The Sovereign Agrees To … A Bourbon Summit

Barack Obama’s remarks on the results of the midterm congressional elections of 2014 were, well, remarkable. What else was the upheaval in the balance of power between the White House and Capitol Hill if not a repudiation of President Obama and his policies? Republicans gained control of the Senate. In the House they won the “largest majority since World War II, 246 seats in 1946, when Harry Truman sat in the White House.” There were major gubernatorial gains as well. Yet the message the president took away from the defeat of Democrats country-wide was that he needed to “get the job done.” He had not been busy enough.

Semantic sophistry being Obama’s forte, the president attempted to delegitimize the results of the midterm elections. A master of divide-and-control tactics, Pharaoh quickly blamed his party’s electoral ousting on a minority: those who voted. “To the two-thirds of voters who chose not to participate in the process yesterday, I hear you, too,” he said.

Luckily for him, Obama did not cry racism—although he had sent race RoboCop Eric Holder and his federales to election stations across the country to ensure that anyone who wanted to vote could, and that if a voter were asked for an ID, informed of a citizenship requirement, hadn’t been provided with “bilingual assistance” or a ramp for a wheelchair—this disenfranchised soul could quickly dial into a hotline to register a complain of “intimidation, discrimination, obstruction,” and racism, naturally.

Having faulted a misguided minority—the few who voted—for rejecting his regime, the president proceeded to reaffirm the policies just repudiated. “[M]ore Americans are working. Unemployment has come down.” [So has participation in the labor force: more than 102 million Americans are not working.] The “minority” that voted were informed, too, that “more Americans have health insurance” [because those who don’t need it, 19- to 25-year-olds, have been forced to purchase it; and the rest of us are paying for them and other indigents in exorbitant deductible and cost-sharing ploys]. “… Our deficits have shrunk [due to crippling taxes, and as the national debt balloons to $17.9 trillion]. Yes, “our economy is outpacing most of the world,” but that’s due entirely to the resilience of America’s private economy and a dearth of the same drive elsewhere in the world.

According to the unrepentant Obama, it’s all good, except that Americans are not feeling it … yet. His mission is thus to keep plugging away “until every American feels the gains of the growing economy.” Just how “magnanimous” is this man? Obama has invited the victors into his legislative inner-sanctum, so that they may partake in sanctioning more government make-work schemes: “rebuilding … roads, bridges, ports, waterways.” If Republicans behave, Barack will also collaborate on “tax reform.” To Obama this means “closing tax loopholes.” In other words, increasing the taxes on the profits of those nasty corporations who account for the productivity the president just touted as his own.

“I hear you”; you want me to … “close divisions, break gridlock, and get stuff done,” preached the president to those “few” voters who, if they could, would have ousted him from office, Tuesday. Just as Obama was once the guy “who was elected by everybody,” by his own admission, he now finds himself as the guy who was rejected by everybody. And the lesson he has learned? Everybody wants him to get busy.

Having never hesitated to jam through legislation by executive action and Senate sleight-of-hand, our munificent loser has suggested this: If Republicans table bills to comport with his “legislative priorities”—pathway to citizenship for illegal aliens, or amnesty, for one—he might refrain from resorting to executive action.

But right Obama is. He has executive authority. The Constitution has saddled Americans with a very strong presidency, should he choose to act on the veto it grants him. Buried in the constitutional thickets, concedes historian Paul Johnson, are “huge powers.” The American president “was much stronger than most kings of the day, rivaled or exceeded only by the ‘Great Autocrat,’ the Tsar of Russia (and in practice stronger than most tsars). These powers were not explored until Andrew Jackson’s time, half a century on, when they astonished and frightened many people.”

Had the “self-restraint and common sense of George Washington” not “prevented any display” of these presidential powers in the 1790s—this “formidable potential authority” vested in the U.S. presidency “would certainly have led to protest and constitutional amendment.” What’s left for Americans is to hope that Obama’s get-busy schemes will revolve around planning a bourbon summit with incoming Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. Hit the bottle, Barack; stay on the juice, just don’t juice the economy.

©ILANA Mercer
WND, Junge Freiheit, Target Liberty,
Quarterly Journal &  Praag.org
November 7, 2014