GOP & Speaker John Boehner Break "Pledge to America"

In yet another kick to conservatives from the GOP hypocrites in D.C., and confirming beyond all reasonable doubt John Boehner has failed as Speaker, the once highly touted GOP "Pledge to America" was nothing more than empty promises....

From American Vision News --

John Hayward of Human Events has the best opener: “On Friday, the House and Senate passed an omnibus spending bill, which is a bit like passing a kidney stone, except it’s much more painful and expensive.”

You may have missed it. While America (especially conservative America) was enraged and taking aimen masse for John Roberts, Congress (especially conservatives in Congress) stuck it to us even harder.

Hayward explains, “This particular bill included a number of measures to address three entirely different topics: student loan rates, highway construction, and flood insurance.”

Red State called out the GOP even before it passed:

In the 2010 GOP Pledge to America, they promised the following: “We will end the practice of packaging unpopular bills with “must-pass” legislation to circumvent the will of the American people. Instead, we will advance major legislation one issue at a time.”

The idea that we are going to package a major 27-month transportation bill with a 5-year flood insurance extension and a one year extension of subsidized student loans under the guise of “must pass – or else,” is an anathema to the pledge.

Yet this is exactly what Congress did, as the Human Events piece makes clear:

Those three subjects have nothing to do with each other, but packaging them together made it far more difficult to vote against any specific portion of it.  Oppose the extension of those famous subsidized student loan rates, and you’re against highway construction.  Express reservations against all that highway spending, and you’re against low-interest student loans and flood insurance.

Political pressures had been cooked up to make each of those individual votes difficult; load them into the same omnibus, and the resulting legislative vehicle is nearly unstoppable.  In the end, only 52 Republican members of the House, and 19 Republican senators, voted against it.  Big Government got bigger, and Broke Government went further into debt.

Billions of dollars were poured into one of the murkiest cash pits of the federal government, the highway trust fund.

Billions which will probably be wasted or otherwise misappropriated:

The Government Accountability Office figures that a good 38 percent of this money is used for purposes other than highway and bridge construction.  Swarms of lobbyists feed from the highway trust fund like remora attached to a great white shark.

Red State is rightly angry, not just over that one aspect of the GOP’s “Pledge,” but in regard to general conservative hypocrisy:

Just 52 Republicans [Ron Paul among them], 21% of the conference, voted against this budget buster, which violated several tenets of the GOP Pledge to America.  Only 19 Republicans in the Senate voted no.

This means that 190 Republicans in the House and 38 in the Senate voted Yes—to increase federal power, spending, and debt. Here they are (click the links, Republicans are in italics):

House Votes.

Senate Votes. 

I say find your Representatives in the list, and if they voted “yes” in violation of their Pledge, then vote them out next term, or at least refuse to support them. Find a principled TEA party conservative to replace them if at all possible.

Not included in the above story, but also included in the Highway Bill was a big government, anti-free market & job-killing amendment that is forcing many Mom & Pop shops out of business.

Putting over 5000 people out of work in Ohio alone, as a favor to the Tobacco Lobby, Congress ruled that the Roll Your Own Tobacco Shops that have popped up across the country should be considered manufacturers.  

Sadly, except for Rep. Steve Chabot, who correctly voted against the Highway Bill, the other GOP Freshmen from Ohio (Rep Bob Gibbs, Rep. Steve Stivers, Rep. Bill Johnson and Rep. Jim Renacci), joined with the GOP hypocrites from Ohio and voted in support of this job-killing bill and in violation of their promise to YOU and the Pledge to America.  

Like the individuals above, Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH) also supported the Highway bill.

But once again showing he is one of the ONLY Congressman from Ohio worthy of having his name even mentioned in the same sentence as the Tea Party movement, Rep. Jim Jordan, stood true to his conservative convictions, his promise to you and his Pledge to America. Senator Portman, surprisingly stood with the conservatives in the Senate and also voted against this bill. 

Thank you Rep. Chabot, Rep. Jordan and Senator Portman for doing the right thing and voting against the Highway bill!

   

Voices Without A Vote: The True Victims in President Obama's "War on Children" (Video)

While we are all negatively affected by President Obama's last 4 yrs of policies that have failed this country, the true victims in President Obama's "War on Children" have a voice but no vote.

Will you protect the future of our country for them?

Obama’s War Against Coal: coming soon to YOUR electricity provider

The Obama administration’s EPA regulations (read: strangulations) will essentially destroy the coal industry, and that will hit YOU in the pocketbook. Just six weeks ago came this bad news [emphasis added]:

One of the country’s largest regional power grid operators, PJM Interconnection, today announced the results of its annual auction that locks in electricity capacity prices three years in advance. Today’s auction established capacity prices for 2015-2016, the first year electric generators will be required to comply with EPA’s costly Utility MACT rule. The results of the auction confirmed the predictions of Republican lawmakers who warned that EPA’s new power rules would drive up electricity costs for American consumers.

The auction set capacity prices at $136 per megawatt (MW) across the PJM footprint, which includes the Mid-Atlantic region and parts of the Midwest. This price is 8 times higher than the $16 per MW price that was set for 2012-2013. Electricity customers in parts of Ohio will be hit the hardest, with the auction setting the price for capacity resources in northern Ohio at $357 per MW, nearly triple the 2014-2015 price set last year. As explained by PJM, the “auction was impacted by an unprecedented amount of planned generation retirements (more than 14,000 MW) driven largely by environmental regulations, which drove prices higher than last year’s auction.”

President Obama’s EPA has issued and proposed a suite of costly new rules on America’s power sector that have already resulted in the premature closure of power plants across the country. Today’s auction shows how these plant closures will affect how much American families and businesses pay for electricity.

“The PJM auction forecasts a dim future where Americans will be paying more to keep the lights on. We are seeing more and more coal plants fall victim to EPA’s destructive regulatory agenda, and as a result, we are seeing more job losses and higher electricity prices,” said Energy and Power Subcommittee Chairman Ed Whitfield (R-KY). “The Obama administration continues to wage a war on affordable energy, and it is the American people who will suffer the consequences.”

Another trainwreck in the future: implementing Obamacare

Ever since the Supreme Court ruled on Obamacare, most of us have been strategizing on how to ensure that Congress repeals the bill and any related bills and regulations. But there’s another impediment that guarantees another type of trainwreck with the (un)Affordable Healthcare Act: that is, the implementation of the bazillions of regulations, taxes, and provisions -- a computer programmer’s nightmare. Think the Y2K panic in 1999 but much much worse. From Standing Pat :

Obamacare faces significant hurdles in implementation. Healthcare is complex, and made much more complex by state and federal regulations. It is administered using massive computer systems, some of them decades old. These systems are difficult to change and modify, yet they will all require modifications to comply with the raft of new regulations introduced by Obamacare. Private organizations face the added burden of making these changes while complying with SOX [Sarbanes–Oxley Act of 2002] procedures. It is no exaggeration to say that SOX doubles development time and doubles the staff needed to do development. SOX makes it very difficult to use modern rapid development methodologies and forces organizations to use older methodologies that are long on paperwork and short on results. . . .

Quoting from Politico:

If state health care exchanges survive the Supreme Court challenge to health care reform, the election and state tea party activists, health policy experts are worried they could still be brought down by a much more mundane problem: information technology.

Even states that are solidly committed to pursuing an exchange are facing major logistical challenges in building the computer systems that will be able to handle enrollment when exchanges open for business in 2014.

That’s largely because the system that will actually connect people to the right coverage will have to “talk” to many other systems, and the systems don’t use a common language. This includes a yet-to-be built federal “data hub” with tax and citizenship info, the enrollment systems of multiple private insurers selling exchange plans and — hardest of all — state Medicaid enrollment systems, many of which are not yet fully computerized.

[back to Standing Pat]: Anyone who has observed the Government’s sorry record on implementing complex IT systems on time and within budget just know that this is a disaster waiting to happen.

The federal government's healthcare power-grab can only make things worse. Another reason to demand that Congress repeal it.

UPDATE from Fox News at 5:17:

The Health and Human Services Department "was given a billion dollars implementation money," Republican Rep. Denny Rehberg of Montana said. "That money is gone already on additional bureaucrats and IT programs, computerization for the implementation."

"Oh boy," Stan Dorn of the Urban Institute said. "HHS has a huge amount of work to do and the states do, too. There will be new health insurance marketplaces in every state in the country, places you can go online, compare health plans."

The IRS, Health and Human Services and many other agencies will now write thousands of pages of regulations -- an effort well under way:

"There's already 13,000 pages of regulations, and they're not even done yet," Rehberg said.

OBAMACARE, THE SCOTUS DECISION, AND STATES' RIGHTS

It’s not over till it’s over. The 5-4 SCOTUS decision upholding Obamacare is prompting a wide range of reactions. According to Dov Fischer at American Thinker:

There is now a formal United States Supreme Court opinion on the books, overdue by nearly a century, holding that the federal government may not wield the Commerce Clause to impose on American citizens the obligation to buy health insurance or anything else we do not want. . . .

What is the point here? If the “federal government may not wield the Commerce Clause to impose on American citizens the obligation to buy health insurance or anything else we do not want,” under this ruling, they may instead wield the authority of Congress to impose a tax to coerce Americans to buy things they don’t want.

It’s actually worse than that. Andy McCarthy makes the case that

the Supreme Court decided that Americans have no right to due process. Indeed, the Court not only upheld a fraud perpetrated on the public — it became a willing participant. …

Chief Justice Roberts & Co. . . . said the American people are not entitled to an honest legislative process, one in which they can safely assume that when Congress intentionally uses words that have very different meanings and consequences — like tax and penalty — and when Congress adamantly insists that the foundation of legislation is one and not the other, the Court will honor, rather than rewrite, the legislative process. Meaning: if Congress was wrong, the resulting law will be struck down, and Congress will be told that, if it wants to pass the law, it has to do it honestly. . . .

Further, it shielded the political branches from accountability for raising taxes, knowing full well that, had Obama and the Democrats leveled with the public that ObamaCare entailed a huge tax hike, it would never have had the votes to pass. . . .

The ObamaCare mandate was enacted as a penalty flowing from Congress’s Commerce Clause power. It has been upheld as a tax flowing from Congress’s power to tax-and-spend under the General Welfare Clause. As the dissent sharply demonstrates, the contention that the mandate could have been enacted as a tax is frivolous.

State Governors, such as Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal (Louisiana) are already stepping up to the plate by refusing to to “establish a federally mandated health care exchange in his state.” So has Democrat Governor John Lynch (New Hampshire). Media Trackers reports that Gov. John Kasich has announced that Ohio will not “create a health insurance exchange” with the federal government. It's an opportunity to call Kasich's office with words of solid support. PH (614) 466-3555 or e-mail him here.

Fischer further commented on the potential political consequences of the SCOTUS ruling:

Congress has a massive new mess awaiting it, all as voters prepare to vote for a new Congress and for 33 Unite States Senate seats, 23 now held by Democrats and their two “independent” allies. House Republicans solidly will vote symbolically to overturn the legislative monstrosity, and they will find endangered House Democrats breaking ranks with their leadership to vote with them. Senate Democrats facing reelection will be caught in a vise. Harry Reid will be trying desperately to prevent a vote on ObamaCare repeal from reaching the Senate floor, even as national news coverage focuses on the two national parties’ conventions.

Politico reports that "House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) said Thursday that the Republican-led House will vote on repealing the health care law soon after the July 4 recess.” It’s not too early to call the representatives from Ohio. Republican contact info is here.

SUPREME COURT UPHOLDS OBAMACARE

SUPREME COURT UPHOLDS OBAMACARE;

CLEVELAND TEA PARTY PATRIOTS RALLY TO REPEAL

In a 5-4 decision today the United States Supreme Court upheld the Affordable Healthcare Act (Obamacare) as constitutional. Chief Justice Roberts wrote the majority opinion, which upholds the individual mandate as a constitutional tax.

While Ohio citizens had gained protection from the federal healthcare mandate when the Ohio Healthcare Freedom bill was approved by voters last year, because of this ruling Ohio citizens and businesses are no longer protected and will continue to be adversely impacted by runaway spending in healthcare programs and policies already put in place by this administration.

While the Cleveland Tea Party Patriots could not disagree more with this ruling, as we respect the Rule of Law -- we will respect their ruling. But patriots can be assured the ruling does not bring the matter to a close.

Even though the SCOTUS ruling found Obamacare to be Constitutional, the ruling does not mean that Obamacare is good or fiscally sound legislation.

As we have since our first days in opposition to a government-run healthcare that will take away our freedom, strip us of our liberties, and further depress our already strained economy -- we remain steadfast and resolute in our calls for repealing Obamacare in its entirety and to defund any programs already in place.

And thanks to Mr. Instapundit for announcing today’s rally in downtown Cleveland!

HOLD HOLDER in Contempt for Fast and Furious

Fast and Furious:

Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force

HOLD HOLDER in Contempt!

Last week (June 20, 2012), Fox News reported that

President Obama has granted an 11th-hour request by Attorney General Eric Holder to exert executive privilege over Fast and Furious documents, a last-minute maneuver that appears unlikely to head off a contempt vote against Holder by Republicans in the House.

Over the weekend, former federal prosecutor Andy McCarthy (who wrote the book on the jihad organization led by the “Blind Sheik” in the first WTC bombing) published an analysis of Fast and Furious that is devastating to the administration assertions of Executive Privilege, and to the continued stonewalling by Holder himself. Essentially, McCarthy sets forth the internal organizational structures in the DOJ and how cases are categorized and funded; he makes the case that Fast and Furious was categorized as an OCDETF, that is Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force. OCDETF cases are, by definition, under the direct authority of “Main Justice,” the AG’s DC department. Extracts from this Must Read [my emphases]:

ATF and the U.S. attorney had to apply to Main Justice for OCDETF status. A case gets approval for funding — which can run well into the millions of dollars — only if senior Justice Department officials, after studying the formally submitted proposal, determine that the investigation has great promise.

The Obama Justice Department made exactly that determination. And this was no rubber stamp — it never is, given the number of agencies across the country competing over the OCDETF pot of gold. Chairman Issa’s most recent memo (dated May 3, 2012) explains that, to win its OCDETF designation, Fast and Furious was “reorganized as a Strike Force including agents from ATF, FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) component of the Department of Homeland Security.” Because of the investigation’s importance, a senior ATF agent (who later became a whistleblower) was transferred to Phoenix to help oversee the case.

…the defining features of OCDETF are investigative coordination under the Justice Department’s leadership and the liberal sharing of information across the department’s array of agencies. No OCDETF case is an outlier.

. . . in January 2010. It was then that the case became an OCDETF investigation. . . . It is a deliberate process. ATF and the U.S. attorney had to apply to Main Justice for OCDETF status. A case gets approval for funding — which can run well into the millions of dollars — only if senior Justice Department officials, after studying the formally submitted proposal, determine that the investigation has great promise.

The Obama Justice Department made exactly that determination. And this was no rubber stamp — it never is,

. . .

OCDETF cases get the attention of the Justice Department’s top hierarchy. What gets that level of attention gets the attorney general’s attention.

McCarthy cites chapter and verse, including memoranda that Darrell Issa has already received, not from Eric “Stonewall” Holder, but from whistle-blowers, that put the AG at the center of this deadly scandal.

Alert for this week: Call Rep. John Boehner to make sure he knows WE know about the OCDETF status of Fast and Furious. One American border patrol agent is dead, one ICE agent is dead, and hundreds of Mexican citizens are dead. And the House should vote to hold Eric Holder in contempt. For starters.

Rep. John Boehner:

• Phone (202) 225-6205
• Fax (202) 225-0704
• Or go here for Twitter, Facebook and other social media links to his office