IRS and press harassment similar to other Obama scandals

The Obama Administration has become embroiled in three simultaneous scandals over the past few weeks. Much speculation has been made about what President Obama knew and when he knew it. Regardless of whether President Obama gave the order or had personal knowledge of spying on reporters or the harassment of conservative groups, the charges are well within the character of an administration well known for executive overreach and disregard for the law. The Obama administration has been hallmarked by disregard for the rule of law since its early days.

In the spring of 2009, the Obama Administration ignored established bankruptcy law to cast aside secured creditors of Chrysler and GM in favor of unsecured but better connected creditors such as the United Auto Workers pension according to National Affairs. Creditors were denied their right to have input on the company reorganizations through a sub rosa plan in which the assets of “old” Chrysler and GM were “sold” to “new” Chrysler and GM, bypassing creditors in the process. When some investors stood up for their rights, President Obama attacked them as “speculators” in a speech at Chrysler.

The closing of dealerships in the aftermath of the auto bankruptcies fueled speculation and rumors that the Obama Administration was using the auto bankruptcies to target political opponents. The Washington Examiner pointed out at the time that dealers on the list of closures had donated millions to Republicans, but only $200 to Obama. The list of closures seems to have been dictated by Steve Rattner, President Obama’s “car czar.”

On the heels of the auto bankruptcies came “Fast and Furious.” In the spring and summer of 2009, Democrats from Secretary of State Clinton to Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-Calif.) claimed that 90 percent of the guns used in Mexican crimes came from the United States. While claim is not accurate, thousands of the guns that actually did get to Mexico from the United States apparently were allowed across the border by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (BATFE). Whistleblowers later told Congress that they had orders to let smugglers take illegally purchased guns across the border into Mexico. As Examiner reported in 2011, several of the illegal weapons were found at the scene of the murder of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry on December 15, 2010. The guns turned up at numerous other crime scenes in Mexico as well. In 2011, another American officer, Jaime Zapata, was murdered in Mexico with a gun that had been tracked by the ATF according to CBS News. The Mexican government was not pleased with the revelations that the Obama Administration allowed thousands of illegal guns into their country.

After the BP oil spill in 2010, President Obama issued a unilateral moratorium on deepwater drilling. When a court ruled that the drill ban was unconstitutional, the Department of Interior still refused to issue new drilling permits. This led a federal judge to hold the Obama Administration in contempt of court for its “determined disregard” for its continued drilling restrictions.

In the spring of 2011, after dithering for months, President Obama approved U.S. intervention in the Libyan civil war. Obama notified Congress within 48 hours as required by the War Powers Act, but neglected to seek congressional approval within 60 days. Obama also failed to end American involvement within 30 days of the deadline for seeking congressional approval as required. The N.Y. Times called the Libya intervention “illegal” and said that it “set a troubling precedent that could allow future administrations to wage war at their convenience — free of legislative checks and balances.”

The matter is all the more stark because President Obama had said in 2007 that “The president does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation.” After Libya, Politifact rated the statement a “full [flip] flop.”

Also in 2011, the Obama Administration’s loan to Solyndra, a solar panel manufacturer, went sour. While most analyses of the Solyndra scandal focus on the poor judgment involved in making a loan that ultimately cost taxpayers $535 million according to Yahoo, laws might have been broken here as well. According to the Christian Science Monitor, it may have been illegal for the Obama Administration to restructure Solyndra’s loan to put private creditors ahead of taxpayers.

In 2012, the Supreme Court affirmed the power of the government to compel its citizens to purchase a private product, keeping Obamacare’s individual mandate intact. The legal status of other parts of Obamacare remains questionable. The mandate that all insurance policies cover contraceptive and abortifacient drugs has been successfully challenged in court as a violation of the freedom of religion.

Since 2010, the Department of Health and Human Services has issued more than 1,200 Obamacare waivers to companies according to The Hill. As noted in Examiner, the language of the Affordable Care Act did not permit such waivers. In 2013, Politico reported that members of Congress were secretly negotiating an exemption from Obamacare’s requirements under concerns that staffers would face sharp increases in premiums when Obamacare goes into effect.

More recently, faced with a $1.5 billion shortfall in funds to implement Obamacare, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius resorted to soliciting donations from insurance companies according to the Washington Post. As Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) points out in the Wall St. Journal, the Constitution and other laws do not permit the government to spend money that has not been appropriated by Congress. Soliciting donations from companies that Sebelius regulates is likely a conflict of interest as well.

Earlier this year, President Obama received a strong rebuke from a federal court for several appointments that he had made to the National Labor Relations Board. The president styled the appointments as recess appointments even though Congress was still in session. The decision, described on Examiner, stated that Congress, not the president, decided when it was in session and then went a step further, stating that recess appointments could only be used to fill vacancies that arise during a recess. A second appeals court issued a similar ruling in May after the NLRB ignored the first court’s ruling and continued to issue decisions on cases heard by the invalid members.

President Obama also has a record of issuing executive decrees when Congress fails to act. In December 2010, the EPA announced plans to regulate carbon after Congress failed to pass cap-and-trade legislation. At the same time, the FCC unilaterally issued “net neutrality” rules in spite of a court ruling stating that the agency did not have the power to regulate the internet. Before even asking Congress to enact new gun control laws, the president signed 23 executive orders relating to guns.

The new scandals, lying to public about Benghazi, spying on reporters to ferret out leakers within the administration, and using federal enforcement agencies to quash political opposition, are merely the latest in a long line of abuses of power by President Obama and his deputies. The common threads among all of the Obama scandals are abuse of executive power disregard of the law for political gain. The new trio of scandals is no different.

A form of this article was originally published as Atlanta Conservative Examiner.

IRS scandal is worse than Benghazi for Obama

Over the past week, the Obama Administration has been repeatedly rocked by scandals. Beginning with last week’s hearings on the pre-election attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi that resulted in the death of ambassador Chris Stevens, President Obama has endured a steady stream of bad news.

Although the Benghazi hearing has raised the ire of conservatives, the real danger to the Obama Administration comes from the domestic scandals. In particular Obama’s problems with the Internal Revenue Service can fire the imaginations and anger of the American people.

As reported by Examiner last October, the fundamentals of the Benghazi fiasco were known within weeks after the attack. The recent hearings have confirmed that President Obama lied about the nature of the attack to avoid having his foreign policy questioned just before the election. Benghazi never captured the public’s imagination, however. Even though a U.S. ambassador, a consulate employee, and two former Navy Seals were killed by al Qaeda-linked militants, the media mostly ignored the story of the cover-up. The American public, weary of war after more than a decade of fighting, seemed unwilling to get angry over the attack, even if it was the result of Obama’s foreign policy or Secretary of State Clinton’s refusal to reinforce the consulate’s security forces. This week’s revelations of IRS bullying and Justice Department subpoenas of Associated Press phone records seem likelier to hit home, each for different reasons.

In the best of times, the IRS is probably the most reviled federal agency. Nobody likes taxes. Tax collectors have been unpopular with taxpayers since long before the days when Matthew and Zacchaeus repented of abuse of power in their chosen profession. More recently, the IRS scandal began with an apology from Lois Lerner, director of the Exempt Organizations Division, for what she termed as the targeting of conservative groups for additional scrutiny on their applications for tax exempt status. The problem, she said, lay with low level workers in Cincinnati who acted independently. It quickly became apparent that the IRS confession barely scratched the surface.

· In 2009, the IRS tried to force board members of a pro-life group to sign a statement promising “under perjury of the law, they do not picket/protest or organize groups to picket or protest outside of Planned Parenthood” in order to gain tax exemption according to the Thomas More Law Center.

· In 2010, Z Street, a pro-Israel group, sued the IRS after being told that its application would take longer because it was “connected to Israel” according to the Jewish Press.

· In September 2010, the Weekly Standard reported that Austan Goolsbee, the head of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors, criticized Koch Industries, citing confidential tax information that was not publicly available.

· Anne Henderschott, a Catholic professor and blogger, was targeted by the IRS for audits after she wrote several articles challenging liberal Catholic groups who supported Obamacare. According to the Blaze, many of the questions in the audit were political.

· In April 2011, Secure America Now, an organization critical of Obama’s foreign policy toward North Korea, Iran, Israel and Libya had its tax exemption held up twice by the IRS according to the WSJ. The investigation intensified after the group produced a popular video about the Benghazi attack.

· In May 2011, Bloomberg reported that the IRS had attempted to retroactively tax gifts made to tax exempt groups “supporting Republican causes.”

· In March 2012, the Puffington Host published private information about donors to the National Organization for Marriage that it admitted had been obtained from the IRS.

· In June 2012, Idaho businessman Frank Vandersloot was subjected to a series of audits after being mentioned in an Obama campaign as one of several “wealthy individuals with less-than-reputable records” who donated to Romney. VanderSloot passed the audits with flying colors.

· From December 2012 to January 2013, the IRS gave the left-leaning group Pro Publica confidential tax information about conservative groups.

· In April 2013, just a few weeks before the scandal broke, CNET reported that internal IRS communications state that Americans have “generally no privacy” in electronic communications such as email and Facebook chats. The IRS position is that no warrant is required to access email. This in spite of judicial rulings to the contrary.

As new victims of IRS abuse come forward, it is evident that the IRS harassed only conservatives. It is also apparent that the problem went beyond merely denying tax exempt status to conservative groups. The IRS sought membership lists from conservative groups, targeted Obama opponents with audits and slow-tracking of approvals, and leaked confidential tax information to liberal groups. The IRS also apparently tried to influence and limit the political speech of individuals and groups opposed to President Obama.

Contrary to the official IRS explanation, at least two IRS offices were involved. According to the Washington Post, letters to conservative groups seeking information about donors also came from the Washington, D.C. and California offices. At least one group was told that their application was under review in Washington.

While such heavy-handed tactics were once the province of many Democratic presidents from FDR to JFK according to historian James Bovard, Congress has since enacted legislation to restrict political contacts between the IRS and the White House. To put President Obama’s current predicament into perspective, the second article of impeachment against Richard Nixon involved using tax information for illegal purposes and auditing political opponents.

The matter of the Justice Department’s AP investigation is less pressing to most Americans, but has the potential to turn members of the media against the Obama Administration. The New Yorker called the AP investigation “aggressive.” The Wall Street Journal notes that the AP subpoenas were “broad, violating normal Justice practice of narrowly tailoring requests that concern the media.” The Justice Department overreach may entice a press corps that mostly sympathizes with Obama to take a more adversarial tack.

President Obama immediately tried to distance himself from the scandals. On May 13, he called the IRS an “independent agency,” an assessment that Factcheck.org disputes. The IRS is actually a branch of the Treasury Department. The president appoints the heads of both the IRS and the Treasury Department, a fact subtly acknowledged by President Obama when he fired Acting IRS Commissioner Steven Miller on Thursday. Miller would have left the post in June anyway.

President Obama’s problems may not be solved that easily. Abuse of power in federal agencies seems to be increasing under President Obama. According to the Wall St. Journal, the Environmental Protection Agency has favored groups that share its political agenda, charging conservative groups for Freedom of Information Act requests while waiving fees for liberal groups. Earlier this year, a court ruled the president’s appointments to the National Labor Relations Board unconstitutional, but the board keeps issuing rulings. In Obama’s first term, several courts decided that the EPA acted outside its legal authority as Examiner reported last year. Obama’s Interior Department was held in contempt in 2010 for refusing to issue new drilling permits after Obama’s unilateral drilling moratorium was ruled unconstitutional.

Whether President Obama personally ordered the IRS to investigate and bully conservative groups or not, there can be little doubt that he set the tone that encouraged the harassment. Kimberly Strassel points out that many of Obama’s speeches that deride conservative groups as “less than reputable” and made thinly veiled calls for their investigation. Senate Democrats went even further notes Karl Rove. On two separate occasions, in 2010 and 2012, Democratic senators sent letters to the IRS demanding investigation of political groups.

Voters are angry about the IRS scandal. A Rasmussen poll released Wednesday indicated that a majority of Americans feel that the IRS agents responsible should be punished. Forty-one percent believe they should be fired while 29 percent support a formal reprimand. Sixteen percent believe that jail time is warranted. Fifty-seven percent believe that the investigations were politically motivated and 55 percent believe that President Obama and his top aides were aware of what the IRS was doing.

While impeachment hearings will not be held any time soon, it is also unlikely that the IRS abuse of power scandal will disappear any time soon. Americans will likely think of their own tax troubles when they hear the tales of politically motivated audits. The problem may be even worse for Obama if voters realize that the IRS will be responsible for much of the implementation of the new health care rules under Obamacare.

Originally published on Examiner:

http://www.examiner.com/article/domestic-scandals-more-dangerous-to-obama-than-benghazi

Obama’s legal problems

By now most Americans are familiar with the legal challenges to President Obama’s signature legislation, the Affordable Care Act. In March, the Supreme Court heard three days of oral arguments on the constitutionality of the various aspects of the law including the government’s mandate that all Americans must buy health insurance. Although the Court has not yet ruled on the case, pointed questions from the justices lead many observers to believe that at least part of the law will be struck down.
If the Supreme Court does rule that the Affordable Care Act is unconstitutional, it will not be the first time that the Obama Administration has been chastised by the judicial branch. Last year, President Obama’s Interior Department was held in contempt for violating a federal judge’s ruling striking down the moratorium on offshore oil drilling imposed after the BP oil spill in 2010. After the judge ordered the moratorium lifted, the Interior Department continued to refuse to issue drilling permits for months. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar also imposed onerous safety rules on drilling that the judge ruled were in violation of federal law.
The Obamacare case is not the first time that the Obama Administration has found itself in legal trouble. In February 2011, a federal judge held the administration in contempt for continuing its deepwater oil drilling moratorium after the policy was struck down. According to Bloomberg, the government acted with “defiance” and “determined disregard” in refusing to issue drilling permits even after a court struck down Obama’s ban on offshore drilling.
President Obama’s EPA has suffered several defeats recently. In a March 2012 Supreme Court ruling, an Idaho couple was building a house when the EPA ordered them to restore the wetlands on their property and threatened fines of $75,000 per day according to the Washington Post. There was no noticeable water on the property. Lower courts ruled that EPA compliance orders were not subject to judicial review, but the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the couple could challenge the EPA’s order in court.
Another EPA case involves the agency’s refusal to approve a Texas plan for implementing air quality standards. According to Businessweek, a U.S. Court of Appeals ruled that the EPA had “no legal basis” to reject the Texas standard after it failed to identify where federal standards were not met and missed a deadline to rule on the plan by three years according to the Austin Statesman.
The EPA has recently lost another case to Texas as well. In December 2011, the U.S. Court of Appeals issued a stay on an EPA rule regarding cross-state air pollution that was set to take effect in January. The ruling means that the EPA regulations will not take effect until the court makes a decision on the case. Arguments in the case were heard in April, but the court has not issued a decision yet. Georgia is also a party to the cross-state lawsuit.
In more litigation relating to the EPA, the Southeastern Legal Foundation, a Marietta, Ga. based group, is challenging the Obama EPA’s decision to unilaterally amend the Clean Air Act to allow it to regulate carbon. On April 2, Shannon Goessling, the executive director of the Southeastern Legal Foundation, was interviewed about the lawsuit on the Michael Medved Show. (Listen in Atlanta on AM-920. The interview is archived at MichaelMedved.com and the SLF website.) Goessling said that 15 Georgia businesses and business associations as well 7 members of Congress from Georgia are among the parties to the lawsuit.
According to Goessling and SLF court filings, six million businesses would potentially be subject to EPA carbon rules under the new regulations. The expansion of EPA regulatory power would have a devastating effect on the economy, dramatically increasing the cost of energy and costing millions of jobs. The result of the regulation would be to reduce the world temperature by 0.00071 degrees Celsius, “70 times smaller than the smallest change that can be detected” according to the SLF brief. The annual emissions reduced by the regulation would be replaced by China in 13 days.
The question is whether the EPA had the right to regulate carbon at all. Congress failed to pass cap-and-trade carbon regulation in 2010. Since Congress did not pass the legislation, President Obama’s EPA chief, Lisa Jackson, decided to bypass Congress and regulate carbon as a pollutant in the wake of a Supreme Court ruling, Massachusetts v. EPA, which directed the agency to review whether it could legally regulate carbon. According to the Atlanta Business Chronicle, EPA regulations will take effect on power plants this month and refineries in November 2012. If the regulations are allowed to take effect, energy costs are poised to skyrocket. The case was recently heard by a federal appeals court which has not yet ruled.
The rash of cases against the EPA for unconstitutional and illegal overreach reflects the attitude of EPA Regional Administrator Al Armendariz who recently surfaced in a video favorably comparing EPA enforcement actions to Roman crucifixions. Armendariz implied that he felt the need to make an example of a few companies in order to intimidate the rest. He resigned after the video went public.
Other members of the Obama Administration have their own personal legal problems. Attorney General Eric Holder may be held in contempt of Congress for his role in the cover-up of the Fast and Furious scandal according to ABC News. Holder’s Justice Department has not complied with congressional requests for many documents detailing the failed gun sting. In Operation Fast and Furious, federal agents allowed straw purchasers to smuggle thousands of guns purchased in the U.S. into Mexico. The guns were used in several murders, including that of U.S. Border Patrol agent Brian Terry in December 2010.
Finally, the Obama Administration was the plaintiff in a case against Arizona’s controversial immigration law. The administration sued to block implementation of the law on the grounds that only the federal government has the right to set immigration policy. Nevertheless, according to Yahoo, the Supreme Court appeared ready to uphold at least part of the Arizona law. At times even liberal judges were critical of the government’s case.
President Obama’s legal problems reflect a disregard for the letter of the law and an arrogant attitude that the government always knows best. Ironically, the disregard for constitutional principles and the rule of law may sink his signature legislative accomplishment and be the ultimate undoing of his presidency.

Read the rest of this article on Examiner.com
http://www.examiner.com/article/obama-s-legal-troubles?cid=db_articles