The political world is abuzz in the wake of Wednesday’s first presidential debate, but most Americans are not aware of the first encounter between the two candidates a couple of weeks ago. Fortunately, the Capitol Steps were there.
Archives for October 2012
The Obamacare Fight Continues
The Supreme Court’s decision to uphold the individual mandate within the Obama health care laws seemed to be the last word in a fierce legal fight.
Think again.
On Monday, the Supreme Court ordered the Justice Department to respond to a suit filed by Liberty Counsel on behalf of Liberty University. The school contends both the individual and employer mandates are unconstitutional on the grounds that they infringe upon the freedom of religious expression. The case was filed in March of 2010 on the very same day President Obama signed the bill into law. It’s been stalled because a federal appeals court ruled that the suit could not proceed because no one had been penalized or taxed yet through the mandates. The recent Supreme Court decision essentially struck down that ruling.
Liberty Counsel Chairman Mathew Staver says no court has ever ruled on the constitutionality of the employer mandate or the religious freedom concerns. Abortion funding is at the heart of the contention that the mandates violate the right to religious expression – something Staver says he saw right away but others didn’t notice until the new government rules on mandatory contraception coverage. The Obama administration insists there is no taxpayer funding of abortion in the laws but Staver pinpoints why he believes that position is patently false.
“It funds it in two ways,” said Staver. “First all, for the individual, for the first time in history, it requires each individual to pay a particular fee and that goes directly into an abortion fund and that fund funds abortion. This fee doesn’t go into a general fund, some of which funds other surgeries or medical treatment, some of which might fund abortion. No, this goes into a specific fund that funds abortion. (It’s the) very first time in history you can trace the dollar to the actual abortion.”
Staver says that provision forces individuals and business leaders to subsidize something they vehemently oppose.
“It requires religious employers, and other employers but certainly religious employers to also fund abortion as well,” he said. And for Liberty University, a Christian university, and for others that’s simply a line we can’t cross. That is a direct collision with the free exercise of religion.”
Staver says an ultimate victory in this case could devastate Obamacare – especially if the individual mandate goes down. “It could ultimately make a big hole in the bottom of the Obamacare boat or completely torpedo it and sink it altogether.”
Three Martini Lunch 10/5/12
Greg Corombos of Radio America and Dan Foster of National Review like new post-debate Rasmussen polls showing Mitt Romney ahead slightly in Virginia and Florida and doing much better in Ohio. They also dig through the supposedly wonderful jobs report and find the economy is not getting better but the numbers will probably boost President Obama anyway. And they discuss Joe Biden’s defense of raising taxes by a trillion dollars on the wealthy because all that money shouldn’t be going to the rich.
Momentum Changer
Mitt Romney dominated the first presidential debate and the change in momentum could be a huge boost to Republican congressional candidates, according to the man tasked with preserving and increasing the GOP majority in the House of Representatives.
Texas Rep. Pete Sessions is chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee. He says Mitt Romney delivered a message in the debate that Americans have been waiting to hear. “We finally had someone stand up and say ‘Mr. President, these things you’ve been saying simply are not true,'” said Sessions.
“Not just about him as a candidate and not just about the tax code and not just about what Republicans stand for but really to say that the American people need someone who will lead to the very best.”
Sessions says the strong performance came at the perfect time for Republicans, who had been on their heels recently.
“It really matters to members of Congress and those who are running as Republican candidates because we’ve had a down couple of weeks where momentum has not been going our way,” he said. “The wind has shifted just like in a big football game when somebody comes out and scores big the rest of the team plays better. I think it’s going to be an awesome next month as we go towards the election.”
As for the big picture on the House races, Sessions is standing by his August prediction of a 5-7 seat pickup for Republicans. However, he admits some tough decisions had to be made to pull funding away from races looking bad but he says Democrats are doing the same.
Sessions dismisses criticisms from Obama that Romney’s is far too vague on the details of plans ranging from tax reform to replacing Obamacare. He says if they emerge victorious in November, Republicans are committed to having a solid replacement plan in place when they launch the effort to repeal Obamacare.
Republicans are also actively playing defense in the 2012 campaign since they’ve controlled the House for the past two years. Sessions is more than willing to compare the record of GOP leadership against the Democrats who came before and the ones still running the Senate. He says the House GOP has actually produced and passed a budget while the Senate hasn’t done so in three years. Sessions also touts the Republicans for their transparency, noting that Speaker John Boehner and his team give members ample time to study legislation before votes while Nancy Pelosi and her lieutenants frequently brought bills to the floor with no time for review.
Three Martini Lunch 10/4/12
Greg Corombos of Radio America and Jim Geraghty of National Review are fired up by Mitt Romney’s dominant performance in the first debate against President Obama. They also enjoy Chris Matthews ranting after the debate and demanding that Obama watch more MSNBC. And they gently discuss the diminished moderating skills of Jim Lehrer.
Mugged
Syndicated columnist Ann Coulter says Democrats are guilty of waging racial demagoguery for nearly 50 years and have devastated the black community in the process. In her new book, “Mugged: Racial Demagoguery from the Seventies to Obama,” Coulter accuses Democrats of leading the fight for segregation and Jim Crow laws and then suddenly jumping in front of the civil rights parade when their previous approach was no longer politically beneficial.
She says the shift led to many destructive trends, including white liberals excusing the criminal behavior of blacks and the media jumping to conclusions in their coverage of stories along racial lines. Coulter says this “coddling” by the liberal establishment was accepted by the general population until America watched “a mostly black jury acquit an obviously guilty black celebrity” in O.J. Simpson. At that point Coulter says “white America just said, ‘That’s it. The white guilt bank is shut down.'”
She says that attitude persisted, despite the best efforts of liberals, until the rise of Barack Obama 12 years later. “Obama’s candidacy brought us right back to the racial demagoguery of the ’70s and ’80s that was so detrimental to our country, to our cities to black neighborhoods in particular and to black advancement,” said Coulter.
And she says that “demagoguery” leads to accusations of racism against anyone with the temerity to criticize Obama. “If you’re against Obamacare, if you’re against the stimulus bill, if you don’t support voting for Obama, you are a racist,” said Coulter. “And liberals love, love, love calling other people racists. Everyone in America is racist except white liberals who are the truest friends a black person has ever had.”
Coulter also asserts that big government programs such as Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society bear the lion’s share of the blame for the swift implosion of the black family. She says black Americans were vulnerable to this because after a history of slavery and Jim Crow, many blacks were “by and large people starting at the bottom rung of society who have the farthest to advance. Instead of going through the hard knocks education of the Irish immigrants or Italian immigrants, liberals rush in to help and their help was to destroy the black family.”
Coulter didn’t stop there. “The Great Society programs were more of a disaster for the black family, at least, than slavery. You had a strong tradition of marriage in the black family and what ruined it? Liberals helping, liberals helping, liberals ministering to black people – not because they care about black people. They care about government workers and solid Democratic voters.”
Three Martini Lunch 10/3/12
Greg Corombos of Radio America and Jim Geraghty of National Review appreciate Vice President Joe Biden admitting the middle class has been “buried” over the past four years. They also explain what they expect and hope to hear in tonight’s first presidential debate. And they discuss the significance of new video from 2007 in which Barack Obama lavishes praise on Rev. Wright and accuses the government of a double standard based on race.
A Criminal Lack of Transparency
In 2008, President Obama excoriated the Bush administration for its lack of transparency, and he vowed to lead the most open administration in U.S. history. Not only has that not materialized, but the Obama White House is among the most secretive in history and routinely breaks federal laws to keep damaging information from coming to light.
Christopher Horner is a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute specializing in energy and environmental issues, although he studies other issues as well. He has filed scores of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to procure documents from the past three administrations. Horner says the Obama administration has routinely tried to squelch his requests by forwarding it to the wrong agencies, claiming he would have to pay huge fees for the documents to be processed or just flatly ignored. Several times, Horner has been forced to sue the government in order for the requests to be honored.
As frustrating as that bureaucratic maze can be, Horner says the administration is also guilty of intentionally breaking the law. In his new book, “The Liberal War on Transparency,” Horner details how multiple officials including former Deputy White House Chief of Staff Jim Messina, conducted business on private email accounts so those communications would never end up on the public record. Messina, who is now manager of the Obama re-election effort, used a personal email account to negotiate with the drug industry and bring them on board the push to pass the Obama health plan in exchange for $4 billion in incentives. Horner says those emails were deleted despite federal law demanding that all government business be preserved and done through official means of communication. He says this is just the tip of the iceberg.
“I’ve got an affidavit, which I reveal in the book for the first time, from an official in the government acknowledging that they’ve got essentially a cyber bonfire going on at all times in the administration,” said Horner, who says the “bonfire” is tasked with “destroying records, using nongovernmental computers to access governmental servers. They’ve got this system rigged whereby that destroys all traces of the record on the government system and because they’re using a private computer very deliberately there’s no government computer you can then find the trace of the record on. If they did what they were supposed to do, you would leave these electronic footprints everywhere. It’s a very organized government-wide systemic effort to avoid leaving any trails. The problem is that’s against the law.”
Three Martini Lunch 10/2/12
Greg Corombos of Radio America and Jim Geraghty of National Review are pleased to see the new ad campaign by former Obama voters who are disillusioned by his performance over the past four years. They’re also frustrated by a federal judge in Pennsylvania who decided new photo ID requirements for voters shouldn’t be in effect in this election. And they slam the Obama administration for telling defense contractors to ignore the law and not notify employees 60 days before expected layoffs because that notification would come before the election.
A ‘Bump in the Road’ to What?
Arabs for Israel Founder Nonie Darwish says President Obama’s Middle East policy is a failure and it’s been proven by the events of the past three weeks. Darwish says it’s unthinkable that our consulate in Benghazi did not have enough security and that the Obama administration took 10 days to admit Ambassador Chris Stevens and three others were killed in a terrorist attack. Obama called the murders a ‘bump in the road’ and Darwish wants to know, “A road to what?” She slams what she considers Obama’s habit of apologizing to Muslims and is unclear on what we could possibly be apologizing for.
She says Obama’s United Nations speech scared her – especially his statement that “the future does not belong to those who slander of the prophet of Islam”. Darwish says no religion should be above criticism and Obama’s language reminds her of the repression inside her native Egypt. She also says the lack of media scrutiny for Obama policies reminds her of how the governments often control the media in the Middle East.
Finally, Darwish says Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is a “brave man” in his defiance towards the Iranian nuclear program but she questions whether Israel can successfully stop the program without any help from the United States. She says it may already be too late to prevent a nuclear Iran.