Internet Scofflaw

Put politicians in charge of health care, and this is what you get:

The federal government wants to reduce the number of Americans diagnosed each year with cancer. But not by better preventive care or healthier living. Instead, the government wants to redefine the term “cancer” so that fewer conditions qualify as a true cancer.

All is proceeding as I have foreseen. Alas.

(Via Instapundit.)

Now that Obamacare has launched, we can evaluate how well Barack Obama has fulfilled his promise to cut everyone’s health care rates by $2500 per year. It may surprise low-information voters, but will be no surprise to those who have followed this disaster closely, that most people will not see a reduction at all, much less a reduction of $2500 per year. Among younger men (the group probably being screwed most badly by Obamacare) we are seeing this:

The blue states are the ones in which premiums are dropping at all. In most states, premiums are not only rising, but skyrocketing. For other groups the picture looks similar; only the magnitude of the disaster is different. You can find all the maps here. The article also shows that most people will not get subsidies enough to break even.

In a tacit acknowledgement that the numbers are terrible, the Obama administration released very little information, and tried to keep even that data from Obamacare’s critics:

The report was issued to news organizations on Tuesday under a strict embargo, with specific instructions not to share the information with anyone else, like outside health insurance experts who might be able to provide more analysis of the numbers. Apparently, though, the word still leaked out.

The New Republic thinks that Obama should send the army against the House of Representatives.

Of course, they can’t really think that (can they?), so why talk that way?

UPDATE: As Ed Driscoll points out, a few years Democrats were pretending that they believed that merely putting a crosshair on a map was enough to drive people to violence. Now they are broadcasting an explicit call to violence.

The most popular question on the Obamacare web page is how to receive an exemption. Right there in black and white, one way to qualify for an exemption is to be in America illegally:

Under certain circumstances, you won’t have to make the individual responsibility payment [i.e., the individual mandate’s penalty]. This is called an “exemption.”

You may qualify for an exemption if: . . .

• You’re not lawfully present in the U.S.

Yet another case of hysterical anti-gun schools punishing kids for non-guns vaguely reminiscent of guns: this time a two-inch keychain shaped like a gun.

(Via Instapundit.)

When asked about the House’s continuing resolution which would repeal the highly unpopular tax on medical devices, White House spokesman Jay Carney compared the effort to birtherism.

It’s one thing for Democrats to obstruct Rep. Darrell Issa’s (R-CA) efforts to get to the bottom of the administration’s myriad scandals. It’s quite another for them to try to get him killed:

CBS News has learned that a “general threat” was made against a member of Congress who made a fact-finding trip to Libya this week. The chairman of the House Oversight Committee, Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., traveled to Tripoli as part of the Republican’s ongoing investigation into the Sept. 11, 2012, terrorist attacks on Americans in Benghazi. . .

Issa planned the trip to Libya in secret, but Democrats on the Oversight Committee revealed the plans in a press release last Friday when they obtained a copy of his itinerary.

(Emphasis mine.)

The Democrats’ purported complaint was that Issa didn’t invite anyone else along with him, but that’s a complaint they easily could have made after he was safely home. I suppose their defense will be that they were too stupid to consider the security implications.

POSTSCRIPT: As to the substance of the Democrats’ complaint, it should be self-evident that a secret fact-finding trip with one Congressman is much more likely to learn something of use than a big “fact-finding” circus. (Of course, they don’t want him to learn anything.) Moreover, they would hardly have gone if they had been invited; they won’t even stay for testimony offered in Congressional chambers.

(Via the Daily Caller.)

The Canadian government has given itself the power to deny entrance into the country for the reason that a person might give a speech that the government doesn’t like:

“Several factors are used in determining admissibility into Canada, including: involvement in criminal activity, in human rights violations, in organized crime, security, health or financial reasons,” spokeswoman Vanessa Barrasa said in an email.

But recent changes to the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act also allow the immigration minister to deny entry over “public policy considerations,” a standard some experts say has been ill-defined.

Under the previous rules, “it was very clear that the offence in question had to be equivalent to a criminal offence in Canada,” said Sharryn Aiken, a law professor at Queen’s University in Kingston.

“The whole problem with the public policy grounds is it vests an enormous amount of discretion in the minister to define what are these exceptional circumstances that warrant the exercise of this power,” she said.

A government backgrounder issued earlier this year said the minister could use his authority to bar anyone “who has a history of promoting violence against a particular religious group.”

The National Counsel of Canadian Muslims (that’s Canada’s CAIR) wants the government to deny Pamela Gellar a visa in order to stop her from giving a scheduled speech on the danger of militant Islam.

I guess it’s really true that free speech is an “American concept”, without value in Canada.

To the extent to which Obamacare is cutting health insurance premiums (mostly premiums are going up), it’s cutting them by cutting back providers:

Lower Health Insurance Premiums to Come at Cost of Fewer Choices

WASHINGTON — Federal officials often say that health insurance will cost consumers less than expected under President Obama’s health care law. But they rarely mention one big reason: many insurers are significantly limiting the choices of doctors and hospitals available to consumers.

From California to Illinois to New Hampshire, and in many states in between, insurers are driving down premiums by restricting the number of providers who will treat patients in their new health plans. . .

Some consumer advocates and health care providers are increasingly concerned. Decades of experience with Medicaid, the program for low-income people, show that having an insurance card does not guarantee access to specialists or other providers.

Indeed, studies have shown that Medicaid is so bad, patients are often better off with no insurance at all. And that’s the kind of health care that, in many states, will be offered on the Obamacare exchanges.

As Dan McLaughlin puts it, this is the most Obama thing ever. Barack Obama decided to support health care nationalization just so he could have something to say in a speech:

The most important red line of Barack Obama’s presidency was scrawled hastily in January 2007, a few weeks before he even announced he was running for president.

Soon-to-be-candidate Obama, then an Illinois senator, was thinking about turning down an invitation to speak at a big health care conference sponsored by the progressive group Families USA, when two aides, Robert Gibbs and Jon Favreau, hit on an idea that would make him appear more prepared and committed than he actually was at the moment.

Why not just announce his intention to pass universal health care by the end of his first term?

Thus was born Obamacare, a check-the-box, news-cycle expedient that would ultimately define a president.

“We needed something to say,” recalled one of the advisers involved in the discussion. “I can’t tell you how little thought was given to that thought other than it sounded good. So they just kind of hatched it on their own. It just happened. It wasn’t like a deep strategic conversation.” . . .

He probably wasn’t going to get elected anyway, the team concluded. Why not go big?

(Emphasis mine.)

He didn’t develop anything in support of that pledge until months later when he was savaged in a debate with Hillary Clinton:

Even after his pledge, though, it took months for Obama to buy in. In March 2007, he found himself on the same stage with a highly confident Clinton at another health care forum, this one sponsored by the Service Employees International Union in Las Vegas.

Obama staggered through a discussion that left policy wonks convinced that he was out of his league, particularly when compared to Clinton, arguably the nation’s premier expert on health care after her unsuccessful attempt to enact reform in the 1990s.

While she dominated, he was confronted by an audience member who asked why he didn’t have a health care plan yet. He responded that his campaign was only eight weeks old and promised to come up with one soon.

A House hearing has exposed how shallow the State Department’s “investigation” of the Benghazi debacle truly was:

*Secretary of State Hillary Clinton handpicked the two leaders of the ARB who were given the job of investigating her department.

*Cheryl Mills, the chief of staff and senior counselor to Secretary Clinton, was intimately involved with the ARB [accountability review board] panel from the beginning. She called the leaders at Clinton’s behest to ask them to serve, she was briefed regularly on the investigation as it unfolded and she received a draft copy of the report before it was finalized. . .

*The chairman of the panel acknowledged at least one instance in which language in the report was softened after an early draft was sent to Clinton and her top aides. . .

*The ARB did not speak with nine key military officials on the ground in Libya or Germany who were deeply involved in the US response to the attacks. Among those who was never interviewed: Lt. Colonel Steven Gibson, who was on the ground in Tripoli and whom State Department official Greg Hicks has testified was on the receiving end of the “stand-down” order that Obama officials have repeatedly disclaimed. . .

*None of the interviews the ARB conducted were recorded in any fashion. . . The only record of those sessions is in notes taken by a staff member. . . (Those summaries and the notes that produced them have not been provided to Congress).

*The ARB did not investigate the Obama administration’s public response to the attack or the role that senior State Department officials played in shaping that narrative. That response included the highly misleading claim that the attacks had come as a reaction to an anti-Islam video and many other claims that were later shown to be false.

The purpose of the probe was not to investigate anything, but to protect Hillary Clinton from damage. Their choice not to investigate the stand-down order is particularly appalling.

UPDATE: The ARB never even interviewed the four employees that it decided to blame.

Barack Obama, yesterday:

You have never seen in the history of the United States the debt ceiling or the threat of not raising the debt being used to extort a president or a governing party and trying to force issues that have nothing to do with the budget and nothing to do with the debt.

As is nearly always the case when the Democrats claim that Republican tactics are unprecedented (such as this), not only is that claim false, but the tactic was actually pioneered by Democrats:

In 1973, when Richard Nixon was president, Democrats in the Senate, including Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Sen. Walter Mondale (D-Minn.), sought to attach a campaign finance reform bill to the debt ceiling after the Watergate-era revelations about Nixon’s fundraising during the 1972 election. . .

Indeed, Linda K. Kowalcky and Lance T. LeLoup wrote in a comprehensive study of the politics of the debt limit, for Public Administration Review, that “during this period, the genesis of a pattern developed that would eventually become full blown in the mid-1970s and 1980s: the use of the debt ceiling vote as a vehicle for other legislative matters.”

Previously, they noted, the debt limit bill had been linked to the mechanics of debt management, but now anything was fair game. Major changes in Social Security were attached to the debt bill; another controversial amendment sought to end the bombing in Cambodia. Kowalcky and LeLoup list 25 nongermane amendments that were attached to debt-limit bills between 1978 and 1987, including allowing voluntary school prayer, banning busing to achieve integration and proposing a nuclear freeze.

In 1982, Senate Majority Leader Howard Baker unleashed a free-for-all by allowing 1,400 nongermane amendments to the debt ceiling legislation, which resulted in five weeks of raucous debate that mostly focused on limiting federal court jurisdiction over school payer and busing.

Yes, lies and hypocrisy, but there’s also Barone’s first rule: all process arguments are insincere.

Barack Obama, June 2009:

If you like your health care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health care plan, period. No one will take it away, no matter what.

As we know well by now, that was a lie. Yesterday, Walgreens dumped 160,000 employees from its health care plan. Today, Home Depot dumped 20,000 employees from its health care plan.

Obama also promised that his plan would cut your health insurance premium by $2,500 per year. Think about that when you see your premium soar.

Don’t worry about the government getting possession of all your medical records; they’ll be sure to keep them secure. Oh:

Obamacare Employee Accidentally Sends Out 2,400 Social Security Numbers

Think Progress says that employers cutting off health care proves that Obamacare is working exactly as it’s supposed to:

Trader Joe’s Is Dropping Coverage For Some Part Time Workers — And That Means Obamacare Is Working

Awesome. I can’t decide which of these clips is a better analogy:

POSTSCRIPT: Of course, in a sense they’re right. Notwithstanding what the public was told, the purpose of Obamacare is to destroy the current system and put the government in charge of health care. When we see people moving from private coverage to the government “exchanges”, the system is indeed working as intended.

. . . like ticketing Pittsburghers for parking in their own driveways. As much as $2400. For parking in your own driveway. Tar and feathers are too good for these people.

Pittsburgh isn’t the first to try to squeeze a little extra revenue from its beleaguered residents, either; Washington, DC tried it a few years ago. DC wanted to sell parking permits for driveways, but Pittsburgh appears to be more interested in the fines, since they are keeping quiet the option to buy a permit.

John Kerry gets tangled in his own double-speak: “To my knowledge, I have no knowledge of . . .”

They say that A people hire A people, while B people hire C people. Yeah, and C people hire John Kerry and Chuck Hagel.

Voters tossed out both of the anti-gun Colorado state senators up for recall last night, including the senate president. This, despite a massive spending advantage in favor of the anti-gun/anti-recall side.

UPDATE: More:

It’s one thing for a deliberately polarizing legislator like Morse to lose a close race in a swing district. It’s quite another for Giron to lose by 12 points in a district that is 47% Democratic and 23% Republican. One reason is that in blue collar districts like Pueblo, there are plenty of Democrats who cling to their Second Amendment rights. As the Denver Post noted, 20% of the voters who signed the Giron recall petitions were Democrats.

The municipal government of Williston, North Dakota has determined that homeless people are better off sleeping on the street (in North Dakota, mind you!), than inside a church without an automatic sprinkler system.

As Democrats like to say, government is just what we call the things we choose to do together, like throwing homeless out on the streets of North Dakota.

Remember the sequester’s horrible budget cuts? Turns out, those draconian cuts amount to just $2 billion, out of a $3.457 trillion federal budget.

This is funny:

Inspired by the “Toy Gun” buyback program recently initiated by Hayward California’s Strobridge Elementary School principal Charles Hill, Vice President Joe Biden is scheduled to announce today White House backing of a new “Imaginary Gun” buyback program.

“We have been plagued by a recent rash of imaginary gun incidents in our nation’s schools,” said Biden spokesman Aldous Orwell. “Children live in terror because of rampant imagination.”

Step One of the program would entail registration of imaginary weapons in a National Imaginary Terror Weapon Information Tracking System (NITWITS). Educators will help students fill out a form from NITWITS to see if their imaginations are producing unacceptable thoughts involving a weapon of any kind. . .

Step Two will involve conditioning the “At Risk” students to “trade-in” their unacceptable actions, like pointing their fingers and saying “bang,” or pretending to hold a sword while making “schwing” or “ting! tang!” sounds, for more correct thoughts – like rejecting gender stereotypes, or performing community service activities.

Read the whole thing. What’s so brilliant about this is that it is so very nearly true. When schools are disciplining children for imaginary guns or symbolic representations of guns, it’s not about keeping children safe, it’s about thought police.

Chicago is bringing sex education to kindergarten. This being Chicago, they don’t care that parents are against it.

If you discourage work, destroy opportunities, and encourage dependence, then surprise! labor force participation hits a 34-year low.

Shockingly, if you dump tens of thousands of criminals onto the streets, the crime rate goes up.

Because we subsidize the US cotton industry, we apparently must also subsidize the Brazilian cotton industry. It’s not clear whether US agricultural policy could get any more stupid.

(Via the Corner.)

As predicted:

For the vast majority of Americans, premium prices will be higher in the individual exchange than what they’re currently paying for employer-sponsored benefits, according to a National Journal analysis of new coverage and cost data. Adding even more out-of-pocket expenses to consumers’ monthly insurance bills is a swell in deductibles under the Affordable Care Act.

Health law proponents have excused the rate hikes by saying the prices in the exchange won’t apply to the millions receiving coverage from their employers. But that’s only if employers continue to offer that coverage–something that’s looking increasingly uncertain. Already, UPS, for example, cited Obamacare as its reason for nixing spousal coverage. And while a Kaiser Family Foundation report found that 49 percent of the U.S. population now receives employer-sponsored coverage, more companies are debating whether they will continue to be in the business of providing such benefits at all.

(Via Instapundit.)

This Slate piece (apparently Slate still exists!) really quite amazing:

If You Send Your Kid to Private School, You Are a Bad Person
A manifesto.

You are a bad person if you send your children to private school. Not bad like murderer bad—but bad like ruining-one-of-our-nation’s-most-essential-institutions-in-order-to-get-what’s-best-for-your-kid bad. So, pretty bad.

I am not an education policy wonk: I’m just judgmental. But it seems to me that if every single parent sent every single child to public school, public schools would improve. This would not happen immediately. It could take generations. Your children and grandchildren might get mediocre educations in the meantime, but it will be worth it, for the eventual common good.

Wow. She says that I should give my kids a “mediocre” education, and indeed that people should do so for generations, and she calls me a bad person?

Not only is she a bad person, she is also an ignorant person. Apparently she believes that if everyone buys a product irrespective of its quality, then its quality will improve. Oh, I see:

I went K–12 to a terrible public school. My high school didn’t offer AP classes, and in four years, I only had to read one book.

Whatever book she read, it clearly wasn’t economics.

(Via Instapundit.)

UPDATE: Ed Morrissey adds:

Benedikt’s entire argument is that non-participants in an organization ruin it by their non-participation.  It’s not the actual participants who are to blame for the institution’s failures – not the teachers, not the administrators, and not the policy-makers — but the people who avoid the failure that should be blamed.

Mayors Against Illegal Guns is a cleverly named organization. The name is intended to give the impression that they aren’t looking to ban guns, just to keep them out of the hands of criminals. But the name is a lie. While they work vigorously to ban guns and accessories, they seem to have no interest at all in actually enforcing the gun laws that exist:

The districts that contain Chicago, Los Angeles and New York City ranked last in terms of federal gun law enforcement in 2012, according to a new report from Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, which tracks federal data. . .

The districts of Eastern New York, Central California, and Northern Illinois ranked 88th, 89th and 90th, respectively, out of 90 districts, in prosecutions of federal weapons crimes per capita last year, but it wasn’t always this way. All three districts fell lower on the list than they had been in years past. In 2010, for example, Chicago was 78th in federal weapons prosecutions.

These cities also have some of the nation’s most restrictive gun laws, as well as the most active mayors in championing gun control. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa are all members of the national Mayors Against Illegal Guns campaign.

88th, 89th, and 90th, out of 90.

Megan McArdle has an interesting article about how Treasury Secretary Jack Lew’s history of lying to Republicans about budget numbers, and then crowing about it, will make it difficult for the White House to strike a budget deal with Republicans. The Republicans, justifiably, simply don’t believe his numbers.

Glenn Reynolds adds:

These people aren’t even competent liars. A competent liar doesn’t brag about how he snookered people he’ll have to deal with in the future.

Without denigrating James O’Keefe’s work at all — I think it’s great — he’s not doing anything that other enterprising investigative journalists couldn’t do. The fact that he’s the only one doing this stuff is an indictment of the entire field.

(Via Instapundit.)

Surprise, surprise. GreenTech’s denials that it lobbied for green cards for its “investors” aren’t true:

Government documents contradict claims made by GreenTech Automotive officials that they did nothing to press federal officials to approve the visa application of Zhenjun Zhang, a foreign investor with ties to a Chinese company on a U.S. spy list.

Documents show that attorney Simone Williams and CEO Anthony Rodham, executives at GreenTech’s investor relations arm, wrote on Jan. 29 to USCIS Director Alejandro Mayorkas seeking to fast track stalled petitions for foreign investors under the government’s EB-5 program. One of those that had been languishing was Zhang’s, according to government documents.

(Via Instapundit.)

For an explanation of the GreenTech scandal, see here. In essence, they were selling green cards. GreenTech’s founder is Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic candidate for governor of Virginia and the former chair of the Democratic party.

Anthony Rodham has no experience in the automotive industry (at least, not according to Wikipedia), but his sister is Hillary Clinton, until recently the Secretary of State. That should give an indication of whether GreenTech’s real business was green cars or green cards.

From Barack Obama’s Twitter feed:

More than 57,000 pre-K children are feeling the affects of the #sequester:

(Via PJ Tatler.)

Cheap shot? Yeah, probably. But after watching his cronies and the media (but I repeat myself) go after Republicans for comparable gaffes — or for things they never even said — I have no inclination to be charitable left.

Lots of employers are cutting health coverage as a result of Obamacare.

I thought this was a very interesting point:

I noted last week that arguments for a uniform [public school curriculum] standard seem rather weak. Nevertheless, Bill Keller of the New York Times devoted some column space this week to one such argument:

The Core does call for schools across the states to deliver their lessons in the same sequence. Does it really matter if children in Alabama and New Jersey start algebra in the same grade? It matters a lot to a kid who moves from Alabama to New Jersey. . .

This argument for national standards is an illustration of how politicians recommend more centralization as a way to fix problems caused by centralization. The public-school monopoly is what limits choice and creates the potential curriculum conflict. If parents had adequate choices in the first place, then interstate migration would not pose a major problem — parents could likely just choose a school in New Jersey whose curriculum is most similar to the child’s previous school in Alabama.

(Emphasis mine.)

It’s not about education, it’s about control of education. Richmond’s rule applies.

Another major Obamacare provision is being suspended (without any legal justification):

In another setback for President Obama’s health care initiative, the administration has delayed until 2015 a significant consumer protection in the law that limits how much people may have to spend on their own health care.

The limit on out-of-pocket costs, including deductibles and co-payments, was not supposed to exceed $6,350 for an individual and $12,700 for a family. But under a little-noticed ruling, federal officials have granted a one-year grace period to some insurers, allowing them to set higher limits, or no limit at all on some costs, in 2014.

The grace period has been outlined on the Labor Department’s Web site since February, but was obscured in a maze of legal and bureaucratic language that went largely unnoticed.

Be sure to notice the last bit (emphasis mine). The Obama administration set aside a major portion of the law, and didn’t even tell anyone.

It’s not just this and the employer mandate. In fact, the Obama adminstration has missed or skipped half of its statutory deadlines. (Via Instapundit.) Half of them! And that’s his own law. This truly is a lawless administration.

Does Eric Holder’s Justice Department tell the truth about anything?

The Justice Department and FBI have quietly acknowledged they grossly overstated the scope of a mortgage fraud crackdown, which the administration heralded with much fanfare a few weeks before last year’s presidential election.

According to a memo circulated by the FBI and a correction posted online by the Justice Department, the number of defendants, the number of victims and the size of the losses are, in reality, a fraction of what officials claimed last October.

In the long run, I think that the Democrats are making a big mistake by identifying the Justice Department with political chicanery. Some day the DOJ might need that reputation they’re ruining.

Two things about the Million Muslim March on Washington, scheduled for September 11: First, they have a legal right to do it. Second, doing it on that particular day is crass, unseemly, and will inflame the anti-Muslim sentiment that they claim to be marching against — much like the Ground Zero Mosque built on the footprint of a building damaged beyond repair by an airplane impact on 9/11.

POSTSCRIPT: Actually, a third thing: they’re expecting a thousand people.

UPDATE (9/11): They didn’t even get that many.

There is a pernicious notion that the essential quality of the American system of government is democracy. This is a very basic misunderstanding, and one that seems to be ingrained early. In my case I picked it up as a child, so early than I’m not even sure when.

But it’s nonsense. Democracy, also sometimes called more forthrightly “majority rule”, is the idea that 51% of the people have the right to impose their will on the other 49%. We know instinctively that this is wrong.

ASIDE: I’m considering democracy under its narrow meaning here. It’s true that democracy (or “liberal democracy”) sometimes is used to refer to whole collection of ideas, not just majority rule. But in that case I am arguing that using “democracy” as an umbrella term is inapt.

The essence of the American system is liberty. Democracy is but a means to an end. As Heinlein’s Jubal Harshaw put it (paraphrasing): democracy is a poor system; the only thing to be said in its favor is the other systems are worse. Since haven’t figured out a realistic way for society to survive without government, putting its management into as broad hands as possible impedes it becoming a tyranny.

Impedes, but does not prevent. Democracy is just one mechanism we use to protect our liberty; others are the rule of law, separation of powers, checks and balances, and a bill of rights. Democracy is probably the least important of these.

The most important is the rule of law. Friedrich Hayek explains it this way (in his brilliant sixth chapter of the Road to Serfdom):

Nothing distinguishes more clearly conditions in a free country from those in a country under arbitrary government than the observance in the former of the great principles known as the Rule of Law. Stripped of all technicalities, this means that government in all its actions is bound by rules fixed and announced beforehand — rules which make it possible to foresee with fair certainty how the authority will use its coercive powers in given circumstances and to plan one’s individual affairs on the basis of this knowledge. . .

While every law restricts individual freedom to some extent by altering the means which people may use in the pursuit of their aims, under the Rule of Law the government is prevented from stultifying individual efforts by ad hoc action.

The rule of law says that people can live their lives, run their businesses, raise their families, in a system whose rules are known to them in advance. The government will not interfere capriciously.

In the American system of government, laws are made, interpreted, and carried out by three distinct branches. The laws are changed only with difficulty (by the legislature), they are interpreted consistently (by a judicial system bound by precedent), and they are “faithfully executed” (by the executive).

Alas, this system has gone off the rails. When the legislative and executive powers are in the same hands, the potential for capricious interference increases dramatically. Once the Constitution was interpreted under the nondelegation doctrine (which dates back at least to 1689), which provided that the legislative power could not be delegated. However, in 1928 the Supreme Court ruled in Hampton v. United States that legislative power could be delegated, provided the law provided an “intelligible principle” to guide the executive branch.

The intelligible principle needn’t be particularly detailed either. Laws have almost never been struck down due to unconstitutional delegation, and in 1989 the Supreme Court made the low standard explicit in Mistretta v. United States, stating:

Congress simply cannot do its job absent an ability to delegate power under broad general directives. Accordingly, this Court has deemed it “constitutionally sufficient” if Congress clearly delineates the general policy, the public agency which is to apply it, and the boundaries of this delegated authority.

Today, Congress “delineates the general policy”, while executive-branch bureaucrats make all the rules that govern our lives. That it does so capriciously cannot be denied. For example, when the EPA decides that carbon dioxide is dangerous, it gains the power to shut down coal-fired power plants, and anyone who invested money under the old rules is simply out of luck. And the EPA did so on its own; there was no legislative action, indeed, Congress considered the question and chose not to act.

Very recently, however, the problem has gotten much worse. President Obama has now arrogated for himself the power to decline to carry out portions of the law he doesn’t want to carry out, even in the absence of any delegation of power to do so. This is in direct violation of the Constitution’s provision that the president “shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.”

He has done so by refusing to enforce the Defense of Marriage Act (justified by his claim that it was unconstitutional, which the Supreme Court later backed), refusing to enforce immigration law for certain classes of illegal immigrants (justified by prosecutorial discretion), and declining to carry out certain provisions of Obamacare (justified by nothing whatsoever).

To be clear: some or all of these may well be good policy. That is entirely beside the point; they are not the law. Under the rule of law, the government is “bound by rules fixed and announced beforehand,” regardless of how the executive might judge their wisdom from moment to moment.

Today we have democracy (mostly), but without the rule of law, democracy merely gives us an elected tyrant.

POSTSCRIPT: A number of people have written elegantly on the dangerous implications of Obama’s arrogation of the power to ignore the law: Michael McConnell, John Yoo, and George Will. Andrew Klavan has recently written about the problems with democracy in another context.

UPDATE: Another example, Obama is unilaterally changing drug laws. Again, I agree as a matter of policy, but that’s not the point. He should push for the law to be changed, but he won’t do that. Respecting the rule of law would require political effort.

Mock the president at the Missouri State Fair, and receive a lifetime ban. Just to cover the bases: Yes, the Missouri State Fair is a government operation (and its board is appointed by the governor) so the First Amendment does apply. Yes, presidential masks have been used this way before, without inspiring outrage. Yes, the same people who are now oh-so-offended had no problem with mockery and assassination fantasies directed toward George W Bush.

And yes, the NAACP is demanding a federal investigation. Of a rodeo clown.

Glenn Reynolds is right. We have a weak president who can’t bear the criticism that is routinely directed at the president. The rodeo clown is guilty of lese majeste.

UPDATE: “Obama were a classy guy, he’d ask the folks that run the rodeo to un-fire the clown. He’d say, Hey, I can take a joke.” Indeed he would. And since he hasn’t, we may apply the contrapositive.

NBC News reports:

Employers around the country, from fast-food franchises to colleges, have told NBC News that they will be cutting workers’ hours below 30 a week because they can’t afford to offer the health insurance mandated by the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. . .

NBC News spoke with almost 20 small businesses and other entities from Maine to California, and almost all said that because of the new law they’d be cutting back hours for some employees – an unintended consequence of the new law.

Obamacare may succeed in a sweeping change, but a different one than the one he intended. He may be making a 30-hour work week standard.

(Via Instapundit.)

President Obama’s brobdingnagian stimulus package was a massive waste of money that accomplished nothing, but at least we got some improved infrastructure out of it, right? I mean, the idea was to “invest” in rebuilding our “crumbling infrastructure”, wasn’t it?

Nope. It turns out that building infrastructure is unfairly slanted toward jobs for “burly men”. Once the radical feminists got their claws into it, infrastructure became “human infastructure”, which means stuff other than infrastructure.

So in the end, we paid for Hoover Dam and we didn’t even get Hoover Dam. Remember this the next time the Democrats plead that we need to rebuild our infrastructure.