Cromnibus compromise shows GOP is ready for primetime

Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Cromnibus

While some conservatives have denounced the passage of the “cromnibus,” a combination of the abbreviation for “continuing resolution” and omnibus, the passage of the annual appropriations bill is a good thing for the Republican Party and the country. It shows that most Republicans are serious about governing, and that they can work with Democrats to find common ground for the good of the country. Since the new Republican congressional class has not yet taken office, the cromnibus compromise should be viewed as the last hurrah of Harry Reid’s (D-NV) Democratic Senate rather than a bill that sets the tone on policy for the incoming Republican majority.

Déjà vu all over again

Many conservatives opposed the cromnibus because they saw it as an opportunity to defund President Obama’s executive amnesty. Others wanted to begin the process of cutting government spending after the huge success in this year’s elections. The problem with these strategies is the same problem that led to the defeat of the Obamacare defunding attempt; Harry Reid’s Senate will not pass such a bill.

A showdown over the cromnibus would have had the same result as the disastrous attempt to defund Obamacare last year. The government shutdown that resulted from the defunding attempt was overwhelmingly blamed on Republicans and it cost the party dearly in terms of approval ratings. The Republican success in November was not due to their role in the shutdown; it was in spite of it. The Democratic collapse on issues ranging from Obamacare to the economy to foreign policy was the driver for the midterm elections.

The fact that another government shutdown would have been a bad idea for Republicans is underscored by two facts. First, the combative Republican candidates who challenged GOP incumbents in primaries lost. In several cases, they lost by slim margins, but Republican voters clearly rejected the shut-it-down, take-no-prisoners mentality of the Senate Conservatives Fund. Second, a Gallup poll from just before the election confirms that American voters want their congressional representatives to get things done, not stand in the way. A McClatchy-Marist poll released December 16 found that 70 percent of voters want the parties to compromise. Only 26 percent favor a stand that might lead to a government shutdown.

Bitter pills for Democrats

The cromnibus may not have been popular with conservatives, but that doesn’t mean that the Republicans didn’t gain from it. The American Spectator noted that “Republicans came out on top” in the negotiations. Provisions in the bill that conservatives should applaud include:

· Higher limits on political donations, a roll back of campaign finance reform laws

· Repeal of some Dodd-Frank restrictions on banks

· Exemption of farm ponds and irrigation ditches from EPA regulation under the Clean Water Act

· Repeal of EPA regulations that count cattle farts as greenhouse gases

· Extension of the federal moratorium on internet taxes

· Delay of enforcement of federal light bulb restrictions

· Ban on use of tax money to bail out insurance companies for Obamacare losses

· A $346 million dollar cut to the IRS budget

· Relaxation of the school lunch standards favored by Michelle Obama

Laying groundwork for the amnesty battle

Some conservatives have complained about the fact that the cromnibus extends most of the government funding through the end of the fiscal year in September, but this criticism is misplaced as well. Federal budgets, normally an annual matter, have rarely been passed in the Obama era. Funding the government through the end of the year will give lawmakers time to properly address and negotiate the 2016 budget, rather than spending their first few months dealing with matters that should have been handled last year.
The budget for the Department of Homeland Security is the exception. The budget for the DHS, the agency tasked with implementing President Obama’s executive amnesty, is only funded through February according to Forbes’ analysis of the bill. The DHS budget will be where the battle over Obama’s actions takes place early next year. Republicans will have the advantage of a majority in both houses of Congress at that point.

No Cruz control

The cromnibus vote gives an indication of the ability of John Boehner and Mitch McConnell to assemble a working bipartisan majority on at least some issues. This will allow some of the more independent Republicans to defect on certain issues - perhaps immigration, for instance – without killing the entire bill.

Cobbling together a majority will be even easier in the next term because the incoming GOP freshmen are unlikely to join the rogue faction led by Sens. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Mike Lee (R-UT). The Washington Examiner reported in November that the new senators had broad support from the various factions of the Republican Party and called them “political hybrids,” while Mitch McConnell (R-KY), the incoming majority leader, said, “The vast majority of them don’t feel they were sent to Washington to just fight all the time.” The Tea Party conservatives, most of who lost in the primaries, would have been much more likely to follow Cruz’s lead.

The cromnibus has also shown that when Cruz and company split from the rest of the Republicans, Democrats may be willing to cross the aisle. As Obama’s agenda becomes less popular, more and more Democrats may be willing to go their separate ways from the president. This was evident in the cromnibus votes as Elizabeth Warren, the progressive left’s new standard bearer, led a faction to oppose the compromise supported by President Obama.

Meeting in the middle

Even if Cruz and his allies stand with the rest of the GOP, it will be necessary to court disaffected and vulnerable Democrats. As the Republicans advance their agenda, it is likely that President Obama will veto much of their legislation. The new Republican caucus can pass bills, but falls short of the 67 votes needed to override a presidential veto. Compromise with Democrats will be necessary to enact many major reforms, including but not limited to repealing and replacing Obamacare.

The biggest boon to the Republican Party may be that the cromnibus shows that the party is mature enough to build a bipartisan majority that can get things done. In the House, a majority of Democrats opposed the bill although a many voted in favor. In the Senate, the bill passed with a majority of both parties. This was in spite of strong opposition from both the Cruz and Warren wings of their respective parties. In essence, the two parties met in the middle to form a workable consensus.

As long as the Republicans are able to work with moderate Democrats to find a consensus, they will be able to advance at least part of their agenda. While repealing Obamacare is probably not in the cards, repealing particularly odious part of it, such as the medical device tax and the individual mandate, might be. There are many examples of such low-hanging fruit where Republicans and Democrats can find common ground for the good of the country. Showing that Congress can function again will, in turn, help Republicans in 2016.

 

Read it on Examiner.com

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