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Streetwise Professor posts on how President Trainwreck wants to spread disaster to the internet.
… If the substance isn’t bad enough, the process is even worse. FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler was originally leaning towards a less intrusive approach to net neutrality that would avoid dropping the Title II bomb. But Obama orchestrated a campaign behind the scenes to pressure an ostensibly independent agency to go all medieval (or at least all New Deal) on the Internet. Obama added to the backstage pressure with a very public call for intrusive regulation that put Wheeler and the other two Democrats on the Commission in an impossible position. (Another illustration of the consequences of Presidential elections: it’s not just the commander that matters, but the anonymous foot soldiers and the camp followers too.)
Yes, part of Obama’s insistence reflected his beliefs: after all, he is a big government control freak. And yes, part reflects the fact that some of his biggest supporters and donors are rabid NN supporters-primarily because they will benefit if they don’t have to pay the full cost that they impose.
But what convinced Obama to make this a priority was his personal vanity and his determination to engage in political warfare by pursuing initiatives that he can implement unilaterally without Congressional involvement. Read this and weep:
“While Obama administration officials were warming to the idea of calling for tougher rules, it took the November elections to sway Mr. Obama into action.
After Republicans gained their Senate majority, Mr. Obama took a number of actions to go around Congress, including a unilateral move to ease immigration rules. Senior aides also began looking for issues that would help define the president’s legacy. Net neutrality seemed like a good fit.
Soon, Mr. Zients paid his visit to the FCC to let Mr. Wheeler know the president would make a statement on high-speed Internet regulation. Messrs. Zients and Wheeler didn’t discuss the details, according to Mr. Wheeler.
Mr. Obama made them clear in a 1,062-word statement and two-minute video. He told the FCC to regulate mobile and fixed broadband providers more strictly and enact strong rules to prevent those providers from altering download speeds for specific websites or services.
In the video, Mr. Obama said his stance was confirmation of a long-standing commitment to net neutrality. The statement boxed in Mr. Wheeler by giving the FCC’s two other Democratic commissioners cover to vote against anything falling short of Mr. Obama’s position.
That essentially killed the compromise proposed by Mr. Wheeler, leaving him no choice but to follow the path outlined by the president.”
Read this again: “Senior aides also began looking for issues that would help define the president’s legacy. Net neutrality seemed like a good fit.” So to achieve a legacy, the Narcissist in Chief decides to interfere with the most successful, innovative industry of the past half-century, and perhaps ever.
What, screwing up the health care industry isn’t enough of a legacy? …
Kevin Williamson writes on the budget process.
President Obama has submitted a budget proposal to Congress. There are many possible responses that Congress might offer in return. The correct one is this: “Thank you for your input, Mr. President. But we’ll take it from here.”
We have three branches of government for a reason, and the Constitution invests each branch with certain powers and responsibilities, establishing divisions within government that have shown themselves, for more than a couple of centuries now, to be extraordinarily prudent. The president is not a prime minister, nor is he the republican model of government’s ersatz king. He is the chief administrative officer in the federal government and commander-in-chief of the armed forces. He is given special responsibilities in the matter of foreign relations, notably in the negotiation of treaties and the making of war, though in both cases his authority is limited by that of the legislative branch, which can reject a proposed treaty and has the power to declare (or decline to declare) war.
He does not have any special constitutional role when it comes to budgets. The Constitution invests the House with the power to initiate revenue bills and the Senate the power to propose or concur with amendments to such bills. The president has a relatively large role in external affairs; in internal affairs, particularly matters of taxing and spending, Congress should — should — play the dominant role. Which is not to say that the president shouldn’t propose a budget plan, if he thinks he has some good ideas. (This one doesn’t, though he may think that he does.) But Congress is under no special obligation to act on them, or to give them any special consideration.
One of the problems with our currently lopsided mode of government — in which the president is the central player in government across the board — is that we have come to think of the president as the national actor and Congress as the national reactor. …
John Fund and Hans Von Spakovsky on Eric Holder’s politicization of Justice.
Departing attorney general Eric Holder’s claim this week in a press conference that there has “been no politicization” of the Justice Department under him makes it appear as if he is living in a Potemkin-like state of denial in the main Justice building. Holder went so far as to claim that he had been forced to clean up the department he took over from the Bush administration. “You want to look at a Justice Department that’s been politicized, you look at the one I inherited,” he claimed.
When we were researching our recent book on Holder’s six-year tenure at Justice, we talked to numerous career employees who were shocked at how much further Holder had gone than any previous administration in politicizing Justice. One longtime lawyer in the Civil Rights Division told us that Holder had
racialized and radicalized the Division to the point of corruption. They embedded politically leftist extremists in the career ranks who have an agenda that does not comport with equal protection or the rule of law; who believe that the ends justify the means; and who behave unprofessionally and unethically. Their policy is to intimidate and threaten employees who do not agree with their politics, and even moderate Democrats have left the Department because they were treated as enemies by administration officials and their lackeys.
Holder said that the “notion” that DOJ has been politicized is “totally inconsistent with the facts.” But the facts show that the politicization started almost immediately, such as when political appointees at Justice ordered the dismissal of the New Black Panther Party voter-intimidation case at the beginning of 2009 because they did not want to enforce the Voting Rights Act against black defendants, ending the race-neutral enforcement of the law. …
And Debra Saunders posts on Holder’s ” sorry sense of justice.”
… Holder’s big hurdle to win confirmation as President Barack Obama’s head enforcer in 2009 was rooted in his actions as deputy attorney general to President Bill Clinton. Holder infamously gave Clinton cover to issue his 177 out-the-door presidential pardons Jan. 20, 2001. Holder even gave a “neutral, toward leaning positive” recommendation to a pardon for Marc Rich, who fled the country after the feds indicted him in 1983 for evading $48 million in income taxes and illegally buying oil from Iran during the 1979 hostage crisis. Ex-wife Denise Rich was a prominent Democratic donor. The pardon wiped clean charges for which the fugitive evaded trial.
As attorney general, Holder has had a chance to atone for his bad pardon recommendations by pushing commutations for low-level federal inmates who don’t have cozy connections with Democratic heavyweights. But he has been slow to use the pardon attorney’s office to champion relief for low-level drug offenders — many of them minorities — sentenced to decades behind bars thanks to the excesses of federal prosecutors. Holder can be brutal when black communities charge racial profiling by beat cops, who don’t work for Washington, but not on overzealous federal law enforcement under his own jurisdiction.
In his first term, Obama issued one commutation. Finally, in December 2013, Obama commuted the sentences of eight crack offenders serving draconian federal mandatory minimum terms. That was great. But then in April, Holder announced a clemency initiative for nonviolent low-level drug offenders who had served at least 10 years and stayed out of trouble. There have been 11 commutations since then — which makes the new initiative a cover for the administration’s paucity on pardons and commutations.
That’s par for the course for Holder. …