The Morning Bell

[Captain Stanman]

White House Admits Obamacare's Individual Mandate is a Tax

Throughout his presidential campaign, then-candidate Barack Obama promised the American people: “If you’re a family that’s making $250,000 a year or less, you will see no increase in your taxes.” After he became President, Barack Obama reiterated that pledge, promising the American people in his September 9th health care press conference: “The middle-class will realize greater security, not higher taxes.” But Obamacare does contain tax hikes. Tons of them. From taxes on tanning beds to taxes on employment and investments, Obamacare is a certified job-killing machine.

None of these taxes touches the lives of every American as closely as the individual mandate to purchase health insurance. For the first time in American history, Obamacare forces all Americans to purchase a product or face sanction from the Internal Revenue Service. This is clearly a tax, as pointed out by ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos during a September 20th interview with the President himself. In an exchange that can only be described as “Clintonesque” Stephanopoulos pressed President Obama to admit his individual mandate was a tax. But President Obama refused to acknowledge reality and denied it. Stephanopoulos was forced to read the definition of “tax” straight from Merriam Webster’s Dictionary. But even then Obama refused to come clean: “George, the fact that you looked up Merriam’s Dictionary, the definition of tax increase, indicates to me that you’re stretching a little bit right now. … Nobody considers that a tax increase.” Well nobody but President Barack Obama’s Justice Department.

The New York Times confirmed Friday that in preparation for defending constitutionality of the Obamacare individual mandate in court, an Obama Justice Department legal brief argues that the penalty used to enforce the mandate is “a valid exercise” of Congress’s power to impose taxes. Mr. Obama’s own Justice Department further repudiates the President’s earlier statement by noting that the penalty is imposed and collected under the Internal Revenue Code, people must report it on their tax returns, and that the Congressional Budget Office estimates that it will cost Americans $4 billion a year. Yale Law School professor Jack Balkin told a meeting of progressive activists last month that President Obama “has not been honest with the American people about the nature of this bill. This bill is a tax.”

The fact that the Obama administration and their allies are now admitting the individual mandate is a tax betrays their very real fear that the Supreme Court could find Obamacare’s individual mandate unconstitutional. In the bill itself, Congress identified the Commerce Clause as the source of their authority to force all Americans to buy health insurance. But as our legal team has made imminently clear, the mandate does not purport to regulate or prohibit commerce of any kind. To the contrary, it purports to “regulate”—and penalize—inactivity. If the Supreme Court allows the Obamacare individual mandate to stand, then Congress could do anything it wanted. They could: require us to buy a new Chevy Impala each year to support the government-supported auto industry; require us to buy war bonds to pay for the Iraq and Afghan wars; or force us to eat our vegetables.

But even if the Obama administration is now admitting the individual mandate is a tax, that still does not make the law constitutional. Rather than operating as a tax on income, the mandate is a tax on the person and is, therefore, a capitation tax. Therefore the 16th Amendment’s grant of power to Congress to assess an income tax does not apply. The Constitution does allow Congress to assess a capitation tax, but that requires the tax be assessed evenly based op population. That is not how the Obamacare mandate works. It exempts and carves out far too many exceptions to past muster as a capitation tax. The Obamacare mandate is still unprecedented and unconstitutional.

But perhaps more importantly, what does the episode say about the integrity of the White House? The President went on national television and insisted in unequivocal terms that his individual mandate was not a tax. Now his administration is saying the exact opposite. At what point do the American people lose all faith in this President’s word?

[Captain Stanman]

The Special Relationship Beyond BP

British Prime Minister David Cameron visited the White House for the first time as Prime Minister yesterday. At a time when the United States is engaged in a war in Afghanistan, when Iran is on the verge of acquiring nuclear weapons, and while the world economy is teetering through a weak recovery, one would hope our press corps would focus on lasting issues of physical and economic security. Unfortunately the press conference and the media coverage focused exclusively on the Scottish government’s release of the 1988 Lockerbie bomber and whether BP was involved in the decision.

This must have been especially galling to Cameron, since as leader of the opposition party in Britain at the time, Cameron objected to the terrorist’s release when it happened. As Cameron said yesterday, there is “violent agreement” between him and President Barack Obama on the issue, adding: “It was the biggest murder in British history, and there was no business letting him out of prison.” Unfortunately Cameron parroted President Obama on another key issue as well, telling BBC News about Afghanistan: “People in Britain should understand we’re not going to be there in five years’ time, in 2015, with combat troops or large numbers because I think it’s important to give people an end date by which we won’t be continuing in that way.” This echoes President Obama’s mistaken decision to identify July 2011 as the beginning of U.S. withdrawal from the region. As long as we are being frank, we ought to acknowledge that the biggest problem with the President’s entire strategy was setting that artificial timeline for withdrawal. That led our military leaders to question the strategy in Afghanistan and put tremendous, unnecessary pressure on our armed forces to accomplish the task at hand. It also gave a psychological advantage to the Taliban, who will convince their recruits that the American will is lacking and thus they can just “wait us out.”

As U.K. Defense Secretary Liam Fox recently put it in a major speech at the Heritage Foundation, an early departure from Afghanistan “would be a shot in the arm to jihadists everywhere, re-energizing violent radical and extreme Islamism. It would send the signal that we did not have the moral resolve and political fortitude to see through what we ourselves have described as a national security imperative.… To leave before the job is finished would leave us less safe and less secure. Our resolve would be called into question, our cohesion weakened, and the Alliance undermined. It would be a betrayal of all the sacrifices made by our armed forces in life and limb.”

At least Cameron is still taking a hard line on government spending and deficit reduction - a position in direct opposition to President Obama’s call on all G20 nations to spend themselves further into debt. Instead of pushing for a fifth round of deficit spending like the Obama administration has done, U.K. Chancellor George Osborne has identified 85 billion pounds worth of budget savings and cuts.

The world needs robust U.S.- British leadership, which has been strikingly absent in recent months. But from the lack of U.S. ratification for the U.S.–U.K. Defense Trade Cooperation Treaty to the Obama administration’s slap in the face on the Falkland Islands, the once “special relationship” between our two nations has faltered under the Obama administration. Britain – not China – is the largest foreign investor in the U.S. economy, and the U.S. is the largest investor in Britain’s. There are three times more U.S.-owned firms in Britain than there are in any other European country. The ties go on and on – from tourism, to defense procurement and to intelligence sharing, the United States and Britain are the best partners in the world. The British government should cooperate fully with any Congressional investigation into BP’s role in the Lockerbie decision. That way er can get beyond the BP issue and focus on the so much more that our countries can accomplish together.

[Captain Stanman]

Let's Not Make a Deal

At the height of the debate over Obamacare, when the White House's leftist allies were in full panic mode, The Washington Post's Ezra Klein accused Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) of being "willing to cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people." Lieberman's crime? He opposed including an expansion of Medicare in the health regulation bill. Now that the President's signature foreign policy achievement, the New START nuclear agreement with Russia, is on the ropes, the left is again back to their hyperbolic ways. Ploughshares Fund president Joseph Cirincione told The Associated Press last week: "A delayed ratification with a close vote would be a blow to U.S. leadership around the world. People would doubt the President's ability to negotiate other agreements."

The histrionics are the result of a sudden surge of concerns over the treaty that started with a blast from Mitt Romney who declared the treaty "Obama’s worst foreign policy mistake." Sens. John Kerry (D-MA) and Carl Levin (D-MI) attempted to shoot down Romney's concerns, but their responses raised more questions than they answered. Romney has responded to his critics by identifying eight problems with New START that must be resolved before the Senate can vote on the treaty. We'll focus on three today:

New START Weakens Our Missile Defense Capabilities: The Washington Post editorial board asserted yesterday that "attempts by Moscow to insert [limits on missile defense] into the treaty failed." This is just plain false. First, even the Post admits that the preamble links missile defense and offensive nuclear weapons. The Post says that this was also true of previous STARTs. But not only is the language in this preamble stronger, and not only has the Russian leadership said that any increase in our missile defense system would be considered a breach of the treaty, but Article V of the treaty specifically limits our ability to convert ICBM and submarine-launched ballistic missile launchers into defensive interceptors. The Post is completely silent about this fact.

New START Fails to Maintain Our Nuclear Forces: The Post does concede that our nuclear weapons our "in need of renewal, as are the laboratories and industrial complex that sustain it." But then they claim, "the Obama administration accepts this priority," which is odd since President Obama has promised not to develop any new nuclear weapons. The Obama administration is promising Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) $80 billion in spending on the "nuclear weapons complex" over the next decade, but no legislation has been produced. Any such promise would have to be passed by the House. Do you trust Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) to spend $80 billion on nuclear weapons? Your answer to that question tells you all you need to know about the credibility of New START's nuclear modernization claims.

New START's Verification Procedures Are Inadequate: The Obama administration is telling skeptical Senators that "rejecting the treaty would leave the two countries dangerously uncertain about each other's arsenals." But New START's verification terms are so weak that they add little informational value. Paula A. DeSutter, the former U.S. assistant secretary of state for verification, compliance and implementation, noted in a Heritage lecture last month: "The Russians can do so much under this treaty to advance and expand their strategic forces… [yet] our ability to determine whether or not they are doing that and whether it violates the treaty is very, very low. The degree of verifiability is very low." Worse, the Obama administration admitted in Congressional testimony last week that they do not even care if the Russians cheat on the treaty.

All the pressure to blow past the critics, cut backroom deals and get the treaty ratified ought to raise huge red flags. New START has had less than half the number of hearings that treaties are normally subjected to, and the pace for approval certainly is trying to outpace any nuclear arms pact the Senate has ever considered. Not only is the speed with which it is being pushed through unprecedented, the administration continues to withhold key documents, including the treaty negotiating record. This is no time for conservatives in the Senate to offer lemming-like support for President Obama's arms control agenda.

[Captain Stanman]

100 Days Later, Obama Still Failing the Gulf

Over the last four weeks, The Heritage Foundation sent multiple teams of respected energy, environment, homeland security and response experts to the Gulf to study the federal response to the oil spill. These three delegations, with more to come, have traversed the areas hit hardest by the crisis, talking to response workers, affected oil crews, fishermen, elected leaders and BP representatives. What we found is simple: President Obama’s administration has turned a crisis into a disaster, and someone needs to be held accountable.

Accountability is in short supply in Washington these days. Fingers are pointed in every direction for our nation’s economic woes. President Obama’s favorite target of choice is the past administration for nearly every problem he faces. Yet, the oil spill has only two central characters: BP and the Obama administration. BP is (very) slowly taking accountability for its creation of this crisis. Tony Hayward was finally dismissed as CEO, and they have promised full financial restitution for direct and indirect victims. On Day 100 of the spill, it’s time the Obama administration followed suit.

And what exactly does the administration have to be held accountable for? An environmental disaster made worse by federal incompetence. An unnecessary drilling moratorium that has pulled the plug on a Gulf economy already on life support. A claims process that was negotiated in secret, leaving few answers to why claims aren’t being processed and transparency is lost. A slow response that wasted clean weather days as hurricane season fast approaches, and a decision-making structure led by politics rather than duty.

Environmentally, the President and his eco-left echo chamber consciously chose to ignore the damage caused by the oil in favor of focusing on future tax increases that would expand government largesse. The President’s initial push for cap-and-trade taxes as a response to an oil spill was so disconnected and oblivious that it was quickly brushed off by the Democrat-controlled Senate. Even so, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said yesterday cap-and-trade taxes were still possible this year if any energy legislation passes the Senate and the bill goes to conference.

Details of the Reid-Boxer bill the Senate will market as a response to the oil spill released last night confirm that increased taxes are the Majority Leader's first priority regardless, with a "drastic increase" in the price of oil per barrel that will be paid at your local gas pump, breaking the President's promise that taxpayers would not foot the bill for the oil spill. Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) also said the bill would create a permanent "jobs moratorium" in the Gulf.

And while focus in Washington has remained on legislative matters, the President’s administration failed to issue emergency permits to protect Louisiana’s fragile coastline. Paid-for barriers were delivered, only to sit on the sidelines, as federal bureaucrats spent months debating three-year old emergency operations plans, only to decide not to implement protective measures.

Efforts were stopped to divert oil into more easily skimmed areas. The problem of skimming the oil was made even more increasingly difficult by the questionable dispersants, authorized by the EPA, which either drove the oil under water or diluted it into impossible-to-clean droplets. And even if the oil could’ve been easily skimmed, the skimmers simply weren’t deployed, whether by ignorance of the Jones Act or an unbelievable rigidity to emergency placement. Skimmers sat in ports across America waiting for another disaster while this one went ignored.

The drilling moratorium takes what is a terrible situation for Gulf residents and turns it into a long-term economic catastrophe. President Obama is not listening to any oil and gas experts as he implements a moratorium that could affect our energy production for a decade. Two federal courts have blocked the moratorium, yet the President ignores the rule of law and proceeds with a de facto moratorium regardless. Ports are cutting rental rates, jobs are being lost, rigs are leaving the Gulf in droves and confidence in American energy contracts is being shattered. Meanwhile, this doesn't affect rising demand, meaning an increasing dependence on foreign oil.

Jim Funk of the Louisiana Restaurant Association told New Orleans Fox 8: "You're looking at figures as high as 30,000 high paying jobs are gonna be lost as a result of this moratorium." And that's just the restaurant and catering business. Layoffs in the offshore transport business have already begun. John Henry, who runs a cement company that services offshore rigs, told Forbes they're already slowing down operations. And CNN reports, companies as far away as Ohio, Tennessee and elsewhere may also lose work as a result of Obama's jobs moratorium. These reports are all in addition to the jobs already lost on the fleeing rigs.

The complicit media chose the President’s negotiation of a secret liability deal with BP as proof he was in charge. But while his strong-arming produced a supposed $20 billion payout, it was settled behind closed doors. Americans never saw any contract that was agreed to between our government and BP, yet that didn't stop the media from celebrating it.

Now we learn that BP is claiming a $9.9 billion tax credit from the expenditure, meaning American taxpayers are now on the hook for half of the supposed settled amount, and the White House is once again proven inept. Congressman James Oberstar (D-MN) called the development "reprehensible." David Desser, managing director of Juris Capital said: "You would have thought in advance of that meeting, [the White House] would've thought of all those issues..." Yes, you would think. Additionally, the claims process itself is operating in the dark, with state and local officials unable to track individual claims.

As Tropical Storm Bonnie approached last week, emergency and elected officials in Louisiana mobilized. The federal government did not. The clean-up operations halted, yes, and plans were in place for re-deployment. But Americans along the Gulf coast did not hear from the Secretary of Homeland Security what the government’s response would be to a potential storm that would be made only worse by their own delays in the clean-up. Leadership was obvious at the state and local level. It was absent in Washington.

President Obama has made it clear he couldn't care less about the oil spill or Gulf residents. He has barely mentioned the crisis since he gave a forced Oval Office address over a month ago. Amid complaints surrounding his three vacations this month, most recently to Maine, he reluctantly is taking his family to Florida in two weeks for a photo-op.

Florida is hospitable to this visit, since Governor Charlie Crist--formerly a Republican, now an Independent due to the pressure of primary politics--has been proven a better ally than Louisiana’s Governor Bobby Jindal. Louisiana residents deserve better than to have politics come between them and a responsive White House. Their share of this disaster is overwhelming, and to be so ignored is unacceptable. Yet, even leading Florida Democrats, like gubernatorial candidate Alex Sink, charge the administration with being “out of touch with reality” when the White House does visit.

Two weeks after Hurricane Katrina made landfall, FEMA Director Michael Brown resigned due to public pressure over the federal response to the crisis. It has now been 100 days since the deadly Deepwater Horizon accident. The clean-up efforts have failed. The moratorium is simply kicking a dying man while he is down. Who is accountable in President Obama’s administration? Apparently, nobody.

[Captain Stanman]

Surviving the Obama Assault on the Rule of Law

Hours after yesterday's decision by President Bill Clinton judicial appointee Susan Bolton to preemptively stop enforcement of Arizona's immigration enforcement law, Thomas A. Saenz, president of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF), told The New York Times: "This is a warning to any other jurisdiction." Just in case the message from the Obama administration and its leftist allies was not clear, Obama appointee U.S. Attorney Dennis Burke told The Associated Press: "Surely it's going to make states pause and consider how they're drafting legislation and how it fits in a constitutional framework."

But no amount of pause by states and localities could ever possibly satisfy the Obama administration, its amnesty allies, and activist judges like Bolton. In a textbook case of judicial activism, Judge Bolton rewrote the Arizona law to her own needs, invented her own facts and ignored clear federal law. President Jimmy Carter appointee and immigration law professor at Yale Law School Peter Schuck told The New York Times: "She rushed to judgment in a way I can only assume reflects a lot of pressure from the federal government to get this case resolved quickly."

The Obama administration's case against Arizona sought to preemptively stop enforcement of Arizona's new immigration law. The legal term for this is a "facial challenge," and federal precedent is clear that facial challenges "must be careful not to go beyond the statute's facial requirements and speculate about 'hypothetical' or imaginary cases." But that is exactly what Judge Bolton did. First, she ignored Section 2(B) of the law as written and completely ignored the section's first sentence that required an officer to have "reasonable suspicion" that a person was in the country illegally before their immigration status should be checked. Then, she invented a completely hypothetical case about a Chilean dog walker detained by a completely fictional Sheriff Smith. Finally, despite the fact that 8 U.S.C. §1373 clearly requires the federal government to "respond to an inquiry by a…State, or local government agency, seeking to verify or ascertain the citizenship or immigration status of any individual," Judge Bolton concluded that the Obama administration's decision not to enforce this provision was as good as rewriting the law itself.

Taken alone, the White House's behavior on this issue is troubling enough. But put into the broader context of the first 18 months of this Administration, a truly pernicious pattern emerges. First, there was the Obama Justice Department's decision to dismiss voter intimidation charges against the New Black Panther Party. Then there was the Obama administration's use of TARP to bail out its union allies in what bankruptcy law scholars have called "so outrageous and illegal that until March of this year [2009], nobody even conceptualized it." Then there was the Obama administration's shakedown of BP in the White House's Roosevelt Room. Less than a week later after a federal court found its first oil drilling ban to be "arbitrary and capricious," the Obama administration issued a second oil drilling ban that was wider and killed even more jobs than the first.

Americans cannot be cowed by the Obama administration and its La Raza and MALDEF allies. Giving into bullies only encourages their behavior. Finally this lawsuit should be a permanent reminder to everyone who wants to call themselves a conservative that any and all claims about an amnesty deal are complete fiction. La Raza and MALDEF will fight every enforcement measure in any such deal tooth and nail while administrations like this one will simply choose not to enforce them. Meanwhile, the amnesty provisions would be instantaneous and permanent. Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer (R) has vowed to fight this decision all the way to the Supreme Court, and she deserves support.

[Captain Stanman]

The Quiet Education Overhaul

Yesterday, President Obama delivered a major speech on education in an effort to garner support for his Race to the Top grant program and his push for national education standards and tests. The President’s remarks came on the heels of a speech delivered by Education Secretary Arne Duncan on Tuesday at the National Press Club, during which Duncan attempted to paint the Administration’s policies as part of a "quiet revolution."

Duncan certainly got the quiet part right. Since his Administration came into office, President Obama has quietly been reworking the country’s education system, doing an end-run around normal legislative procedure. With the U.S. Department of Education’s (DOE) funding doubled thanks to the so-called "stimulus," the Administration has little need or incentive to bother negotiating its education agenda through Congress. Instead, the DOE is using that windfall of funding and power to stage a significant overhaul of local schools; dangling grant money before cash-strapped states on the condition they adopt key pieces of the Obama education agenda. And this is all happening without public consideration, even though it means that parents will now have to trek to Washington to petition an unaccountable bureaucracy if they want to see changes in their children’s curriculum. Knocking on the door at the DOE (the lowest rated federal department) is unlikely to produce a response.

The push for national education standards and tests began last year when the National Governors Association (NGA) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) began writing standards for what all U.S. students should learn in school. Meanwhile, the Obama Administration has been backing the effort with federal dollars, pressing Race to the Top grants in front of fiscally starved states while making it clear that they also intend to make Title I funding (the largest federal education program at $14.5 billion) contingent upon acceptance of these standards. A number of states have signed onto the standards to position themselves for federal grants—without the American people ever having the opportunity to weigh in on such a drastic change that will soon be coming to a school near you.

Secretary Duncan’s use of the term revolution was also right on the mark. The federal government’s ever-expanding role in education, and now the Obama Administration’s push for national standards and tests, threatens the long-established right of parents to direct their children’s education and confuses a proper understanding of federalism. States model federalism for children by setting standards, tests, and curriculum. But that important lesson in self-government will be another unintended casualty of this standards overhaul now that the federal government is overreaching to set the educational terms for local schools—contrary to the spirit of the Constitution and the letter of federal law, which expressly prohibits federal involvement in standards, tests, and curriculum.

But it’s not just our deep-rooted principal of federalism that is at stake in President Obama’s education agenda; it’s also our ongoing pursuit of excellence that hangs in the balance.

Secretary Duncan has referred to state standards as "50 different goal posts." That comment makes clear that the Administration’s push for national standards is geared more toward uniformity than with excellence and more concerned with standardization than minimum standards of quality and rigor. States that currently have high quality state standards—such as Massachusetts, California, Virginia, and Indiana—offer exemplary models, creating competitive pressure for other states to raise their academic standing.

But when national standards are enshrined, they’ll slump toward the middle of the pack—standardizing mediocrity and generating the kind of nationwide uniform data that will be more useful to national bureaucrats than to parents. Current standards and tests, developed at significant taxpayer expense by each state, currently provide the kind of information parents need. What’s needed is more transparency about that information and for parents to be empowered to make choices on that information.

The Obama Administration’s plans would dramatically change our country’s education system without a single vote in Congress and without the American people having the opportunity to debate the issue. But this one-size-fits-all approach from Washington is not a fait accompli. State leaders in Texas, Virginia, Minnesota, and Indiana have voiced clear concerns about losing state autonomy under this federal standards overhaul.

National standards would not make public schools accountable to families; rather, they would make schools responsive to bureaucrats in Washington, D.C. Moreover, national standards and tests would be a one-size-fits-all approach that tends toward mediocrity and standardization, undercutting the pockets of excellence and the principle of federalism on which this nation is founded.

[Captain Stanman]

Another Victory on the Road to Repeal

Last month at a town hall in Hayward, Calif., a constituent asked Rep. Pete Stark (D-CA) about Obamacare: "If this legislation is Constitutional, what limitations are there on the federal government's ability to tell us how to run our private lives? … If they can do this, what can't they?" Stark, a long-time advocate of government-run health care, gave an honest yet troubling answer: "The federal government can, yes, do most anything in this country."

Yesterday a federal court in Virginia agreed with the logic, but not the Constitutional understanding, of Stark's view of federal government power. In the first substantive legal ruling on President Barack Obama's health regulation law, U.S. District Court Judge Henry Hudson held that the Commonwealth of Virginia raised a valid substantive theory to challenge Obamacare and that its democratically passed Virginia Health Care Freedom Act provided it standing to challenge the federal individual mandate. On the issue of that mandate, Hudson wrote: "Unquestionably, this regulation radically changes the landscape of health insurance coverage in America. ... No reported case from any federal appellate court has extended the Commerce Clause or the Tax Clause to include the regulation of a person's decision not to purchase a product, notwithstanding its effect on interstate commerce."

Echoing the court's ruling, Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli said: "This lawsuit is not about health care, it's about our freedom and about standing up and calling on the federal government to follow the ultimate law of the land – the Constitution." And it is becoming more and more clear that Obamacare makes it next to impossible for Americans to even track, let alone check, federal power. While the Joint Economic Committee released a report showing that the President's health law created an impenetrable web of at least 47 new bureaucratic entities, a CRS report from earlier in the month drew an even starker conclusion: "The precise number of new entities that will ultimately be created pursuant to PPACA is currently unknowable."

How are the American people supposed to check the power of the federal government if even the official research arm of Congress cannot keep track of all the bureaucracies Congress creates? It can't. The CRS report goes on to say: "Under the new law, the Government Accountability Office must appoint at least 83 new members to six new boards. It is unclear how GAO will be able to independently audit these entities when the [Comptroller General] has appointed their members." And the matters these new bureaucrats will be regulating are not minor. One such entity, the Independent Payment Advisory Board, is empowered to make Medicare payment policy, including which procedures (like mammograms) the federal government will or will not pay for. And the President insisted on making the IPAB's decisions virtually impossible to overturn.

As long as President Obama is in the White House, full repeal of Obamacare is not possible. But its web of undemocratic, unaccountable bureaucracies can be defunded. And that is exactly what conservative candidates across the country are promising the American people they will do. This is a good first step, but it is not enough. The Obama administration will stop at nothing to protect the expansion of government. Just last week it wasted $700,000 of your tax dollars on a national cable television propaganda campaign promoting the President's new law. In the ad, celebrity Andy Griffith tells American seniors that under Obamacare "like always, we’ll have our guaranteed [Medicare] benefits." But as documented by FactCheck.org, "the truth is that the new law is guaranteed to result in benefit cuts" for the 10 million seniors currently enrolled in Medicare Advantage plans.

The American people are already fighting back against these tactics, and they are winning. In total, 33 states have mounted legal and legislative challenges to Obamacare. The American people are going to continue to fight this intolerable act in Congress, in the courts and in the states. It may take some time, but they are going to win.

Too see how our sister-organization Heritage Action for America is responding to Obamacare, click here.

[max61]

when the people fear the government, that is tyranny

when the government fears the people, that is freedom.

The choice is ours to take or preserve.

Those that choose to let things fall where they may need not complain later on

Every choice has consequences some good some bad. I urge you to make the best choice that you can and hopefully freedom will prevail.

In the end, it is all up to you.

[Captain Stanman]

The Obama Elite vs The American People

This Tuesday voters in Missouri, by a 40-point margin, approved a ballot measure rejecting the individual mandate at the core of President Barack Obama's health care law. Asked what the vote meant to the White House, press secretary Robert Gibbs said: "Nothing." Yesterday in San Francisco, federal judge Vaughn Walker gave the exact same weight to a California ballot measure that affirmed marriage as an institution between one man and one woman. Specifically Judge Walker overturned the California Marriage Protection Act after concluding, as a matter of fact, that the majority of Californians who voted to protect marriage were bigots who had no rational basis to define marriage on their own terms. Here are just some of the "facts" Judge Walker found:





Religious beliefs that gay and lesbian relationships are sinful or inferior to heterosexual relationships harm gays and lesbians.

The campaign to pass Proposition 8 relied on stereotypes to show that same-sex relationships are inferior to opposite-sex relationships.

The Proposition 8 campaign relied on fears that children exposed to the concept of same-sex marriage may become gay or lesbian.

The genetic relationship between a parent and a child is not related to a child’s adjustment outcomes.

Children do not need to be raised by a male parent and a female parent to be well-adjusted.




How did Judge Walker arrive at these “facts”? By agreeing with everything the same-sex marriage proponents "experts" said while ruling that the traditional marriage witness was "unreliable" and "provided no credible evidence to support any of the claimed adverse effects proponents promised to demonstrate." In so doing, Walker not only ignored the views of millions of Californians, but by basing his decision on the 14th Amendment, he also ignored the factual determinations of every single popular vote that has been held on the issue in the past two decades. According to Judge Walker's reasoning every single one of these Americans is a bigot whose opinion on marriage has no place under Judge Walker's Constitution.

From the beginning, it was clear that Judge Walker was more interested in making a political statement than upholding the rule of law. That is why after Judge Walker ruled that the trial could be broadcast live, the Supreme Court took the remarkable step of overturning his decision, writing in January: "Not only did [Judge Walker's court] ignore the federal statute that establishes the procedures by which its rules may be amended, its express purpose was to broadcast a high-profile trial that would include witness testimony about a contentious issue."

Clearly that Supreme Court would have rightly viewed with great skepticism every sentence of Judge Walker spurious ruling. But that Court will not be deciding this case. Today the Senate will vote on whether to confirm President Obama's Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan. The same Elena Kagan who manipulated the law and facts to deny military recruiters equal access to Harvard law students because she did not personally approve of our military's personnel policies regarding same-sex relationships.

The same Elena Kagan who was simply "not sympathetic" to the claim of a petitioner that his 2nd amendment rights were violated, and was actively involved in President Clinton's gun control agenda. The same Elena Kagan who advised President Clinton that it would be a "disaster" if the full medical truth was revealed about partial-birth abortion, endangering the gruesome procedure.

The facts are becoming quite clear. Kagan, Walker, Gibbs, and Obama all give the same weight to the will of the American people as expressed at the ballot box: "Nothing." We'll see today if the Senate agrees.

[Captain Stanman]

The Obama Tax Hikes, Another Step Toward a European Welfare State

Last night, the Senate voted 61-39 in favor of a $26 billion bailout for states and government unions financed in part by an $11 billion tax hike that will kill American jobs at U.S. companies that compete overseas. Worse, before that final vote was taken, the Senate also defeated two amendments by Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC), both by 58-42 votes, that would have prevented the largest tax hike in American history. And earlier this month, Vice President Joe Biden told ABC News that the only thing wrong with President Barack Obama's first $862 billion economic stimulus was that it didn't borrow and spend enough.

The message to the U.S. economy's job creators from this Administration and Congress is clear: You can expect higher spending, higher taxes and higher deficits for years to come. The verdict on this approach is in. Today the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor and Statistics released its monthly jobs report showing the economy shed 131,000 jobs in July as 143,000 temporary census workers lost their government jobs. With the private sector only managing to add 71,000 jobs and averaging only 51,000 jobs over the past three months, the private economy appears stuck in first gear. Despite the job losses, the nation's unemployment rate didn't budge from 9.5% because another 181,000 discouraged workers left the workforce. All told the U.S. economy has now lost 2.4 million jobs since President Barack Obama signed his stimulus bill, and his administration is 7.6 million jobs short of what he promised the American economy would support by 2010.

Faced with this failure, the Obama administration wants to double down on its tax and spend policies by hiking taxes on America's job creators. Research on the last seven recessions shows that small businesses generate about two out of every three new jobs during recoveries. But the $3.2 trillion Obama Tax Hike in January will hit these businesses the hardest. As Heritage Foundation analyst Curtis Dubay has detailed, while only eight percent of small businesses pay the highest two tax rates, those businesses earn 72 percent of all small business income and pay 82 percent of all income taxes paid by small businesses. According to a study by the American Family Business Foundation, just stopping President Obama's Death Tax hike alone would create 1.5 million jobs.

But lower taxes and a more dynamic private sector is not the direction that President Obama wants to take the country. Obama's economic direction is obviously not popular among conservatives, and is now becoming less and less popular among independents and liberals. As Slate columnist David Weigel told National Review's Dan Foster this week: "It is like the biggest failing of Obama, and I keep saying this, that he just can't be honest about the fact that he wants America to be more like Europe. Obviously he does." We couldn't agree more. For two generations after post-war reconstruction, Europe and America have pursued different economic models, and accordingly, moved in different economic directions. The American model was low tax, low spending and small government. It favored growth, income and vibrancy. The European model is high tax, high spending and big government. It favored fairness, equality and stability. It also featured unemployment rates double those of the United States, often hovering around 10 percent. Now that is no longer the case. Under Obama’s economic leadership, U.S. unemployment rates are surpassing Europe’s.

Commenting on President Obama’s budget, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) told National Review Online: "This budget presents a choice of two futures. … This budget is about more than specific programs or policies. It is really about the American idea, and whether we want to move towards a European-style welfare state." Allowing the Obama Tax Hikes to occur will be one huge step down that road. Is that really the choice Americans want to make?