Creeping Authoritarianism

            I came across this interesting quote from James Madison the other day: "There are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by silent and gradual encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations." How perfectly this mirrors what is going on today with "Obama's creeping authoritarianism," a phrase coined by the Wall Street Journal's Dan Henninger.  It amazes me that Madison could foresee this sort of thing happening more than 200 years after the drafting of our Constitution.

            If President Obama is ever impeached, it will be for his deliberate and repeated violation of his oath of office to preserve, defend, and protect the Constitution of the United States.  The evidence is all around us.  Sometimes it is blatant and arrogant as when he said, "So where I can act on my own, I'm going to act on my own.  I won't wait for Congress," and, "We're going to do everything we can...with or without Congress."  In other words, Obama intends to use his executive authority to make his own law.
            We have already seen this with the president's multiple executive orders and other decisions to bypass laws enacted by Congress, the most recent examples of which are his postponement  of ObamaCare's employer mandate and his use of taxpayer funds to subsidize health insurance costs for Congressmen and their aides.  Both actions were violations of specific provisions of the law, a law he signed.   Oh, well.  Since ObamaCare is his baby, I guess that means he can do whatever he wants, regardless of what the law says.  But where in our Constitution does it say that the President of the United States is not obligated to execute the law when he doesn't feel like it?
            At other times Obama uses his henchmen to do his dirty work.  Remember when Eric Holder made up his own version of the Voting Rights Act or when Janet Napolitano decided not to enforce immigration law? 
            Worst of all, though, are the "silent and gradual encroachments" by Obama lackeys in the EPA, the Energy Department, the NLRB, the IRS and others.  They not only make and impose their own laws in the form of regulations, they also act as judge and jury when their regulations are not obeyed.         
            What we're talking about here is  the importance the Constitution places on the separation of powers. If the president ignores Congress and makes his own laws; if he picks and chooses which laws he will execute;  if he does not abide by Supreme Court decisions, then he simply is not preserving, defending and protecting the Constitution. That is the very definition of authoritarianism.  It is also the path to despotism.  And that, in my view, is an impeachable offense.

           

             

Education Law Changes

            For the first time in the eleven years I have been living in North Carolina, I can say that I am happy with the results of legislation passed by our representatives in Raleigh.  In particular, I am pleased with the state's tax reforms.  They not only will reduce income taxes beginning next year, they will also make North Carolina a much more attractive state in which to do business.  I am hopeful that this last change will have a positive effect on our community.  Goodness knows we could use more employers in Perquimans County.

            Other changes have not been met with equal enthusiasm, especially legislation affecting education.  Overall spending for K-12 education is increasing by 2.1%, but there are some changes in the budget that will leave teachers' unions and some individual teachers grumbling. 
            One of those changes eliminates tenure; teachers will no longer earn lifetime security after four years of teaching.  Up to now, it has been almost impossible to fire teachers who enjoy the protection of tenure's security umbrella.  That only 17 of North Carolina's 97,184 teachers were fired last year is proof of that.  I know from personal experience as a school board member for 13 years that a small school district cannot afford to fight a well-funded union in court to remove incompetent, abusive, or uncaring teachers, even test cheats.   Merit pay and performance bonuses are much better inducements to excellence.   The legislature gets a gold star from me on this one.
            Another change unpopular among teachers is the elimination of extra pay for a master's degree.  The legislature relied on research showing that teachers with advanced degrees are no more effective on average than those without them.  The change seems to suggest that teachers obtain these degrees just to get a boost in salary.  That charge may be unfair in many cases.   Unfortunately, the reputations of good teachers who work hard to improve themselves can be sullied by others, like a guidance counselor I knew who waited 25 years to go for his doctorate so he could increase his base pay before retiring and thus get a big boost in his pension.  Here again, I think merit pay and performance bonuses are a better way to reward  excellence in the classroom.
            I hope our legislature will not stop here.  Anyone who looks at the superiority of educational systems in places as far distant as South Korea and Sweden knows that there is a lot of room for improvement here at home.  I'm likely to get a lot of flack on this one, but I am a big proponent of increased school hours and  a longer school year (perhaps through year-round classes).  I also support charter schools and school vouchers; North Carolina is inching in this direction, but needs to do much more.  And we should give more high school students the option of either preparing for college or acquiring the hands-on technical skills to enter the job market upon graduation.  
           Finally, we need to update a curriculum that is not competitive with other countries in math and science, and leaves so many graduating students pathetically clueless on the principles of freedom and democracy and the history of our country. 
            When I was a kid, we studied something called Civics.  Now the kids all think Civics are cars made by Honda.

Congressional Rewards

            The signal achievement of President Obama's first term was the signing into law of the Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as ObamaCare.  It was passed without time to review its contents ("We have to pass it to know what's in it." _ Nancy Pelosi) and without a single Republic vote.    The engineer and the passengers on the train that brought us ObamaCare (a train wreck, as Democratic Senator Max Baucus calls it), are all Democrats.  Put simply, the Democratic Party owns ObamaCare.

            Now it turns out that these same Democrats don't like the way ObamaCare applies to them.  According to the law they wrote and passed in the dead of night, they would  be subject to the same rules as the common people.  They would even have to buy their own health insurance.  Imagine that!  But why should they be treated like everybody else?  They are, after all, the privileged, the elite, the ruling class. 
            So what did they do?  They appealed to President Obama for help.  More than happy to reward his co-conspirators for their continued fealty,  he obliged.
            This is not the first time Obama has modified the law in defiance of the Constitution.  Within weeks of the bill's passage  he gave waivers to 2,000 select companies and his buddies in the labor unions.  Then last month he postponed for a year the law's requirement for employers to provide insurance for their employees.  Now, using a slick and illegal maneuver via the Office of Personnel Management, he's given members of Congress and their aides  $4,900 ($10,000 for families) in taxpayer money to offset their insurance costs.  Like his actions to circumvent the law on DOMA, the Dream Act, and Cap and Trade, the man who swore to uphold the law of the land is once again picking the laws he chooses to enforce or disregard.  
            The president's shameful conduct violates a specific provision in the Affordable Care Act that prohibits this special treatment.   Several Republican congressmen have called him out on this, as have Conservative media outlets.  But where is the outrage in the liberal media?  Why do they give the president a pass on this as they do every time he issues executive orders that bypass Congress and amount to legislating from the White House? 
            Why do we put up with it?  We should all be screaming bloody murder.  I hope lawmakers hear it from their constituents at town hall meetings during their summer recess.
            There is one legislator, however, who does not intend to benefit from presidential generosity for very long.  Tom Coburn, Republican Senator from Oklahoma and a great favorite of mine, is not running for re-election in 2014. He is imposing a term limit on himself, keeping his promise not to stay in the Senate for more than two terms.   Why can't we have more like him?  Wouldn't it be nice to clean out that rat's nest in Washington?

 

Those Phonhy Scandals

            President Obama is back on the campaign trail where he feels most comfortable reading from teleprompters while surrounded by hand-picked sycophants.  He sounded very much like his old self in Chattanooga, Jacksonville, and Knox College last month.  He offered a grand bargain to Republicans while berating them for their obstructionism and for pushing their phony scandals.

            When asked what phony scandals the president was talking about, his spokesman Jay Carney specified Benghazi and the IRS.  I found that very interesting, because those are the two scandals that are slowly but surely finding their way to the Oval Office.  The others, like the James Rosen persecution and the NSA spying, are easily blamed on somebody else.
            Thanks to the persistence of Congress and CNN, the Benghazi scandal isn't going away.  Three recent developments were especially significant.  In a closed door session, Colonel George Bristol, commander of the Joint Special Operations Task Force - Trans Sahara, testified before the House Armed Services Committee on the reasons why Special Forces did not come to the aid of Americans under siege in Benghazi.  Concurrently, David Ubben, one of those diplomatic security agents who waited for 20 hours on the roof of the diplomatic compound for aid that never came, is also talking after being told to keep his mouth shut.  Meanwhile,  we learn that CNN correspondent Arwan Damon managed to interview Ahmed Abu Khattala, leader of Anwar al Sharia, one of the terrorist groups that attacked and killed four Americans.  Khattala told CNN that he had yet to be interviewed by anyone from the FBI or the Libyan government, although he has been openly walking the streets of Benghazi.  All this shines a fresh light on the Administration's SOP of deny, stonewall, obstruct, and lie.
            On the IRS front we now know that IRS officer Lois Lerner colluded with the Federal Election Commission to influence the last presidential elections by divulging tax information on Conservative groups to the FEC.  This is very much in keeping with Lerner's reputation for aggressive investigations of Conservatives and Republicans while she headed the FEC's enforcement division from 1986 to 2001.  Of course, we also know from White House logs that IRS chief counsel and Democratic political appointee William Wilkins met with President Obama on 4/23/12.  The very next day IRS Commissioner Doug Shulman met with the president.  And on 4/25/12 Wilkins offered some "guidance" to Lois Lerner for approving or denying tea-party tax-exempt applications. 
            Maybe this doesn't prove that Obama used the IRS to steal the 2012 presidential elections.  But it sure does stink to high heaven. 
            But then again, it was just another one of those phony scandals.