When the President decided to no longer actively support the Federal laws governing same sex marriage, it was honestly received with a certain degree of boredom by the American voters. People have grown so collectively tired of the argument over what marriage legally is that most are to the point that they do not care if people marry anything. The reality that state laws and court challenges will sooner, rather than later result in same sex marriages for all interested parties means there is no longer any political imperative for the government to bother with defending the Defens of Marriage Act at the Federal level.
Its a waste of both money and time.
The issue of dropping immigration laws by the stroke of a pen has already been covered here in an earlier post. If it was a case of the President willingly ignoring laws he was under oath to support when it came to these laws, what conclusions should be drawn regarding the Affordable Care Act?
Whether we needed wholesale reform of the medical care system in the United States is a separate issue. We had anywhere from 7-15 million uninsured people. Uninsured people accessing the healthcare system was a serious problem. We were told that at the very least, the ACA if passed would go greatly beyond what was needed to solve this primary problem as well as literally hundreds of related problems. So four years later we are finding that the same pre passage level of uninsured remains and may increase to 20 million people. What happened?
The law has had so many changes by executive decree that there is now no longer any reasonable assumption that the actual words of the law have any bearing upon reality. When the law has become politically damaging, it has undergone a protean change. Obama has either through executive order, administrative order, or bureaucratic rule changing effectively sought to either mitigate a failing of the law's implementation or the negative impacts that would accrue to voters if the law was implemented as written. In either case, the President has either sought to not enforce the law as written or move beyond the intent as it is written to resultantly create an implementation of the law compatible with political priorities.
So the goal line for moving the final deadline for enrolement in the Health Care Exchanges has slipped now to the end of April. It was announced at 10:00 PM Eastern Daylight time. Almost no one will notice the announcement. The reason for this announcement is that the rates in 2015 will be determined by the enrolled individuals from the open enrollment period that the law requires starring January 1st of each year and ending the last day of March.
So far the most optimistic numbers released by the administartion states that 5 million people have gone through the enrollment portal since it opened late last year. The rates were assumed to be based upon 7 million enrolled by the end of the March period. The assumption by the administration had been that likely 12 million would enroll because it was such a good deal and the consumer demand would be there.
The demand has not been there. In fact no one knows for sure how many people who enrolled have paid a premium. Some numbers are coming to light showing that people actually paying for the coverage may not have even reached 2 million people. And that is the true reason for this new delay. If at the end of April, only 7 million have signed up and of that number only half have paid for a premium, the rates the insurer pools will need to be viable will not only force a crippling rate increase for 2015, but will also likely initiate the government backed funding mechanism in the law designed to pay the insurance companies if the available pool of enrollees does not make it statistically possible for them to remain solvent despite inadequate insured pool size.
In other words, the people in 2015 attempting to enroll for insurance in 2016 will be seeing even greater sticker shock for quoted premiums. The average person this year saw a 44% increase in his premium regardless of who is providing coverage for him. How angry will people be with yet another double digit percentage increase in 2015? Never mind the issue of just how much more expensive the law has been compared to what we were promised.
What this latest delay is, is simply a last gambit to forestall a major sticker shock revolt by voters leading up to the 2016 election. If the enrollment remains low, resulting in increased premiums in 2015 and 2016 Obama will likely see a total collapse of the Democrat Party but also healthcare in the country as well.
The fact the President is not enforcing the law but instead is treating it as a Constitutional Tar Baby is telling.
Tuesday, March 25, 2014
Executive Power Grab Revisited
Saturday, June 23, 2012
Early Election 2012 Prediction
Obama wins.
Romney will garner flyover country.
Obama will manage to lock out the North East, and the West coast. He will take Penn and Ohio with metropolitan city based votes. He will also eek out a victory in Florida.
In essence, his win will be built from the following coalition.
DNC supporting Democrats. The machine will lockstep the traditional DNC Big Union political focus that depends on 4 more years with Obama.
Liberal causes based independent Liberals. Social cause or liberal causes will be forced out of desperation to support Obama. No one really cares about the temperature of the Sun, who is starving in Appalachia, or why Jim cant marry John. But the supporters of these fringe political issues aren't even invited to the political table for discussion with Romney.
Black voters, voting mostly due to pigmentation and no other reason. Blacks have taken a huge economic hit under this administration's policies. But for the most part, the black voters won't stop and question if President Obama's promises have even remotely turned out as he said they would.
Hispanics that are citizenship challenged. Motor Voter laws, and the refusal of Voter ID laws has created an interesting case where many of the Southern States now have substantial illegal voters who break the traditional mold. In the past we had "Dead Voters" or "Out of District Voters", or even the favorite ploy of "mass proxy" voters. But in this case we have a substantial pool of "voters" who will vote in Federal Elections and largely for Democrat candidates. Given Obama's recent announcement to not enforce immigration law, he will undoubtably enjoy even more support from this group of voters. In most states and in most voting districts the existence of illegal voters has as much impact as absentee ballot provisional counting does. IE not enough to make a difference even if every single vote by the illegals was cast in the same direction. However in states like Florida, where margins in presidential elections amount to a couple thousand, having 80,000 illegals registered to vote who are also primarily Hispanic, and primarily leaning Democrat probably will take that state, and the election to Obama's favor.
Social voters. The Get out the vote to be in a popular movement young voter. Likely their first election. Likely don't know who their state representatives are or even what the
Romney will lose due to the following:
RNC. Its so out of touch that it cant understand that raising scads of cash from major corporate donors and conservatives with more money than sense in order to run glitzy attack media advertising, does nothing to address what most Republican rank and file see as important. All in all the RNC favored candidates from Romney down are there not because they are the best people but because they played the RNC game and got the money.
Moral Issues Supporters. In the grand scheme of things, where you are allowed to put a penis, or what you are allowed to put into a vagina is ultimately not an actual political policy debate. Many of the fundamentalist Christian denominations threaten candidates that if they don't publicly espouse the same opinion, they wont get that denomination's block vote or the money that is needed to fund second and third tier candidates in an election cycle. Most American's dont really care if Gary marries Steve. But Romeny will be too timid to risk losing this block of voters and therefor two their version of the party line.
Tea Party voters. While the mainstream media still miss characterizes and misrepresents the Tea Party, the reality remains that these people see a specific but also broad set of issues that need to be addressed. IE, the government has too many regulatory holds on every day life. The government has grown too large in terms of administrative units and in actual employees. Taxation policy is too dysfunctional to either fund the government or be fair in the taxation levels. For romeny to win their vote, he has to promise to eliminate government agencies, reduce government staff levels, eliminate regulatory oversights, eliminate current tax code, and propose an enactable replacement of the tax code that is broad, flat and fair. None of which Romney is going to do. Many Tea Party supporters will be casting protest votes or not at all.
The average American. TMZ and the latest fashion craze. They will tire of the contest between the two candidates early. Given the portrayal of Obama over the past 3 years in the media, these voters wont even be able to fathom a single plausible reason why anyone wouldn't want Obama as President for 4 more years. Thankfully most of them wont vote in November because they will actually somehow forget about election day. But enough of them will go to the polling station to eliminate Romney's chances.
Popular vote wise, I see Obama pulling 52% to Romney's 48%.
EC wise I see it being much tighter.
Obama 268
Romney 270
WA,CA,OR,NV,CO,NM, NE2, MN, WI, IL, MI, NY, VT, ME, MA, RI, CT, NJ, DE, DC, MD, NC,SC, HI, all going to Obama.
Remainder going to Romney with key wins in VA and FL.
Will lead to the claims of Romney not being a legitimate political leader, stolen elections, and a call for the elimination of the EC.
Who's the tyrant? Whose rights has Obama violated? What law has he ignored?
Lincoln's abatement of haebeus corpus comes to mind as unilaterally abrogating an explicitly enumerated Constitutional civil right by Executive Action. Which is indeed a case where the President has deprecated guaranteed Constitutional right.
And that was in response to the reality at that time that much of the civilian population currently administered by the Federal Government was likely to engage in actions that could not be ignored if the Republic was to survive. New York Draft riots being a prime example, as well as the military taking over Kentucky.
F.D.R. had similar instances as well, whether it was dealing with known Axis agents or even interring U.S. citizens who were suspected of potential loyalties to one of the Axis powers.
Bush's actions were justifiably of the same scope an measure compared to Lincoln's and F.D.R.'s actions in that all three occasions were in direct response to alien actions and threats that had the stated goal of eliminating the independence and authority of the Federal Government. In Bush's case however the Patriot Act passed by Congress post haste Bush's actions, confirmed what Bush had done with Congressional authorization.
Lincoln and F.D.R. were never given that imprimatur nor was it politically necessary at the time since none of the then political parties offered any resistance to their actions because the threat that initiated their actions was obvious to everyone. That the Confederacy and the Axis Powers were threats was not even debated.
In Obama's case, he has previously stated that to take the actions he took by Executive Order would not only be unjustified but also Constitutionally illegal because there is no basis upon which he could justify the change in enforcement of the laws. Although he disagrees with the law as it currently stands, he reiterated that he was Constitutionally required to enforce the laws and urge Congress to change them to reflect a legal structure that he could personally support. That is what President Obama stated as his informed opinion as both being the Executive as well as being a Constitutional Law scholar & expert.
So where is the threat to the existence of the Federal Government that normally would accompany an Executive Order of the magnitude where a President states he will not seek enforcement of a set of laws? He has discarded his previous public statements where he said he was Constitutionally unable to stop enforcing the laws because they met Constitutional scrutiny and left no political or Constitutional avenue open where he could adopt the stance that the President of Mexico was asking for.
A tyrant was previously defined at the start of the thread. No Agency of the Executive branch gave him Constitutional cause to act by Executive Order. He has abrogated the law as passed by Congress, signed by previous Executives, and upheld by the Federal Courts as being legal. By abrogating the enforcement of the laws, he has directly infringed upon the legal citizens and alien citizens who have adhered to the law instead of violating it. By now stating that he will not enforce the laws that effect illegal minors, and instead enact by Executive Order the main components of the Congressionally defeated Dream Act, he has disenfranchised the legal voters of the United States and their Congressional representation at the expense of an unprecedented expansion of Executive authority that favors illegal aliens over legal citizens and aliens.
He disagreed with Congress not passing the Dream Act. So he has caused it to be implemented by Executive Order.
Its kinda a big deal. You have the biggest Executive power grab since Nixon. The difference is that Nixon tried to extend the authority and was rebuked by the Press, Congress, and the threat of Judicial Review by the Supreme Court resulting in potential presentment of a Bill of Impeachment before Congress. In this case however, you have a Press which is not even making an issue of it in the mainstream media, a split Congress where the Senate has no interest in tarnishing Obama's actions before an election 6 months away, and a judicial system which has so far not been presented with a request for injunction due to the perverse fact that Obama's actions require a challenge drawn from one who is impacted by the order directly or by a State which has been directly harmed by the Executive order that has gone through the lower Federal Courts seeking injunctive relief.
So when you have no means of changing the actions of an executive by civil process, and the action you want to change is the result of an abrogation of civil process, you are left with two logical results.
The first is that there is no substantial civil process legally standing that would prevent the action in the first place nor allow its change after the fact. The second is that the legal civil process has been abrogated by personal act by a person acting outside of that process in direct challenge to the civil process's scope of authority, thereby rendering that authority as subordinate to the outside authority.
Or in more simpler terms and definition, the second logical result is that you are suffering at the hands of a tyrant who is acting outside the political and civil framework.
Given that Obama stated that he could not do what he has done and still be Constitutionally valid, the fact that he has now gone ahead and done what he said Constitutionally would be illegal for him to do logically indicates that he is now acting outside the civil scope of authority he previously restrained himself to.
So the short answer. Obama would be the tyrant. He has violated the rights of all legal citizens and aliens & abrogated the State's rights under the Constitution. And the laws he is ignoring would be those that he has abrogated by Executive Order since the Dream Act which would have changed those laws was not passed.
Posts
