Scott Spiegel

The problem with modern-day liberals’ penchant for implementing proposals not authorized by the Constitution isn’t just that they’re sticking their noses where they shouldn’t; it’s that they aren’t sticking their noses where they should.

Fresh out of the gate, in the early days of his administration, President Obama decided to continue President Bush’s plan to take over the nation’s largest car companies and banks by tempting them with bailout funds, then tightening the noose around their necks and micromanaging them from Washington.  Soon after, Obama decided to force taxpayers to guarantee virtually all U.S. mortgages, thus sticking a $5 trillion tab to people who had largely paid their mortgage bills on time.  Recently, Obama decided to cap executive pay for banks that took bailout money, and has expressed an interest in monitoring executive pay for even banks that didn’t take TARP money.

Congress is currently considering unconstitutional legislation—stalled only because they are trying to pass even bigger, more expensive unconstitutional legislation—to impose cap-and-trade regulations to restrict and tax individual citizens’ energy use.

This summer, Obama carried out an amusing little $3 billion scheme that involved paying car owners to destroy their used automobiles and buy new ones, a jaunt that resulted in no significant net energy conservation in the U.S., boosted the auto industries of Japan and South Korea, and hurt the American used car business.

Since July, Democrats’ pet project has been to take over the U.S. health care system.  Not crazy enough to try to force through a single payer system, Senate Leader Harry Reid nonetheless went “rogue” on Monday, in defiance of Senate committee members and moderate Democrats, and announced that the Senate version of the health care reform bill would offer a public health insurance option, though such an option has zero chance of passing in the Senate.

Other fun and unconstitutional dalliances the administration has undertaken in recent months include:

•    Nationalizing the student loan system

•    Nominating for the Supreme Court a justice who believes in ignoring the equal protection offered under the law and considering race and gender in her rulings

•    Threatening to violate free speech rights by regulating the Internet and talk radio in order to ensure “balanced” views and prevent “irresponsible” content

•    Attacking a private organization, FOX News, for criticizing the administration, and threatening its right to freedom of the press by shutting it out of White House interviews to which other major news organizations are invited

•    Appointing 34 unaccountable czars—“green jobs czar,” “science czar,” “diversity czar,” “czar witness protection program czar”—to set policy while circumventing Congress’s approval of either policy or czars

•    Engaging in massive, unprecedented deficit spending to stimulate the economy

Obama’s expansion of federal government rivals the explosion of federal agencies resulting from FDR’s New Deal and the establishment of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare in the 1950s.

If the Obama administration finds a free moment from poking around in the Constitution identifying such lame justifications for its schemes as “promoting the general welfare,” it might consider dealing with the following urgent tasks, which are actually allowed by the Constitution but seem to have fallen by the wayside:

•    Providing adequate troop levels for our ongoing war in Afghanistan, as the General whom Obama hired to turn around the war requested several months ago.  Joseph Curl of The Washington Times notes, “The White House bristles when asked whether Mr. Obama is so distracted by domestic affairs and health care that he is unable to focus on Afghanistan.”  Hint to Obama: People don’t “bristle” about something that isn’t true—they brush it off their shoulders and move on, because they and everyone else know it isn’t true.  Instead of bristling, Obama might want to consider that his interlocutors are on to something.

•    Taking steps to protect the U.S. and its allies from the threat of a nuclear Iran—beyond Obama’s chilling warning to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that he will meet him “without preconditions or preconceptions.”  As the UK Telegraph recently reported, Israel’s former deputy defense minister has somberly observed that Israel can no longer rely on the U.S. to rein in Iran’s nuclear program if Israel wants to survive as a nation.

•    Sticking up for allies Poland and the Czech Republic and honoring our agreement to defend them against potential Russian aggression

•    Providing adequate funding for missile defense rather than slashing it to make room for bloated domestic spending

•    Standing up for human rights in Iran—by not waiting a week after anti-government protests to support the protestors; in China—by not having our Secretary of State rhetorically place the issue of human rights below that of reversing climate change; and in Tibet—by not refusing to meet the Dalai Lama in order to appease China

•    Defending the Honduran government’s enforcement of its constitution in their ouster of President Zelaya for attempting to violate presidential term limits

Recently, The New York Times’ Bob Herbert came out against fighting crime in New York; he called it a racist promise for Mayor Bloomberg to make in his reelection bid.  The Times’ editorial board no doubt approves of Obama’s Attorney General Eric Holder’s early decision to drop charges in the Black Panther voter intimidation lawsuit brought last fall after a harassment incident in Philadelphia on Election Day.

If protecting citizens against violent crimes by fellow citizens isn’t a legitimate Constitutional function, then what is?

I think we have a good idea regarding the priorities the administration will and will not be focused on for the next four years.

The Democrats’ health care legislation, as is or in very similar form, cannot be passed.  Every choice point they encounter from this stage on leads to an internal contradiction or a dead end.  To use a mathematical metaphor, their situation is overdetermined: there are too many conflicting restrictions; there is no solution to their dilemma.  (To use a liberal metaphor: It’s a slam dunk!)

Democratic proponents of health care reform have the following major goals:

(1)    Create a federal public health insurance option to “compete with” private insurers, or

(2)    Set up state cooperatives to “compete with” private insurers on a state-by-state basis;

(3)    Prevent discrimination by insurance companies based on preexisting condition—i.e., forbid insurance companies from “providing insurance”;

(4)    Limit the ratio of high-to-low insurance premiums by age group.

Whether pursuing any of these goals is the government’s business—and it isn’t—Democrats need to enact some combination of these proposals in order to fulfill their aim of turning us into Canada; the Congressional Budget Office estimates that this will cost about $1 trillion.

Democrats have proposed numerous bad ideas for paying for their legislation, all of which lead to intractable circumstances that they cannot tolerate politically with the general electorate, even if they were able to figure out a way to cobble together, rush through, or force the votes in Congress to pass them.  These funding ideas include:

(1)    Increase the deficit: This would violate Obama’s promise that health care reform will be “dime”-neutral.

(2)    Make taxpayers subsidize the public option: This would keep the government plan from having to cut costs or be efficient to attract and retain customers, as any private insurance company must.  It would therefore eventually force those who are satisfied with their current plans to pay higher premiums or get less for their money.

(3)    Cut $500 billion in Medicare: This would upset seniors, and anyone who plans to be a senior at some point in his life, who fear rationing of care.

(4)    Tax high-cost plans at a 40% rate: This would anger emergency workers and union members, and huge numbers of people who will hit the non-insurance-adjusted premium threshold for this level of taxation in the next 10 years.

(5)    Impose fees on insurance and pharmaceutical companies: These costs would simply be passed on to doctors, who would in turn dump them on to patients.

(6)    Cap deductions for health savings accounts: This would increase out-of-pocket medical expenses.

(7)    Force everyone to buy government-approved health insurance by charging a penalty for not having coverage: If the penalty were low, in order to avoid making it burdensome, then people would wait to get coverage until they became sick, then drop coverage after they recovered, which means the penalty would be useless.  If the penalty were high, in order to make it effective, then the public would be infuriated over the imposition of a costly penalty for not buying something that should be optional.

(8)    Cover fewer uninsured people: This would involve turning the nation’s health care system upside down while failing to fulfill the basic aim of the plan.

In case Democrats are interested, there are provisions to which they could agree, all previously proposed in legislation by House Republicans, which would actually pay for the proposed plan.  These steps should be taken anyway, and should be pursued instead of the Democrats’ aims, but just for the record, they include:

(1)    Medical liability tort reform: This would reduce settlement amounts and lower doctors’ malpractice insurance premiums.

(2)    Tax deductions for health insurance premiums, medical expenses, and prescriptions: This would allow people to decide how to allocate their earnings toward medical expenses, which they can do more efficiently than Kathleen “Jolly Roger” Sebelius.

(3)    Vouchers for opting out of Medicare: This would allow people to decide how to spend their money on medical care in old age.

(4)    Interstate provision of private insurance: This would allow for greater competition and cost-cutting.

Despite conservatives’ nail-biting uncertainty over their ability to defeat HR 3200, they have one advantage: the truth.  All the arguments conservatives have advanced against liberals’ bad ideas are informed by it, whereas liberals must disguise it, distort it, downplay it, or lie about it to persuade anyone that their impossible legislative feat and fevered social engineering fantasy can be achieved.  There are plenty of voters and legislators who are content to ignore the truth and stumble down dead ends, but enough may turn out to be smart and honest enough to see through these efforts and find their way out of the labyrinth.

Thanks to fierce lobbying by Congressional Democrats, the Senate Finance Committee’s version of the health care bill just passed on Tuesday with bipartisan support from (1) liberal senators, represented by Olympia Snowe from Maine, and (2) ultraliberal senators, represented by all 13 Democrats on the committee.

On Wednesday morning, GOP senator and fellow Pine Stater Susan Collins also announced that she was open to health care reform along the lines of the committee’s proposal.

Impressive as this Republican sweep is, you may recall how Obama’s $787 billion stimulus package received even broader bipartisan support last spring, inasmuch as it attracted the votes of no fewer than three Republican senators, including Snowe, Collins, and Arlen Specter, which of course means that the failure of the stimulus bill to do anything it was supposed to lies equally with Democrats and Republicans.  (Of course, Specter became a Democrat five minutes later, but right up until that moment he was planted firmly on the other side of the aisle.)

Snowe, like Collins, Specter, John McCain, and other liberal senators, has a reputation for magnanimously cooperating with the opposition party (the ultraliberals) in passing legislation that might otherwise abridge our liberty.  Legislators such as Snowe (L-ME) serve the valuable function of watering down such legislation to render its impact marginally less onerous on average Americans.

For example, Snowe opposes a “public option” in the health care reform bill—that is, unless private insurance companies don’t live up to arbitrary standards to be issued by the Secretary of Health and Human Services that will ensure such companies don’t get away with swindles like “earning a profit,” at which point the public option will kick in faster than you can say “single payer.”

It’s a shame that no other Republican congressmen will put aside their partisan differences and work with liberal and ultraliberal senators.  (Imagine how Obama would trumpet the expansive consensus of a tripartisan bill!)  As is, even some liberal senators such as Independent Joe Lieberman have expressed resistance to embracing the proposed legislation on the grounds that it will massively increase health insurance premiums for Americans—i.e., that it is self-defeating and crazy.

Some might quibble that the mere addition of one senator to a committee vote does not indicate the establishment of bipartisanship on health care.  Yet Snowe’s vote must signify a major shepherding of Republicans into the fold, in that Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus has made a host of concessions on her behalf, such as slashing by 50% the penalty for individuals who don’t buy insurance, and increasing subsidies to people whom the bill mandates must purchase insurance (i.e., everyone).  Never mind that the tiny state of Maine receives the same number of votes in the Senate as California—Snowe’s Finance Committee vote is evidently equal to the vote of 13 Democrat Senators!

The mainstream media’s critical, analytical take on this latest development on health care has been: a hearty rah! rah! for health care reformers for clearing such a grueling hurdle in such a graceful fashion.

While we’re talking about hurdles, it’s instructive to peruse an internal memo released by the Finance Committee in early June, which proposed a timetable for moving legislation through Congress.  According to this starry-eyed agenda, the Committee would pass its bill by mid-July, merge it with the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee’s wildly different bill and send it to the Senate floor for a vote by the end of July, and merge this with the House’s even more wildly different bill and have legislation ready for Obama to sign by October 1.

So the initial round of passing the bill out of committee, the slam-dunk part of the process, was supposed to take a month—and took four.  The next two rounds—merging the Senate bills, then merging the merged Senate bill with the merged House bill—will be far trickier than the initial round.  These tasks are predicted to take two-and-a-half months—by the same people who were confident Obama would have already signed a health care reform bill two weeks ago.  Based on the Committee’s previous underestimates, by my calculation Congress should get around to voting on a final healthcare bill around September 2010—two months before a third of the Senate and all of the House are up for reelection by a public that opposes every plan they’ve seen out of Congress this year.

Now that the Democrats have secured wide-ranging approval among lawmakers for their bill, I recommend that they capitalize on this groundswell of support.  Let’s hope that ultraliberals can leverage the runaway momentum created by bipartisanship from the Snowe Party to ensure swift passage of their bill.

On matters such as whether to spend $800 billion on “stimulus” projects, $1 trillion on health care “reform,” or billions of dollars to build stadiums in the “city” of Chicago, President Obama is all about the now.  When it comes to approving a months-old request from his beleaguered general in Afghanistan to increase troops in an eight-years-and-running war to support the dying soldiers already there, Obama engages in leisurely stargazing.

Never mind that only a wee percentage of funds are seeping out eight months after the stimulus bill was passed, health care legislation wouldn’t start until 2013, and the 2016 Summer Olympics don’t take place for seven years.  Those items were all at the top of Obama’s to-do list.

The war in Afghanistan just entered its ninth year.  Obama formulated his grand strategy for Afghanistan in March, and replaced his former commander there with General Stanley McChrystal in June.  McChrystal, as requested, made his assessment of what was necessary to implement Obama’s counterinsurgency strategy, including adequate troop levels, and has been waiting since August for Obama to give him what he needs.

Now Obama tells us that before troops can be approved, we need to make sure we have a strategy.  As George Will recently asked, didn’t Obama formulate his strategy in March?  Has it changed since then?  If not, then why the delay in sending troops to carry it out?

For one, we are told that discontent is brewing among Congressional Democrats over sending more troops, and that Obama wants to take into account their diverse opinions.  Yet discontent is always brewing among Democrats over sending any American troops anywhere, unless the mission is purely humanitarian and serves absolutely no U.S. security interest.  People who think it’s always wrong to go to war or escalate a conflict cannot be trusted to give strategic advice on troop levels in any specific conflict.

Even Hillary Clinton is sane enough to realize that if we follow Vice President Joe Biden’s preferred plan of stepping up surgical strikes and predator attacks against Al Qaeda leaders, maintaining current troop levels, and allowing the Taliban to retake large swaths of Afghanistan, Al Qaeda will return to the region before we know it.

Now, as a red herring, senior Democrats are criticizing McChrystal for “violating” the chain of command, simply because after a speech he gave last week he honestly answered a question on strategy by referencing the need for more troops in Afghanistan.

To remind Obama: McChrystal was brought in to replace General David McKiernan due to Obama’s stated intent to implement the new counterinsurgency strategy that General David Petraeus had successfully used in Iraq.  McChrystal privately requested 30,000 to 40,000 additional troops in August, a detail that was leaked to the press.  Last week, he obliquely reiterated the need for more troops in his factual response to a question.  How was he supposed to know that Obama had gone all mushy and was reconsidering his already committed to strategy?

To satisfy critics’ demand that he say nothing precise without clearing it with our commander-in-chief, McChrystal’s response to questions about strategy in Afghanistan would have had to have been, “We’re going to win in Afghanistan.  As for details, please ignore everything I’ve said before and the report and troop request I issued in August—all of that may or may not be true and reflect my honest assessment of the situation and the reason I was hired, but I have to speak with Obama to see if his strategy has changed in the last five minutes.”  (This would have been an especially interesting standard for McChrystal to live up to, inasmuch as Obama had had exactly one phone conversation with the general since he took command before last week.)

The most infuriating aspect of having to listen to all this dithering over troops is that we just went through this whole process in Iraq several years ago—and the “troop dilemma” was conclusively decided in favor of the surge option.  George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld mistakenly ignored the advice of then-General Eric Shinseki to implement massive troop increases in 2003.  The war bumbled along for several more years, until General Petraeus sent more troops and began his counterinsurgency operation in 2007, and by 2008 we were hardly hearing a peep from Iraqi insurgents.

In other words, we learned what to do in Afghanistan from what we finally did in Iraq.  General Petraeus now supports General McChrystal’s counterinsurgency operation in Afghanistan.  Why do we have to learn this bloody lesson the hard way all over again, just because Obama wants to appear “thoughtful”?

One eerie possibility is that Democrats actually believe all that nonsense they were spouting in 2008 about “many factors” being responsible for quelling the violence in Iraq, such as: cooperation from the nice Iraqi people, efforts made by the efficient Iraqi government, Sunni-Shiite compromises, the weather, oh—and also some super-helpful troops that were sent over at the last minute.

Some have suggested that Obama may listen to his inner Zen and take the “middle way”—that is, approve a modest increase, such as 10,000 troops, but not meet McChrystal’s full request.  This solution would offer the twin advantages of putting more U.S. soldiers in harm’s way and not giving McChrystal enough troops to succeed in his mission.  Sounds like a winner!

As Senator John McCain recently noted, half-measures in war “lead to failure over time and an erosion of American public support,” as in Iraq.  Or, as Ike Shelton, chair of the House Armed Services Committee, more succinctly put it, Obama had better not “half-ass it and hope.”