January 6, 2012
Today’s jobs report from the Department of Labor was encouraging news for the U.S. economy. It shows that 200,000 jobs were created and the unemployment rate ticked down from 8.7 percent to 8.5 percent. Jobs were created in every sector of the economy save one — government! This report is consistent with other economic indicators and shows that the economy is finally coming out of its malaise. But like any reports, they must be put into context. The creation of 200,000 new jobs is solid growth and above the 130,000 to 150,000 new jobs that must be created to keep up with population growth. However, this doesn’t mean happy times are here again.
There are not enough Americans working or looking for work. In fact participation in the labor force is at its lowest point in 30 years as many potential workers are not yet even attempting to find jobs. Moreover, at this stage in a recovery, new jobs should be surging instead of averaging less than 140,000 for the last three months. So all is not well and President Obama should not check the “mission accomplished” box. In fact, Obama’s painful economic policies will only serve to further hamstring America’s economic engine, thereby preventing a truly strong, vibrant economy that the country is capable of having.
The President single-handedly unleashed another poison pill on Wednesday with the White House’s announcement that he will exact another illegal, unconstitutional end-run around Congress with the appointment of three new members to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) without Senate approval, all of whom are union officials. Here’s why that matters.
The NLRB is a five-member board that is responsible for investigating unfair labor practices, creating labor-related rules, and conducting elections for labor union representation. Last year the NLRB enacted measures shortening union elections to as little as 14 days, limiting employees’ ability to hear from both sides before they vote, allowing unions to cherry-pick which workers in a company can vote on unionizing, and preventing workers from insisting on a secret ballot in union drives, as Heritage’s James Sherk explains. These measures will make it much easier for unions to organize workers — but at the expense of workers’ rights. If workers want to join a union they have that right — management gets the union it deserves — but the government should not limit their rights in order to press workers into unionizing.
Prior to the President’s appointments, the NLRB had only three sitting members, with the one member’s term ending at the end of 2012. Were the NLRB to go down to two members, it wouldn’t have a quorum to conduct its business, meaning that the President’s Big Labor agenda couldn’t be enacted. Now, though, the President has appointed three new members who will undoubtedly carry out his agenda without any checks or balances.
And that agenda is to bolster America’s unions — a key constituency and political force standing behind the President. Unfortunately, their goal is not primarily to protect workers. The trouble is that the Big Labor agenda is fundamentally at odds with the pro-growth agenda that America is so thirsty for. Sherk explains:
CONTINUED:
http://blog.heritage.org/2012/01/06/morning-bell-beneath-growth-a-sea-of-poison/
Showing posts with label Morning Bell. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Morning Bell. Show all posts
Friday, January 6, 2012
Monday, January 2, 2012
THE MORNING BELL: New Year's Resolutions for Conservatives
The key to keeping your New Year's resolutions is to make them more realistic. Rather than try to drastically change the way you live, why not start with the more modest goal of changing the way you speak? And what better place to start for conservatives than with America's Founding principles?
As conservatives continue to rediscover the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, it is important to use words and embrace ideas that are consistent with our Founding principles.
If you're fond of the term "states' rights," have a soft spot for nullification, are tempted by isolationism or are wary of equality, here are four simple resolutions to begin getting right with America's principles. Once you have these down, you can start correcting your friends and move on to other core concepts.
http://blog.heritage.org/2012/01/02/morning-bell-new-years-resolutions-for-conservatives/?utm_source=Newsletter&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=Morning%2BBell
As conservatives continue to rediscover the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, it is important to use words and embrace ideas that are consistent with our Founding principles.
If you're fond of the term "states' rights," have a soft spot for nullification, are tempted by isolationism or are wary of equality, here are four simple resolutions to begin getting right with America's principles. Once you have these down, you can start correcting your friends and move on to other core concepts.
http://blog.heritage.org/2012/01/02/morning-bell-new-years-resolutions-for-conservatives/?utm_source=Newsletter&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=Morning%2BBell
Wednesday, January 12, 2011
U.S. Drops to 9th Place in Economic Freedom!
- The Foundry: Conservative Policy News. - http://blog.heritage.org -
Posted By Conn Carroll On January 12, 2011
Morning Bell: The Government Spending Threat to Economic Freedom
This morning, The Heritage Foundation and The Wall Street Journal [1] released the 2011 Index of Economic Freedom [2], and while the news is good for many countries, it is depressing for the United States. All told, 117 countries, mainly developing and emerging market economies, improved their Economic Freedom Index score. Meanwhile the U.S. dropped to 9th place, remaining “mostly free,” weighed down by the burden of President Obama’s spending spree.
Of course, we should all celebrate the improving lot of many impoverished people across the globe. The data [3] in this year’s Index again confirm [4] the strong correlation not just between economic freedom and higher per capita incomes but between higher economic freedom and overall well-being (which takes into account such factors as health, education, security, and personal freedom) as well. The Index shows that freer societies reduce poverty at nearly twice the rate as less free societies do.
The United States, however, is no longer “the Land of the Free” economically. Our Economic Freedom Index score fell to 77.8, moving us down to 9th internationally [5] behind such countries as Denmark, Canada, and first-place Hong Kong. What drove America’s decline? Huge increases in government spending. Despite obvious past failures of Keynesian spending policies in countries like Japan, the U.S. government undertook a massive government spending spree designed to combat unemployment and spur economic growth. This Keynesian stimulus has proved to be an abject failure: Unemployment is still above 9 percent for a post–World War II record 20th month in a row, and economic growth has not returned as strong as the Obama Administration predicted [6].
This spending, more than any market factor, poses the greatest risk to American economic dynamism. Relying on government spending to create growth not only has failed to reduce unemployment but has also prolonged the crisis by hampering private sector investment. Bloated government debt has turned the economic slowdown into a fiscal crisis, with economic stagnation fueling a long-term employment crisis. And the Index shows that this truth applies to many other countries as well: Index data show that countries with the highest levels of government spending had growth rates 4.5 points lower, on average, than countries where government spending was under control [4].
But there is still hope. Across the world voters are beginning to reject big government spending ways and embrace economic freedom. In the United Kingdom, which has dropped all the way down to 16th place from the top 10 in only two years, voters tossed out the profligate Labour Party in favor of Prime Minister David Cameron’s austerity-promising government. And here at home, the Tea Party movement has said “enough,” electing a Republican House of Representatives that has promised to rein in the Obama Administration’s reckless spending.
Over the past 30 years, freer economies have fueled unprecedented economic growth around the world. From 1980 to 2008, the world economy achieved real GDP expansion of around 145 percent, lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. Globally, poverty has fallen by 40 percent since 1990. The United States can continue to be a leader of this prosperous free world, but first we have to get our own bad spending habits under control.
Copyright © 2008 The Heritage Foundation. All rights reserved.
SEE VIDEO:
http://blog.heritage.org/2011/01/12/morning-bell-the-government-spending-threat-to-economic-freedom/?utm_source=Newsletter&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=Morning%2BBell
Posted By Conn Carroll On January 12, 2011
Morning Bell: The Government Spending Threat to Economic Freedom
This morning, The Heritage Foundation and The Wall Street Journal [1] released the 2011 Index of Economic Freedom [2], and while the news is good for many countries, it is depressing for the United States. All told, 117 countries, mainly developing and emerging market economies, improved their Economic Freedom Index score. Meanwhile the U.S. dropped to 9th place, remaining “mostly free,” weighed down by the burden of President Obama’s spending spree.
Of course, we should all celebrate the improving lot of many impoverished people across the globe. The data [3] in this year’s Index again confirm [4] the strong correlation not just between economic freedom and higher per capita incomes but between higher economic freedom and overall well-being (which takes into account such factors as health, education, security, and personal freedom) as well. The Index shows that freer societies reduce poverty at nearly twice the rate as less free societies do.
The United States, however, is no longer “the Land of the Free” economically. Our Economic Freedom Index score fell to 77.8, moving us down to 9th internationally [5] behind such countries as Denmark, Canada, and first-place Hong Kong. What drove America’s decline? Huge increases in government spending. Despite obvious past failures of Keynesian spending policies in countries like Japan, the U.S. government undertook a massive government spending spree designed to combat unemployment and spur economic growth. This Keynesian stimulus has proved to be an abject failure: Unemployment is still above 9 percent for a post–World War II record 20th month in a row, and economic growth has not returned as strong as the Obama Administration predicted [6].
This spending, more than any market factor, poses the greatest risk to American economic dynamism. Relying on government spending to create growth not only has failed to reduce unemployment but has also prolonged the crisis by hampering private sector investment. Bloated government debt has turned the economic slowdown into a fiscal crisis, with economic stagnation fueling a long-term employment crisis. And the Index shows that this truth applies to many other countries as well: Index data show that countries with the highest levels of government spending had growth rates 4.5 points lower, on average, than countries where government spending was under control [4].
But there is still hope. Across the world voters are beginning to reject big government spending ways and embrace economic freedom. In the United Kingdom, which has dropped all the way down to 16th place from the top 10 in only two years, voters tossed out the profligate Labour Party in favor of Prime Minister David Cameron’s austerity-promising government. And here at home, the Tea Party movement has said “enough,” electing a Republican House of Representatives that has promised to rein in the Obama Administration’s reckless spending.
Over the past 30 years, freer economies have fueled unprecedented economic growth around the world. From 1980 to 2008, the world economy achieved real GDP expansion of around 145 percent, lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. Globally, poverty has fallen by 40 percent since 1990. The United States can continue to be a leader of this prosperous free world, but first we have to get our own bad spending habits under control.
Copyright © 2008 The Heritage Foundation. All rights reserved.
SEE VIDEO:
http://blog.heritage.org/2011/01/12/morning-bell-the-government-spending-threat-to-economic-freedom/?utm_source=Newsletter&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=Morning%2BBell
Thursday, August 5, 2010
Morning Bell: The Obama Elite vs The American People
Morning Bell: The Obama Elite vs The American People
Posted August 5th, 2010 at 9:49am in Family and Religion, Rule of Law with 0 comments Print This Post
This Tuesday voters in Missouri, by a 40-point margin, approved a ballot measure rejecting the individual mandate at the core of President Barack Obama’s health care law. Asked what the vote meant to the White House, press secretary Robert Gibbs said: “Nothing.” Yesterday in San Francisco, federal judge Vaughn Walker gave the exact same weight to a California ballot measure that affirmed marriage as an institution between one man and one woman. Specifically Judge Walker overturned the California Marriage Protection Act after concluding, as a matter of fact, that the majority of Californians who voted to protect marriage were bigots who had no rational basis to define marriage on their own terms. Here are just some of the “facts” Judge Walker found:
•Religious beliefs that gay and lesbian relationships are sinful or inferior to heterosexual relationships harm gays and lesbians.
•The campaign to pass Proposition 8 relied on stereotypes to show that same-sex relationships are inferior to opposite-sex relationships.
•The Proposition 8 campaign relied on fears that children exposed to the concept of same-sex marriage may become gay or lesbian.
•The genetic relationship between a parent and a child is not related to a child’s adjustment outcomes.
•Children do not need to be raised by a male parent and a female parent to be well-adjusted.
How did Judge Walker arrive at these “facts”? By agreeing with everything the same-sex marriage proponents’ “experts” said while ruling that the traditional marriage witness was “unreliable” and “provided no credible evidence to support any of the claimed adverse effects proponents promised to demonstrate.” In so doing, Walker not only ignored the views of millions of Californians, but by basing his decision on the 14th Amendment, he also ignored the factual determinations of every single popular vote that has been held on the issue in the past two decades. According to Judge Walker’s reasoning every single one of these Americans is a bigot whose opinion on marriage has no place under Judge Walker’s Constitution.
From the beginning, it was clear that Judge Walker was more interested in making a political statement than upholding the rule of law. That is why after Judge Walker ruled that the trial could be broadcast live, the Supreme Court took the remarkable step of overturning his decision, writing in January: “Not only did [Judge Walker's court] ignore the federal statute that establishes the procedures by which its rules may be amended, its express purpose was to broadcast a high-profile trial that would include witness testimony about a contentious issue.”
Clearly that Supreme Court would have rightly viewed with great skepticism every sentence of Judge Walker’s spurious ruling. But that Court will not be deciding this case. Today the Senate will vote on whether to confirm President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan. The same Elena Kagan who manipulated the law and facts to deny military recruiters equal access to Harvard law students because she did not personally approve of our military’s personnel policies regarding same-sex relationships.
The same Elena Kagan who was simply ”not sympathetic” to the claim of a petitioner that his 2nd amendment rights were violated, and was actively involved in President Clinton’s gun control agenda. The same Elena Kagan who advised President Clinton that it would be a “disaster” if the full medical truth was revealed about partial-birth abortion, endangering the gruesome procedure.
The facts are becoming quite clear. Kagan, Walker, Gibbs, and Obama all give the same weight to the will of the American people as expressed at the ballot box: “Nothing.” We’ll see today if the Senate agrees.
Quick Hits:
•Using the powers of the Civil Rights Division, the Obama Justice Department is giving large sums of money to leftist activist groups that are not discrimination victims and are not connected to a particular suit.
•The Senate on Wednesday cleared the way for a $26 billion bailout for government unions, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), said she would call back the House to vote on the bill.
•Government-owned General Motors gave $41,000 to politicians last year including $36,000 to the Congressional Black Caucus.
•President Obama told the AFL-CIO Executive Council yesterday that he will “keep on fighting to pass” card check legislation that would eliminate workers’ rights to a secret ballot vote on joining a union and give government bureaucrats the power to set compensation and make major business decisions at newly unionized companies.
•As President Obama refuses to lift a job-killing moratorium, a new Rasmussen Reports poll shows that 64% of U.S. voters now believe offshore oil drilling should be allowed, an eight-point jump from mid-July.
http://blog.heritage.org/2010/08/05/morning-bell-the-obama-elite-vs-the-american-people/?utm_source=Newsletter&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=Morning%2BBell
Posted August 5th, 2010 at 9:49am in Family and Religion, Rule of Law with 0 comments Print This Post
This Tuesday voters in Missouri, by a 40-point margin, approved a ballot measure rejecting the individual mandate at the core of President Barack Obama’s health care law. Asked what the vote meant to the White House, press secretary Robert Gibbs said: “Nothing.” Yesterday in San Francisco, federal judge Vaughn Walker gave the exact same weight to a California ballot measure that affirmed marriage as an institution between one man and one woman. Specifically Judge Walker overturned the California Marriage Protection Act after concluding, as a matter of fact, that the majority of Californians who voted to protect marriage were bigots who had no rational basis to define marriage on their own terms. Here are just some of the “facts” Judge Walker found:
•Religious beliefs that gay and lesbian relationships are sinful or inferior to heterosexual relationships harm gays and lesbians.
•The campaign to pass Proposition 8 relied on stereotypes to show that same-sex relationships are inferior to opposite-sex relationships.
•The Proposition 8 campaign relied on fears that children exposed to the concept of same-sex marriage may become gay or lesbian.
•The genetic relationship between a parent and a child is not related to a child’s adjustment outcomes.
•Children do not need to be raised by a male parent and a female parent to be well-adjusted.
How did Judge Walker arrive at these “facts”? By agreeing with everything the same-sex marriage proponents’ “experts” said while ruling that the traditional marriage witness was “unreliable” and “provided no credible evidence to support any of the claimed adverse effects proponents promised to demonstrate.” In so doing, Walker not only ignored the views of millions of Californians, but by basing his decision on the 14th Amendment, he also ignored the factual determinations of every single popular vote that has been held on the issue in the past two decades. According to Judge Walker’s reasoning every single one of these Americans is a bigot whose opinion on marriage has no place under Judge Walker’s Constitution.
From the beginning, it was clear that Judge Walker was more interested in making a political statement than upholding the rule of law. That is why after Judge Walker ruled that the trial could be broadcast live, the Supreme Court took the remarkable step of overturning his decision, writing in January: “Not only did [Judge Walker's court] ignore the federal statute that establishes the procedures by which its rules may be amended, its express purpose was to broadcast a high-profile trial that would include witness testimony about a contentious issue.”
Clearly that Supreme Court would have rightly viewed with great skepticism every sentence of Judge Walker’s spurious ruling. But that Court will not be deciding this case. Today the Senate will vote on whether to confirm President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan. The same Elena Kagan who manipulated the law and facts to deny military recruiters equal access to Harvard law students because she did not personally approve of our military’s personnel policies regarding same-sex relationships.
The same Elena Kagan who was simply ”not sympathetic” to the claim of a petitioner that his 2nd amendment rights were violated, and was actively involved in President Clinton’s gun control agenda. The same Elena Kagan who advised President Clinton that it would be a “disaster” if the full medical truth was revealed about partial-birth abortion, endangering the gruesome procedure.
The facts are becoming quite clear. Kagan, Walker, Gibbs, and Obama all give the same weight to the will of the American people as expressed at the ballot box: “Nothing.” We’ll see today if the Senate agrees.
Quick Hits:
•Using the powers of the Civil Rights Division, the Obama Justice Department is giving large sums of money to leftist activist groups that are not discrimination victims and are not connected to a particular suit.
•The Senate on Wednesday cleared the way for a $26 billion bailout for government unions, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), said she would call back the House to vote on the bill.
•Government-owned General Motors gave $41,000 to politicians last year including $36,000 to the Congressional Black Caucus.
•President Obama told the AFL-CIO Executive Council yesterday that he will “keep on fighting to pass” card check legislation that would eliminate workers’ rights to a secret ballot vote on joining a union and give government bureaucrats the power to set compensation and make major business decisions at newly unionized companies.
•As President Obama refuses to lift a job-killing moratorium, a new Rasmussen Reports poll shows that 64% of U.S. voters now believe offshore oil drilling should be allowed, an eight-point jump from mid-July.
http://blog.heritage.org/2010/08/05/morning-bell-the-obama-elite-vs-the-american-people/?utm_source=Newsletter&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=Morning%2BBell
Wednesday, July 7, 2010
MORNING BELL: This is What is Ahead for Americans in Healthcare!
The Rationer-in-Chief
When Linda O’Boyle was diagnosed with bowel cancer, her doctors told her she could boost her chances of survival by adding the drug cetuximab to her regimen. But the rationing body for Britain’s National Health Service, the National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE), had previously ruled that the drug was not cost-effective and therefore would not be paid for by the government. So O’Boyle liquidated her savings and paid for the drug herself. But this is not allowed under NHS rules. When government bureaucrats found out that O’Boyle had purchased the drug with her own money, she was denied NHS treatment and died within months.
Defenders of Britain’s health care rationing system may try to claim that this tragic death is an outlier in an otherwise acceptable government run health care system. They are wrong. It is the point of the system. As socialized medicine and infanticide advocate Peter Singer has argued in The New York Times, the NICE bureaucrats must ration care or else free government health care would bankrupt the British economy. “NICE had set a general limit of £30,000, or about $49,000, on the cost of extending life for a year,” Singer writes. Following this logic, Singer supported NICE’s decision not to allow British citizens the kidney cancer fighting drug Sutent. As a result of this, and many other rationing decisions Britain, has one of the lowest cancer survival rates in the Western world. While 60.3% of men and 61.7% of women in Sweden survive a cancer diagnosis, in Britain the figure ranges between 40.2% to 48.1% for men and 48% to 54.1% for women. And NICE’s rationing has not just hit cancer patients. Doctors have warned that patients with terminal illnesses are being made to die prematurely under the NHS rationing scheme. And according to the Patients Association, one million NHS patients have been the victims of appalling care in hospitals across Britain.
Most Americans would find this harrowing. But not President Barack Obama. Yesterday he bypassed the Senate confirmation process and used a recess appointment to install Dr. Donald Berwick to be the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS is the agency that runs the Medicare and Medicaid programs). Dr. Berwick said of Britain’s health care system: “Cynics beware, I am romantic about the National Health Service; I love it.” And his love for Britain’s health care system is not in spite of its rationing, but because of it. In 2009 Dr. Berwick told Biotechnology Healthcare: “NICE is extremely effective and a conscientious and valuable knowledge-building system. … The decision is not whether or not we will ration care – the decision is whether we will ration with our eyes open.”
The fact that the White House chose to empower Dr. Berwick by recess appointment is particularly audacious. The recess appointment power was intended to be used for occasions when the Senate is out for months at a time. The Senate is currently out of session for just 11 days. Worse, the Senate majority has never even scheduled a hearing so that Dr. Berwick’s rationing views could be given an “open” forum. In fact, Dr. Berwick has not even returned Senators’ written questionnaires. The White House defends the move by claiming “there’s no time to waste with Washington game-playing.” But then why did the Obama administration wait until April 2010, a full 15 months after President Obama was sworn into office, to nominate Dr. Berwick? Is it because they did not want Dr. Berwick’s well known and public support for rationing health care to affect the debate over Obamacare?
In a 2005 interview with Health Affairs, Dr. Berwick said: “(G)overnment is an extraordinarily important player in the American health care scene, and it has inescapable duties with respect to improvement of care, or we’re not going to get improved care. Government remains a major purchaser. … So as CMS goes and as Medicaid goes, so goes the system.” And that was before Obamacare gave far reaching new powers to government bureaucrats.
In June of 2009, President Obama told the American Medical Association that “identifying what works is not about dictating what kind of care should be provided.” Moreover, the president has assured the public time and again that the government will not get between patients and their doctors. His nomination of Don Berwick for Director of CMS, however, tells a different story.
Quick Hits:
•Arizona Democrats who have to face voters this year are lining up against the Obama administration’s suit aimed at stopping states new immigration enforcement law.
•According to a new study by the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), the cost of harboring illegal immigrants in the United States is a staggering $113 billion a year.
•According to Gallup a majority of Americans believe the government’s main focus should be on halting the flow of illegal immigrants coming into the U.S., not developing a plan to deal with those already here.
•The Obama EPA proposed new regulations for coal-burning power plants yesterday that would cost consumers nearly $3 billion a year.
•Also according to Gallup, only 38% of independents approve of the job Barack Obama is doing as president, the first time independent approval of Obama has dropped below 40%.
http://blog.heritage.org/2010/07/07/morning-bell-the-rationer-in-chief/?utm_source=Newsletter&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=Morning%2BBell
When Linda O’Boyle was diagnosed with bowel cancer, her doctors told her she could boost her chances of survival by adding the drug cetuximab to her regimen. But the rationing body for Britain’s National Health Service, the National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE), had previously ruled that the drug was not cost-effective and therefore would not be paid for by the government. So O’Boyle liquidated her savings and paid for the drug herself. But this is not allowed under NHS rules. When government bureaucrats found out that O’Boyle had purchased the drug with her own money, she was denied NHS treatment and died within months.
Defenders of Britain’s health care rationing system may try to claim that this tragic death is an outlier in an otherwise acceptable government run health care system. They are wrong. It is the point of the system. As socialized medicine and infanticide advocate Peter Singer has argued in The New York Times, the NICE bureaucrats must ration care or else free government health care would bankrupt the British economy. “NICE had set a general limit of £30,000, or about $49,000, on the cost of extending life for a year,” Singer writes. Following this logic, Singer supported NICE’s decision not to allow British citizens the kidney cancer fighting drug Sutent. As a result of this, and many other rationing decisions Britain, has one of the lowest cancer survival rates in the Western world. While 60.3% of men and 61.7% of women in Sweden survive a cancer diagnosis, in Britain the figure ranges between 40.2% to 48.1% for men and 48% to 54.1% for women. And NICE’s rationing has not just hit cancer patients. Doctors have warned that patients with terminal illnesses are being made to die prematurely under the NHS rationing scheme. And according to the Patients Association, one million NHS patients have been the victims of appalling care in hospitals across Britain.
Most Americans would find this harrowing. But not President Barack Obama. Yesterday he bypassed the Senate confirmation process and used a recess appointment to install Dr. Donald Berwick to be the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS is the agency that runs the Medicare and Medicaid programs). Dr. Berwick said of Britain’s health care system: “Cynics beware, I am romantic about the National Health Service; I love it.” And his love for Britain’s health care system is not in spite of its rationing, but because of it. In 2009 Dr. Berwick told Biotechnology Healthcare: “NICE is extremely effective and a conscientious and valuable knowledge-building system. … The decision is not whether or not we will ration care – the decision is whether we will ration with our eyes open.”
The fact that the White House chose to empower Dr. Berwick by recess appointment is particularly audacious. The recess appointment power was intended to be used for occasions when the Senate is out for months at a time. The Senate is currently out of session for just 11 days. Worse, the Senate majority has never even scheduled a hearing so that Dr. Berwick’s rationing views could be given an “open” forum. In fact, Dr. Berwick has not even returned Senators’ written questionnaires. The White House defends the move by claiming “there’s no time to waste with Washington game-playing.” But then why did the Obama administration wait until April 2010, a full 15 months after President Obama was sworn into office, to nominate Dr. Berwick? Is it because they did not want Dr. Berwick’s well known and public support for rationing health care to affect the debate over Obamacare?
In a 2005 interview with Health Affairs, Dr. Berwick said: “(G)overnment is an extraordinarily important player in the American health care scene, and it has inescapable duties with respect to improvement of care, or we’re not going to get improved care. Government remains a major purchaser. … So as CMS goes and as Medicaid goes, so goes the system.” And that was before Obamacare gave far reaching new powers to government bureaucrats.
In June of 2009, President Obama told the American Medical Association that “identifying what works is not about dictating what kind of care should be provided.” Moreover, the president has assured the public time and again that the government will not get between patients and their doctors. His nomination of Don Berwick for Director of CMS, however, tells a different story.
Quick Hits:
•Arizona Democrats who have to face voters this year are lining up against the Obama administration’s suit aimed at stopping states new immigration enforcement law.
•According to a new study by the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), the cost of harboring illegal immigrants in the United States is a staggering $113 billion a year.
•According to Gallup a majority of Americans believe the government’s main focus should be on halting the flow of illegal immigrants coming into the U.S., not developing a plan to deal with those already here.
•The Obama EPA proposed new regulations for coal-burning power plants yesterday that would cost consumers nearly $3 billion a year.
•Also according to Gallup, only 38% of independents approve of the job Barack Obama is doing as president, the first time independent approval of Obama has dropped below 40%.
http://blog.heritage.org/2010/07/07/morning-bell-the-rationer-in-chief/?utm_source=Newsletter&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=Morning%2BBell
Thursday, July 1, 2010
Morning Bell: The Limitless Power of the Obama-Kagan Congress
This Sunday, our nation will celebrate Independence Day, which commemorates the Continental Congress’ adoption of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration preamble reads: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” The fact that we as a nation came together every year to celebrate this document might lead many Americans to believe that a Supreme Court Justice should take the Declaration of Independence into account when they are interpreting the Constitution. Elena Kagan is not one of those Americans. Under questioning from Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) yesterday, Kagan admitted: “To be honest with you, I don’t have a view of what are natural rights independent of the Constitution.”
And Kagan’s disturbing indifference to the existence of natural rights is just one of the many frightening revelations her confirmation hearing has produced. On Tuesday, Sen. Coburn pressed Kagan about the limits the Constitution places on Congress’ power to control what Americans do:
Coburn: If I wanted to sponsor a bill and it said Americans, you have to eat three vegetables and three fruits every day and I got it through Congress and that’s now the law of the land, got to do it, does that violate the Commerce Clause?
Kagan: Sounds like a dumb law
Coburn: Yeah, but I got one that’s real similar to it that I think is equally dumb. I’m not going to mention which it is.
Kagan: But I think that the question of whether it’s a dumb law is different from whether the question of whether it’s constitutional and I think that courts would be wrong to strike down laws that they think are senseless just because they’re senseless.
The law Coburn was referring to, of course, was President Barack Obama’s signature legislative accomplishment: the Obamacare provision that forces all Americans to buy health insurance. But Jefferson and the other Constitution framers designed the document to protect our “unalienable Rights” by limiting the power of Congress. They designed an ingenious system of checks and balances that divides state and federal authority in the hope of preventing any one government from exerting too much control over a free people. Specifically, Article I allocates to Congress “[a]ll legislative powers herein granted,” and section 8 of Article I (referred to by Sen. Coburn above as the Commerce Clause), grants Congress the authority “[t]o regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian tribes.” The Supreme Court has always understood that, taken together, these clauses put some legislative powers beyond Congress’ reach.
But Kagan has now testified that not only does she find the Founders’ concept of “unalienable Rights” irrelevant to Constitutional interpretation, but she also declined to say if the Constitution prevents Congress from telling Americans what to eat. Her evasive non-response to Coburn’s Commerce Clause inquiry shows that she would indeed be a rubber-stamp for almost any part of the Obama agenda that Congress enacts. So if the Obama administration convinced Congress (and this is a total hypothetical) that the survival of a single car company, let’s say Chrysler, was absolutely necessary for the survival of the nation’s economy, and Congress then passed a law forcing all Americans to buy a Chrysler car, Kagan would find such a law, while perhaps “dumb,” perfectly constitutional. Jefferson must be rolling in his grave.
The leftist members of the Senate Judiciary Committee know that the Obamacare individual mandate is extremely vulnerable to being struck down by the Supreme Court. That is why they have spent so much of the hearing trying to redefine what “judicial activism” is. As Heritage Deputy Director of the Center for Legal and Judicial Studies Robert Alt will testify today, the Court is not committing “judicial activism” every time it finds that a law violates the Constitution. Judicial activism is not a function of outcomes, but one of interpretation. Instead, it occurs when a judge applies his or her own policy preferences to uphold, or strike down, a statute or other government action which is clearly forbidden by the Constitution.
Kagan came to the committee with one of the thinnest records of any Supreme Court nominee in recent history. What little has been learned about her views so far has been highly disturbing. Nothing in her testimony has demonstrated she has either the respect for our nation’s founding documents or the independence from this White House to apply the law as it is written, and dispense justice without regard to the parties before her.
Quick Hits:
•Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) used her time questioning Elena Kagan to ask: “I keep wanting to ask you about the famous camp of Edward vs. Jacob or the vampire vs. the werewolf.”
•According to the CBO, the federal debt will represent 62% of the nation’s economy by the end of this year, the highest percentage since World War II.
•House Democrats have attached $10 billion in spending for government union jobs to the Afghanistan war funding bill.
•U.S. private employers added just 13,000 jobs in June, suggesting expectations of a big drop in the government’s upcoming nonfarm payrolls report were on target.
•A former Justice Department attorney who quit his job to protest the Obama administration’s handling of the New Black Panther Party voter intimidation case is accusing Attorney General Eric Holder of dropping the charges for racially motivated reasons.
Reprinted from: http://blog.heritage.org/2010/07/01/morning-bell-the-limitless-power-of-the-obama-kagan-congress/?utm_source=Newsletter&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=Morning%2BBell
And Kagan’s disturbing indifference to the existence of natural rights is just one of the many frightening revelations her confirmation hearing has produced. On Tuesday, Sen. Coburn pressed Kagan about the limits the Constitution places on Congress’ power to control what Americans do:
Coburn: If I wanted to sponsor a bill and it said Americans, you have to eat three vegetables and three fruits every day and I got it through Congress and that’s now the law of the land, got to do it, does that violate the Commerce Clause?
Kagan: Sounds like a dumb law
Coburn: Yeah, but I got one that’s real similar to it that I think is equally dumb. I’m not going to mention which it is.
Kagan: But I think that the question of whether it’s a dumb law is different from whether the question of whether it’s constitutional and I think that courts would be wrong to strike down laws that they think are senseless just because they’re senseless.
The law Coburn was referring to, of course, was President Barack Obama’s signature legislative accomplishment: the Obamacare provision that forces all Americans to buy health insurance. But Jefferson and the other Constitution framers designed the document to protect our “unalienable Rights” by limiting the power of Congress. They designed an ingenious system of checks and balances that divides state and federal authority in the hope of preventing any one government from exerting too much control over a free people. Specifically, Article I allocates to Congress “[a]ll legislative powers herein granted,” and section 8 of Article I (referred to by Sen. Coburn above as the Commerce Clause), grants Congress the authority “[t]o regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian tribes.” The Supreme Court has always understood that, taken together, these clauses put some legislative powers beyond Congress’ reach.
But Kagan has now testified that not only does she find the Founders’ concept of “unalienable Rights” irrelevant to Constitutional interpretation, but she also declined to say if the Constitution prevents Congress from telling Americans what to eat. Her evasive non-response to Coburn’s Commerce Clause inquiry shows that she would indeed be a rubber-stamp for almost any part of the Obama agenda that Congress enacts. So if the Obama administration convinced Congress (and this is a total hypothetical) that the survival of a single car company, let’s say Chrysler, was absolutely necessary for the survival of the nation’s economy, and Congress then passed a law forcing all Americans to buy a Chrysler car, Kagan would find such a law, while perhaps “dumb,” perfectly constitutional. Jefferson must be rolling in his grave.
The leftist members of the Senate Judiciary Committee know that the Obamacare individual mandate is extremely vulnerable to being struck down by the Supreme Court. That is why they have spent so much of the hearing trying to redefine what “judicial activism” is. As Heritage Deputy Director of the Center for Legal and Judicial Studies Robert Alt will testify today, the Court is not committing “judicial activism” every time it finds that a law violates the Constitution. Judicial activism is not a function of outcomes, but one of interpretation. Instead, it occurs when a judge applies his or her own policy preferences to uphold, or strike down, a statute or other government action which is clearly forbidden by the Constitution.
Kagan came to the committee with one of the thinnest records of any Supreme Court nominee in recent history. What little has been learned about her views so far has been highly disturbing. Nothing in her testimony has demonstrated she has either the respect for our nation’s founding documents or the independence from this White House to apply the law as it is written, and dispense justice without regard to the parties before her.
Quick Hits:
•Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) used her time questioning Elena Kagan to ask: “I keep wanting to ask you about the famous camp of Edward vs. Jacob or the vampire vs. the werewolf.”
•According to the CBO, the federal debt will represent 62% of the nation’s economy by the end of this year, the highest percentage since World War II.
•House Democrats have attached $10 billion in spending for government union jobs to the Afghanistan war funding bill.
•U.S. private employers added just 13,000 jobs in June, suggesting expectations of a big drop in the government’s upcoming nonfarm payrolls report were on target.
•A former Justice Department attorney who quit his job to protest the Obama administration’s handling of the New Black Panther Party voter intimidation case is accusing Attorney General Eric Holder of dropping the charges for racially motivated reasons.
Reprinted from: http://blog.heritage.org/2010/07/01/morning-bell-the-limitless-power-of-the-obama-kagan-congress/?utm_source=Newsletter&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=Morning%2BBell
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