It’s Wednesday, July 10th, 2013…but before we begin, two quick thoughts occasioned by current events.  One, though we’re never one to give The Marxist-in-Chief credit for anything, for once, BO be right; had he a son, he unquestionably would have looked…

…just like Trayvon Martin.

Two, here’s something we’d be asking the pilot were we ever to find ourselves flying Asiana Airlines:

Now, here’s The Gouge!

First up, Commentary Magazine‘s Jonathan Tobin poses a question anyone who knows anything at all about the subject can easily answer:

Is Perry a Viable 2016 Contender?

Dumber than dirt…slower than sub-zero molasses…makes Nancy Pelosi seem like a rocket surgeon.  Bottomline: there ain’t enough time left in the Millennium to prepare this guy to debate Joe Biden, let alone the candidates likely to compose the 2016 Republican field.

Next up, courtesy of NRO, John Fund presents a positive perspective on Der Obafuhrer’s latest trampling of the Constitution:

Why Obamacare Threatens Immigration Reform

In delaying the employer mandate, Obama shows his disregard for the rule of law.

Chuck Todd, the political director of NBC News, startled much of Washington on Sunday morning when he announced on Meet the Press that White House aides he’s spoken to have lost confidence that immigration reform will pass. He reported that “suddenly the White House doesn’t see a path” to passing a bill through the House this year.

There are many reasons why immigration reform is in trouble, ranging from the fact that immigration is not currently a burning political issue to the inherent complexity and internal contradictions of a 1,200-page bill.

But there is another less-discussed reason. The Obama administration’s instinctive dishonesty and contempt for the rule of law are finally catching up with it. Few Republicans in the House — even those who devoutly want immigration reform — trust the Obama administration to enforce with consistency and integrity anything that passes Congress.

Take the 900-page (900 pages; with accompanying regulations in excess of 20,000…and counting!) monstrosity of a law that’s been dubbed “Obamacare.” When it passed back in 2010, the law was clear on many points. It decreed that beginning in 2014, any company with more than 50 full-time employees would be required to offer them health-care insurance or pay stiff fines. But it’s been impossible, in the three years since the law’s passage, to work out the Byzantine requirements of that mandate. Max Baucus (D., Mont.) said in a congressional hearing he feared that Obamacare’s implementation would result in a “train wreck,” and many other Democrats have come to share his anxiety. White House aides fretted that enforcing the mandate’s timetable would hurt job creation in the run-up to the 2014 midterm elections and put Democratic control of the Senate in jeopardy.

The White House could have handled the problem as the Constitution envisioned and opened up negotiations with Congress to change the law. But it quickly concluded that the Republican House would demand too much in exchange for any adjustment to the law. So instead the administration had a blog item quietly posted on the Treasury’s website just before the July Fourth holiday. Under the Orwellian headline “Continuing to Implement the ACA [Affordable Care Act] in a Careful, Thoughtful Manner,” Assistant Secretary for Tax Policy Mark Mazur announced that enforcement of the employer mandate would be delayed until 2015. A Treasury official claimed that the administration has “longstanding administrative authority to grant transition relief when implementing new legislation like the ACA.” Oh, really? Even though the law is quite clear that the mandate shall be effective as of 2014?

Representative Darrell Issa (R., Calif.), chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform committee, says the announcement represents “policy by blog post” and that it is “another in a string of extra legal actions” that President Obama has used to evade laws and the intent of Congress. He noted earlier this year that the Obama administration was interpreting the health-care law to provide tax credits in health exchanges even if states refused to set them up.

“As a former constitutional-law teacher, President Obama must know that this action gets into very questionable constitutional territory,” Issa told the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call. “It also paves the way for future administrations to simply not enforce parts of Obamacare they don’t believe are functioning well.”

Rick Klein of ABC News concluded that the announcement was “a blow in every conceivable way to the Obama administration — an admission that its signature legislative accomplishment isn’t ready for prime time, just as the law’s critics have been arguing and arguing.”

Ultimately, the greatest damage from delaying the employer mandate may come in the way it solidifies House Republican doubts about the immigration bill. Representative Phil Roe (R., Tenn.), chairman of an Education and Workforce subcommittee, says that he doubts the administration can be trusted to enforce the will of Congress when it comes to border security or any other part of the immigration bill. “They have shown no respect for traditional Constitutional separation of powers, and that makes it difficult to pass laws where the fear is that they will simply ignore the parts they don’t like,” he tells me. The Obama administration has not hesitated to simply ignore the clear language of Obamacare. Why wouldn’t it disregard the immigration bill in the same way? In addition, the Gang of Eight bill is stuffed with instances of discretion – in other words, opportunities for administrative meddling. It includes 222 mentions of the word “may” and 153 uses of “waive.” That’s an awful lot of discretion to hand to an administration that is expert at interpreting laws creatively to suit whatever political advantage it desires.

In the classic 1960s free-market poem “Tom Smith and His Incredible Bread Machine,” an entrepreneur is pursued and prosecuted by an ideologically driven Justice Department on trumped-up charges. Just before he is sentenced, he asks the judge presiding over his trial what is happening to him. “The rule of law, in complex times, has proved itself deficient,” she sneers at him. “We much prefer the rule of men! It’s vastly more efficient.”

But our system wasn’t designed by the Founding Fathers to be efficient. Indeed, it was designed to rein in the arbitrary and capricious use of power. The growing belief that the Obama administration can’t be trusted to respect the rule of law may prove to be one of the biggest obstacles it faces in passing the immigration reform it so powerfully desires.

Point well taken.  But what inquiring minds really want to know is how the hell Republicans plan to stop him, particularly when he’s likely already got SCOTUS…

 “Sieg heil, mein Obafuhrer!”

…in his hip pocket.

Case in point, courtesy of the WSJ, as Michael McConnell, former judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit, is a professor of law and director of the Constitutional Law Center at Stanford Law School and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, is long on accurately depicting the problem but short on any possible solutions:

Obama Suspends the Law

Like King James II, the president decides not to enforce laws he doesn’t like. That’s an abuse of power.

President Obama’s decision last week to suspend the employer mandate of the Affordable Care Act may be welcome relief to businesses affected by this provision, but it raises grave concerns about his understanding of the role of the executive in our system of government.

Article II, Section 3, of the Constitution states that the president “shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” This is a duty, not a discretionary power. While the president does have substantial discretion about how to enforce a law, he has no discretion about whether to do so.

This matter—the limits of executive power—has deep historical roots. During the period of royal absolutism, English monarchs asserted a right to dispense with parliamentary statutes they disliked. King James II’s use of the prerogative was a key grievance that lead to the Glorious Revolution of 1688. The very first provision of the English Bill of Rights of 1689—the most important precursor to the U.S. Constitution—declared that “the pretended power of suspending of laws, or the execution of laws, by regal authority, without consent of parliament, is illegal.”

To make sure that American presidents could not resurrect a similar prerogative, the Framers of the Constitution made the faithful enforcement of the law a constitutional duty.

The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, which advises the president on legal and constitutional issues, has repeatedly opined that the president may decline to enforce laws he believes are unconstitutional. But these opinions have always insisted that the president has no authority, as one such memo put it in 1990, to “refuse to enforce a statute he opposes for policy reasons.”

Attorneys general under Presidents Carter, Reagan, both Bushes and Clinton all agreed on this point. With the exception of Richard Nixon, whose refusals to spend money appropriated by Congress were struck down by the courts, no prior president has claimed the power to negate a law that is concededly constitutional.

A President with a pen can steal more than 535 lawyers with briefcases.

In 1998, the Supreme Court struck down a congressional grant of line-item veto authority to the president to cancel spending items in appropriations. The reason? The only constitutional power the president has to suspend or repeal statutes is to veto a bill or propose new legislation. Writing for the court in Clinton v. City of New York, Justice John Paul Stevens noted: “There is no provision in the Constitution that authorizes the president to enact, to amend, or to repeal statutes.”

The employer mandate in the Affordable Care Act contains no provision allowing the president to suspend, delay or repeal it. Section 1513(d) states in no uncertain terms that “The amendments made by this section shall apply to months beginning after December 31, 2013.” Imagine the outcry if Mitt Romney had been elected president and simply refused to enforce the whole of ObamaCare.

This is not the first time Mr. Obama has suspended the operation of statutes by executive decree, but it is the most barefaced. In June of last year, for example, the administration stopped initiating deportation proceedings against some 800,000 illegal immigrants who came to the U.S. before age 16, lived here at least five years, and met a variety of other criteria. This was after Congress refused to enact the Dream Act, which would have allowed these individuals to stay in accordance with these conditions. Earlier in 2012, the president effectively replaced congressional requirements governing state compliance under the No Child Left Behind Act with new ones crafted by his administration.

The president defended his suspension of the immigration laws as an exercise of prosecutorial discretion. He defended his amending of No Child Left Behind as an exercise of authority in the statute to waive certain requirements. The administration has yet to offer a legal justification for last week’s suspension of the employer mandate.

Republican opponents of ObamaCare might say that the suspension of the employer mandate is such good policy that there’s no need to worry about constitutionality. But if the president can dispense with laws, and parts of laws, when he disagrees with them, the implications for constitutional government are dire.

Democrats too may acquiesce in Mr. Obama’s action, as they have his other aggressive assertions of executive power. Yet what will they say when a Republican president decides that the tax rate on capital gains is a drag on economic growth and instructs the IRS not to enforce it?

And what of immigration reform? Why bother debating the details of a compromise if future presidents will feel free to disregard those parts of the statute that they don’t like?

“So?!?  Somebody stop me!”

The courts cannot be counted on to intervene in cases like this. As the Supreme Court recently held in Hollingsworth v. Perry, the same-sex marriage case involving California’s Proposition 8, private citizens do not have standing in court to challenge the executive’s refusal to enforce laws, unless they have a personal stake in the matter. If a president declines to enforce tax laws, immigration laws, or restrictions on spending—to name a few plausible examples—it is very likely that no one will have standing to sue.

Of all the stretches of executive power Americans have seen in the past few years, the president’s unilateral suspension of statutes may have the most disturbing long-term effects. As the Supreme Court said long ago (Kendall v. United States, 1838), allowing the president to refuse to enforce statutes passed by Congress “would be clothing the president with a power to control the legislation of congress, and paralyze the administration of justice.”

So what do we DO?!?  If you’ve got any ideas, please leave them in the comments section of our home page at www.thedailygouge.com.  And while you’re there, check out today’s Cover Story and featured videos.

Then again, as Walter Russell Mead notes in the WSJ, what can one expect from a inexperienced dilettante who deems syntax synonymous with action:

Our Rhetorical President’s Unserious Speeches

Obama seems to think that eloquent words are a replacement for deeds.

Early in the Edward Snowden saga, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney was harsh and unsparing about the National Security Agency leaker. While China was harboring the American turncoat, Mr. Carney said: “If we cannot count on them to honor their legal extradition obligations, then there is a problem. And that is a point we are making to them very directly.” Yet somehow China seems to have survived the imperial wrath.

When Russia took over as the fugitive’s haven, the Obama administration stated its clear expectation that Russia would “expel Mr. Snowden for his return to the United States.” But a few days later, the White House was forced to sing small. Secretary of State John Kerry, tasked as usual with the thankless responsibility to conciliate Moscow, tried to walk back Mr. Carney’s remarks: “We are not looking for a confrontation. We are not ordering anybody. We are simply requesting under a very normal procedure for the transfer of somebody.”

With few cards left to play, the president himself was suddenly interested in making the dispute look insignificant: “I’m not going to be scrambling jets to get a 29-year-old hacker,” Mr. Obama said. “We’ve got other business to do.”

Blah…

This isn’t the first time that the contrast between hot words and cold deeds has made this White House look bad. Both President Obama and then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton last year told the world boldly that Syria’s President Bashar Assad “must” go. Yet the despot remains, gaily crossing American “red lines” and making U.S. policy look feckless.

These are not rookie mistakes made by a new president. Mr. Obama’s rhetorical problems—and they filter down to those who take their cues from him—reflect a flawed view of what rhetoric is and what it can do.

The president, like many products of American elite education, seems to believe that admirable sentiments eloquently expressed are good deeds well done. He was encouraged in this belief, even before winning the White House, by an enchanted press corps. Reporters swooned at the oratory of the Illinois senator during the presidential campaign, and his March 2008 speech on race was hailed as one of the great speeches of all time, in a league with Lincoln’s Second Inaugural.

…blah…

Mr. Obama’s race speech is not much remembered today, for reasons the president himself inadvertently explained in his speech: “And yet words on a parchment would not be enough to deliver slaves from bondage . . . What would be needed were Americans in successive generations who were willing to do their part—through protests and struggle, on the streets and in the courts, through a civil war and civil disobedience and always at great risk—to narrow that gap between the promise of our ideals and the reality of their time.” The gap between black and white families has widened significantly during President Obama’s time in office. The average white family has about six times the financial assets as the average black one; black families were hit three times as hard by the recession and its aftermath, according to an April report from the Urban Institute. No risks have been taken to narrow the gap, though the words continue to flow.

The first year of President Obama’s tenure was marked by high-profile speeches. In Cairo and Istanbul, he sought to overcome the polarization between the Muslim world and the West. As he said on June 4, 2009, in Cairo: “I do have an unyielding belief that all people yearn for certain things: the ability to speak your mind and have a say in how you are governed; confidence in the rule of law and the equal administration of justice; government that is transparent and doesn’t steal from the people; the freedom to live as you choose. These are not just American ideas; they are human rights. And that is why we will support them everywhere.”

Eight days later, on the night of June 12, demonstrations broke out in a major Islamic country in protest against the blatant vote-rigging of a presidential election. From the White House: first several days of silence, then on June 17 came this less-than-inspirational remark from the president: “It is not productive, given the history of U.S. and Iranian relations, to be seen as meddling in Iranian elections.” In other words, never mind: U.S. policy toward democracy in the Islamic world is still driven solely by national interest.

…blah!!!

The president seems not to realize that grand sentiments in fine words do not great speeches make. Winston Churchill’s Battle of Britain speeches weren’t great because they referred to noble values; they were great because they were true. The speeches were the verbal expression of a determination to resist unto death—and Churchill meant every word with every fiber of his being. The Gettysburg Address is a great speech because it condenses the essence of a cause for which hundreds of thousands were willing to die into a short and simple talk in which every word is real.

Second-rate orators use flowery language to disguise the conventionality or insincerity of their sentiments, to disguise their true motives, or—and this was the biggest problem for the White House on Syria—to substitute rhetoric for action. President Obama’s best speeches, like his Nobel Prize address, are strong because they express his true purpose. As he spoke of the tragic necessity of war, he was planning a surge in Afghanistan and unleashing a drone campaign. The speech was a serious reflection on important actions.

You cannot be a great speaker unless you are a great doer. If Martin Luther King Jr. had not led the civil-rights movement to success and ultimately laid down his life for it, his speeches would be little studied. If Churchill had surrendered to Hitler, nobody would care about his defiant addresses.

At worst, as in Mr. Obama’s Cairo speech, the contrast between exalted rhetoric and mingy deeds undermines both speech and speechmaker. But even at their best, the president’s speeches often demonstrate an intellectual mastery of the subject but lack a true aim. To change that, he would do well to quit thinking of speechmaking as an act in itself and begin to think of it as the verbal expression of an action already under way. Otherwise, Mr. Obama’s speeches will continue to resemble the fireworks that lit up America’s skies last week: briefly dazzling the crowds, then fading quickly as the dark returns.

All of which is why he comes across to anyone wishing America ill simply as an…

…i.e., Neville Chamberlain to Reagan’s Churchill.

Meanwhile, back in the Entitlement State…

101M Get Food Aid From Fed; Outnumber Full-Time Private Sector Workers

Math was never our strong suit…but doesn’t this pose a bit of a problem in the long-term?!?

Speaking of problems, as this forward from Jeff Foutch and BuzzFeed.com recounts, that’s evidently exactly what manufacturing a fabricated facade for Valerie Jarrett’s true presented the Offal Office:

White House Memo Shows Obama Administration’s Painful Efforts To Defend Valerie Jarrett

“Valerie is someone here who other people inside the building know they can trust. (need examples.)” As reported in the forthcoming book This Town.

Why not just come out and admit her favorite philosopher was Mao Tse-Tung?!?  Oh, yeah; been there…

…done that!  By the way, can you ever remember anyone…ANYone…referring to Mother Theresa as a “political philosopher”?!?

And in the Environmental Moment, the WSJ‘s Bret Stephens asks the question which has been on inquiring minds ever since Rachel Carson (with an assist from Richard Nixon and William Ruckelshaus), sentenced almost 100,000,000 people in the Third World to a painful, premature death from malaria:

Can Environmentalists Think?

Think of the Keystone XL pipeline as an IQ test for greens.

“Uhh…defnine ‘think'”, says Kari Norgaard, who’s likened anthropogenic global-warming skepticism to racism.

As environmental disasters go, the explosion Saturday of a runaway train that destroyed much of the Quebec town of Lac-Mégantic, about 20 miles from the Maine border, will probably go down the memory hole. It lacks the correct moral and contains an inconvenient truth.

Not that the disaster lacks the usual ingredients of such a moral. The derailed 72-car train belonged to a subsidiary of Illinois-based multinational Rail World, whose self-declared aim is to “promote rail industry privatization.” The train was carrying North Dakota shale oil (likely extracted by fracking) to the massive Irving Oil refinery in the port city of Saint John, to be shipped to the global market. At least five people were killed in the blast (a number that’s likely to rise) and 1,000 people were forced to evacuate. Quebec’s environment minister reports that some 100,000 liters (26,000 gallons) of crude have spilled into the Chaudière River, meaning it could reach Quebec City and the St. Lawrence River before too long.

Environmentalists should be howling. But this brings us to the inconvenient truth.

The reason oil is moved on trains from places like North Dakota and Alberta is because there aren’t enough pipelines to carry it. The provincial governments of Alberta and New Brunswick are talking about building a pipeline to cover the 3,000-odd mile distance. But last month President Obama put the future of the Keystone XL pipeline again in doubt, telling a Georgetown University audience “our national interest will be served only if this project does not significantly exacerbate the problem of carbon pollution.”

Did the explosion at Lac-Mégantic not significantly exacerbate the problem of pollution, carbon or otherwise? Why do environmentalists routinely frame political choices in the language of moral absolutes—save/destroy the planet; “don’t be mean, go green,” and so on—rather than as complex questions involving trade-offs that are best dealt with pragmatically?

When it comes to the question of how best to transport oil, environmentalists tend to act like rabbis being asked for advice on how best to roast a pig: The thing should not be done in the first place. So opposition to Keystone XL becomes an assertion of virtue, indifferent to such lesser considerations as efficiency (or succulence).

But the pig will be roasted. The oil will be pumped. What happens then?

Naive Environazis: another white meat!

Like water, business has a way of tracing a course of least resistance. Pipelines are a hyper-regulated industry but rail transport isn’t, so that’s how we now move oil. As the Wall Street Journal’s Tom Fowler reported in March, in 2008 the U.S. rail system moved 9,500 carloads of oil. In 2012, the figure surged to 233,811. During the same period, the total number of spills went from eight to 69. In March, a derailed train spilled 714 barrels of oil in western Minnesota.

Predictable, you would think. And ameliorable: Pipelines account for about half as much spillage as railways on a gallon-per-mile basis. Pipelines also tend not to go straight through exposed population centers like Lac-Mégantic. Nobody suggests that pipelines are perfectly reliable or safe, but what is? To think is to weigh alternatives. The habit of too many environmentalists is to evade them.

Perhaps this explains why the environmental movement has excelled ideologically and failed politically. As in fashion, green is a nice color that rarely wears well. So the whole world (minus your correspondent) agrees that climate change is an urgent threat to life as we know it, yet every U.N. megasummit to save the planet ends on a whimpering note. So all Americans are convinced that the threat of climate change is real, but President Obama had to use executive fiat to impose regulations on the coal industry that Congress would have rejected out of hand.

Perhaps this is also the reason climate science is so prone to scientific embarrassment. In 2001, the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change insisted that “global average surface temperatures [will rise] at rates very likely without precedent during the last 10,000 years,” and that they would rise sharply and continuously.

Yet in the 15 years since 1998, surface air temperatures have held flat, a fact now grudgingly conceded by the climate-science establishment, despite more than 100 billion tons of carbon dioxide having been pumped into the atmosphere over the same period. “Nature is far more imaginative than we are,” Stamatios Krimigis, the eminent Johns Hopkins physicist, said last month when readings from the Voyager spacecraft failed to match expectations for what it would find at the far edge of the solar system. That kind of humility in the face of data is tough for today’s environmentalists, who have staked so much on their own models, predictions and certitudes.

It’s a pity. The world needs a credible environmental movement. Conservation matters. So does the quality of water and air. In China and Russia today environmentalists have mounted the most effective (and often the most courageous) critique of the toxic combination of coercive states and corrupt businesses. In the developed world, urban life has been massively improved thanks to a keener environmental awareness.

But all that depends on an environmental movement that isn’t just another fire-and-brimstone religion, that wants to be part of a solution without castigating everyone else as part of the problem. In other words, a movement that is capable of reasoned thought.

The first application for a Keystone XL pipeline permit was filed with the U.S. State Department in 2008. Since then, the amount of oil being shipped on rails has risen 24-fold. Environmentalists enraged by this column should look at the photo of Lac-Mégantic that goes with it, and think it over.

Which, given their lack of cognitive function, is a bit of an oxymoron.

On the Lighter Side…

Then there’s a sign, courtesy of Jeff Foutch, the entrepreneurial spirit of America lives on…at least for now:

Finally, in the Wide, Wild World of Sports…

Man wants Browns pallbearers so team ‘can let him down one last time’

Things might have been worse; after all, he could have been from…

…Chicago!

Magoo