Wednesday, January 15, 2014
The Obama Brand of Crony Capitalism and Political Harassment
The attorney appointed by the Obama administration to head the internal investigation into potential unfair targeting and harassment of conservative political groups by the IRS turns out to be a frequent and significant donor to both the Democratic National Committee and President Obama, Representative Darrell Issa reveals, in what he calls a "startling conflict of interest" that jeopardizes the investigation. Issa, Chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, recently sent a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder revealing new information that reached the committee on who is conducting the internal investigations at the IRS regarding the inappropriate targeting of the conservative groups. Issa is asking Holder for an explanation as to why the FBI has been unresponsive to committee requests for information, noting that current and former IRS officials revealed that Barbara Bosserman, a trial attorney within the IRS's Civil Rights Commission, is leading the internal investigation. Bosserman's leadership raises serious questions about the investigation's fairness. Issa told Holder that his investigations revealed that she has been a loyal financial backer of the Democratic National Committee since 2004 and has donated multiple times personally to President Obama's two campaigns. Her personal donation total reaches $6,750 to both the party and President Obama. Choosing someone so openly and obviously partisan to lead an investigation into partisan targeting of opposition groups is "unbelievable" and "highly inappropriate," Representative Issa asserts, and demands that the Attorney General take immediate action to both remove Bosserman from leading the investigation and remedy any damage that may have occurred due to her involvement. The White House has been carefully and completely silent despite its apparent involvement in unfairly targeting 501(c)(4)s and other political civic action committees aligned with the Tea Party for more thorough investigations into whether their political advocacy was proper. White House Press Secretary Jay Carney called the targeting a " phony scandal" when questioned about it, and the White House has attempted to argue that progressive political groups also found themselves in the IRS's crosshairs. However, more than 80% of the 162 groups targeted in one case investigating inappropriate political "propaganda" were Tea Party-affiliated or otherwise anti- Obama groups. ~~~~~ As if that were not enough, in a tacit admission of its error in the non-bid naming of Michelle Obama's friend's company to a key Obamacare IT job, the Obama administration is dropping CGI Federal, the contractor responsible for building the glitch-laden HealthCare.gov website that has been a major source of the problems in Obamacare when open enrollment began in October, a source has told the Washington Post. Federal officials will sign a new contract with consulting firm Accenture for a 12-month period worth about $90 million to fix the problems that continue to plague the government-run site, the source said. The CGI contract was to expire at the end of February. Accenture is a large consulting firm that has done work for states but has never done major work for the federal government. It was the firm behind California's state-run health exchange website. The consulting firm refused to comment on any potential contracts it currently has in the works. "We are in discussions with potential clients all the time but it is not appropriate to discuss with the media contracts we may or may not be discussing," Joanne Veto, Accenture spokeswoman, told The Post. Government officials at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), which oversees HealthCare.gov, would not confirm either. "We continually evaluate our needs and remain focused on ensuring consumers have access to affordable, quality coverage," said CMS spokesman Aaron Albright. While the front-end of the website was largely fixed by November 30, 2013, there are still major problems with the back-end that is supposed to communicate with insurers, making it difficult to complete the enrollment process and leaving many people without insurance even though they thought they had signed up. Because of these continuing problems, the government decision to end the contract with CGI is not a surprise. The sources that spoke with the Post said the decision was made by CMS because of frustration with the quality and pace of the work from CGI. According to a report released by Bloomberg Government analyst Peter Gosselin, CGI was paid more than $1 billion for the deeply flawed website. IT experts who analyzed the website have said it shouldn't have cost more than $10 million to build HealthCare.gov. ~~~~~ So, dear readers, we can see the Obama White House and administration at work. Appoint unqualified friends to very lucrative contract jobs, pay them well for failing, then replace them with someone to clean up the mess. And when conservative and Republican groups try to register as political committees, harass and delay their applications until Obama could be re-elected without the opposition that might have revealed his crony capitalism and illegal campaign practices. Just another day in the life of Barack Obama.
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It is soooooo Chicago style politics...
ReplyDeleteThe simple act of doing this from Obama is not surprising. The fact that the House & Senate is allowing him to get away with it is the news here.
ReplyDeleteWhere is the Advise & Consent, the Checks & Balances, the mildest form of working together at?
Certainly have major disagreement within the parties on the BIG subject. But the daily operation of the federal government should be common sense.
How stupid is Obama to want to ruffle the feathers over an appointment that anyone of 100 others in DC could fill and fill better.
Is presidential appointments really the "mountain that Obama wants to have his administration die on?"
The political problem is that Republicans fear impeaching Obama would do more to hurt them than it would the president. Not only did Clinton weather the storm, so did his approval rating. If you’ve got a weak president in office like Obama who’s facing a debacle from his signature legislation between now and the next presidential election, why make any sudden moves to mess with that dynamic if you’re a Republican? They’re probably going to get a good result from SCOTUS on Obama’s NLRB power grab; if they want to push back against executive overreach, court battles might be fruitful high-publicity ways of doing it with minimal political risk — certain difficulties notwithstanding.
ReplyDeleteTo solve their political problem, the GOP would have to convince a majority of the public (probably a big majority) that impeachment is warranted. But that’s the thing — even when the president’s guilty of encroaching on another branch’s powers or suspending parts of the law that are politically inconvenient to him, you’ll never find a majority of Americans willing to entertain a punishment as severe as removal from office for that.
To make impeachment stick, you need to show that the president’s motives for acting were rotten and selfish, like Nixon’s; Obama, by contrast, always takes care to present his motives for ignoring Congress as civic-minded, something he does for the good of the people, not for himself.
Tim Scott once suggested that Obama could be impeached if he tried to raise the debt ceiling unilaterally, but the public would never support that, I suspect. He’d simply say that he was driven to desperate measures to protect the country’s creditworthiness; at best you’d get a 50/50 split in public opinion on whether he should be punished, and I doubt the ratio would be even that good. A constitutionalist would wave his hand at all of the above and say that motives are irrelevant — if you violate due process or separation of powers, impeachment is an obvious remedy, however allegedly virtuous the motives. That’s what it means to follow the rule of law. How many constitutionalists are out there in the voting booth on Election Day, though? Fifteen percent of the electorate, maybe? Less?
Let’s step back in history a few hundred years. It would not have been tolerable to stand up at the Constitutional Convention and say, Yes, the president is going to have the authority and duty to enforce the laws, but if there are laws he doesn’t like, he will be able to delay provisions or ignore provisions as he sees fit, as long as it is consistent with his overall purpose or political agenda. That would not have been acceptable to anybody at the time (or legally at this time either).
ReplyDeleteCan you visualize if when John Adams succeeded George Washington, he just started delaying provisions related to the Bank of the United States or the Jay Treaty? Imagine when Jefferson came in. He ran against the Alien and Sedition Act. Some of those were just allowed to expire, but they went in and repealed a core portion of the Alien and Sedition Act. They didn’t just ignore it. The provisions that expired; and then they repealed the provisions that were still in effect.
That is the way it is supposed to be done. They would never have allowed John Adams or Jefferson to come in and just willy-nilly enforce what they wanted to and not enforce what they didn’t want to.
Why – outside of his ethnicity – is Obama being allowed to do all this and more? He is raping the Constitution of all its strengths of “Checks & Balances” and the House and senate is co-operating fully.
He has been playing the “race implication “card way too long. It’s time for Obama to start being simply a president and not an African-American president. The rules are the same for one and all … NO special treatment
When the government hands out other people’s money to crony capitalists promising 'green' jobs, does this magically turn them into effective innovators? How are experimental technologies based on ideological fantasies supposed to achieve commercial sustainability by being rushed to market for purely political considerations? How does crippling the evolution of proven energy businesses through capricious regulations and endless environmental reviews make our energy future more secure, our economy more robust, or high paying jobs more plentiful?
ReplyDeleteAs voters weigh the competing narratives of where our country went wrong and how to get it back on track, will they gain sufficient clarity to deliver a watershed election or will we face more years of political dysfunction? If the latter, how long can we stay on autopilot careening downhill before we face an ugly crackup? If the former, where will the leadership come from to deliver the hope we were promised four years ago—and the prosperity we created for ourselves 30 years ago, the last time the American people realized that hyperactive government is the problem and not the solution?"
"The most fundamental fact about the ideas of the political left is that they do not work. Therefore we should not be surprised to find the left concentrated in institutions where ideas do not have to work in order to survive."
ReplyDeleteThomas Sowell