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John Fund explains how the dishonesty of President Pick-and-Choose will probably cause the collapse of immigration reform.
Chuck Todd, the political director of NBC News, startled much of Washington on Sunday morning when he announced on Meet the Press that White House aides he’s spoken to have lost confidence that immigration reform will pass. He reported that “suddenly the White House doesn’t see a path” to passing a bill through the House this year.
There are many reasons why immigration reform is in trouble, ranging from the fact that immigration is not currently a burning political issue to the inherent complexity and internal contradictions of a 1,200-page bill.
But there is another less-discussed reason. The Obama administration’s instinctive dishonesty and contempt for the rule of law are finally catching up with it. Few Republicans in the House — even those who devoutly want immigration reform — trust the Obama administration to enforce with consistency and integrity anything that passes Congress.
Take the 900-page monstrosity of a law that’s been dubbed “Obamacare.” When it passed back in 2010, the law was clear on many points. It decreed that beginning in 2014, any company with more than 50 full-time employees would be required to offer them health-care insurance or pay stiff fines. But it’s been impossible, in the three years since the law’s passage, to work out the Byzantine requirements of that mandate. Max Baucus (D., Mont.) said in a congressional hearing he feared that Obamacare’s implementation would result in a “train wreck,” and many other Democrats have come to share his anxiety. White House aides fretted that enforcing the mandate’s timetable would hurt job creation in the run-up to the 2014 midterm elections and put Democratic control of the Senate in jeopardy.
The White House could have handled the problem as the Constitution envisioned and opened up negotiations with Congress to change the law. But it quickly concluded that the Republican House would demand too much in exchange for any adjustment to the law. …
Charles Krauthammer has fun with globalony.
… For the sake of argument, nonetheless, let’s concede that global warming is precisely what Obama thinks it is. Then answer this: What in God’s name is his massive new regulatory and spending program — which begins with a war on coal and ends with billions in more subsidies for new Solyndras — going to do about it?
The United States has already radically cut carbon dioxide emissions — more than any country on earth since 2006, according to the International Energy Agency. Emissions today are back down to 1992 levels.
And yet, at the same time, global emissions have gone up. That’s because — surprise! — we don’t control the energy use of the other 96 percent of humankind.
At the heart of Obama’s program are EPA regulations that will make it impossible to open any new coal plant and will systematically shut down existing plants. “Politically, the White House is hesitant to say they’re having a war on coal,” explained one of Obama’s climate advisers. “On the other hand, a war on coal is exactly what’s needed.”
Net effect: tens of thousands of jobs killed, entire states impoverished. This at a time of chronically and crushingly high unemployment, slow growth, jittery markets and deep economic uncertainty.
But that’s not the worst of it. This massive self-sacrifice might be worthwhile if it did actually stop global warming and save the planet. What makes the whole idea nuts is that it won’t. This massive self-inflicted economic wound will have no effect on climate change. …
Craig Pirrong reminds us of the folly of ethanol mandates. Mandates, by the way, signed into law by George W. Bush who proved he could be as stupid as the idiot incumbent.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions. A couple of examples from environmentalist attempts to mitigate climate change.
The first relates to ethanol. In its infinite wisdom, in 2010 Congress mandated the use of renewable fuels with lower CO2 content than corn ethanol to meet the renewable fuel standard it created in 2005. Sugar ethanol from Brazil fits the bill. But given the blend wall and other limits on ethanol usage, this created an excess of corn ethanol in the US, and created an incentive to export excess corn ethanol from the US to Brazil, and import sugar ethanol from Brazil.
The problem being, of course that all the fuel burned to ship ethanol from the US to Brazil, and from Brazil to the US, pours CO2 into the atmosphere. And the net result: more CO2 emissions than would have occurred absent the mandate to meet the renewable fuel standards with low CO2 producing fuels:
Left hypocrisy exposed by Victor Davis Hanson.
One of the strangest things about the modern progression in liberal thought is its increasing comfort with elitism and high style. Over the last 30 years, the enjoyment of refined tastes, both material and psychological, has become a hallmark of liberalism — hand in glove with the art of professional altruism, so necessary to the guilt-free enjoyment of the good life. Take most any contemporary issue, and the theme of elite progressivism predominates.
Higher education? A visitor from Mars would note that the current system of universities and colleges is designed to promote the interests of an elite at the expense of the middle and lower-middle classes. UCLA, Yale, and even CSU Stanislaus run on premises far more reactionary and class-based than does Wal-Mart. The teaching loads and course responsibilities of tenured full professors have declined over the last half-century, while the percentage of units taught by graduate students and part-time faculty, with few benefits and low pay, has soared.
The number of administrators has likewise climbed — even as student indebtedness has skyrocketed, along with the unemployment rate among recent college graduates. A typical scenario embodying these bizarre trends would run something like the following: The UC assistant provost for diversity affairs, or the full professor of Italian literature, focusing on gender and the self, depend on lots of graduate and undergraduate students in the social sciences and humanities piling up debt without any guarantee of jobs, while part-time faculty subsidize the formers’ lifestyles by teaching, without grading assistants, the large introductory undergraduate courses, getting paid a third to half what those with tenure receive.
The conference and the academic book, with little if any readership, promote the career interest and income of the trendy administrator and the full professor, and are subsidized by either the taxpayers or the students or both. All of the above assumes that a nine-month teaching schedule, with tenure, grants, sabbaticals, and release time, are above reproach and justify yearly tuition hikes exceeding the rate of inflation. The beneficiaries of the system win exemption from criticism through loud support of the current progressive agenda, as if they were officers with swagger sticks in the culture wars who must have their own perks if they are to properly lead the less-well-informed troops out of the trenches. …
Today we opened with an example of the extra-legal actions of the administration and Kim Strassel provides more at the close.
For a true expression of the imperious and extralegal tendencies of the Obama administration, there is little that compares with the Wisdom of Solomon. Lafe Solomon, that is, the acting general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board.
Mr. Solomon’s wisdom was on revealing display this week, in the form of a newly disclosed letter that the Obama appointee sent to Cablevision in May. The letter was tucked into Cablevison’s petition asking the Supreme Court this week to grant an emergency stay of NLRB proceedings against it. The Supremes unfortunately denied that request, though the exercise may prove valuable for shining new light on the labor board’s conceit.
A half-year has passed since the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in Noel Canning that President Obama’s appointments to the NLRB were unconstitutional, and thus that the board lacks a legal quorum. In May, the Third Circuit affirmed this ruling. Yet the NLRB—determined to keep churning out a union agenda—has openly defied both appeals courts by continuing to issue rulings and complaints.
Regional directors in April filed two such unfair-labor-practice complaints against Cablevision. The company requested that Mr. Solomon halt the proceedings, given the NLRB’s invalid status. It is Mr. Solomon’s refusal, dated May 28, that provides the fullest expression of the NLRB’s insolence.
The acting general counsel begins his letter by explaining that the legitimacy of the board is really neither here nor there. Why? Because Mr. Solomon was himself “appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate”—and therefore, apparently, is now sole and unchecked arbiter of all national labor policy.
This is astonishing on many levels, the least of which is that it is untrue. Mr. Solomon is the acting general counsel precisely because the Senate has refused to confirm him since he was first nominated in June 2011. Nor will it, ever, given his Boeing escapades. …