doesn’t sound right, send it to the White House? People, I think all across America, are going to say, is this 1984? What is happening here? Is big brother watching?” Accusing the White House of compiling an “enemies list,” Senator John Cornyn sent a letter to Obama, saying, “I am not aware of any precedent for a president asking American citizens to report their fellow citizens to the White House for pure political speech that is deemed ‘fishy’ or otherwise inimical to the White House’s political interests.” Cornyn expressed understandable concern that the White House’s speech monitoring effort could chill citizens’ political expression.
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The more Obama overreached, the more simmering citizen angst boiled into outrage. In response to the snitch program, the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons and the Coalition for Urban Renewal and Education filed a federal lawsuit to prohibit the Executive Office of the President, the White House Office of Health Care Reform and its director Nancy-Ann DeParle, and Macon Phillips from collecting and maintaining data on citizens’ protected speech.
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Eventually, the White House reversed its policy of encouraging citizens to report ObamaCare opponents to the White House. But less than a month later, the White House came under criticism for engaging in another form of data mining and archiving. It had implemented a plan to permanently archive citizen comments posted on the White House’s Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, and Twitter pages. The White House insisted it was just acting “out of an abundance of caution” to comply with the Presidential Records Act, which requires that information generated by the president and his staff be preserved.

A conservative government watchdog group, the National Legal and Policy Center, didn’t buy that excuse. “This is a huge, secretive effort by the White House to capture web material far beyond what is required by the Presidential Records Act, which only requires archiving materials produced by the president and his staff at the Executive Office of the President,” said NLPC chairman Ken Boehm. A spokesman for the Competitive Enterprise Institute said he didn’t share the NLPC’s concern, but believed the government should make extra efforts to inform posters that their contributions will be archived.
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Within a day or two Obama himself got into the act, attempting to use his office to directly mobilize his supporters on the healthcare effort. He sent out his own e-mail castigating opponents of ObamaCare for “filling the airwaves and the Internet with outrageous falsehoods to scare people into opposing change.”
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He later used the same language in a radio address bashing insurance companies for “filling the airwaves with deceptive and dishonest ads.”

During the final push for healthcare reform, Nancy-Ann DeParle, the White House’s pointwoman for ObamaCare, began “feverishly” sending out unsolicited e-mail to federal employees proselytizing for ObamaCare. The chief executive’s allocation of federal dollars to pressure federal employees into supporting his policies was obviously improper, but what’s more, these e-mails were sent to the employees’ official government e-mail accounts for weeks without permission or request. Some of the employees felt threatened by “the overt political language,” according to
CBS News
. Tellingly, many State Department employees complained privately about the partisan messages but wouldn’t publicly object for fear of retribution. Richard Grenell, a former spokesman for four U.S. ambassadors to the UN, noted, “Federal employees are public servants, not partisan foot soldiers for President Obama and shouldn’t have to decide whether a partisan White House request can be ignored without consequences.”
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A similar incident occurred at the Obama-Holder Justice Department, which formed a secret, in-house blogging group to influence public opinion. Set up and operating out of the Justice Department’s Office of Public Affairs, the “Blog Squad” used liberal bloggers to scour the Internet for news stories, commentaries, and blog posts critical of the administration and then post comments supporting their agenda. Similarly, the administration and its allies enlisted supporters to call conservative radio talk shows to create the appearance of widespread grassroots support of Obama and dissent from conservative positions. The administration is obviously projecting when it falsely depicts the genuine grassroots tea party protests as an “Astroturf” phenomenon—a manufactured, top-down, artificial publicity campaign—because that is precisely the type of activism the administration was sponsoring.

In fact, Cass Sunstein, who “has long been one of Barack Obama’s closest confidants” and is now his head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, has advocated the government’s use of fake websites and outside 501(c)(3) interest groups to front as independent supporters of government policy and to “cognitively infiltrate” opposing websites. This is especially troubling considering Sunstein’s new position entails him “overseeing policies relating to privacy, information quality, and statistical programs.”

Sunstein had the right background to lead this kind of effort for Obama. While at Harvard Law School in 2008, Sunstein, according to
Salon
magazine’s Glenn Greenwald, co-wrote a “truly pernicious paper proposing that the U.S. Government employ teams of covert agents and pseudo-‘independent’ advocates to ‘cognitively infiltrate’ online groups and websites—as well as other activist groups—which advocate views that Sunstein deems ‘false conspiracy theories.’” The purpose would be to “increase citizens’ faith in government officials and undermine the credibility of conspiracists.”
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Does this not sound familiar? Is this not precisely the strategy the administration has used to depict tea party protestors as fringe, violent, “conspiracist,” and downright crazy? Based on these factors,
Red State
’s Eric Erickson speculated the Obama administration could be behind a new anti-tea party website called “The Other 95,” which “defends the government from tea party criticisms and attacks the tea party movement as fringe.” The designer of the site, reported Erickson, is affiliated with
MoveOn.org
and other leftwing sites and causes. But “most notable,” Erickson said, “the donations page makes donations out to Democracy in Action,” which “is
not
for individual activists to use,” but for small and medium sized 501(c)(3) organizations and other leftists. Its clients include ACORN and True Majority.
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