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Daniel Henninger says regardless of the Court decision today, the Affordable Care Act will never take effect.
Leaked national security secrets may be a dime a dozen now, but the Supreme Court still sits as the last major American institution that doesn’t conduct its business out the back door. Which is to say none of the Supreme Court’s nine justices called me to reveal their ObamaCare decision before its Thursday annunciation. What difference does that make? Anyone who had to wait for the Supreme Court to tell them what the Affordable Care Act represents is too far behind the curve to ever catch up. Alas, that includes Barack Obama, the president that time forgot.
Whether ObamaCare was affirmed or overturned by the ladies and men in robes, nothing was going to change one unimpeachable fact: From day one, the Obama health-care legislation was swimming against the tides of history. It was a legislative monolith out of sync with an iPad world. In the era of the smartphone, ObamaCare was rotary-dial health reform.
The signs this was so were everywhere, but Barack Obama and the Pelosi-Reid edition of the Democratic Party blew past them. Years before it arrived at the Supreme Court’s door, the Obama health-care law was unpopular with the American public. With occasional exceptions, its unfavorables have been above 50% for nearly three years. And why not? It runs counter to the daily experience of virtually everyone.
Electronics, foods, fashion, entertainment, apps, social media, appliances—pretty much anything that escapes the cold hands of a public agency is laid before us in a dazzling, unprecedented array of choices. Despite all the incoming, people learned to navigate the options. Virtually everyone has become adept at customizing a personal milieu that suits them. Given a reasonably growing economy, they’ll be able to sustain these choices.
In this context, the Affordable Care Act gave new meaning to the word “outlier.” …
Charles Lane, who appears on the panel sometimes with Sir Charles, has an interesting take on role of the Court.
… the United States periodically redefines the role of the federal government in society, in a process that is both political and legal — and, sometimes, more revolutionary than evolutionary. In that sense, we do have a “living Constitution.”
In the 1930s, expanding federal power was innovative, promising. By blessing it, the court aligned itself with the wave of the future, in this country and globally. Ditto for the 1960s. Much of the legislation that resulted — from Social Security to the Voting Rights Act — was indeed progressive.
Today, however, there is nothing new about federal intervention — and much evidence from the past 70 years that big programs produce inefficiencies and unintended consequences.
The post-New Deal consensus about the scope of federal power has broken down amid national, and global, concern over the welfare state’s cost and intrusiveness — a sea change of which the tea party is but one manifestation. Obamacare itself, which has consistently polled badly, fueled that movement. …
Frank Bruni of the NY Times on the things presidents can and can’t control.
… And now? He’s beholden to lawmakers’ whims, buffeted by global winds, as much a spectator as an agent of the most important developments around him, a leader of the free world who follows the news like the rest of us. Against Obama’s wishes and will, his attorney general is investigated and excoriated by a House panel. His jobs bill languishes. Egypt charts a once unexpected course, electing an Islamist president. The Syrian government pursues a bloody crackdown against its people, ignoring the Obama administration’s protests.
At times he looks dazed, and flails. To focus his economic message, he gave an unfocused 54-minute speech on the apparent theory that the more sentences in the mix, the greater the odds of a keeper.
Less than a week later, he stepped up to a lectern at the end of a conference of world leaders in Mexico and rambled some more, whatever particular point he intended to highlight getting lost in a wonky, windy tutorial on the European economy. He stammered. Sputtered. Slowed down to the point where he almost went into oratorical reverse.
Much has been made of his recent executive decision regarding young illegal immigrants as an act of sheer political calculation. It may well be. But I wonder if there wasn’t an emotional motivation as well — if he wasn’t trying to find one small patch of ground on which he could have his unchallenged say and way. …
Barack is back in Boston and Andrew Malcolm has thoughts.
Boston has been very good to him.
Back in 2004 a wannabe senator named Barack Obama spoke at the Democratic National Convention there. Remember, that was the hometown event where John Kerry saluted America and reported for duty? And America replied, ‘That’s OK. Go back to your yacht moored in Rhode Island to dodge Massachusetts’ taxes.”
Obama’s speech did absolutely nothing for Kerry, who thought he’d become president at lunchtime on election day that fall. But by evening he knew he’d become instead the second consecutive Democrat to lose to George W. Bush. Oh, the humanity!
But Obama’s Boston convention speech was very well-received. Just ask him. He went home to Illinois after and crushed his powerhouse Republican opponent, Alan Keyes. And began a brief Senate career that was mostly spent out of town seeking the next office.
The Boston experience gave him the confidence that he could take on the vaunted Clinton machine and, later, pretty much defeat anyone or anything if he’d just throw another speech at it. Obama speeches almost always have someone yelling, “We love you, Barack!” He loves the public adulation. Who wouldn’t? “I love you back,” Obama claims. …
Kevin Williamson wants the president to know the difference between outsourcing and offshoring.
Could somebody please get Barack Obama to shut up about “outsourcing” until some undergraduate aide has explained to him what the word means? As it stands, the president is showing himself an ignorant rube on the subject, and that is to nobody’s advantage.
The Obama campaign, as you probably know, has been running ads denouncing Mitt Romney’s role at Bain Capital, in which Romney made various business deals that had the effect of making a whole lot of money for Bain’s customers while also allowing a lot of dirty foreigners to eat, and God knows the world would be better off if a billion-some Chinese were hungry and desperate, that being an obvious recipe for global stability.
Because the Obama campaign knows that one of its most important constituencies is economically illiterate yokels — a demographic to which the president himself apparently belongs — it is on the airwaves claiming “Romney’s never stood up to China — all he’s ever done is send them our jobs.’’ (Whose?) The Obama campaign cites a Washington Post story on the subject, and the Romney campaign has noted that the folks over at WaPo did not distinguish between outsourcing and offshoring (and, indeed, the story is not a very smart one — do read it and see). Obama responded thus: “Yesterday, his advisers tried to clear this up by telling us that there was a difference between ‘outsourcing’ and ‘offshoring.’ Seriously. You can’t make that up.” And indeed you wouldn’t have to make it up, because it is a real thing: different words with different meanings. (Seriously, can we get this guy a library card?)
“Outsourcing” happens when a firm contracts out its non-core functions to other vendors, e.g., a hotel decides to hire a cleaning service rather than keep maids on the hotel payroll. To take an extreme but illustrative case, consider that the firms that provide car-driving services do not manufacture their own automobiles or stitch their drivers’ uniforms, even though doing so would “create jobs.” They outsource those tasks to GM or Ford and to whomever makes their uniforms. Likewise, their communication systems are outsourced to Apple or Motorola or RIM.
But at least they should “buy American,” right? GM is an “American” company building “American” cars, but it too outsources many of its needs, sometimes to other U.S.-based companies, sometimes to companies overseas. Moving facilities overseas is what “offshoring” means; it is not synonymous with “outsourcing.” …
Jennifer Rubin tells the story of when she was Nora Ephrom’s lawyer.
In a former life I was a labor lawyer, working for Hollywood studios. And that’s where I met Nora Ephron.
In the movie industry there are rules upon rules in various union contracts about credits on screen and in ads — about where they go, how big they need to be, and whose name goes before others. It’s insane to the average person, but really, really important to people who work in movies.
Ephron had a film, “Sleepless in Seattle.” She wanted to give the now-very-famous Marc Shaiman a music supervisor credit for selecting the many wonderful tracks for that film. And she wanted to give him credit in a prominent position in the credits before the movie. This was not permitted by her own union, the Directors Guild of America, because it was perceived as a slight to other DGA personnel (the assistant directors, for example) whose names got shoved in the back. ( I know this all seems nuts, but stick with me.) …
The Free Beacon has the double dipping Donilon details.
National Security Adviser Tom Donilon collected more than $148,000 in pension payments from bailed out mortgage giant Fannie Mae in 2011, on top of his White House salary of $172,200, according to a Free Beacon analysis of White House personal financial disclosure forms.
Donilon netted more than $320,000 in income in 2011 between the two taxpayer-funded sources, including monthly payments totaling $12,391 as part of Fannie Mae’s “Executive Pension” and “Qualified Benefit” plans, the documents show.
“Most taxpayers are struggling to make ends meet. Yet, Mr. Donilon is still profiting from his work during the Fannie Mae buildup of the housing bubble that led to a recession and massive taxpayer bailouts,” said Sen. Jim DeMint (R., S.C.) in a statement to the Washington Free Beacon.
“We find it fairly unsurprising an Obama adviser is double-dipping the public coffers,” said Mattie Duppler, government affairs manager at American for Tax Reform. “After all, after trillion-dollar deficits for four years running, what’s a few hundred thousand?” …