Obama’s never-mind presidency
...The PPACA remains unpopular, and there are congressional elections in years divisible by two — not even the Obama administration can ignore that constitutional fact — so last Tuesday, the administration said this about the act’s mandate that in 2014, large employers provide expensive health-care coverage for their workers or pay a substantial penalty: Never mind.
Although the Constitution has no Article VIII, the administration acts as though there is one that reads: “Notwithstanding all that stuff in other articles about how laws are made, if a president finds a law politically inconvenient, he can simply post on the White House Web site a notice saying: Never mind.”
Never mind that the law stipulates 2014 as the year when employers with 50 full-time workers are mandated to offer them health-care coverage or pay fines. Instead, 2015 will be the year. Unless Democrats see a presidential election coming.
This lesson in the Obama administration’s approach to the rule of law is pertinent to the immigration bill, which at last count had 222 instances of a discretionary “may” and 153 of “waive.” Such language means that were the Senate bill to become law, the executive branch would be able to do pretty much as it pleases, even to the point of saying about almost anything: Never mind.
Will Obama Follow Richard Nixon As An Asterisk President?
...Noonan ventures that a Tea Party, not under attack by the IRS, but that simply maintained its momentum after 2010, would “have brought the Republican Party as many as 5-8.5 million votes compared to Obama’s victory margin of 5 million.”
Per Noonan, the mere disclosure of the IRS harassment would have cost Obama even more votes:
“Imagine if we–if you can–what would have happened if this fact (IRS harassment of Tea Party groups) came out in September 2012, in the middle of a presidential election? The terrain would have looked very different.”...
...Imagine just one renegade reporter from the mainstream media (network television, the New York Times, or Newsweek) reporting just one simple fact, which we know to be true – that the President communicated directly with his top defense and intelligence officials handling the Benghazi crisis only once – at 5 PM – as word of the tragedy was first coming in. (We still do not know the President’s whereabouts that fatal night. He was next seen at 10:30 AM the next day in the Rose Garden before jetting off to campaign in Las Vegas).
The renegade reporter’s headline — Obama AWOL as American Diplomats Killed in Benghazi – could have dealt a critical blow to the Obama campaign. This pithy but true headline would have changed the complexion of the Obama-Romney foreign policy debate on October 23 and shut off mainstream-media’s Candy Crawley’s shameful and incorrect interference in the debate on behalf of the President....
