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Here is Mark Steyn’s take down of Newt that appeared in the National Review in December.
I was wrong about Newt. Or, as Newt would say, I was fundamentally wrong. Fundamentally and profoundly wrong. I was as adverbially wrong about Newt as it’s possible to be. Back in the spring, during an analysis of the presidential field, I was asked by Sean Hannity what I thought of Gingrich. If memory serves, I guffawed. I suggested he was this season’s Alan Keyes — a guy running for president to boost his speaking fees but whose candidacy was otherwise irrelevant. I said I liked the cut of this Tim Pawlenty fellow, who promptly self-destructed. There would be a lot of that in the months ahead: Michele Bachmann ODing on Gardasil, Rick Perry floating the trial balloon of his candidacy all year long, only to puncture it with the jaunty swing of his spur ten minutes into the first debate. And when all the other Un-Romney of the Week candidates were gone, there was Newt, the last man standing, smirking, waddling to the debate podium. Unlike the niche candidates, he offers all the faults of his predecessors rolled into one: Like Michele Bachmann, his staffers quit; like Herman Cain, he spent the latter decades of the last century making anonymous women uncomfortable, mainly through being married to them; like Mitt Romney, he was a flip-flopper, being in favor of government mandates on health care before he was against them, and in favor of big-government climate-change “solutions” before he was against them, and in favor of putting giant mirrors in space to light American highways by night before he was agai . . . oh, wait, that one he may still be in favor of. So, if you live in the I-95 corridor, you might want to buy blackout curtains. …
Jennifer Rubin rounds out the Newt stuff for today.
It is symptomatic of Newt Gingrich’s ego and the distorted view of the world which accompanies it that he is convinced his woes are traceable to ideological enemies who lie and cheat to prevent his wonderfulness from becoming available to the American people. It was Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s fault he was brought up on ethics charges. It is the mainstream media that distorts his own words. And it is Mitt Romney who had the temerity to point out Gingrich’s own record and embarrass him, which has robbed him of his golden opportunity.
Sound farfetched? Well, if you saw his post-caucus speech, filled with venom, and watched his behavior thereafter you’ll come to see, I think, that he is now motivated purely by anger and spite. His ire is directed specifically at Romney (not Rep. Ron Paul (R-Tex.)) for reasons not entirely clear, although the notion of a viable candidate besting him for the nomination is probably too much for him to bear. …
Speaking of arrogant people, WSJ OpEd comments on the president’s latest stunt.
President Obama’s appointments of Richard Cordray as head of the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and of three new members of the National Labor Relations Board, are all unconstitutional.
Each of these jobs requires Senate confirmation. The president’s ability to fill them without that confirmation, using his constitutional power to “fill up vacancies that may happen during the recess of the Senate,” depends upon there actually being a recess. Both the House of Representatives and the Senate are open for business. The new appointees can pocket their government paychecks, but all their official acts will be void as a matter of law and will likely be struck down by the courts in legal challenges that are certain to come. …
… The president has done his new appointees and the public no favors. Both the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau are regulatory agencies with profound real-world impact. Those individuals and businesses subject to regulations and rulings adopted during the tenure of Mr. Obama’s recess appointees can challenge the legality of those measures in the courts, and they will very likely succeed.
Only two years ago in New Process Steel v. NLRB, the Supreme Court undercut hundreds of NLRB decisions by ruling that the board had not lawfully organized itself after the terms of two recess appointee members expired, leaving it without a quorum. Similar issues will arise when both the new financial bureau and the NLRB begin to act with members whose appointments are constitutionally insupportable.
The fact that the president has apparently triggered the constitutional crisis without really expecting to produce any lasting policy impact, and for no better reason than to bolster his claim of running against a “do-nothing” Congress (the key part of his re-election campaign), makes his behavior all the more reprehensible.
More from Nile Gardiner.
In December Barack Obama vainly declared himself the fourth best president in American history, up there with the likes of Abraham Lincoln and FDR, just three years into his first term. In an interview with 60 Minutes on CBS he observed:
“The issue here is not gonna be a list of accomplishments. As you said yourself, Steve, you know, I would put our legislative and foreign policy accomplishments in our first two years against any president – with the possible exceptions of Johnson, FDR, and Lincoln – just in terms of what we’ve gotten done in modern history. But, you know, but when it comes to the economy, we’ve got a lot more work to do. And we’re gonna keep on at it.”
Perhaps this display of self-importance is not surprising, coming from a president who enthusiastically accepted the Nobel Peace Prize after just a few months in the job, and even campaigned thousands of miles across the Atlantic in Berlin while running for office. This is a leader who thinks nothing of taking a $4 million, taxpayer-subsidised vacation in Hawaii – nearly 100 times the average annual salary of an American worker, which currently stands at $41,673.
And upon his return from the sun-swept beaches of the Pacific, the president decided to bypass the elected representatives of the US Congress on Wednesday by unilaterally installing “three members of the National Labor Relations Board as well as a director for the controversial new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau” (Richard Cordray), in a huge sop to the powerful Left-wing labour unions. The move has been condemned on Capitol Hill and described by a prominent legal scholar as “a tyrannical abuse of power”.
There is something rotten at the heart of the White House when the President ignores the separation of powers enshrined in the Constitution and rules with impunity. Not only is it an unhealthy power play by executive authority in the freest nation on earth, but it is also a display of extraordinary contempt for the American people 14 months after the US mid-terms where voters emphatically rejected the president’s agenda. Despite his self-proclaimed “shellacking” at the hands of the US electorate, President Obama continues to behave with impunity, in the belief that most Americans are wrong and that he is right. His approach is remarkably lacking in humility and empathy at a time of tremendous public dissatisfaction with the state of the nation. …
Jennifer Rubin says even the left is troubled by the latest Obama outrage.
… But on the left there is a growing sense of queasiness. Do they really want to set the precedent for President Romney or Santorum? And really, with this ploy why would the president ever submit to the ordinary confirmation process? The left-leaning Bloomberg View editorial board writes:
“We understand why the president, out of deep frustration, went around Republican senators. .. Nevertheless, our desire to have effective regulation doesn’t trump our reservations over the president’s unusual methods. .”.
We think the president, who is making confrontation with congressional Republicans a major theme of his re-election effort, is choosing politics over principle, and playing dangerously with the Constitution’s checks and balances, in choosing to tell the Senate when it is and is not in session.”
Tim Noah at the New Republic likewise grasps the lack of legal support for the president’s action: “I’m having trouble understanding how the recess appointment of Cordray can possibly withstand a legal challenge. And I’m really having trouble understanding why Obama didn’t take advantage of his constitutional window [January 3], when the Senate was inarguably in recess.” Because he wants the fight, not the appointees.
Obama is playing to the very worst inclinations on the left — the contempt for the strictures of precedent and the Constitution, which act as a check on needless confrontation, government overreach and legal chaos. Obama has made worse decisions in his presidency (putting the Afghanistan war on an election timetable), but he has never made one so destructive of the fabric of the Constitution and the comity that is essential for productive governance.
American.com says we have more ethanol regs to repeal.
Deficit hawks, environmentalists, and food processors are celebrating the expiration of the ethanol tax credit. This corporate handout gave $0.45 to ethanol producers for every gallon they produced and cost taxpayers $6 billion in 2011. So why did the powerful corn ethanol lobby let it expire without an apparent fight? The answer lies in legislation known as the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS), which creates government-guaranteed demand that keeps corn prices high and generates massive farm profits. Removing the tax credit but keeping the RFS is like scraping a little frosting from the ethanol-boondoggle cake.
The RFS mandates that at least 37 percent of the 2011-12 corn crop be converted to ethanol and blended with the gasoline that powers our cars. The ethanol mandate is causing corn demand to outstrip supply by more and more each year, creating a vulnerable market in which even the slightest production disturbance will have devastating consequences for the world’s poor. It is time for the federal government to stop requiring cars to burn food.
Human mouths and motor engines provide the main sources of demand for corn. …