Reprinted from Foxnews.com, March 06, 2013.

A leaked email from an Agriculture Department field officer adds fuel to claims President Obama’s political strategy is to make the billions in recent federal budget cuts as painful as possible to win the public opinion battle against Republicans.

The email, circulated around Capitol Hill, was sent Monday by Charles Brown, a director at the agency’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service office in Raleigh, N.C. He appears to tell his regional team about a response to his recent question on the amount of latitude he has in making cuts.

According to the partially redacted email, the response came from the Agriculture Department’s budget office and in part states: “However you manage that reduction, you need to make sure you are not contradicting what we said the impact would be.”

The response noted that the administration had already told Congress that the APHIS would “eliminate assistance to producers in 24 states in managing wildlife damage to the aquaculture industry” without additional funds.

Arkansas Republican Rep. Tim Griffin said the administration’s response to Brown’s email shows a bid to undermine efforts to replace the cuts, known as sequester, with less onerous ones.

“This email confirms what many Americans have suspected: The Obama administration is doing everything they can to make sure their worst predictions come true and to maximize the pain of the sequester cuts for political gain,” Griffin said in a statement.

Griffin told Fox News on Wednesday that the bosses effectively said “you can’t do anything that is inconsistent with the negative impact that we’ve told everybody these cuts are going to have.”

Under the 2011 deal reached by Obama and Congress, the cuts are supposed to be across the board, meaning government officials have limited flexibility in moving around money.

The administration in recent weeks has made doomsday predictions about the impact of the cuts. And the White House so far has appeared unwilling to accept a Republican offer to give the president more autonomy in making the cuts, covering $85 billion this fiscal year, to help reduce the impact on some of the most essential or hardest-hit programs or agencies.

Some political strategists say the president hopes the cuts hurt enough to compel Republican lawmakers seeking re-election next year to end them by agreeing to more tax increases.

On Sunday, Gene Sperling, the White House’s top economic adviser, suggested Republicans would indeed make this decision.

“Our hope is, as more Republicans start to see this pain in their own districts, they will choose bipartisan compromise over this absolutist position,” he said.

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, during a House hearing Tuesday, was asked by South Dakota Republican Rep. Kristi Noem about the Brown e-mail.

Vilsack said he was unaware of the email but denied the administration has a policy of being inflexible and maximizing the cuts’ impact.

“I wouldn’t say that we’ve said no to flexibility,” Vilsack said. “But there are certain circumstances where we don’t have flexibility.”

“I’m hopeful that isn’t an agenda that has been put forward,” Noem said.

Reprinted March 03, 2013 from FoxNews.com

The White House is retreating from its doomsday predictions about the impact of the $85 billion in federal spending cuts as they enter a second week — with Republican leaders appearing at least satisfied about delivering on their promise to limit government spending and hold down taxes.

Gene Sperling, the White House’s top economic adviser, repeatedly said Sunday the cuts will not hurt as much on “Day One” as they will over the long haul.

“Nobody ever suggested that this … was going to have all its impact in the first few days,” he told “NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “It is a slow grind.”

His remarks are in contrast to weeks of President Obama and his Cabinet warning that the cuts will result in furloughs or pay cuts for middle-class wage-earners such as teachers, Capitol Hill janitors and air traffic controllers, which they said could cause 90-minute delays at major U.S. airports.

Sperling declined at least twice to directly answer questions about whether the worst-case-scenario rhetoric has hurt the president’s credibility on the issue. He instead stuck to his argument that independent economists forecast the cuts will result in 750,000 fewer jobs and that corporate executives now anticipate slower economic growth.

Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell told CNN’s “State of the Union” Americans absorbed similar cuts once already this year.

“This modest reduction of 2.4 percent in spending over the next six months is a little more than the average American experienced just two months ago, when their own pay went down when the payroll tax holiday expired,” the Kentucky Republican said.

Congress agreed to the cuts, known as sequester, in 2011 after failing to agree on more measure reductions — to defense and some domestic spending. However, the cuts were intended to be so drastic that Democrats and Republicans would be forced to compromise before they started.

Still, Sperling rejected several Republican-backed plans and said no compromise would be reached unless the party agrees to tax increases.

Sen. Kelly Ayotte, R-N.H., responded by saying Congress agreed to such increases in January “at the president’s request” and questioned why Obama and other Democrats will not agree to additional spending cuts.

She argued for potential pay freezes for federal employees and reforms to the federal food stamps program.

“There’s a whole host of ideas to cut spending” without jeopardizing security, Ayotte said on ABC’s “This Week.”

However, she also said she would consider tax reform that comes with entitlement reforms. But she would not agree to revenue increases to pay for additional government spending.

Earlier on the show, Sperling said Republican strategy is flawed because the cuts will take resources from several of the party’s most valued positions — including national defense and border security.

“This is not a win for Republicans,” Sperling said. “This cuts into military preparedness.”

He hinted Sunday at Democrats’ likely strategy for retaking the House in 2014.

“Our hope is as more Republicans start to see this pain in their own districts, they will choose bipartisan compromise over this absolutist position,” he said.

Sperling also dismissed a plan backed by at least some Republicans to give the president some flexibility in the cuts.

“It’s like saying you have to cut off three of your fingers but you can choose which ones,” he said.

Sperling also addressed an email sent to Bob Woodward in which he said The Washington Post reporter might “regret” writing a story that said Obama has “moved the goal posts” on sequester.

He told ABC that he and Woodward share a mutual respect and he hopes they can “put this behind us.”

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., told CBS’ “Face the Nation” that any tax increases were unacceptable.

“I’m not going to do any more small deals,” he said. “I’m not going to raise taxes to fix sequestration. We don’t need to raise taxes to fund the government.”

All of this comes ahead of a new, March 27 deadline that could spell a government shutdown and a debt-ceiling clash coming in May.

House Speaker John Boehner said his chamber would move this week to pass a measure to keep government open through Sept. 30.

McConnell said a government shutdown was unlikely to come from his side of Capitol Hill. The White House said it would dodge the shutdown and roll back the cuts, which hit domestic and defense spending in equal share.

Sperling said the White House is committed to trying to find a way that Republicans and Democrats can reach a compromise.

The billions in cuts apply to the remainder of fiscal 2013, which ends Sept. 30. But without a deal they will continue slashing government spending by about $1 trillion more over a 10-year period.

His comments continued what has become a running dispute between Woodward, perhaps the country’s best-known print journalist, and the Democratic White House over who is responsible for the across-the-board cuts scheduled to begin on Friday.

Last week, Woodward published an opinion piece in the Washington Post – where he is an associate editor – saying the administration was “wrong” to blame the cuts on Republicans.

That drew retorts from White House press secretary Jay Carney, who in posts on Twitter and later in comments to reporters blamed the budget stalemate on Republican opposition to including increased revenues in any deal to replace the cuts.

The $85 billion across-the-board budget cuts were mandated by Congress and the White House as part of the August 2011 deal to avoid a government default. The reductions are split between defense spending and domestic programs.

Woodward, who first gained fame in the 1970s from exposing the Watergate scandal during the administration of President Richard Nixon, wrote a detailed account in his 2012 book, “The Price of Politics,” of the August 2011 deal that led to the cuts.

On Wednesday he attacked Obama for drawing national security into the budget debate.

“So we now have the president going out (saying) ‘Because of this piece of paper and this agreement, I can’t do what I need to do to protect the country.’ That’s a kind of madness that I haven’t seen in a long time,” Woodward told MSNBC on Wednesday.

On Tuesday, Obama warned of threats to Navy readiness in a visit to the Newport News Shipbuilding shipyard in Virginia, where maintenance to the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln has been delayed by the budget crisis.

Earlier this month, the Pentagon said it was delaying deployment of another carrier, the USS Harry Truman, to the Middle East because of funding.

Obama’s decision to drag the military into the budget fight likely would not have happened in previous administrations, Republican or Democratic, Woodward added on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” program.

(Reporting by Susan Heavey; Editing by Fred Barbash and Eric Beech)

It made the Senate more democratic — and that’s not good.

By Charles C.W. Cooke, Reprinted from National Review Online

In our grubby, unhelpful political lexicon, certain words exist solely to end conversations. The most prominent such word is “racist.” Less popular, but by no means less potent, are “democracy” and “rights.” When welded together as “democratic rights,” the pair becomes all-powerful — strong enough to send grown men spinning for the exits and to render eloquent speakers mute.

For a good example of this principle in motion, witness the orthodox reaction to anyone who calls for the repeal of the 17th Amendment. (Direct election of senators, if you’re wondering.) Removing this ugly violation from the Constitution it so corrupts is an idea that has long lingered on the fringe (there’s another of those conversation-terminating words) and, until the massive expansion of federal power that marked the past decade and woke up the sleeping libertarians, it seemed destined to remain there in perpetuity. Even now, to declare in public that you think the whole of 1913 was one long, ghastly mistake is to be looked at as if you have just announced that the United States should consider restoring the British monarchy.

Providing what may be the Platonic ideal of such dismissals, Salon’s Alex Seitz-Wald reacted to the renewed interest by declaring in 2012 that, because any increase of democracy was “unquestionably positive,” any modifications were tantamount to “doing away with rights.” America, “we’re told from a young age, is all about democracy,” Seitz-Wald wrote, “and democracy is all about choosing whom you want to be your representative and holding them accountable.” This, he added, “seems like an entirely uncontroversial idea.” I cannot account for Mr. Seitz-Wald’s grasp of America’s history, beyond saying that if he has indeed been told “from a young age” that America is “all about democracy,” then he must be forgiven for believing it. Still, whatever his schools might have told him, the United States is not in fact a democracy but a constitutional republic, and her virtues lie as much in her undemocratic institutions as in her ample provisions for self-rule — more, perhaps.

Doubt it? Look around. Despite the violence that the 17th Amendment did to it, the Senate remains a partially anti-democratic institution; the Supreme Court is an entirely undemocratic institution; the Constitution is undemocratic, too, requiring for any changes to its structure the consent of a supermajority and containing the Bill of Rights, which is as elevated and explicitly counter-majoritarian a component of national law as you will find. The strong American protections of free speech, freedom of religion, the right to bear arms, due process, privacy, and the right to a jury trial are triumphs of minority rights. How about the absence of a state church? Not for nothing did Patrick Henry cry ardently for “liberty or death.” It is liberty, not democracy, that is America’s highest ideal.

Walter Lippmann famously observed that, at some point in their history, “the American people came to believe that their Constitution was a democratic instrument, and treated it as such.” The New York Times’ David Firestone appears to be one of these American people, arguing as he did in 2010 that “a modern appreciation of democracy” makes the idea of directly electing senators “so obvious” that any proposal of change is “unthinkable.” Putting to one side for now the narrow procedural majoritarianism inherent in his definition, Firestone’s thesis runs into two problems: America is not “modern” and it is not a “democracy.” Perish the thought.

Instead, the American system was deliberately designed to balance power between the various branches of government and to guarantee individual rights against majority rule, thus protecting the people from tyranny whether they liked it or not. The United States government was arranged in this way as a permanent bulwark against federal encroachment. “Changing times” was no more a strong justification for the undoing of this system in 1913 than it is now. And whatever the Wilson-era progressives might have held, the federal government was not intended to be a wholly separated layer of government. Instead, it was to be intertwined with the states to such an extent that it could not ride roughshod over their interests without pushback. As James Madison resolved during the debate over the Bill of Rights:

The state legislatures will jealously and closely watch the operations of this Government, and be able to resist with more effect every assumption of power, than any other power on earth can do; and the greatest opponents to a Federal government admit the State Legislatures to be sure guardians of the people’s liberty.

It is exactly here that America’s democracy fetishists go wrong. As Madison makes clear in the Federalist Papers, in order to defend the vertical checks and balances that allow America’s federal system to function, senators would be “elected absolutely and exclusively by state legislatures.” The Senate was not intended to be the people’s representative body, but that of the states. Lest the federal government “swallow up the state legislatures,” George Mason insisted to his fellow convention delegates in Philadelphia, “let the state legislatures appoint the Senate.” The delegates backed him unanimously.

It makes no more sense to argue that to return to this original arrangement would be to “take away” the “rights” of the people than it does to maintain that not being able to vote directly for Supreme Court justices violates their democracy. Everything has its place, and indulging popular sovereignty is simply not what the Senate was designed to do. One could sometimes be forgiven for thinking otherwise, but the states are not regional departments of the federal government. To ensure that they had a working mechanism by which to resist the expansion of federal power, the architects of our Constitution hard-wired the state legislatures into its structure; with the 17th Amendment, progressives pulled out that wiring like punch-drunk Jacobins.

Has there ever been a time when America was more in need of the states’ being represented in Washington? “The People” have their representatives in the House. The nation has its leader in the White House. What of the states? Andrew Napolitano has it right: The 17th Amendment, he gripes, “effectively just gave us another house like the House of Representatives . . . and the states lost their place at the federal table.” This is problematic because, to their great discredit, The People seem not greatly to care how power is structured. Who then is surprised that the abolition of the Senate as the supporting wall of federalism has led inexorably to, as Jefferson warned just before his death, “all government, domestic and foreign, in little as in great things,” being “drawn to Washington as the center of all power”? Returning the selection of senators to state legislatures would help to focus citizens’ eyes locally, where they belong.

“Democracy” may be the cry now. But as Alex Seitz-Wald goes on to acknowledge in his dissent, the primary argument in favor of the 17th Amendment was that it might serve to cut out corruption. Money was said to be rife in politics; direct elections would stamp it out. Lobbying by big business was staining the republic; direct elections would cut the buggers off at the knee. The small constituency that a senator served effectively gave him tenure; an amendment would make the body competitive. Bad behavior among senators was rife; the rigors of direct election would make them moral. And how are things now that the scalpel has been taken to Madison’s handiwork? There is more money in politics than ever before; direct elections have served only to cut out the middleman between lobbyists and politicians; senators rarely lose their seats; and Ted Kennedy killed a woman and got away with it.

In a brilliant Humanitas essay from 1996, C. H. Hoebeke rendered this judgment:

In retrospect, the amendment failed to accomplish what was expected of it, and in most cases failed dismally. Exorbitant expenditures, alliances with well-financed lobby groups, and electioneering sleights-of-hand have continued to characterize Senate campaigns long after the constitutional nostrum was implemented. In fact, such tendencies have grown increasingly problematic.

Americans purchased this dismal failure at the cost of their federal system’s integrity. Like the other two Progressive Era amendments that sit either side, the 17th is a testament to hubris — a parchment admonition of those who would tinker with the permanent in the name of the temporary. Nonetheless, it benefits those who would be required to amend it, which, alas, is a recipe for eternal life in Washington. Repeal is thus almost certainly a dead end; interest in such things is limited. And so the federal titan lumbers on, the states shrinking inexorably in stature. One cheer for democracy, Mr. Wilson.

— Charles C. W. Cooke is an editorial associate at National Review.

There are still a few people who claim to be undecided about today’s elections. Do they want to continue to support Barack Obama, or has our country reached a point where we must make a change of leadership . .  from the top down?

This is a video documenting the development of Obama’s policies, and how he made certain representations to the public while making different promises to special interests, and made political decisions different than he promised.

Watch this video, then share it with your friends and associates.

Obama, in his own words:

PUBLIUS

Since the Supreme Court’s ruling on the President’s healthcare law a few weeks ago, a lot of people on both sides of the issue have asked about my reaction to it. It probably goes without saying at this point that I think the law was an enormous mistake from a policy standpoint – $800 billion in new taxes ($675 billion in the most recent estimates by the Joint Committee on Taxation plus roughly another $125 billion in taxes from their 2010 estimates of the individual mandate, employer mandate, and other revenues – likely to go up further), plus $500 billion in cuts to Medicare, zero done to control the growing costs in healthcare, etc – but setting aside the specific issue of health reform, my biggest concerns surround the ruling itself and the precedent it sets. These are issues that frankly, I think the media has a responsibility to make sure Americans are informed about.

Here is the short version. The Supreme Court ruled that the individual mandate requiring Americans to buy health insurance could not be allowed under Congress’ constitutional authority to regulate interstate commerce. The Court said very plainly that the federal government does not have the authority to require you to buy something and penalize you for failing to do it.

But in the same breath, citing Congress’ authority to levy taxes, the Court said that although the federal government can’t force you to buy health insurance, they can compel you to buy it by taxing you if you don’t. In a nutshell, the government can’t fine you for not buying something, but they can hit you with a tax penalty if you don’t… I frankly don’t see a meaningful difference between the two.

Think about it this way: the federal government has long been able to encourage certain behavior through the tax code (think about the mortgage interest tax deduction), but it has never been able to compel you to go out and buy a house by threatening to hit you with a tax penalty if you didn’t. That is a huge difference. On page 39 of his majority opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts used the example of energy efficient windows. He suggested that although the federal government couldn’t require you to buy energy efficient windows, it could essentially force you to do so by levying a tax on you if you don’t.

I don’t think anybody out there disputes the benefits of having health insurance or lowering your electricity bill, but in the United States of America, those decisions have always been up to the people – not up to the federal government. And regardless of how you feel about the healthcare law, I think this is something that all Americans should consider very carefully. Should Congress have the power to force American citizens into buying things that they don’t want? Should the federal government be able to force you to buy a certain car, or windows, or insurance, or anything else that the Congress thinks you should have? Is that a power that We The People want to surrender?

I don’t believe it is. But that’s what the Supreme Court has done here. Regardless of whether or not the President’s healthcare law is repealed, the precedent has been set. The government now has the legal authority to force you to buy things. That wasn’t the case before the ruling and it is not something that is easily undone. Following on the heels of our Independence Day, when all Americans gather together to celebrate our freedom and the sacrifices of those who made it possible, this is an issue that I think we should all consider very carefully. Are we less free as a people in the wake of this ruling and is that something we should be comfortable with?

You know where I stand.

Congressman Richard B. Nugent