When his pet businesses did not like elements of the Affordable Care Act, Obama simply exempted them. When employers objected that their mandate would unduly hamper job creation, the president simply ignored the settled law and exempted them. Now, when millions have lost their coverage, the president is said to be ready to again reinterpret settled law and no longer demand that private insurance plans conform to the ACA statute, at least for a year. Aside from the question of whether it is legal or right for the president to decide arbitrarily which elements of legislation to faithfully execute, it is also a sort of new way of ad hoc governing: The president grandly introduces a new piece of unworkable legislation, does not know or care much about the consequences of implementing it, demagogues the bill, demonizes the opposition, gets it passed, uses the passage for political purposes, and then waits to see what happens in the real world. When more than 50 percent of the country is outraged, he scraps what he finds politically useful to scrap (“enforcement discretion”). Apparently, Obama believes that after such trial and error he will work the bugs out of the ACA and end up with what he can call a success — too bad for those who lose coverage or pay more in the meantime and for the legalists who worry that what he is doing is against the law. All this is right out of the radical Athenian assembly, which on any given day could do whatever its majority wished and then the next undo whatever it wished. But such governance is not what the framers had in mind when they established the checks and balances of a republican tripartite government and entrusted the president with faithfully executing all the laws passed by congress and signed by him.
The current troubles of the Obama presidency can be read back into its beginnings. Rule by personal charisma has met its proper fate. The spell has been broken, and the magician stands exposed. We need no pollsters to tell us of the loss of faith in Mr.
by Charles Blahousvia e21, Economic Policies for the 21st Century
Thursday, November 14, 2013
The federal deficit is a huge public policy problem that must be understood, confronted, and solved. Federal deficits run in these last five years dwa...
Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone when he killed President John F. Kennedy in a bid to make his mark in the world and impress his scorn-filled wife, Marina, says Paul Gregory, whose family were friends of the assassin.
Neel Kashkari has spent nights in homeless shelters, picked strawberries in the fields and met with 600 potential campaign donors - groundwork for a Republican 2014 gubernatorial campaign he says would be "totally different" from anything California has ever seen. The 40-year old former assistant Treasury secretary, dubbed "the $700 billion man" when he ran the Troubled Assets Relief Program bailing out banks after the 2008 economic crash, hasn't declared that he's running next year against Gov. Jerry Brown in what would be his first political campaign. [...] Kashkari - who is pro-choice, favors same-sex marriage rights and voted for Barack Obama in 2008 - is talking like a candidate on a mission to rebrand a California Republican Party that is tired of losing. Political observers say the attention that GOP luminaries are lavishing on Kashkari - the son of Indian immigrants and a practicing Hindu - underscores the hunger for a new type of Republican in California, where the party holds no statewide offices. At least three veteran GOP politicians could be on the primary ballot in June - moderate former Lt. Gov. Abel Maldonado and Tea Party Assemblyman Tim Donnelly of Twin Peaks (San Bernardino County), both of whom have declared their intentions to run, and former Rep. George Radonovich of Mariposa, who is exploring a campaign. If he can get donor backing, Kashkari could become "a fresh new face" who can push the state GOP away from its "harsh partisan brand," said Rob Stutzman, a Republican strategist who advised the party's 2010 gubernatorial nominee, Meg Whitman. The political landscape is littered with the failed candidacies of wealthy political novices, most recently Whitman, the former eBay CEO who spent $144 million on her campaign and lost to Brown in a landslide in 2010. While unable to offer detailed policy proposals, he criticizes Brown as a politician "born in the governor's mansion" who has shown "superficial action on a lot of different issues without actually addressing the underlying problems." Promising a "transparent" campaign, Kashkari invited a reporter along to observe his meetings last month with students and administrators at two schools that serve mostly low-income students, many of them immigrants.
