Obama stumbles in slapdash effort to do too much
by Bob Hoig, Publisher
Midlands Business Journal
America is a great country and Americans are a great people.
We have proven many times that we can do anything — in wars, economic hard times, natural disasters.
The mistake of the Obama Administration so far is to think that we can, or should, do everything.
Vaulted into the Illinois Legislature fresh from his career as a community organizer (many would substitute “agitator”), Barack Obama is an academic to the letter. He has made a mess of all he touches, short of campaign self-promotion into the presidency.
He shows no ability or inclination to lead on substantive issues.
As a state senator, he voted “present” 130 times — brilliant for avoiding tough issues and casting no shadow, but hardly the mark of a leader.
Obama frittered away his first year as president and accomplished nothing on his supposed top priority item, passing a health care overhaul bill.
The legacy-defining health bill chores were handed off to leaders of the congressional left, most notably Speaker Nancy Pelosi in the House of Representatives and Majority Leader Harry Reid in the Senate.
Only lately has he seemed to come alive. Critics believe the explanation for this urgency is the impending Easter congressional recess. Members home for the holiday will get an earful from the voters. And, goodbye ObamaCare. So it is now or never.
Neither Pelosi nor Reid tolerated Republican input on ObamaCare. They chose to craft landmine-laden 2,700 page bills with like-minded Democrats behind closed doors.
Pelosi made an ugly sort of congressional history pronouncing airily that ObamaCare Bill has to be passed so citizens can learn what is in it.
She will share a few pages in lawmaker infamy with Reid, thanks to his obamanations (pun intended) like the “Cornhusker Kickback” bribe for Nebraska Sen. Ben Nelson’s vote to pass ObamaCare, found tucked away on a page deep inside the bill, and Sen. Mary Landrieu for her similar dodge, the “Louisiana Purchase.”
These words are written on Wednesday. By the time they are read a so-called “deemed” bill might be on way to President Obama’s desk and signed into law.
For the uninitiated, the reference is to an arcane House procedure to allow Senate-passed bills to seem to pass constitutional muster without an up or down vote by the House. Such bills are wrapped in resolution, which when approved, are “deemed” to have passed both the resolution and the actual bill from the Senate.
The practical result will be that a murky ObamaCare bill can slink out of the House without individual representatives casting a “yea” or “nay” vote on an actual bill.
It is this “yea-nay” angle that some scholars predict will bring ObamaCare to grief. They quote the Constitution as specifically demanding a “yea” or “nay” response out of the Pelosi cadre, votes Democrats so dearly want to avoid on what will be an unpopular law with 2010 mid-term elections so close in November.
What about Obama, a Harvard Law graduate said to be an expert on the subject? Fox News Channel Bill O’Reilly puts more faith in the president than this writer. O’Reilly contended in an interview with Fox’s Brit Hume that Obama is too steeped in the law not to know this bit of “deeming” is illegal and thus will never sign the bill into law.
My take on Obama is that he takes his chances in squirrelly situations and deals with muddy consequences later.
One consequence be that the U.S. Supreme Court will declare “deemed” ObamaCare unconstitutional. Obama has already attempted to set up the court as a body of know-nothings.
Few Americans who witnessed his State of the Union address in January will forget Obama’s fit of pique aimed at the justices over the court’s decision allowing corporate free speech.
It was all the more unseemly and out of context for a constitutional scholar and lecturer on law, as Obama professes himself to be, to lead a raucous pep-rally against the judges, seated in the front row almost at his feet, egging on cheering, clapping Democrats who surrounded them.
Beware when you ask for hope and change from Obama-style politicians.
You might get it.
March 19, 2010
