The Front Man –  Face of the law



The Front Man –  Face of the
lawless bureaucracy   –

By Kevin D.
Williamson , August 5, 2013

Conservatives have for
years attempted to put our finger upon precisely why
Barack Obama strikes us as queer in precisely the
way he does. There is an alienness about him, which
in the fever swamps is expressed in all that
ridiculous Kenyan-Muslim hokum, but his
citizen-of-the-world shtick is strictly sophomore
year — the great globalist does not even speak a
foreign language. Obama has been called many things
— radical, socialist — labels that may have him dead
to rights at the phylum level but not down at his
genus or species. His social circle includes an
alarming number of authentic radicals, but the
president’s politics are utterly conventional
managerial liberalism. His manner is aloof, but he
is too plainly a child of the middle class to
succumb to the regal pretensions that the Kennedys
suffered from, even if his household entourage does
resemble the Ringling Bros. Circus as reimagined by
Imelda Marcos when it moves about from Kailua Beach
to Blue Heron Farm. Not a dictator under the red
flag, not a would-be king, President Obama is
nonetheless something new to the American
experience, and troubling.

It is not simply the
content of his political agenda, which, though
wretched, is a good deal less ambitious than was
Woodrow Wilson’s or Richard Nixon’s. Barack Obama
did not invent managerial liberalism, nor has he
contributed any new ideas to it. He is, in fact, a
strangely incurious man. Unlike Ronald Reagan, to
whom he likes to be compared, President Obama shows
no signs of having expended any effort on big
thinkers or big ideas. President Reagan’s guiding
lights were theorists such as F. A. Hayek and Thomas
Paine; Obama’s most important influences have been
tacticians such as Abner Mikva, bush-league
propagandists like the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, and
his beloved community organizers. Far from being the
intellectual hostage of far-left ideologues,
President Obama does not appear to have the
intellectual energy even to digest their ideas, much
less to implement them. This is not to say that he
is an unintelligent man. He is a man with a
first-class education and a business-class mind, a
sort of inverse autodidact whose intellectual
pedigree is an order of magnitude more impressive
than his intellect.

The result of this is his utterly predictable
approach to domestic politics: appoint a panel of
credentialed experts. His faith in the powers of
pedigreed professionals is apparently absolute.
Consider his hallmark achievement, the Affordable
Care Act, the centerpiece of which is the
appointment of a committee, the Independent Payment
Advisory Board (IPAB), the mission of which is to
achieve targeted savings in Medicare without
reducing the scope or quality of care. How that is
to be achieved was contemplated in detail neither by
the lawmakers who wrote the health-care bill nor by
the president himself. But they did pay a great deal
of attention to the processes touching IPAB: For
example, if that committee of experts fails to
achieve the demanded savings, then the ball is
passed to . . . a new committee of experts,
this one under the guidance of the secretary of
health and human services. IPAB’s powers are nearly
plenipotentiary: Its proposals, like a presidential
veto, require a supermajority of Congress to be
overridden.

IPAB is the most dramatic example of President
Obama’s approach to government by expert decree, but
much of the rest of his domestic program, from the
Dodd-Frank financial-reform law to his economic
agenda, is substantially similar. In total, it
amounts to that fundamental transformation of
American society that President Obama promised as a
candidate: but instead of the new birth of hope and
change, it is the transformation of a constitutional
republic operating under laws passed by
democratically accountable legislators into a
servile nation under the management of an
unaccountable administrative state. The real import
of Barack Obama’s political career will be felt long
after he leaves office, in the form of a permanently
expanded state that is more assertive of its own
interests and more ruthless in punishing its
enemies. At times, he has advanced this project
abetted by congressional Democrats, as with the
health-care law’s investiture of extraordinary
powers in the executive bureaucracy, but he also has
advanced it without legislative assistance — and,
more troubling still, in plain violation of the law.
President Obama and his admirers choose to call this
“pragmatism,” but what it is is a mild expression of
totalitarianism, under which the interests of the
country are conflated with those of the president’s
administration and his party. Barack Obama is the
first president of the democracy that John Adams
warned us about.

Democracy never
lasts long,” Adams famously said. “It soon wastes,
exhausts and murders itself. There was never a
democracy that did not commit suicide.” For liberal
regimes, a very common starting point on the road to
serfdom is the over-delegation of legislative powers
to the executive. France very nearly ended up in a
permanent dictatorship as a result of that error,
and was spared that fate mostly by good luck and
Charles de Gaulle’s patriotism. Long before she
declared her infamous state of emergency, Indira
Gandhi had been centralizing power in the prime
minister’s office, and India was spared a permanent
dictatorship only by her political miscalculation
and her dynasty-minded son’s having gotten himself
killed in a plane wreck. Salazar in Portugal,
Austria under Dollfuss, similar stories. But the
United States is not going to fall for a strongman
government. Instead of delegating power to a
would-be president-for-life, we delegate it to a
bureaucracy-without-death. You do not need to
install a dictator when you’ve already had a
politically supercharged permanent bureaucracy in
place for 40 years or more. As is made clear by
everything from campaign donations to the IRS jihad,
the bureaucracy is the Left, and the Left is the
bureaucracy. Elections will be held, politicians
will come and go, but if you expand the power of the
bureaucracy, you expand the power of the Left, of
the managers and minions who share Barack Obama’s
view of the world. Barack Obama isn’t the leader of
the free world; he’s the front man for the permanent
bureaucracy, the smiley-face mask hiding the
pitiless yawning maw of total politics.

 

Thursday, August 15, 2013

The Face of the
Lawless Bureaucracy


http://directorblue.blogspot.com/2013/08/the-face-of-lawless-bureaucracy.html

Thursday, August 15, 2013

Kevin D. Williamson’s “The
Front Man” is a strong contender for article of the
year (emphases mine).

Democracy never lasts long,” [John] Adams famously said.
“It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself. There was
never a democracy that did not commit suicide.” For liberal
regimes, a very common starting point on the road to serfdom
is the over-delegation of legislative powers to the
executive. France very nearly ended up in a permanent
dictatorship as a result of that error, and was spared that
fate mostly by good luck and Charles de Gaulle’s patriotism.
Long before she declared her infamous state of emergency,
Indira Gandhi had been centralizing power in the prime
minister’s office, and India was spared a permanent
dictatorship only by her political miscalculation and her
dynasty-minded son’s having gotten himself killed in a plane
wreck. Salazar in Portugal, Austria under Dollfuss, similar
stories…

…But the United States is not going to fall for a
strongman government. Instead of delegating power to a
would-be president-for-life, we delegate it to a
bureaucracy-without-death. You do not need to install a
dictator when you’ve already had a politically supercharged
permanent bureaucracy in place for 40 years or more. As
is made clear by everything from campaign donations to the
IRS jihad, the bureaucracy is the Left, and the Left is the
bureaucracy. Elections will be held, politicians will
come and go, but if you expand the power of the bureaucracy,
you expand the power of the Left, of the managers and
minions who share Barack Obama’s view of the world. Barack
Obama isn’t the leader of the free world; he’s the front man
for the permanent bureaucracy, the smiley-face mask hiding
the pitiless yawning maw of total politics…

…the president would very much like the unemployment
problem to be somewhat abated by the time of the 2014
congressional elections, but he knows that this is unlikely
to happen with employers struggling under an expensive
health-care mandate that he has not told enough of a story
about. And so he has decided — empowered to do so by
precisely nothing — that the law will not be enforced until
after the elections. Neither does the law empower him
arbitrarily to exempt millions of his donors and allies in
organized labor from the law, but he has done that too.

This is a remarkable thing. The health-care law gives the
executive all sorts of powers to promulgate regulations and
make judgments, but it does not give the executive the
power to decide which aspects of the law will be enforced
and which will not, or to establish a different timeline
from the one found in the law itself. For all of the
power that Congress legally has given the president in this
matter, he feels it necessary to take more — illegally…

…[Obama] has a constitutional duty to enforce the law.
Representative Tom Cotton says that the president’s
health-care delay makes a deal on immigration less likely —
if the president can simply decline to enforce the
provisions of a law he fought for, why trust him to enforce
provisions of a law he is accepting only as a compromise?
Representative Cotton must also of course have in mind the
fact that after Congress had unequivocally rejected another
piece of immigration reform, the so-called DREAM Act, that
the president had supported, he simply instituted it
unilaterally, as though he had the authority to declare an
amnesty himself. He then did away with criminal-background
checks for those to be amnestied, also on his own authority.
Strangely, the order to halt background checks came down
on November 9, 2012, the same day that John Boehner said
Republicans would seek a compromise on immigration reform…

…The law also prohibits the president and his allies from
using the instruments of government to persecute their
rivals, but that is precisely what the IRS has been up to
for several years, as it turns out. And not just the IRS:
Tea-party activist Catherine Engelbrecht was subject to an
IRS audit, two FBI visits, an OSHA investigation, and an ATF
inspection of her business (which does not deal in A, T, or
F). And although the IRS has no statutory power to collect
Affordable Care Act–related fines in states that have not
voluntarily set up health-care exchanges, Obama’s managers
there have announced that they will do so anyway…

…Barack Obama’s administration is unmoored from the
institutions that have long kept the imperial tendencies of
the American presidency in check. That is partly the fault
of Congress, which has punted too many of its legislative
responsibilities to the president’s army of faceless
regulators, but it is in no small part the result of an
intentional strategy on the part of the administration. He
has spent the past five years methodically testing the
limits of what he can get away with, like one of those
crafty velociraptors testing the electric fence in Jurassic
Park. Barack Obama is a Harvard Law graduate, and he knows
that he cannot make recess appointments when Congress is not
in recess. He knows that his HHS is promulgating regulations
that conflict with federal statutes. He knows that he is not
constitutionally empowered to pick and choose which laws
will be enforced. This is a might-makes-right presidency,
and if Barack Obama has been from time to time muddled and
contradictory, he has been clear on the point that he has no
intention of being limited by something so trivial as the
law.

The president’s acts of
lawlessness have become so egregious, so outre, that even
the buttoned-down George Will — pseudo-conservative
columnist at The Washington Post — just penned his
own, far less cogent warning (“Obama’s
unconstitutional steps worse than Nixon’s“) to the
Beltway elite.

And if the Republicans served as a true opposition party —
rather than a deer-like herd of feckless cowards — they
would have thrown roadblock after roadblock in front of the
engine of Obama’s long train of abuses and usurpations.

Instead, they watch and whimper and cower, terrified of
their own shadows, interested only in preserving their
tenuous grips on power rather than acting on principle.