Looking back on the most noteworthy events of 2013, three of them stand out above the rest.
First up was the revelation that the regulatory power of the federal government had been put to political use in unprecedented ways. In May of this year Lois Lerner let drop that the IRS had been systematically delaying, and thus denying, conservative organizations the same tax exempt status that was routinely granted to equivalent liberal organizations.
In previous IRS scandals it was the powerful abusing the powerful—a White House moving against prominent financial or journalistic figures who, because of their own particular status or the machineries at their disposal, could pretty much take care of themselves. A scandal erupts, there are headlines, and then people go on their way. The dreadful thing about this scandal, what makes it ominous, is that this is the elites versus regular citizens. It’s the mighty versus normal people. It’s the all-powerful directors of the administrative state training their eyes and moving on uppity and relatively undefended Americans.
This was an important story because of the impact that the targeting is likely to have had on the 2012 election. Some amount of conservative money and conservative messages were kept out of it.
The scandal followed a familiar Obama-style series of disclaimers. First it was said to be the work of a couple of rogue employees in a single IRS office, the Cincinnatti office. Then later when asked to testify before a congressional committee investigating the improper targeting, Lois Lerner announced that she had done nothing wrong. Then finally, asserting her constitutional right against self-incrimination, she refused to answer any questions.
In testimony before a House committee yesterday, before invoking the Fifth Amendment, Lerner proclaimed her innocence. “I have not done anything wrong. I have not broken any laws. I have not violated any IRS rules or regulations, and I have not provided false information to this or any other committee.”
After making that proclamation, she then refused to answer questions. No questions. Not one.
It was like she was following a script, which seems to be the one she got from President Obama who at first condemned the targeting,
"If in fact IRS personnel engaged in the kind of practices that have been reported on and were intentionally targeting conservative groups, then that's outrageous. And there's no place for it," Obama told reporters.
...then, after declaring it a phony scandal, Obama moved to legalize the targeting.
The Obama administration launched an attempt Tuesday to limit the same class of politically active non-profit groups the IRS was accused of targeting last summer.
Under the proposed new rules, organizations that fall under the tax-exempt 501(c)(4) umbrella would also be more clearly identified during campaigns. The new guidance would curtail activities such as running ads, distributing campaign literature and other get-out-the-vote initiatives.
...
The American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ), which is representing 41 organizations in a federal lawsuit challenging the IRS, says the proposed regulation change puts free speech rights of Americans at risk.
“This is a feeble attempt by the Obama Administration to justify its own wrong-doing with the IRS targeting of conservative and Tea Party groups,” attorney Jay Sekulow said in a written statement. “Instead of holding those responsible for the unlawful targeting scheme accountable for their actions, the Obama Administration is determined to further limit the free speech of Americans by attempting to change constitutional practices that are decades old.”
The next big story for 2013 were the revelations by Edward Snowden, which publicized the extent to which the National Security Agency has gone in collecting what is termed cell phone communications "metadata." Was the NSA spying on American citizens? In a pair of dueling judicial rulings the courts found in one case that the capture and storage by the NSA of phone records of millions of Americans is likely to be unconstitutional, but in another case found that it is legal.
The ruling Friday by U.S. District Judge William H. Pauley III and the opposing view earlier this month by U.S. District Judge Richard Leon in Washington, D.C., sets the stage for federal appeals courts to contemplate the delicate balance between individual rights set out in the Constitution and the need to protect national security.
Pauley concluded the program was a necessary extension of steps taken after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
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Still, Pauley said such a program, if unchecked, "imperils the civil liberties of every citizen" and he noted the lively debate about the subject across the nation, in Congress and at the White House.
"The question for this court is whether the government's bulk telephony metadata program is lawful. This court finds it is. But the question of whether that program should be conducted is for the other two coordinate branches of government to decide," he said.
A week ago, President Barack Obama said there may be ways of changing the program so that is has sufficient oversight and transparency.
The judgment in favor of national security might carry some weight if President Barack Obama seemed somehow inclined to protect Americans. His past performance, however, does not provide evidence of any such an inclination.
Just look at how well he protected Ambassador Christopher Stevens and the three Americans who died with him in Benghazi, Libya. In the face of a heightened threat of terrorist attack, the Ambassador repeatedly asked for additional security personnel, but all requests were denied. You see, Obama was campaigning for re-election at the time and beefing up security at that moment might have contradicted Obama's campaign theme: al Qaeda on the run and decimated. It was a theme Obama would not relinquish even after the terrorists murdered Stevens. Sent out to explain how and why Americans were killed in Libya on the anniversary of 9/11, Susan Rice said it was a spontaneous demonstration gone awry.
Obama protects Obama. Assuming Obama stays true to form, his natural inclination will be to use the NSA just as he has used the IRS — against his political enemies instead of against America's enemies.
But the biggest story of the year is the disastrous ObamaCare rollout, which is not to say that the disaster was came as a big surprise. If anything, the fact that it was a predictable disaster made the story even bigger. What a picture. Against Senate Republican urging to let ObamaCare fall of its own weight, House Republicans used the threat of shutting down the government to try to delay the ObamaCare individual mandate. They failed only to have Obama delay the individual mandate when it became clear that the $650 million Healthcare.gov website didn't work. It barely works now, three months down the road.
But in the meantime, millions of Americans received letters from their insurance carriers that their health insurance plans were "substandard" and were being cancelled. Substandard was the word Obama used to describe plans that didn't conform to his new regulatory requirements. Those millions whose plans were cancelled were finding that comparable ObamaCare plans were double and triple the cost of what was being cancelled. They were also finding that thousands of doctors were being dropped from insurance plans because of ObamaCare.
Between October 1st and December 31st Obama has been making adjustments on the fly. The administration is strongly advising that insurance carriers please continue to offer the formerly substandard policies which are, under the letter of the law, illegal. Dear Insurance Company, Please disregard the law. Why not? Barack Obama does.
This has become the biggest problem of Barack Obama's presidency. All during his re-election campaign he had assured us: "If you like your plan, you can keep your plan. Period. If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor. Period." Here on the right we all knew it was a lie, but he was able to get away with it by saying those people on the right who disagreed with him could only be doing it out of racist hostility.
But when the cancellation letters started hitting the mailboxes, the rest of America came to realize he had been lying as well. And then he compounded his problem by lying about the lie.
Obama’s speech on Nov. 4, 2013, at a meeting of Organizing for Action, his campaign organization, seemed to offer a new, and confusing, wrinkle.
"Now, if you have or had one of these plans before the Affordable Care Act came into law and you really liked that plan, what we said was you can keep it if it hasn’t changed since the law passed," Obama said.
Unfortunately for Obama, that's not at all what he said, and by claiming it was, he confirmed to everyone that he was lying when he said, "Period."
But he's been lying all along. What's new is that now more people are aware of it, even to the point where his fawning media has been forced to make mention of it. We have a president who stands revealed. For Obama, as for so many on the left, truth is a relative thing. In Obama's case truth is anything that sets him in a flattering light while anything that reflects badly on him is subject to dispute.
Those three stories of 2013 — the IRS targeting, the NSA surveillance, and the ObamaCare rollout — have put Obama in a new light. Obama is a politician who is eager to use the power of government for his own political benefit. By looking the American people in the eye and lying to us about ObamaCare, he put his credibility in doubt on the IRS and NSA issues. Alas, I will not go so far as to say that he or any of his Democrat colleagues will pay a political price for it, though they should.
But there are another ten months to go before the 2014 midterms. That's plenty of time for our leftist media to go to work smearing Republicans in order to save Obama's questionable legacy.
