Crimes Against Liberty (27 page)

Well, apparently not. In June 2010, Obama issued an executive order “Establishing the Prevention, Health Promotion, and Public Health Council,” which will focus on “lifestyle behavior modification” (including smoking cessation, proper nutrition, appropriate exercise, mental health, behavioral health, substance-use disorder, and domestic violence screenings). It will also recommend federal policy changes to reduce “sedentary behavior.” Obama’s propensity to overreach his constitutional authority is only exceeded by his obsession with controlling every aspect of our lives in complete disregard for our individual liberties.
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It seems George Will’s description of Secretary LaHood as “Secretary of Behavior Modification” could apply just as fittingly to LaHood’s boss, Barack Obama, the President of Behavior Modification.

PUTTING HUMAN BEINGS IN THEIR PLACE: LAST

One of the biggest yet least publicized outrages in recent memory is the Obama administration’s assault on California farmers. Environmental regulations purporting to protect endangered species of fish resulted in tens of billions of gallons of water being diverted away from mountains close to Sacramento and into the ocean, greatly exacerbating drought conditions and ruining hundreds of thousands of acres of farmland—a crushing blow to California agriculture.

In August 2009, some fifty mayors in California’s San Joaquin Valley sent Obama a letter requesting him to witness the devastation for himself. But Obama didn’t seem any more open to their appeal than he did to Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s request to designate California a disaster area. The administration refused Schwarzenegger’s plea, some believed, because to have granted it would have been an implicit admission that the administration itself had helped cause the drought. But with an administration that sees no limits to its power, why should anyone be surprised that it would effectively seize control of a state’s water supply in order to place the interests of fish above the health of human beings?
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Presidential adviser Rahm Emanuel wasn’t kidding when he said the administration would unleash a raft of executive orders across a number of fronts (read: those few areas where Congress won’t roll over for Obama’s agenda). This became one of Obama’s preferred methods of advancing his green policies. On June 12, 2009, Obama created, by memorandum, an Interagency Ocean Policy Task Force, led by the White House Council on Environmental Quality. The task force “is charged with developing a recommendation for a national policy that ensures protection, maintenance, and restoration of oceans, our coasts and the Great Lakes . . . to make [them] healthier—both environmentally and economically.”
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But one of the key purposes of the task force, and of the “National Ocean Council” that the task force created, was to “deal with the effects of climate change.”
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The task force’s report recommended the government view all ocean policy with an “ecosystem-based approach,” representing a “key philosophical shift” in the nation’s approach.
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Frank Miniter at
National Review Online
observed that the task force “has decided that the opinions of America’s 60 million anglers aren’t worthy of its consideration,” despite their enormous environmental and tax contributions. Miniter predicted the task force, with its “agenda of federal control and environmentalist ideology,” would recommend closing many of the nation’s saltwater and freshwater recreational-fishing areas.
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This policy flowed naturally from a president who is closely connected to extreme environmental groups, and whose policy course “precisely mirrors” what the green groups outlined in their position paper, “Transition Green.” Essentially, it would involve the federal government gobbling up wide swaths of land to preserve natural resources, irrespective of the effects on private industry. All these green groups, Miniter observed, share the “conviction that green ideology trumps ordinary human freedoms.”
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EPA’S CARBON END RUN

Obama’s initial failure to push cap and trade legislation through Congress didn’t deter him from skinning the cat another way—showing again that he would not allow constitutional checks and balances to hinder his agenda. After cap and tax, as it’s often rightly called, stalled in Congress, the EPA issued a decree in late 2009 defining carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases as toxic air pollutants subject to regulation under the Clean Air Act. EPA administrator Lisa Jackson declared, “The administration will not ignore science or the law any longer, nor will we avoid the responsibility we owe to our children and our grandchildren.”
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Thus, Obama’s EPA claimed unilateral authority to act, such as setting new carbon emission standards for power plants, factories, and cars,
whether or not Congress passes supporting legislation
. Environmental groups, naturally, were busting their buttons at this usurpation of congressional authority. Sierra Club chief climate counsel David Bookbinder said, “What it says for the rest of the world is that although Congress has not succeeded in passing the big piece of climate legislation, nevertheless the United States is prepared to move forward in dealing with carbon dioxide.”

The administration showed no concern over the enormous damage to the economy that carbon taxes would cause. As Republican senator James Inhofe noted, “Today the American public are getting a raw deal. All cost and no benefit. Yet the Obama administration is moving forward anyway.” Keith McCoy, with the National Association of Manufacturers, commented, “I’ve heard from every industry sector, I’ve heard from utilities, I’ve heard from large manufacturers, I’ve heard from small manufacturers. There is significant concern from every single manufacturing sector out there.”
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Coal-fired power plants would likely be hardest hit—not that this would concern Obama, who unapologetically boasted during the presidential campaign that under a cap and trade regime, any company that builds a coal-fired plan would go bankrupt.
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Furthermore, seeking to exploit anxiety over the Gulf oil spill, Obama ordered the government in May 2010 to set the first-ever mileage and pollution limits for big trucks and to tighten rules for future cars and SUVs, giving federal agencies until July 2011 to come up with fuel efficiency and greenhouse standards for commercial trucks and buses.
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Former U.S. senator George Allen and the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Marlo Lewis responded that the EPA “is carrying out one of the biggest power grabs in American history,” having “positioned itself to regulate fuel economy, set climate policy for the nation and amend the Clear Air Act—powers never delegated to it by Congress.”
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“A 2,100-PAGE MONSTROSITY FULL OF SPECIAL DEALS”

ObamaCare was an unmitigated disaster in its own right, but it was also a playground for assorted abuses of power by the Obama administration, beginning with certain ancillary provisions that were smuggled into the bill. An analysis of the Joint Economic Committee and the House Ways and Means Committee minority staff shows ObamaCare will lead to the largest increase in the IRS since World War II, with as many as 16,500 new IRS personnel required to collect, examine, and audit returns.
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Dave Camp, the ranking Republican on the Ways and Means Committee, warned the bill involves “a very dangerous expansion of the IRS’s power and reach into the lives of virtually every American.”
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Under the bill, the IRS will have to ensure Americans comply with the mandatory provision that they acquire health insurance. Taxpayers who fail to prove on their annual tax return that they are policyholders would be subject to a fine of $2,250 or 2 percent of their income, whichever is greater. The IRS would have the authority to confiscate tax refunds for this purpose. Some young Americans will probably gamble on their good health and opt to pay the penalty, but that fine will almost certainly lead to outright noncompliance among many young people, as well as among those in cash-oriented businesses who will have greater incentive to work under the radar.
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So Obama’s IRS will doubtlessly prepare itself to chase down these healthcare recalcitrants.

Republicans contend these changes would fundamentally alter the relationship between an already overly powerful and intrusive IRS and the American taxpayers, making the IRS responsible for “tracking the monthly health insurance status of roughly 300 million Americans.”
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(Note that almost half the mandated coverage will be imposed on people making less than $66,150 for a family of four.) The IRS would also collect hundreds of billions of dollars in new fees assessed against employers, drug companies, and device makers. The IRS budget is expected to increase by some $10 billion over the next decade to help administer this new program.
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Another IRS-related surprise in the bill is a hidden change in the tax law that will force companies to submit IRS 1099 forms for any individual or company from which they purchase more than $600 in goods or services a year. This will mean the required filing of millions of new forms each year to be sent to vendors and the IRS.
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Also folded into ObamaCare was an insidious federal power grab over student loans. The bill gave the government a monopoly on the student loan industry, with an expected profit to the government—literally robbed from the private sector—of $60 billion over the next decade. In keeping with Obama’s penchant for growing government, he wouldn’t just subsume the student loan business; he would expand it by some $40 billion, which would still leave a profit of around $20 billion that the CBO was required to consider in its scoring of the bill—even though its only relation to healthcare was that it was smuggled into the bill.

Obama snuck this provision into ObamaCare because it probably wouldn’t have been able to secure the sixty votes necessary for passage on its own. The student loan section of the bill also contained a hidden payoff to North Dakota senator Kent Conrad, who happens to be Budget Committee chairman. The bill would “establish a new program for lenders who were chartered before July 1, 2009, and are owned by a state under the control of a board including the governor and offered guaranteed loans prior to June 30, 2010.” For all that fancy and misleading language, the program will only apply to one lender: the Bank of North Dakota .
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The administration presumptuously began transitioning toward the new student loan program half a year before the bill even passed, when Education secretary Arne Duncan sent colleges and universities a letter in October 2009 pressuring them to prepare to transition to the government-run system for the 2010-2011 academic year. At the time, schools generally preferred private lenders to the government-run “public option” available to them, because private firms provided better service. But the administration, possibly as a foreshadowing of what we can expect with ObamaCare, was intent on making the public option the only option.

But not all school administrators were happy with this transition, which was not, as the White House promised, “as simple as throwing a switch.” Dewey Knight, a financial aid officer for the University of Mississippi, called the administration’s approach “an insult to people who spent years getting delivery systems in place. We didn’t just throw a switch to get where we are.” Knight, one of the few financial aid administrators willing to criticize Obama’s student loan machinations, revealed the White House had pressured aid administrators to support the nationalization of student loans by going above their heads to university presidents.

A Republican staffer on the House Education and Labor Committee confirmed Knight’s perspective, noting that financial aid professionals expressed opposition to the plan early in the process, but were pressured to be quiet after the administration refused to satisfy their concerns. The staffer divulged she’d even been told about “specific instances at individual schools where administration officials or members of Congress had contacted school leadership in an effort to tamp down opposition.”
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This strong-arming reflects the same MO Obama has employed with all his significant legislative bills. Shortly after the bill passed, lender Sallie Mae announced it would cut 2,500 jobs due to the government takeover of the student loan program.
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ObamaCare also earned notoriety because the administration resorted to the crudest kind of political bribery to pass it, marking a shocking violation of Obama’s core campaign promises of transparent government and an end to backroom deals. There was the “Louisiana Purchase,” whereby Obama and his Democrats bought Senator Mary Landrieu’s vote with a promise to send $300 million in additional Medicaid funding to Louisiana. There was the “Cornhusker Kickback,” the administration’s disgraceful bribe of Nebraska senator Ben Nelson with a promise to exempt his state from its share of Medicaid expansion, meaning that the other forty-nine states would subsidize Nebraska’s new Medicaid recipients to the tune of about $45 million over the first decade. Obama, in an interview with ABC’s Diane Sawyer, denied he had been involved in the Nelson deal, which was ultimately dropped from the bill due to public opposition. “Let’s hold on a second, Diane. . . . So let’s just clarify. I didn’t make a bunch of deals.”
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But his aid Rahm Emanuel, when asked about the Cornhusker Kickback, told a different story to CBS’s Katie Couric: “Look, we were involved in the legislation all the way through. . . . We were helpful in getting the bill off the Senate floor.”
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