Furthermore, seeking to exploit anxiety over the Gulf oil spill, Obama ordered the government in May 2010 to set the first-ever mileage and pollution limits for big trucks and to tighten rules for future cars and SUVs, giving federal agencies until July 2011 to come up with fuel efficiency and greenhouse standards for commercial trucks and buses.21 Former U.S. senator George Allen and the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Marlo Lewis responded that the EPA “is carrying out one of the biggest power grabs in American history,” having “positioned itself to regulate fuel economy, set climate policy for the nation and amend the Clear Air Act—powers never delegated to it by Congress.”22
“A 2,100-PAGE MONSTROSITY FULL OF SPECIAL DEALS”
ObamaCare was an unmitigated disaster in its own right, but it was also a playground for assorted abuses of power by the Obama administration, beginning with certain ancillary provisions that were smuggled into the bill. An analysis of the Joint Economic Committee and the House Ways and Means Committee minority staff shows ObamaCare will lead to the largest increase in the IRS since World War II, with as many as 16,500 new IRS personnel required to collect, examine, and audit returns.23 Dave Camp, the ranking Republican on the Ways and Means Committee, warned the bill involves “a very dangerous expansion of the IRS’s power and reach into the lives of virtually every American.”24
Under the bill, the IRS will have to ensure Americans comply with the mandatory provision that they acquire health insurance. Taxpayers who fail to prove on their annual tax return that they are policyholders would be subject to a fine of $2,250 or 2 percent of their income, whichever is greater. The IRS would have the authority to confiscate tax refunds for this purpose. Some young Americans will probably gamble on their good health and opt to pay the penalty, but that fine will almost certainly lead to outright noncompliance among many young people, as well as among those in cash-oriented businesses who will have greater incentive to work under the radar.25 So Obama’s IRS will doubtlessly prepare itself to chase down these healthcare recalcitrants.
Republicans contend these changes would fundamentally alter the relationship between an already overly powerful and intrusive IRS and the American taxpayers, making the IRS responsible for “tracking the monthly health insurance status of roughly 300 million Americans.”26 (Note that almost half the mandated coverage will be imposed on people making less than $66,150 for a family of four.) The IRS would also collect hundreds of billions of dollars in new fees assessed against employers, drug companies, and device makers. The IRS budget is expected to increase by some $10 billion over the next decade to help administer this new program. 27
Another IRS-related surprise in the bill is a hidden change in the tax law that will force companies to submit IRS 1099 forms for any individual or company from which they purchase more than $600 in goods or services a year. This will mean the required filing of millions of new forms each year to be sent to vendors and the IRS.28
Also folded into ObamaCare was an insidious federal power grab over student loans. The bill gave the government a monopoly on the student loan industry, with an expected profit to the government—literally robbed from the private sector—of $60 billion over the next decade. In keeping with Obama’s penchant for growing government, he wouldn’t just subsume the student loan business; he would expand it by some $40 billion, which would still leave a profit of around $20 billion that the CBO was required to consider in its scoring of the bill—even though its only relation to healthcare was that it was smuggled into the bill.
Obama snuck this provision into ObamaCare because it probably wouldn’t have been able to secure the sixty votes necessary for passage on its own. The student loan section of the bill also contained a hidden payoff to North Dakota senator Kent Conrad, who happens to be Budget Committee chairman. The bill would “establish a new program for lenders who were chartered before July 1, 2009, and are owned by a state under the control of a board including the governor and offered guaranteed loans prior to June 30, 2010.” For all that fancy and misleading language, the program will only apply to one lender: the Bank of North Dakota .29
The administration presumptuously began transitioning toward the new student loan program half a year before the bill even passed, when Education secretary Arne Duncan sent colleges and universities a letter in October 2009 pressuring them to prepare to transition to the government-run system for the 2010-2011 academic year. At the time, schools generally preferred private lenders to the government-run “public option” available to them, because private firms provided better service. But the administration, possibly as a foreshadowing of what we can expect with ObamaCare, was intent on making the public option the only option.
But not all school administrators were happy with this transition, which was not, as the White House promised, “as simple as throwing a switch.” Dewey Knight, a financial aid officer for the University of Mississippi, called the administration’s approach “an insult to people who spent years getting delivery systems in place. We didn’t just throw a switch to get where we are.” Knight, one of the few financial aid administrators willing to criticize Obama’s student loan machinations, revealed the White House had pressured aid administrators to support the nationalization of student loans by going above their heads to university presidents.
A Republican staffer on the House Education and Labor Committee confirmed Knight’s perspective, noting that financial aid professionals expressed opposition to the plan early in the process, but were pressured to be quiet after the administration refused to satisfy their concerns. The staffer divulged she’d even been told about “specific instances at individual schools where administration officials or members of Congress had contacted school leadership in an effort to tamp down opposition.”30 This strong-arming reflects the same MO Obama has employed with all his significant legislative bills. Shortly after the bill passed, lender Sallie Mae announced it would cut 2,500 jobs due to the government takeover of the student loan program.31
ObamaCare also earned notoriety because the administration resorted to the crudest kind of political bribery to pass it, marking a shocking violation of Obama’s core campaign promises of transparent government and an end to backroom deals. There was the “Louisiana Purchase,” whereby Obama and his Democrats bought Senator Mary Landrieu’s vote with a promise to send $300 million in additional Medicaid funding to Louisiana. There was the “Cornhusker Kickback,” the administration’s disgraceful bribe of Nebraska senator Ben Nelson with a promise to exempt his state from its share of Medicaid expansion, meaning that the other forty-nine states would subsidize Nebraska’s new Medicaid recipients to the tune of about $45 million over the first decade. Obama, in an interview with ABC’s Diane Sawyer, denied he had been involved in the Nelson deal, which was ultimately dropped from the bill due to public opposition. “Let’s hold on a second, Diane. . . . So let’s just clarify. I didn’t make a bunch of deals.”32 But his aid Rahm Emanuel, when asked about the Cornhusker Kickback, told a different story to CBS’s Katie Couric: “Look, we were involved in the legislation all the way through. . . . We were helpful in getting the bill off the Senate floor.”33
Then there was Senator Bernie Sanders, who secured $10 billion in new funding for community health centers for Vermont, though he denied it was a “sweetheart deal.” Nebraska’s Senator Nelson and Michigan senator Carl Levin also secured an exemption for non-profit insurers in their respective states from a significant excise tax, which will be borne by the other forty-eight states. Pennsylvania, New York, and Florida received special protections for their Medicare Advantage beneficiaries when the program was making nationwide cuts.34 Senator Chris Dodd received $100 million in funding for a university hospital—not that his vote was ever in doubt. Vermont and Massachusetts will receive federal subsides for their Medicaid expansion costs.35
Obama silenced Big Pharma’s opposition by agreeing not to further cut Medicare’s payments to them and by abandoning his campaign promise to push for importi
ng drugs from Canada. He allegedly won the support of the American Medical Association by agreeing to cancel all or part of the 21 percent cut in physicians’ reimbursements (the “doc fix”). He seduced AARP with a promise to eliminate subsidies for Medicare Advantage, which was eating into AARP’s side business, the Medi-gap insurance program, which supplements Medicare coverage.36 In exchange for its support and in keeping with Obama’s unsavory alliance with unions, Big Labor earned an exemption from the new Cadillac tax on high-cost insurance coverage.37
But one industry wouldn’t give in to Obama: the medical device industry, which rejected Obama’s Godfather-like offer to cut costs in exchange for his promise not to impose even worse cuts.38 Now those crucial, life-saving companies are facing a 2.3 percent excise tax on sales of medical devices, which is expected to raise $20 billion over ten years to help fund ObamaCare. Industry experts fear the tax will destroy jobs, innovation, and small companies with thin profit margins.39 It will also likely increase the cost, and thus reduce the availability, of such devices as automatic external defibrillators (AEDs), whose wide availability, according to research reported by the New England Journal of Medicine, could significantly improve the survival rates of cardiac arrest patients .40
Perhaps even more disturbing were indications Obama’s parade of bribes and threats at times may have descended into illegality. For example, there was widespread speculation that Obama offered judgeships to secure healthcare votes. The Weekly Standard reported that in March 2010 Obama hosted ten House Democrats who had voted against the House bill the previous November. One of the ten was Utah’s Jim Matheson, whose brother Scott M. Matheson, Jr., was nominated by Obama that very day to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit.41
Along the same lines, Human Events reported a “rumor” that two retiring Democratic congressmen from Tennessee, Bart Gordon and John Tanner, were promised positions as NASA administrator and U.S. Ambassador to NATO, respectively, in exchange for their ObamaCare votes.42 (Gordon ultimately voted for ObamaCare, while Tanner opposed it.) And perhaps most inglorious in this sordid process was Obama’s last minute promise to Congressman Bart Stupak and other allegedly pro-life Democrats, as previously mentioned, to issue a counterfeit executive order denying federal funding for abortion in exchange for their “yes” votes.
In addition to all this, Democrats reportedly threatened to strip Connecticut senator Joe Lieberman of his chairmanship of the Homeland Security Committee for opposing Obama’s public option.
Taking in the full ugliness and corruption of this process, Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell said, “This bill is a monstrosity, a 2,100-page monstrosity full of special deals for people who are willing to vote for it. And they’re playing these kind of games with the nation’s health care. This is an outrage.”43 And indeed it is.
“TARP IS NOT A PIGGY BANK”
Obama has shown a similar disregard for the rule of law in his handling of TARP bailout funds. Obama brags about how much TARP monies have been repaid (notwithstanding his refusal to allow some banks to pay their loans back and his plans to immediately spend recovered funds on yet more quixotic jobs creation programs).44 But it’s hard to take seriously his pledges to safeguard these funds when he frequently treats them as his personal stash.
One particularly egregious example was the administration’s effort to transfer $30 billion of repaid TARP money to a new small-business credit program. Senator Judd Gregg upbraided OMB director Peter Orszag over what would have been an illegal act. Holding up a copy of the TARP bill, Gregg declared, “Let me read to you again, because you don’t appear to understand the law. The law is very clear. The monies recouped from TARP shall be paid into the general fund of the Treasury for the reduction of the public debt.” TARP, said Gregg, is not “a piggy bank.” Heritage Foundation senior legal policy analyst Andrew Grossman agreed. “The administration,” said Grossman, “lacks legal authority” to use TARP monies for anything it chooses outside the bill’s specific intent. “If the authority is as broad as the administration and some lawmakers say, then it is unconstitutional. Congress cannot pass the buck and give unlimited power to the executive.”45
BIG BROTHER
In light of their intolerance of criticism, their belief in behavior modification, and their cavalier rejection of the rule of law, it’s unsurprising this administration sometimes seems like it comes straight out of 1984. For example, one Big Brother-sounding post on the White House blog read as though the administration had declared a private war on U.S. citizens—the ones who opposed ObamaCare, at any rate—and was recruiting “spies” to snitch on the offenders. The post, by White House “new media director” Macon Phillips, said,Scary chain e-mails and videos are starting to percolate on the Internet, breathlessly claiming, for example, to “uncover” the truth about the President’s health insurance reform positions.... There is a lot of information about health insurance reform out there, spanning from control of personal finances to end of life care. These rumors often travel just below the surface via chain e-mails or through casual conversation. Since we can’t keep track of all of them here at the White House, we’re asking for your help. If you get an e-mail or something on the web about health insurance reform that seems fishy, send it to [email protected]
The blog entry brought fire from conservatives. Senator John Barrasso declared, “If you get an e-mail from your neighbor and it doesn’t sound right, send it to the White House? People, I think all across America, are going to say, is this 1984? What is happening here? Is big brother watching?” Accusing the White House of compiling an “enemies list,” Senator John Cornyn sent a letter to Obama, saying, “I am not aware of any precedent for a president asking American citizens to report their fellow citizens to the White House for pure political speech that is deemed ‘fishy’ or otherwise inimical to the White House’s political interests.” Cornyn expressed understandable concern that the White House’s speech monitoring effort could chill citizens’ political expression.47
The more Obama overreached, the more simmering citizen angst boiled into outrage. In response to the snitch program, the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons and the Coalition for Urban Renewal and Education filed a federal lawsuit to prohibit the Executive Office of the President, the White House Office of Health Care Reform and its director Nancy-Ann DeParle, and Macon Phillips from collecting and maintaining data on citizens’ protected speech.48
Eventually, the White House reversed its policy of encouraging citizens to report ObamaCare opponents to the White House. But less than a month later, the White House came under criticism for engaging in another form of data mining and archiving. It had implemented a plan to permanently archive citizen comments posted on the White House’s Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, and Twitter pages. The White House insisted it was just acting “out of an abundance of caution” to comply with the Presidential Records Act, which requires that information generated by the president and his staff be preserved.
A conservative government watchdog group, the National Legal and Policy Center, didn’t buy that excuse. “This is a huge, secretive effort by the White House to capture web material far beyond what is required by the Presidential Records Act, which only requires archiving materials produced by the president and his staff at the Executive Office of the President,” said NLPC chairman Ken Boehm. A spokesman for the Competitive Enterprise Institute said he didn’t share the NLPC’s concern, but believed the government should make extra efforts to inform posters that their contributions will be archived.49
Within a day or two Obama himself got into the act, attempting to use his office to directly mobilize his supporters on the healthcare effort. He sent out his own e-mail castigating opponents of ObamaCare for “filling the airwaves and the Internet with outrageous falsehoods to scare people into opposing change.”50 He later used the same language in a radio address bashing insurance companies for “filling the airwaves with deceptive and dishonest ads.”
During the final push for healthcare reform, Nancy-Ann DeParle, the White House’s pointwoman for ObamaCare, began “feverishly” sending out unsolicited e-mail to federal employees proselytizing for ObamaCare. The chief executive’s allocation of federal dollars to pressure federal employees into supporting his policies was obviously improper, but what’s more, these e-mails were sent to the employees’ official government e-mail accounts for weeks without permission or request. Some of the employees felt threatened by “the overt political language,” according to CBS News. Tellingly, many State Department employees complained privately about the partisan messages but wouldn’t publicly object for fear of retribution. Richard Grenell, a former spokesman for four U.S. ambassadors to the UN, noted, “Federal employees are public servants, not partisan foot soldiers for President Obama and shouldn’t have to decide whether a partisan White House request can be ignored without consequences.”51
A similar incident occurred at the Obama-Holder Justice Department, which formed a secret, in-house blogging group to influence public opinion. Set up and operating out of the Justice Department’s Office of Public Affairs, the “Blog Squad” used liberal bloggers to scour the Internet for news stories, commentaries, and blog posts critical of the administration and then post comments supporting their agenda. Similarly, the administration and its allies enlisted supporters to call conservative radio talk shows to create the appearance of widespread grassroots support of Obama and dissent from conservative positions. The administration is obviously projecting when it falsely depicts the genuine grassroots tea party protests as an “Astroturf” phenomenon—a manufactured, top-down, artificial publicity campaign—because that is precisely the type of activism the administration was sponsoring.
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