Zogby Report Card: Obama is an 'ogre of a hellish national security state'
By Paul BedardPollster John Zogby reports in our weekly White House report card that President Obama is no longer seen as an agent of change, but the boss of an oppressive national security state.
"Not only did the president not get a triumph from his Asia trip, but he hit a wall of bad news. First quarter economic growth is worse than expected, just 0.1 percent.
"Next, the administration admits that its Middle East efforts is on life support. And the Europeans haven't jumped on board with another round of sanctions against Russia.
“Mr. Obama is no longer seen as the transformational symbol of hope and change, but more as an ogre of a hellish national security state. A new round of Benghazi emails reappears like a nasty zit. Lousy week."
Grade — F
White House week ahead: California fundraisers, tour of storm-battered Arkansas
By Brian HughesMost of President Obama's week will be spent outside Washington, as he travels to California for a three-day trip dedicated mostly to raising money for Democrats and stops in Arkansas to view the damage caused by a tornado there.
Obama is scheduled to visit Little Rock on Wednesday en route to California fundraisers for Democrats, the White House confirmed. State officials say the Arkansas storm killed at least 16 people, and the president is expected to meet with victims, their families and first responders.
After the event, Obama heads to Los Angeles for a joint fundraiser for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.
Democrats are at risk of losing the Senate, due in large part to disapproval of Obama's signature health law and pessimism over the state of the economy. Republicans need to pick up six seats to take control of the upper chamber.
Later Wednesday, the president will be the guest of honor at a dinner organized by the USC Shoah Foundation.
Obama on Thursday has a full day of fundraisers, with a Democratic National Committee roundtable in Los Angeles, a DCCC event in San Diego and two DNC gatherings in San Jose.
The president on Friday will hold an energy event in the San Jose area. By scheduling a policy stop, the White House can offset most of the travel costs — to taxpayers — for a trip mostly devoted to fundraising.
The early part of the president’s week is much lighter, as he welcomes Djibouti President Ismail Omar Guelleh to the White House Monday and hosts a Cinco de Mayo reception.
House votes this week focus on IRS targeting, Senate takes on energy measure and Keystone XL
By Susan FerechioThe House this week will vote on whether to hold former top Internal Revenue Service official Lois Lerner in contempt of Congress, while Senate lawmakers will grapple with legislation that would green light construction of the controversial Keystone XL pipeline project.
...In addition to the contempt vote, the House also will vote on a resolution calling on Attorney General Eric HOlder to appoint a special counsel to investigate the IRS pattern of targeting, which was first uncovered by the Treasury inspector general. Most Democrats are likely to vote against this measure, too, but the GOP majority ensures both the contempt vote and special counsel measure will pass. A contempt vote would trigger a Department of Justice investigation into whether Lerner broke the law by refusing to testify.
House leaders also are weighing whether to put a measure on the floor this week that would create a select House committee to investigate the Obama administration's response to the Sept. 11, 2012, terrorist attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, which killed the U.S. ambassador and three other Americans.
Senate votes on Keystone XL, efficiency bill hang in the balance
By Zach ColemanWhen the Senate returns Monday, the upper chamber could play host to the first substantive energy debate it has had since 2009 and lay the groundwork for a vote on the Keystone XL oil sands pipeline.
....President Obama has put off making a decision on the pipeline, which would stretch from the oil sands of Canada to refineries in the Gulf Coast. A group of Democrats, some of them vulnerable incumbents up for re-election, are insisting on a standalone bill to green-light Keystone XL. Republicans, meanwhile, want to attach the measure to the energy-efficiency legislation, which would likely trigger a veto threat from Obama.
The week head in economics: Janet Yellen to the Hill, financial regulation and hiring
By Joseph LawlerFederal Reserve Chairwoman Janet Yellen will appear before both the Joint Economic Committee on Wednesday and the Senate Budget Committee on Thursday to discuss the economic outlook.
That’s a topic of added interest after last week’s disappointing reading on gross domestic product for the first quarter of 2013, which showed growth nearly stalling out, at just 0.1 percent.
...On Wednesday, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew will head a meeting of the Financial Stability Oversight Council, the financial regulatory superbody, which likely will produce an update to the status of rulemaking related to the Dodd-Frank financial reform law.
On Friday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics will shed further light on the state of the labor market, and in particular the pace of hiring and firing, with its release of the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey for March. Last month, the number of job openings at the end of the month ticked above 4 million, and the number of total hires eclipsed 4.5 million — both improvements, but well off pre-recession levels.
10 big Supreme Court cases awaiting decisions
Last week, the Supreme Court heard its final arguments for the current term. So what big decisions can we expect between now and late June?
...But 10 other big decisions remain
unannounced by the Court as it moves toward wrapping up a busy term in
late June. Here are the cases to watch, with a brief description of each
case (or pair of cases).
10 Cases To Watch
The big picture issue in the Bond case is the possible fate of a landmark 1920 Supreme Court decision: Missouri v. Holland. The Holland decision gave Congress the power to pass laws to carry out the U.S. government’s obligations under international treaties.
The Justices will decide whether a
town council’s practice of beginning its legislative meetings with a
prayer session violates the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause.
In Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc.,
the national hobby and crafts chain store asked the Court to take on
the Affordable Care Act birth control mandate that applies to for-profit
companies. The Obama administration also had asked the Court to take up
the Hobby Lobby case.
In the Conestoga Wood
case, a Mennonite family-owned, profit-making business claims that the
ACA’s birth control mandate violates the company’s rights under the
First Amendment free exercise clause and the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act.
This high-profile case invites
the Court to interpret the breadth of the President’s constitutional
authority to make appointments during Senate recesses.
This case is about
Massachusetts’s selective exclusion law – which makes it a crime for
public speakers other than clinic “employees or agents . . . acting
within the scope of their employment” to protest within 35 feet of a
reproductive health care facility.
The Justices will determine how
states define if a person is mentally disabled to the point of becoming
ineligible for the death penalty.
The highly publicized case
involves a copyright battle between Aereo, a tech TV startup, and the
major television networks that could affect the future of broadcast
television and cloud computing.
Both cases examine the power of
the police, acting without a search warrant in certain circumstances, to
look at information stored on a cellphone taken from a suspect at the
time of an arrest.
High court ruling favors prayer at council meeting
By Mark ShermanThe Supreme Court said Monday that prayers that open town council meetings do not violate the Constitution even if they routinely stress Christianity.
The court said in 5-4 decision that the content of the prayers is not significant as long as officials make a good-faith effort at inclusion.
The ruling was a victory for the town of Greece, N.Y., outside of Rochester.
In 1983, the court upheld an opening prayer in the Nebraska legislature and said that prayer is part of the nation's fabric, not a violation of the First Amendment. Monday's ruling was consistent with the earlier one.
Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the majority, said the prayers are ceremonial and in keeping with the nation's traditions.
"The inclusion of a brief, ceremonial prayer as part of a larger exercise in civic recognition suggests that its purpose and effect are to acknowledge religious leaders and the institutions they represent, rather than to exclude or coerce nonbelievers," Kennedy said.
Justice Elena Kagan, in a dissent for the court's four liberal justices, said the case differs significantly from the 1983 decision because "Greece's town meetings involve participation by ordinary citizens, and the invocations given — directly to those citizens — were predominantly sectarian in content."
Students, It’s Illegal To Wear An American Flag Shirt On Cinco De Mayo
By Robby SoaveStudents in a California school district will not be allowed to wear American flag T-shirts on Cinco de Mayo, due to concerns that such displays of patriotism would inflame racial tensions by offending Mexican students on their holiday.
The district’s policy concerned many free speech advocates, but was upheld by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.
In response, Tea Party groups plan to protest outside Live Oak High School in Morgan Hill. And they will be wearing American flag T-shirts.
“They silenced a symbol of patriotism and freedom in America,” said Georgine Scott-Codiga, president of the Gillroy-Morgan Hill Patriots, in a statement to KCBS.
The trouble dates back to Cinco de Mayo in 2010, when the school forced four students to remove their American flag T-shirts. Administrators worried that fighting would break out between white and Latino students if the shirts were noticed, and so the four offending students were sent home.
The practice of limiting one group’s free speech rights because that speech might cause another group to react violently is known as the “heckler’s veto.” It is understood by free speech enthusiasts to have a chilling effect on First Amendment rights
The Ninth Circuit, however, ruled in February that the school was legally permitted to abridge white students’ free speech rights in service of Latino students’ feelings.
By Rick Moran
A
GOP Senate candidate from Oregon was asked to leave an editorial
meeting of a liberal, alternative weekly newspaper when he called out a
reporter for disrespecting Republican candidates.
The
reporter, listening to a response from another candidate who joined the
meeting by phone, wrote "blah, blah, blah, blah" instead of quoting
the candidate.
What happened next was recorded for posterity:
The video shows an editorial board meeting where the newspaper was interviewing Republican candidates for Senate. One of those candidates, Jo Rae Perkins, was responding to a question over the phone when Callahan noticed something was amiss."You want to talk about disrespect, I see what you're writing down there," he said, pointing at a reporter at the table. "You just wrote down 'blah blah blah blah blah' for everything that Jo Rae said. Jo Rae is a respectable woman. Why are you not respecting her by writing 'blah blah blah blah blah' on your notepad?"The moderator tried to get Callahan to "move on" and answer a question about whether climate change is a "myth or a reality."Callahan said "myth."Then, the same reporter, later identified by the newspaper as Nigel Jaquiss, asked him a follow-up: "Where are you on the Easter Bunny?""What's that?" Callahan said, and the reporter repeated the question.The interview really went downhill from there."Are these really the questions that I was called here to answer?" Callahan said. "How about you ask a very serious and respectful question instead of asking a little childish question?"The two sides continued to argue, and the moderator warned him he'd be asked to leave if they didn't move on, noting he had "two strikes.""Who do you think you are?" Callahan asked."Okay, you may leave now," the moderator said. "Go ahead. You're done here."Callahan then accused them of being "disrespectful, thin-skinned liberals."Someone else in the room said: "There's the door." Walking out, Callahan told them he had "better things to do with my time."
Liberals don't do tolerance and respect so much. But they are experts at smarmy, arrogant, intolerable smugness.
Reporters
for these alternative weeklies tend to be young and ignorant so perhaps
Mr. Jacquiss didn't understand the issues involved and was writing
nonsense because he was embarrassed not to comprehend what the candidate
was saying. More likely, he's just an ass - and doesn't understand the
issues anyway.
Good
on Mr. Callahan for calling out Jacquiss for his contemptible
behaviior. He should wear his ejection from that meeting as a badge of
honor.
PK'S NOTE: Secretary Panetta and General Dempsey both testified that
they had a single, 30 minute long, prescheduled meeting with Obama at
5:00 P.M., of which the Benghazi attack was only a portion.
What Obama Did on September 11, 2012
By Jack Cashill...While Woods and company held off the enemy in Benghazi, Obama holed up in the White House. About 7 p.m. he called Benjamin Netanyahu to discuss a perceived snub of the Israel prime minister. This perception, reported Lynn Sweet of the Chicago Sun-Times, presented “a political problem to a president who is wooing the Jewish vote.” The Sun-Times posted Sweet’s story, based obviously on a self-serving White House release, at 9:18 p.m. that evening. Obama obviously found time for politicking, but this was not something one did in the situation room.
About
10 p.m. that evening Obama made another phone call. Five months would
pass before anyone admitted he did so. In February 2013, Sen. Lindsay
Graham used the confirmation hearings for defense secretary nominee
Chuck Hagel to pry some answers out of the president, but he got
stonewalled for his efforts. The White House sent a letter to the Senate
claiming the president did not make any phone calls the night of
September 11. “During the entire attack, the president of the United
States never picked up the phone to put the weight of his office in the
mix?” asked a disbelieving Graham.
A
week later, Fred Lucas of CNSNews.com followed up on Obama’s September
11 timeline and got an entirely different answer out of spokesman Jay
Carney. “He was in regular communication with his national security team
directly, through them,” said Carney before adding the surprise jolt,
“and spoke with the secretary of state at approximately 10 p.m. He
called her to get an update on the situation.”
Soon after that 10 p.m. phone call, Secretary Clinton released a memo on
the Benghazi attack. “Some have sought to justify this vicious behavior
as a response to inflammatory material posted on the Internet," said
Clinton. "The United States deplores any intentional effort to denigrate
the religious beliefs of others. . . . But let me be clear: There is
never any justification for violent acts of this kind.” The earliest
confirmed posting Lucas could find of the Clinton statement was 10:32
p.m. Washington time.
The
timing suggests she and Obama coordinated the blame-the-video
misdirection during their call. To this point in the evening, no one in
the military or on the ground in Libya had mentioned the video or
suggested that the assault on the consulate was anything other than a
coordinated attack. By 7 p.m. in Washington, Anshar al-Sharia had
claimed credit for the attacks via Twitter. At about 8 p.m. Clinton called Hicks in Tripoli.
They spoke mostly about the status of Stevens now reported to be in a
hospital controlled by Anshar al-Sharia. There was no talk of a video or
a riot.
While the White House tried to save the election, Doherty and his crew were scrambling to save the CIA annex in Benghazi.
....Obama
avoided the situation room that night because the decisions he was
making -- just two months before a tightly contested election -- were
political, not military.
...On
September 11, 2012, war was the last thing Obama wanted or needed as
well. He had already bagged Osama bin Laden, pacified al Qaeda, and
liberated Libya -- or so he repeated endlessly. Foreign policy was
alleged to be his electoral strong suit. Given the political dynamics,
Obama retreated, just as the Clintons had, to the family quarters. There
he would spend the night translating national security data into
electoral strategy. For the next two months he did what the Clintons did
after the demise of TWA Flight 800: he just kicked the investigatory
can down the road and hoped that the media would not call attention to
the kicking. If the Clintons could get away with it, why not he?
What Difference at this point Does It Make?
By Anthony J Ciani
....Let
us grab the bull by the horns with an ansatz: Obama was told about the
attack, he confused it with the protests in Egypt, told his military
commanders that they were wrong and it was just a rowdy protest over a
video, demanded that no military action be taken, and ordered that he
was not to be disturbed about it further. This would explain why the
military began to act and
then stopped, why Obama received no further updates regarding the
attack, and why Secretary Clinton was left to rally civilian security from Tripoli. It
explains the origin of the web video obfuscation, the resistance to
investigation, and it meets well with Obama's overly rosy view of the
Islamic world. Although other explanations might exist, this simple
ansatz perfectly explains the events surrounding the attack and subsequent coverup, far better than the other hypotheses explored.
So what if, after all the investigations, the above ansatz is proved? It will become apparent that Obama screwed up, once again, and it will be one more
embarrassing mark on his presidency. Certainly, covering it up,
apologizing for our free speech, and throwing an innocent man in jail as
part of the coverup are far beneath the Office of President, and do
constitute high misdemeanors, but among his various scandals, Benghazi
sits the least.
Sale of a Senate seat; hostile takeover of two automobile companies and gifting them to political donors; circumvention of department review to issue energy grants to political donors; violation of export restrictions and Mexican sovereignty to fabricate a straw purchase and gun running crisis; strong-arming banks to borrow TARP funds; using the IRS to harass political opposition; the use of executive orders to
undermine or undo existing statutes and act as a dictator: these are
just a few of Obama's high Crimes and Misdemeanors. Except for the
dictates, about which Obama proudly boasts, all of these have been
traced back to the White House and various cabinet members.
The
only, and Constitution prescribed, option for such high crimes and
misdemeanors is impeachment and removal from office, but this option
seems far off the radar. Even should the House of Representatives
Impeach Obama, it is highly unlikely that enough Senate Democrats would
agree that these are crimes or actions serious enough to remove Obama.
Will Obama Claim Executive Privilege On Benghazi?
By Ken Klukowski
With Congress breathing down his neck on Benghazi, President Obama
has a legal ace in his hand – executive privilege – which he could
assert to protect the documents explaining exactly why the White House
came to blame the attack on a YouTube video. Politically, however, it's a hand he dare not play. To get the strongest legal backing for the privilege, Obama would need to claim he personally participated in the conversations about telling America the falsehood that the 9/11 Benghazi terrorist attack was due to the video.
There are two types of the executive privilege. The stronger one is the presidential communications privilege, and the (much) weaker one is the deliberative process privilege.
In the Fast and Furious scandal, Obama asserted deliberative process privilege. The issue is now being fought in court, where court precedent is against the Justice Department's arguments. While the move did buy Obama time, in all likelihood the defense won't ultimately stand up, granting Congress, and the public, the right to see the documents in question.
If Obama were to exert the presidential communications privilege in Benghazi, the the public will never get White House testimony or documents to find out what really happened, in part because the issue is in the realm of foreign policy, an area where courts have held the executive privilege is strong.
But that would require a scandalous assertion by Obama that he participated in the discussions to blame the attack on a YouTube video.
If it’s only the deliberative process privilege, then Congress will steamroll the Obama administration in court, and the American people will learn everything.
Already, Democrats are discussing whether Obama will assert executive privilege.
When Fox News Sunday’s Chris Wallace asked former Congresswoman Jane Harman (who also has a Harvard law degree) why this possible “smoking gun” email was not disclosed prior to a federal court ordering its release, Harman said there “may be some claim of executive privilege.”
Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes’ email to then-U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice instructing her to blame the Benghazi attacks on an anti-Muslim Internet video has raised new questions and put the issue again on the front burner.
Who told Rhodes to blame the video? Was that person was acting on his/her own or instead passed along orders from someone higher UP the food chain?
From the CC list on the email, America now knows that a whole constellation of people around President Barack Obama was aware of this communication and strategy, including Press Secretary Jay Carney who has repeatedly assured the nation that these talking points came from the CIA, not the White House.
The House of Representatives will soon act on Speaker John Boehner’s call to form a House Select Committee solely dedicated to investigating the attacks. No doubt Rhodes will be subpoenaed to testify under oath, and all White House emails and documents relevant to this topic will be subpoenaed as well. And whatever names he reveals, those people will be subpoenaed as well.
Tough choices are coming for this White House.
The AWOL Commander-in-Chief
What was Obama doing while terrorists attacked Americans in Benghazi?
By Andrew C McCarthy....Lovell bears the burden of their abandonment with a heavy heart. His moving testimony made that clear. Still, his version of events is deeply unsatisfying. Why did AFRICOM fail to respond? “Basically,” he stammered, “there was a lot of looking to the State Department.” Unfortunately, we’re told Secretary Hillary Clinton and her minions were unclear “in terms of what they would like to have.” Come again? “They didn’t come forward with stronger requests for action.”
This Foggy Bottom focus had me groping for my pocket Constitution. Sure enough, Article II was as I remembered it. Much as Hillary Clinton may desire to be the commander-in-chief of the United States armed forces, that job does not belong to the secretary of state.
It was the solemn duty of the president to come forward with not requests but commands for action. Why was AFRICOM hanging on the State Department’s preferences? Why were our troops hamstrung by what Lovell described as “deference to the Libyan people?” On the night of September 11, 2012, AFRICOM was not beholden to Mrs. Clinton or Tripoli. They answered to Barack Obama.
Of course, no one can answer to a commander-in-chief who abdicates his command, a commander-in-chief who is AWOL.
...The foundation of any such political case is simply this: The executive branch is designed to make the president singularly accountable. That is why he is the sole official in whom the Constitution vests all executive power — AFRICOM moves, or doesn’t move, based on his orders because it is his authority that the armed forces exercise. The chief executive, James Madison asserted, would be wholly “responsible for [the] conduct” of his subordinate officials. Therefore, it would “subject [the president] to impeachment himself, if he suffers them to perpetrate with impunity high crimes or misdemeanors against the United States, or neglects to superintend their conduct, so as to check their excesses.” When AFRICOM abstains from battle, or Lois Lerner obstructs an investigation, or Eric Holder misleads Congress, or Michael Morell doctors talking points, or Susan Rice serially lies on national television, Barack Obama is responsible. It is his bidding that they do, and by failing to fire or discipline them he implicitly endorses their malfeasance.
Outnumbered and fighting off wave after jihadist wave, Americans were left to die in Benghazi while administration officials huddled, not to devise a rescue strategy, but to spin the election-year politics. The most powerful and capable armed forces in the history of the world idled, looking not to their commander-in-chief but to a State Department that busied itself writing press releases about phantom Islamophobia. The president of the United States, the only constitutional official responsible for responding, was nowhere to be found.
We are left with four dead Americans and an emerging paper trail of dereliction stretching from Benghazi to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Benghazi is not about what Hillary Clinton or Leon Panetta or Susan Rice or Ben Rhodes or Jay Carney or Robert Lovell did or didn’t do. The only question is: What was President Barack Obama doing, and not doing, during the critical hours when his sworn duty required decisive action? Mr. Obama owes Americans a detailed answer. Now.
Release Obama’s Benghazi intelligence briefings
By Marc A TheissenPresident Obama claims he was only repeating what the intelligence community told him when his administration asserted that the attack in Benghazi began with a spontaneous protest inspired by an Internet video. If that’s the case, there is a simple way to prove it: Give the new congressional select committee investigating Benghazi his daily intelligence briefings that show exactly what he was told.
There is precedent for doing so. In 2004, at the request of the 9/11 Commission, President George W. Bush declassified and publicly released the President’s Daily Brief (PDB) delivered to him before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. No sitting president had ever declassified a PDB while still in office. But Bush did it anyway, releasing the report titled “Bin Laden determined to attack inside the U.S.” It warned that the FBI had detected “patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings” but contained no actionable intelligence that could have stopped the 9/11 attacks from happening.
What’s good enough for Bush should be good enough for Obama. Congress should ask the president to follow precedent and release the PDBs he received in the days after the Benghazi attack.
There is no good reason for Obama to refuse such a request. If Obama is right that the intelligence community told him the attack was the result of a protest over the Internet video, releasing the PDBs will demonstrate that he is telling the truth — and put the Benghazi debate to rest once and for all.
Of course, it is highly unlikely that is what the Benghazi PDBs would show. That’s because when the intelligence community presents judgments to the president, it always does two things: First, it attaches a level of confidence (low, medium or high) to its judgments. And second, it includes dissenting views, if there are any.
The PDBs would reveal what level of confidence the intelligence community put in the judgment that the Benghazi attack was video-related and spontaneous. They would also tell us whether that confidence level declined between the time of the Sept. 12, 2012, attack and when Susan Rice made her now infamous rounds on the Sunday shows on Sept. 16.
The Benghazi PDBs would also reveal what dissenting views in the intelligence community were presented to the president and his top aides. We know that by the time Rice went on the air, acting CIA director Michael Morell had informed the White House that the CIA station chief on the ground in Libya had dissented from the spontaneous-protest narrative. Moreover, Gen. Robert Lovell, who served as deputy director of intelligence for U.S. Africa Command at the time of the attack, testified last week that our military intelligence community determined within hours that “there was no demonstration gone terribly awry” and that this was a terrorist attack. The PDBs would tell us if, when and how those dissenting judgments were shared with the president and his top national security advisers.
IRS Brazenly Continues Crackdowns On Conservative Organizations
By Rachel Alexander
A little publicized IRS decision should have conservatives who write about politics very alarmed. The IRS revoked
the tax-exempt status of a conservative political organization, the
Patrick Henry Center for Individual Liberty (PHCIL), due to a handful of
articles that founder Gary Aldrich wrote in his personal capacity. His
decade-old articles simply criticized Hillary Clinton and John Kerry,
which the IRS claimed constituted electioneering. The articles were linked to as "alerts" from the PHCIL website. The American Spectator noted, “Although the literature demands that those like Clinton and Kerry be kept out of power, it never specifically says, ‘Don’t vote for Clinton or Kerry.’ As a former elections attorney for Maricopa County in Arizona, I recognize the difference between politicking vs. electioneering - yet the IRS appears not to care about the distinction.
The IRS justified revoking PHCIL's tax-exempt status with this draconian language, "[PHCIL] has shown a pattern of deliberate and consistent intervention in political campaigns” and has made “repeated statements supporting or opposing various candidates by expressing its opinion of the respective candidate’s character and qualifications.”
....The IRS revoked PHCIL's status as a 501(c)(3), a type of tax-exempt nonprofit that allows limited lobbying and political activity, but can receive tax-exempt contributions. Garth Kant of Worldnetdaily pointed out that the left wing group Media Matters for America, a 501(c)(3), has engaged in nonstop political criticism of Mitt Romney - to name just one political candidate - yet the IRS has never revoked its tax-exempt status. In just one month during 2012, Media Matters published 238 articles containing the word “Romney,” with many partisan titles such as “CBS News Covers for Romney Campaign’s Tax Doublespeak” and ““Fox’s Hemmer Parrots Romney’s ’12 Million Jobs’ Lie.”
Media Matters has a 501(c)(4) wing, Media Matters Action Network, but those articles appeared under its main 501(c)(3) side. At a minimum, PHCIL should be allowed to operate as a tax-exempt 501(3)(4), which is permitted much more political activity, although contributions are not tax deductible. Tellingly, not a word has been said by the IRS about this alternative.
How has Media Matters not done exactly what PHCIL is accused of doing and ten times more, "repeated statements supporting or opposing various candidates by expressing its opinion of the respective candidate’s character and qualifications?” As conservative columnist Robert Knight observes, this smacks of more selective enforcement. Considering Aldrich’s organization only reported $350,000 in revenues for 2012, it seems even more likely he was singled out.
This is being done to make it difficult for Aldrich to speak up about his personal knowledge of the Democrats' likely candidate for president in 2016, Hillary Clinton. If anyone has read his jaw-dropping book about corruption at the Clinton White House in the 1990s, it all makes sense. Now that another Clinton has a realistic shot at the White House, the Democratic machine behind them will ruthlessly do what they have to do to keep the the slime and corruption Aldrich witnessed firsthand from resurfacing.
Any conservative who works for a nonprofit organization and writes or blogs should be terrified and expose this. The revocation goes into effect on July 1; it is not too late to fight back and appeal. Otherwise, expect more conservative nonprofit groups and writers to be targeted in order to allow Hillary to sail through to the presidency.
Obamacare’s Doom
Its non-participation tax penalty did not originate in the House.
By George F WillIf the president wants to witness a refutation of his assertion that the survival of the Affordable Care Act is assured, come Thursday he should stroll the 13 blocks from his office to the nation’s second-most important court, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. There he can hear an argument involving yet another constitutional provision that evidently has escaped his notice. It is the origination clause, which says: “All bills for raising revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives; but the Senate may propose or concur with amendments as on other bills.
The ACA passed the Senate on a party-line vote, and without a Democratic vote to spare, after a series of unsavory transactions that purchased the assent of several shrewdly extortionate Democrats. What will be argued on Thursday is that what was voted on — the ACA — was indisputably a revenue measure and unquestionably did not originate in the House, which later passed the ACA on another party-line vote.
...In June 2012, a Supreme Court majority accepted a, shall we say, creative reading of the ACA by Chief Justice John Roberts. The court held that the penalty, which the ACA repeatedly calls a penalty, is really just a tax on the activity — actually, the nonactivity — of not purchasing insurance. The individual mandate is not, the court held, a command but merely the definition of a condition that can be taxed. The tax is mild enough to be semi-voluntary; individuals are free to choose whether or not to commit the inactivity that triggers the tax.
The “exaction” — Roberts’s word — “looks,” he laconically said, “like a tax in many respects.” It is collected by the IRS, and the proceeds go to the Treasury for the general operations of the federal government, not to fund a particular program. This surely makes the ACA a revenue measure.
Did it, however, originate in the House? Of course not.
In October 2009, the House passed a bill that would have modified a tax credit for members of the armed forces and some other federal employees who were first-time home buyers — a bill that had nothing to do with health care. Two months later the Senate “amended” this bill by obliterating it. The Senate renamed it and completely erased its contents, replacing them with the ACA’s contents.
Case law establishes that for a Senate action to qualify as a genuine “amendment” to a House-passed revenue bill, it must be “germane to the subject matter of the [House] bill.” The Senate’s shell game — gutting and replacing the House bill — created the ACA from scratch. The ACA obviously flunks the germaneness test, without which the House’s constitutional power of originating revenue bills would be nullified.
Case law establishes that the origination clause does not apply to two kinds of bills. One creates “a particular governmental program and . . . raises revenue to support only that program.” The second creates taxes that are “analogous to fines” in that they are designed to enforce compliance with a statute passed under one of the Constitution’s enumerated powers of Congress other than the taxing power. The ACA’s tax, which the Supreme Court repeatedly said is not an enforcement penalty, and hence is not analogous to a fine, fits neither exception to the origination clause.
The ACA’s defenders say its tax is somehow not quite a tax because it is not primarily for raising revenue but for encouraging certain behavior (buying insurance). But the origination clause, a judicially enforceable limit on the taxing power, would be effectively erased from the Constitution if any tax with any regulatory — behavior-changing — purpose or effect were exempt from the clause.
The Court of Appeals sits six blocks from the Senate, which committed the legislative legerdemain of pretending to merely amend a House bill while originating a new one. Across the street from the Senate sits the Supreme Court, where this case may be headed.
Two years ago, the Supreme Court saved the ACA by declaring its penalty to be a tax. It thereby doomed the ACA as an unconstitutional violation of the origination clause.
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