Obama and Aides Did Not Want To Clutter Message with the Truth

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Photo Credit: APThe Wall Street Journal broke the news this weekend that, even as President Obama was telling the American people they could keep their health plans, “some White House policy advisors objected to the breadth of Mr. Obama’s ‘keep your plan’ promise. They were overruled by political aides.”

Overruled by political aides? This is simply damning.

It’s not easy to get a lie into a presidential speech. Every draft address is circulated to the White House senior staff and key Cabinet officials in something called the “staffing process.” Every line is reviewed by dozens of senior officials, who offer comments and factual corrections. During this process, it turns out, some of Obama’s policy advisers objected to the “you can keep your plan” pledge, pointing out that it was untrue. But it stayed in the speech. That does not happen by accident. It requires a willful intent to deceive.

In the Bush White House, we speechwriters would often come up with what we thought were great turns of phrase to help the president explain his policies. But we also had a strict fact-checking process, where every iteration of every proposed presidential utterance was scrubbed to ensure it was both accurate and defensible. If the fact-checkers told us a line was inaccurate, we would either kill it or find another way to make the point accurately. I cannot imagine a scenario in which the fact-checkers or White House policy advisers would tell us that something in a draft speech was factually incorrect and that guidance would be ignored or overruled by the president’s political advisers.

This whole episode is a window into a fundamentally dishonest presidency. And the story gets worse. After Obama began telling Americans they could keep their plans, White House aides discussed using media interviews “to explain the nuances of the succinct line in his stump speeches.” But they decided not to do so, because “officials worried . . . that delving into details such as the small number of people who might lose insurance could be confusing and would clutter the president’s message.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Treaties Don’t Trump the Constitution

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Photo Credit: American Thinker Can the President and Senate invest the federal government with new powers not enumerated in the U.S. Constitution simply by signing and ratifying a treaty? Can the treaty power be used to override the Tenth Amendment and render it a dead letter? Those issues will be argued before the U.S. Supreme Court on November 5, 2013, in the case of Bond v. United States.

When I returned to Congress in January, I also wanted to return to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs on which I had served almost 20 years ago. I also wanted to serve on the Subcommittee that oversees the United Nations and other international organizations that continue to push treaties on us that could jeopardize the sovereignty of our nation.

Indeed, I am so concerned about these threats to national sovereignty that I filed an amicus curiae brief in the U.S. Supreme Court to undo an 86-year old case under which a treaty, in essence, amends the U.S. Constitution. I was pleased to be joined in this amicus curiae brief by Gun Owners of America, Gun Owners Foundation, Citizens United’s American Sovereignty Action Project, U.S. Justice Foundation, The Lincoln Institute, The Institute on the Constitution, The Abraham Lincoln Foundation, Downsize DC Foundation, DownsizeDC.org, Policy Analysis Center, Conservative Legal Defense and Education Fund, and the Tenth Amendment Center. I want to thank each of these groups for their commitment to this issue.

Here’s what this case is about. Mrs. Bond, a Pennsylvania woman learned that her husband had impregnated her best friend, and set about to harm her in some way by smearing some chemicals she obtained from work where the other woman would touch them, including her mailbox. Her attempts only gave her victim a chemical burn on her thumb.

However, based on the woman’s complaint to a mail carrier, the U.S. Postal Inspectors decided to make a federal case out of it. They set up surveillance cameras, searched her car, home and workplace, arrested Mrs. Bond, and incarcerated her initially in a post office. To make it seem like a postal matter, Mrs. Bond was charged with stealing two envelopes. But the Justice Department also charged her with two counts of violating a statute which implemented the Chemical Weapons Convention — a treaty designed to prevent countries from engaging in chemical warfare.

Mrs. Bond’s actions are like the types of cases handled every day by state and local law enforcement. Under Pennsylvania law, she could have been charged with assault, and very likely could have been convicted, and could have received a sentence appropriate for the crime. She was charged under federal law instead. These federal investigations and demands by federal prosecutors for punishment for dubious federal crimes are intruding on the police powers of state and local governments. Congress has no authority to criminalize simple assault, or the use of household chemicals, but claimed the authority based on the treaty the Senate had ratified. The crime with which she was charged was considered a way to implement the terms of the Chemical Weapons treaty.

The concept that the federal government can give itself additional powers by signing a treaty with a foreign power was invented nearly a century ago to justify federal laws regulating bird hunting. In Missouri v. Holland, the Supreme Court ruled that the federal government could regulate bird hunting — not because it had that power under the Constitution — but because the Senate had ratified a treaty on bird hunting. A prior federal law regulating bird hunting, the Weeks-McLean Act, had been conceded as likely unconstitutional even by its supporters.

The Missouri v. Holland court decision was written by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. beloved by left-wing statists as an early proponent of the concept of the Constitution as a “living document.” Holmes declared that cases before the Supreme Court “must be considered in the light of our whole experience and not merely in that of what was said a hundred years ago.” Holmes embraced a formula for a nation without a written Constitution – not applicable to the United States of America.

One of my biggest concerns about the Missouri v. Holland case then, and about the Bond case now, is that this method could be used to criminalize other behavior that the federal government may not regulate, such as gun ownership. President Obama and Eric Holder have been searching for a way to implement gun control. Obama’s spokesman Jay Carney, when asked recently about the issue, told us “sometimes these efforts don’t succeed initially, but … this is going to get done.” Could Obama draw on the treaty power to impose further regulations on firearms?

On April 2, 2013, the United Nations General Assembly overwhelmingly approved a treaty designed to regulate global trade in conventional weapons. The Arms Trade Treaty, posted on the UN’s Disarmament page, regulates small arms and ammunition. Article 8 of the Treaty requires the government of any country which imports guns to “take measures to ensure that appropriate and relevant information is provided” to the government of the exporting country, stating “such measures may include end use or end user documentation.” This and other similar articles in the treaty, such as the duty to maintain a national control system, would open the door to a national registry of guns, facilitating the confiscation of firearms of the citizenry in an emergency declared by the President. Predictably, on September 25, 2013, Secretary of State John Kerry signed this treaty on behalf of the United States, presenting it to the U.S. Senate for ratification.

If President Obama could form another “Gang of Eight” Senators to join him to ratify this UN gun treaty, a Supreme Court with just one new member could find an excuse to claim a powerful new theory to erode gun rights. Even since District of Columbia v. Heller, no federal firearms law has been struck down by the Supreme Court on Second Amendment grounds. The only federal gun law struck down by the Supreme Court implicated the Tenth Amendment. If Missouri v. Holland is not overruled, a UN treaty could be used as a basis to implement a national gun registry, or other restrictions on guns.

But firearms are just one reason why my amicus brief asks the Supreme Court to recognize the text and meaning of the Tenth Amendment, and to repudiate Missouri v. Holland as unconstitutional. There are other threats as well, including UN efforts to override US law limiting access to nutritional supplements, and to control our use of energy. If we don’t stop the federal government here in the Bond case, the internationalists at home and abroad will keep trying to reduce the individual freedom of Americans, so that we are more like the citizens of other nations. Well, we don’t want to be like the other nations. Our job is to defend America against enemies foreign and domestic — and, sadly, there is no shortage of either.

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Steve Stockman is a Member of Congress representing the 36th Congressional District of Texas. Steve serves on the Foreign Affairs Committee and its Subcommittee on Africa, Global Health, Global Human Rights, and International Organizations and its Subcommittee on Europe, Eurasia, and Emerging Threats. He also serves on the Science, Space and Technology Committee where he serves on the Subcommittee on Space and is Vice Chairman of the Subcommittee on Research. Follow Steve Stockman on Twitter @SteveWorks4You or on Facebook.

Where’s the Darn Tea Party?

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Photo Credit: WNDI don’t know about you, but I’m frustrated by the fact that no one is marching on Washington today despite the fact that the fabric of our nation is being destroyed in the greatest attack on liberty and self-government in the history of our country.

Where, I keep wondering, has the tea party been hiding?

Oh, don’t get me wrong. Like all of you, I get the emails from various tea-party groups busy raising money for pet causes. I see the criticisms of Barack Obama and others in Washington by the self-proclaimed tea-party leaders. I hear the defensiveness of tea-party spokesmen denouncing attacks on the tea party by the bullies in Washington who tolerated the politically motivated targeting of patriotic groups by the Internal Revenue Service.

What I don’t see are people in the streets of Washington – with placards and signs and loud voices. I don’t see any organized opposition. Where is the tea party?

This is not a criticism I level lightly.

Read more from this story HERE.

GOP Can Win by Waiting: Make Democrats Clean Up their Own Mess

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Photo Credit: National Review Democrats are pleading for help, in the face of the implosion of Obamacare. House Republicans confronted with these pleas should listen to those who say: “Don’t do something; just stand there.”

It was Obama and the Democratic Senate who caused the disaster now unfolding. Specifically, Democratic red- or swing-state senators such as Mary Landrieu (La.), Kay Hagan (N.C.), Mark Begich (Alaska), Mark Pryor (Ark.), and even Al Franken (Minn.) provided key votes to adopt the monstrosity without a single ballot to spare. Let them face the music; let them reap the consequences. And let them try to fix what’s utterly unfixable.

If they want to delay the individual mandate, fine: They can go first. If they want to fix the grandfathering rules so that people who want to keep their plans really can do so, fine: They can go first on that, too. Let them figure out the details. Let them try to make it work. The House can always vote to add its assent once the Senate has acted — all while noting, accurately, that even the delay or the grandfathering fix won’t make the whole of Obamacare successful or popular.

But with each fruitless effort to correct the uncorrectable, the vulnerable Senate Democrats effectively will be acknowledging that they were wrong to begin with.

The likelihood is that the Senate won’t act. It’s likely that the White House won’t let it happen. It’s likely that the vulnerable senators won’t even be able to get the more liberal members of the Senate Democratic caucus to go along with them. It’s likely that the Hagans and Pryors will be left to look both wrongheaded for having passed Obamacare and ineffectual for being unable to convince their leaders to try to improve it.

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Obamacare Is Obama Unmasked

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Photo Credit: DonkeyHoteyAren’t some of you tired of making lame excuses for him that only serve to make things worse? He has made a mess of nearly everything his policies have touched, and he’s mostly avoided the blame; but he owns Obamacare, and he has nowhere to hide.

When someone with the influence Obama enjoyed upon first taking office sets out to fundamentally transform the nation — and he has the unqualified support of the entire liberal media apparatus, the Democratic Party in lock step, millions of people purchased with government money and/or indoctrinated in liberal universities, and the cudgels of racial shaming and white guilt — the possibilities are endless.

Constitutionalists have observed for years that America has been on a downward spiral as its ruling class has discarded its founding principles — the very ideas that led to this nation’s uniqueness, power, prosperity and benevolence. We’ve known that we could not forever piggyback, with impunity, on America’s system of limited government and its free market economy. Eventually, statist encroachments on both would destroy our prosperity, liberty and power.

But we were thinking in terms of decades into the future, not a matter of a few years. Who would have ever thought the United States would embark on such an accelerated path of national suicide?

At the beginning, people could argue that Obama would usher in a period of prosperity and bipartisanship and that things would get better in America. But after five years of unconscionably reckless federal spending, a wholesale assault on our domestic energy industries, endless abuses of executive authority and other lawless incursions on the Constitution, unprecedented divisiveness and polarization across economic, racial and gender lines, America’s declining power and prestige in the world, an explosion of the welfare state, and the worst economic recovery in 60 years, how can anyone who cares about this nation’s future and the well-being of our children and grandchildren keep supporting this man’s policies?

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The Madness of Law Enforcement’s Escalating Brutality

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Photo Credit: U.S. Government/Reason Law enforcement excesses grab an ever-growing share of headlines. Doors kicked in, people killed, dogs shot, phone lines tapped, curfews imposed—they’re all examples of official overreaching at that unpleasant intersection of private activity and state disapproval. For some people, the implication of such abuses is that more scrutiny and the right people in charge will make law enforcement an enterprise which people need not fear.

But what if that’s not the case? It may be that lawmakers have assigned law-enforcers goals so frustratingly elusive that even angels couldn’t resist the temptation to escalate tactics to insane extremes, trampling liberty and decency along the way.

Deranged escalation resulted in the misguided marijuana raid on the home of Berwyn Heights, Maryland, Mayor Cheye Calvo, during which his dogs were killed. When even a government official like Calvo can’t protect his pets from police overstepping, you know we’ve gone over a cliff.

A similar venture into law enforcement madness resulted in the death of one police officer, and injuries to five others, when Ogden, Utah, resident, Matthew David Stewart, defended himself against the home invasion. Stewart later hanged himself in jail when it became clear that the legal system wasn’t about to admit police errors or recognize his right to self-defense.

But that leap into the void was probably inevitable given the government’s obsession with achieving the impossible: eliminating marijuana consumption. Almost eighty years after Reefer Madness, decades into the War on Drugs, a 2008 survey by the World Health Organization still says that 42.4 percent of Americans have smoked grass.

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Why So Shocked? You Were NEVER Meant To Keep Your Health Insurance Under Obamacare

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Photo Credit: Red State By LaborUnionReport.

It takes some time to fundamentally transform America and, while they may be wrong about a lot of things almost everything, in this instance, Democrats are right about one thing: The term transition is absolutely the correct term when discussing the debacle known as ObamaCare.

You see, while they will never openly admit it (excepting, perhaps, in the darkest recesses of some corner inside the White House or the Center of American Progress), ObamaCare was never meant for Americans to “keep their health insurance plans,” it is a transition plan to drive all Americans* to single-payer (aka nationalized or socialized) health care.

On October 15, 2008, several weeks before Barack Obama’s election and well before ObamaCare was enacted, I wrote (pre-LUR and RedState) a post entitled Obama’s Plan to Socialize Health Care.

In the post, I stated, “Within five years (if not sooner), the U.S. will have full-blown socialized medicine under President Barack Obama.”

This prediction was not based on all of the regulations that were eventually put into the Affordable Care Act–those regulations that are causing millions to lose their individual coverage and another 93 million potentially to lose their employer-sponsored health plans–but was based on simple economics.

Read more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: Bloomberg NewsYou Also Can’t Keep Your Doctor

By Edie Littlefield Sundby.

Everyone now is clamoring about Affordable Care Act winners and losers. I am one of the losers.

My grievance is not political; all my energies are directed to enjoying life and staying alive, and I have no time for politics. For almost seven years I have fought and survived stage-4 gallbladder cancer, with a five-year survival rate of less than 2% after diagnosis. I am a determined fighter and extremely lucky. But this luck may have just run out: My affordable, lifesaving medical insurance policy has been canceled effective Dec. 31.

My choice is to get coverage through the government health exchange and lose access to my cancer doctors, or pay much more for insurance outside the exchange (the quotes average 40% to 50% more) for the privilege of starting over with an unfamiliar insurance company and impaired benefits.

Countless hours searching for non-exchange plans have uncovered nothing that compares well with my existing coverage. But the greatest source of frustration is Covered California, the state’s Affordable Care Act health-insurance exchange and, by some reports, one of the best such exchanges in the country. After four weeks of researching plans on the website, talking directly to government exchange counselors, insurance companies and medical providers, my insurance broker and I are as confused as ever. Time is running out and we still don’t have a clue how to best proceed.

Two things have been essential in my fight to survive stage-4 cancer. The first are doctors and health teams in California and Texas: at the medical center of the University of California, San Diego, and its Moores Cancer Center; Stanford University’s Cancer Institute; and the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.

Read more from this story HERE.

How Obama Went from Bulls–t to Lies

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Photo Credit: APHow Americans see President Obama changed in an important way this week. It’s because there is a huge difference between lies and bulls – – t.

Obama says a lot of things that are not true, even nonsensical. But it’s easy to shrug off most of these, because they aren’t really lies. They’re just bulls – – t…

This week was something new. It was the week Obama was revealed to be a stone-cold liar. Some 10 million Americans are going to lose their health insurance as a direct result of the Affordable Care Act.

On June 15, 2009, Obama said, in one of hundreds of similar statements, “No matter how we reform health care, we will keep this promise to the American people: If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor, period. If you like your health-care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health-care plan, period. No one will take it away, no matter what.”

This wasn’t just bulls – – t. This was a lie.

Read more from this story HERE.

Media Forced To Report The Truth

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TerrellAfterMath.comYou know things are bad when the public outcry over the president’s signature legislation is so strong that it forces the Democrats in the media to report the facts – even though it reflects negatively on the president they’ve been protecting for five years.

Apparently, we now have a national crisis that affects a majority of us: Obamacare. Countless Americans are finding out every day that the so-called Affordable Care Act (ACA) is in reality quite unaffordable.

Unlike the IRS or NSA scandals, unlike Benghazi, Fast and Furious, and a dozen others, the new health care law hits many working Americans because it’s a tax.

There are Democrats calling it “a disaster.”

I’ve not often had the opportunity to give credit to some in the media; so I’m thrilled to say “Thanks for doing your job” to those it pertains to.

Read more from this story HERE.

More Lipstick on the ObamaCare Pig

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Photo Credit: Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.comThe White House PR machine keeps trying to put lipstick on the ObamaCare pig. According to Whitehouse.gov, “there’s some great news from a Department of Health and Human Services report… Thanks to Obamacare, half of young adults between age 18 and 34 who are single and uninsured can get health coverage for $50/month or less.”

There are two problems with the claim. First, the actual percentage, according to HHS figures, of 18-34 year olds who qualify for the $50/month rate is not “half” but 2.9%. The numbers are 1.3 million out of 44.2 million.

Secondly, the $50/month rate is not a market price but one that is subsidized by an expanded government entitlement.

The White House statement is not technically another ObamaCare lie, but it requires reading the fine print for interpretation. The full “caveated” statement in the report from the Office of The Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation at HHS reads as follows:

Nearly 5 in 10 (46 percent, or 1.3 million) uninsured young adults in single-person households who may be eligible for the Health Insurance Marketplace may be able to purchase a bronze plan for $50 per month or less after tax credits, based on analysis of data in 34 states.

Read more from this story HERE.