Chief Justice Roberts Fires Back at Pres. Obama

   The wires were abuzz this week with news of U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Roberts' speech to the law school at the University of Alabama. Chief Justice Roberts broke his silence about Pres. Obama using his State of the Union address in February to lash out at the Supreme Court"s recent decision on campaign financing.


 
By a narrow margin the Court invalidated certain restrictions on campaign financing by corporations and labor unions. Pres. Obama lashed out at the decision in front of the justices who were forced to sit there, stone-faced, as the overwhelmingly Democrat chamber applauded loudly around them. It was a scene out of a North Korean re-education camp.

   Chief Justice Roberts today questioned whether the Court should continue attending the annual State of the Union affair, saying that the event had "degenerated into a political pep rally."

  Obama Minister of Propaganda, "Bagdad Bob" Gibbs, staunchly flaked for the president, saying in reply that the Court ruling opens the door for Big Corporations to buy elections. (In the liberal half of the world there's always a bogeyman, and the bogey is always Big.)

   But that's a red herring. Few if any corporations can or would do that because they have to answer to too many people. For example, they would risk loss of business by endorsing a conservative candidate and risk upsetting their more liberal customers. The same goes for financially supporting liberal candidates and causes. No company wants to risk a product boycott. And if sales do decline because of a company's political activism the company's management has to answer to shareholders who care about only one thing: their investment.

  Truth be told, the ruling, far from ushering in a new era of Robber Barons, as the president intimated, actually benefits Mr. Obama's biggest supporters: labor unions. Labor union spending on elections far exceeds that of corporate America, $80 million in the last presidential election. Labor bosses themselves strutted around after Pres. Obama's election and claimed that they were responsible for putting him in the White House, with millions of dollars in donations and thousands of get-out-the-vote foot soldiers. The Court's ruling only increases their ability to buy elections.

   In seeking to embarrass the Justices Pres. Obama said that they had "reversed a century-old law...that will open the flood gates for special interests." But the president, who bills himself as something of a constitutional scholar should have known that the turn-of-the-20th-century law he claimed the ruling invalidated wasn't the issue. It was a portion of the more recent McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance Reform Act that the Court took to to the woodshed.

   Let's assume for a minute that the president confused the two laws, rather than engaged in deliberate demagoguery, railing against "special interests". The real issue is that he committed a transgression not seen since Franklin D. Roosevelt took the Court to task 73 years ago for invalidating much of his New Deal program (It's a prickly thing, that Constitution.) In addition to socialist-leaning politics, Barack Obama shares what was FDR's boundless self-confidence that somehow his intellect gave him the right to act badly in public.

   The Supreme Court is the most respected institution in the U.S. At a time like this, when the president's job approval ratings continue to sink like a two-seam fastball, and Congress' job approval rating hovers down there with used car salesmen and televangelists, the Supreme Court remains nearly universally respected. Does the Court always get it right. No.  Both liberals and conservatives rail against specific decisions, and not all individual justices are held in the same regard. But the institution of the Court is respected by nearly everyone.

   That's because no matter who we are, where we come from, whether we're rich or poor, black or white, we all feel that the Supreme Court is the last stop on Democracy Road. It's the institution that will set things right when everything else seems so wrong. It is the one place we can go where we think we'll get a fair shake, no matter if our name is Linda Brown or Ernesto Miranda. Yaser Hamdi or George Bush. The one place that's never forgotten the Forgotten Man, because it doesn't forget the Constitution.

   Mr. Constitutional Scholar, Mr. Defender of the Forgotten Man, forgot. He forgot when insulted the Court on national TV.

   Mr. Obama's supporters use a lot of adjectives to describe him. Brilliant. Articulate, Cool. I'll add another based on his State of the Union performance.

   Graceless.

   Just thought you'd like to know.

Rep. Paul Ryan Has a Better Idea on How to Fix What Ails the U.S.

Tonight, January 27, Pres. Barack Obama will deliver his State of the Union address to a Joint Session of Congress. While the Constitution mandates that the Executive report to Congress on an annual basis, the tradition of doing so in person is a relatively new one. However, in this case, Pres. Obama might just want to mail it in, like many of his predecessors did.

Word on the street is that the president, following his battlefield conversion in Massachusetts last week, will make small business the tall pole in his economic recovery tent. He'll propose a combination of small business tax credits in an attempt to spur the economy. But this is just nibbling around the edges of a very large cracker-the collapse of the U.S. economy as we've known it for the last 60 years. See our January 26 post.

Paul Ryan is a member of Congress from Wisconsin. He is the ranking member of the House Budget Committee. He's taken the opportunity of tonight's State of the Union address to propose what he calls a "road map for America's future." While Pres. Obama may nibble around the edges of the problem, Rep. Ryan is a lot bolder. His plan is built on good old Midwestern common sense and American values. Writing in today's Wall Street Journal he lists the elements of his roadmap:

• Healthcare. We've spent 8 months in a bruising, partisan battle over the shape of healthcare reform. The result: A conservative-liberal stalemate. How about we try this: Provide universal access to health insurance by making the tax code fairer  to allow all Americans, either through their employer or on their own, to purchase insurance, even if those policies are written in another state. Provide supplemental payments to the poor so that they can find top-notch healthcare, rather than being consigned to the nether world of Medicaid coverage. Make insurance truly portable so it stays with the insured, not the company, and create high risk pools to make sure people with pre-existing conditions can get insurance without knocking out the concept of risk management, which keeps insurers solvent. The goal: Put Americans back in charge of their health, not insurance companies or government bureaucrats.
• Medicare. Preserve the system as is for older patients (55+), but create a Medicare payment for the younger ones to let them purchase their own Medicare-eligible plan. Also, fully fund Medical Savings Accounts for lower income patients. 
• Social Security. As with Medicare, keep the system intact for those workers who have paid into the system their whole lives and have an expectation of benefits in retirement. But allow workers younger than 55 to invest a third of their current Social Security taxes into personal retirement accounts, similar to the Thrift Savings Plans that federal workers currently enjoy. These plans are guaranteed to not lose money. Most important, make these savings plans personal property so that when the beneficiary passes on, his heirs can inherit the asset. 
• Tax Reform. Reduce today's thousand-page tax code to two income brackets: 10% for joint returns up to $100,000 in income ($50,000 for individual filers), and 25% on taxable income above that amount. Period. The plan would preserve the standard deduction and personal exemption but would eliminate tax loopholes, deductions, credits, exclusions (except the healthcare tax credit), and nearly the entire tax preparation industry (which the current administration is attempting to tax with its harebrained tax prep licensing program)

There is a lot more to the Ryan Roadmap but you can see it for yourself online. Pres. Obama tonight will nibble at the problem in an attempt to re-engage the independent voters who elected him, while at the same time trying not to alienate the leftist/socialist cabal who created him. Delicate balance, and too little, too late. America's economy needs real, significant reforming, and Paul Ryan just might be the guy to do it.

Just thought you might like to know.

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisconsin) addresses the House of Representatives on the looming pitfalls of the Obama 
healthcare plan.

The State of the Union is Bleak

Wednesday evening, January 27, Pres. Obama will deliver his State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress. He'll have to report to Congress, his cabinet, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the justices of the Supreme Court exactly what he's done as president over the last 12 months. And the answer to that is not much.

For the record, here is the president's score card, January 2009-January 2010:

• Nearly a trillion dollars in "stimulus" spending that has generated little to no growth and has only transfered wealth out of the economy to government institutions
• A $1.3 trillion budget deficit
• A continuing budget deficit projected to aggregate to $6 trillion over the next decade, based on current spending rates
• A national debt of about $7.5 trillion, which is more than half the amount of our Gross Domestic Production, or GDP
• A projection that our national debt will grow to $15 trillion by the end of the next decade and will balloon to 67% of our GDP, which starts to put us in the class of third world countries who owe two-thirds to three-quarters of everything they produce (Like the old Tennessee Ernie Ford song, we'll soon owe our soul to the company store. But for us the company store is in Beijing.)
• A 10% unemployment rate that won't budge significantly for several more years

Congressional Budget Office chief James Elmendorf says we won't see a 5% unemployment again until 2014. That means we're not even half way through this thing. Pres. Obama, who continually mislabels the current recession as the greatest economic disaster since the Great Depression, is about to make that a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Look for the president Wednesday night, in his typical graceless manner, to blame Pres. Bush in part for the country's troubles. But, as they say down in Pres. Bush's West Texas homeland, that dog won't hunt. Pres. Obama has had a year to turn around the recession he inherited,  and frankly we're going in the wrong direction. We have nothing to show for for the last year but higher unemployment, a bigger deficit, and a national debit, the payment for which will suck every spare dollar out of the consumer economy.

The president Wednesday night will resort to what boxing impresario Don King called "trickeration," saying that he's ordered an immediate three year spending freeze (Funny, how that brings us right to his reelection year.). But most of the programs lined up for "cuts" have already received healthy increases over the last year. These "cuts" won't even restore those programs to where they were before Jan. 20, 2009.

Maybe it's because so much was expected of Barack Obama that his failures look monumental. Maybe it's the election of Republican Scott Brown in heavily Democrat Massachusetts that's gotten the president a good old dose of foxhole religion-making him a deficit hawk, at least for one night. But I think the issue is that this presidency, by any calculus, is shaping up to be among the worst in history. Massive deficits. Monumental debt. Chronically high unemployment on the order of the European countries the president so admires. Lack of security. No cogent homeland security strategy.  And more concern for the alleged rights of self-admitted terrorists than the rights of the American people to travel safely.

Regardless of how the president spins it, that's the state of our union right now.

Just thought you might like to know.