“Conscience is the most sacred of all property.”

James Madison

Yet another aspect of the American Affordable Care Act has caused the Obama Administration to come-a-cropper with the United States Constitution. The act has already inspired a dense thicket of law suits over its individual mandate provision that forces people to buy insurance or pay a penalty tax for not so doing. Recently, Health and Human Services Secretary, Kathleen Sibelius, has added more fuel to the legal bonfire that has erupted over ObamaCare.

The law entails that all health plans provide “preventive services” free of charge. This previously included the sorts of things you would want to have to prevent disease. This would include child vaccinations, physical check-ups and other practical medical services that wise people would want from time to time. Now Kathleen Sibelius has decided to add contraception to include RU-486. Secretary Sibelius issued the following news release.

Today the department is announcing that the final rule on preventive health services will ensure that women with health insurance coverage will have access to the full range of the Institute of Medicine’s recommended preventive services, including all FDA -approved forms of contraception. Women will not have to forego these services because of expensive co-pays or deductibles, or because an insurance plan doesn’t include contraceptive services.

(www.hhs.gov)

Archbishop Timothy Dolan had previously made his concerns about this plan known to President Obama in a personal audience with the president at the White House. He had been informed that the Obamacare mandate would not be forced upon the various services and schools run by The American Catholic Church.

However, like most of what Barack Obama promises, this guarantee came with an expiration date. That expiration date was 20 January 2012. Secretary Sibelius explains below.

After evaluating comments, we have decided to add an additional element to the final rule. Nonprofit employers who, based on religious beliefs, do not currently provide contraceptive coverage in their insurance plan, will be provided an additional year, until August 1, 2013, to comply with the new law.

Timothy Dolan responded to this obvious betrayal in language that was about as forceful as you could expect to hear from a man of the cloth. He explains how the decision has now forced The Catholic Church to start funding insurance coverage for abortions and sterilizations as of 1 August 2013.

On Friday, the administration reaffirmed the mandate, and offered only a one-year delay in enforcement in some cases — as if we might suddenly be more willing to violate our consciences 12 months from now. As a result, all but a few employers will be forced to purchase coverage for contraception, abortion drugs and sterilization services even when they seriously object to them. All who share the cost of health plans that include such services will be forced to pay for them as well. (See individual mandate).

I’m not a Catholic. On a very limited, personal level, I have no skin in this particular power-struggle. But then I stop and realize the fact that our current, statist administration has once more done rough and intentional violence to the fundamental precepts of the US Constitution and its accompanying Bill of Rights. The First Amendment thereof reads as follows.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

(HT: Wikipedia)

Catholics are bound by the Law of Moses expressed in The Decalogue not to commit murder. The Catholic Church considers an unborn child a fully-corporate, living human being. Abortion, kinetic or chemical, terminates this life and hence violates the Sixth Commandment of the Ten. Paying for this act to take place (by buying insurance or paying the penalty fee for not providing the insurance) would make the Church morally culpable for every one of these murders that occurred under the auspices of an ObamaCare-approved employer insurance plan. Sec. Sibelius has just ordered the Catholic Church to directly violate a fundamental precept of their faith.

To understand where to go from here, the church will have to ask itself a lot of questions. Do they actively enforce a moral law, or do they just dress a guy up in a clown-suit on Sunday and pass around the collection plate? Do they limit their activities to legalistic challenges and then accept any ruling that goes against their stated doctrine on when human life begins? Do they change church doctrine to appease Barack Obama and NARAL?

If they do enforce a moral law and they will not change it in search of political consensus, does The American Catholic Church shut down in protest and put The United States under interdict until our government changes its regulatory course? Or if they don’t believe they are directly subsidizing the murder of unborn children through their compliance with the mandates of ObamaCare, do they now believe in Leprechauns? Such are the questions that the power-hungry statists have posed to one of the oldest religious organizations on the face of the planet.

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n November 14, 2011, the Supreme Court agreed to review the constitutionality of President Obama’s health-care act. The central question is, What limits does the Constitution — specifically, the Commerce Clause — impose upon the federal government’s exercise of power? This health-care act is the defining legislation of the president’s term, and the issue of limited government is at the very heart of the debate between Obama and his opponents. The political, economic, and constitutional stakes are very high. These arguments before the Court will provide a dramatic — and perhaps even decisive — backdrop for the 2012 election.

Constitutional crises of this magnitude are not without precedent. Indeed, the seeds of this case can be found in the court battles of the 1930s and 1940s, as Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal legislation challenged traditional constitutional bounds. Supported by record congressional majorities, FDR and his fellow Democrats passed a blizzard of programs designed to alleviate the economic hardship of the Great Depression — and to alter the very fabric of the U.S. capitalistic system.

The 1932 Democratic platform, largely written by the party’s 1924 nominee, John W. Davis, was a clear statement of conservative, Jeffersonian principles, but FDR abandoned this platform during his first hundred days in office. So radical were the changes that by 1935, conservatives — Democrats and Republicans alike — agreed with Davis when he wrote, “If the structure of this Government is to be preserved, the courts must do it.”

As conservatives looked in desperation to the judiciary for relief, Davis was their logical leader. A highly esteemed former solicitor general under President Wilson, former ambassador to Great Britain, former president of the American Bar Association, and senior partner at one of New York’s premier law firms, Davis commanded respect from all quarters of the political and legal spectrum. As a founder of the bipartisan, anti–New Deal Liberty League in 1934, Davis repeatedly wrote to his supporters, “I believe in the Constitution of the United States; I believe in the division of powers that it makes. I believe in the right of private property, the sanctity and binding power of contracts; the duty of self-help. I am opposed to confiscatory taxation, wasteful expenditure, socialized industry, and a planned economy controlled and directed by government functionaries. I believe these things to be inimical to human liberty and destructive of American ideals.”

Sensing the gravity of the crisis, Davis seized every opportunity and expertly wielded every legal weapon at his disposal to thwart the New Deal. Publicly labeling the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) “a bribe to farmers,” he signed the amicus curiaebrief and successfully led the fight that ultimately resulted in the court’s 6–3 ruling that the AAA was unconstitutional. He successfully opposed the Public Utility Holding Act in the lower courts and led the fight against it within the American Bar Association. Davis personally argued the unconstitutionality of the Frazier-Lemke Bankruptcy Act and the National Labor Relations (Wagner) Act before the Supreme Court.

When Roosevelt responded to these courtroom defeats by setting forth his infamous court-packing scheme in 1937, it was Davis who advised the New Deal’s congressional opponents in defeating the measure. By the late 1930s, he had earned the New Dealers’ enduring enmity, and he wore with pride their sobriquet, “Public Enemy Number One.”

During the course of these battles, Davis repeatedly warned that “paternalism fastens its grasp upon the country, and, little by little, the practice of local self-government fades away. Baptize a scheme, even the most fantastic, with a high-sounding and attractive title, and it will elicit the public support.” Of the failure to limit government, he admonished, “Nothing but mischief, to my way of thinking, can come from any government attempting tasks which lie beyond its power to accomplish.” Ever clear about the indivisibility of property rights from human rights, Davis contended, “The two are not antagonistic. History furnishes no instance where the right of man to acquire and hold property has been taken away without the complete destruction of liberty in all its forms.”

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As the implementation of Obamacare rolls into high gear, we’ve been given insight into how it will be implemented in general. On January 20, the Department of Health and Human Services announced that it would not exempt health plans provided by non-profit religious employers from the requirement to provide “contraceptive services.”

… Today the department is announcing that the final rule on preventive health services will ensure that women with health insurance coverage will have access to the full range of the Institute of Medicine’s recommended preventive services, including all FDA -approved forms of contraception. Women will not have to forego these services because of expensive co-pays or deductibles, or because an insurance plan doesn’t include contraceptive services.

The cateory of “all FDA-approved forms of contraception” includes the abortifacients like the “morning after pill.” At the same time I couldn’t help but note that the group of health plans provided by “non-profit religious employers” who do not support contraception winnows the field down rather quickly to those provided by either the Catholic Church or one of its social service or medical subsidiaries.

The best is yet to come.

By way of full disclosure, I’m Roman Catholic. I’m a convert who became Catholic with eyes wide open rather than a “cradle Catholic” who was born into the religion. As such I’ve never ceased to be amazed at the antics of many of our Church leadership. I write it off to equal parts cognitive dissonance and a pathological desire to be popular.

The Democrat party has been anti-Catholic in its political positions since George McGovern ran for president yet the priesthood and heirarchy of the Roman Catholic Church in America tend to hail from Democrat constituencies. So on the one hand the Magesterium is teaching very traditional social values while on the other it is embracing without even a hint of credulity every lefty scheme that comes down the pike.

For instance, in 1983, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops declared nuclear weapons to be immoral and weren’t terribly fond of deterrence either. By 1988 they had decided SDI was destabliizing as was the US linking a Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan to future arms treaties. When communist terrorists were trying to create a people’s paradise in El Salvador, many of our bishops ignored what was happening to personal libery under the Sandinistas in Nicaragua as they stumbled over themselves to create the “sanctuary movment”. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanctuary_movement

Without putting too fine a point on it but there was no daylight between the position of the Magesterium and that of the Kremlin on these issues.

Not that they are all commies or anything. But there were MOVEMENTS out there that had freakin Pete Seeger singing protest songs and James Earl Jones and Ed Asner at their rallies. How could you not be in favor of these things?

Similar stampedes took place on global warming and immigration.

This is where the cognitive dissonance comes in. When given the choice between seeming to endorse a religious conservative for office and seeming to endorse a heterodox leftist there is no limit to the contortions a large share of our bishops won’t put themselves through to help the lefty. To wit: by the black letter of the Catechism of the Catholic Church supporting abortion is forbidden. If a public figure does so this failure is compounded by “scandal”, that is, an action that could cause others to question their faith. The fact that there are very few bishops in the nation who have taken steps to discipline pro-abort advocates and politicians especially when they proclaim themselves to be devout.

The second strain is the want to be liked. For most of American history, Catholics were THE OTHER. It was a foreign religion practiced by all manner of foreigners who either couldn’t speak English (Italians, Poles, etc.) or who could barely speak it (the Irish, it goes without saying). What other religion still has amendments to state constitutions directly aimed at its religious schools?

Just when things were going well with JFK (another devout Catholic) in the White House, he gets killed and the whole counter culture begins. If there was anything less cool in the 1960s than being in ROTC it was being a Catholic who believed in monogamy and abstinence until marriage not to mention avowing any religion that did not use mind altering drugs. Being cool is still important and despite his views on abortion Obama, that epitome of coolness, was invited to give a commencement address at a Catholic university.

This mindset was most egregiously on display during the 2008 election. The Catholic heirarchy — and I have to digress here for a moment to emphasize that we have many traditional bishops in this country who have fought the good fight for decades — wanted to catch the Hope-and-Change wave and had a problem: Barrack Obama loves him some abortion. Not just plain vanilla abortion. He is in favor of partial birth aboriton. He is in favor of killing a kid who happens to survive the abortion procedure.

Demonstrating again a contortionist skill that would gain them employment at any county fair in the country the bishops issued a document called “Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship.”

As first blush it looks like a strong statement in favor of life which would not have helped Obama, or any other elected Democrat for that matter, until one reads deeper.

34. Catholics often face dificult choices about how to vote. This is why it is so important to vote according to a well-formed conscience that perceives the proper relationship among moral goods. A Catholic cannot vote for a candidate who takes a position in favor of an intrinsic evil, such as abortion or racism, if the voter’s intent is to support that position. In such cases a Catholic would be guilty of formal cooperation in grave evil. At the same time, a voter should not use a candidate’s opposition to an intrinsic evil to justify indifference or inattentiveness to other important moral issues involving human life and dignity.

35. There may be times when a Catholic who rejects a candidate’s unacceptable position may decide to vote for that candidate for other morally grave reasons. Voting in this way would be permissible only for truly grave moral reasons, not to advance narrow interests or partisan preferences or to ignore a fundamental moral evil.

In other words if you feel like the opposition to the war in Iraq or midnight basketball or furthering the ends of labor unions or any other pet peeve are “morally grave reasons” you can vote for the pro-abort. And they got what they wanted: American Catholics gave a majority of their votes to Obama.

Then came Obamacare which gave the bishops a real taste of what happens when you create a moral equivalence between universal health care and abortion. You get them both.

As reported in the Wall Street Journal, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops was heartbroken and gobsmacked, or gobsmacked and heartbroken, when they got the bad news about the elimination of an exemption for religious conscience in health plans.

President Obama telephoned Archbishop Dolan on Friday morning to tell him of the decision, said a spokeswoman for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. The pair had discussed the issue during a November meeting, during which the archbishop “got the message that they could work together,” said the spokeswoman, Sister Mary Ann Walsh.

The issue was likely to form the “backdrop to future relations,” she said. “It’s too big to ignore… the elephant is tramping around in the sanctuary.”

An administration official on Tuesday confirmed the call was made on Friday and reiterated comments made by Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius that the administration is committed to its partnerships with faith-based groups.

Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D., Conn.), a Catholic who supports abortion rights and access to contraception, said she thought the White House had handled the decision “very well” by being open to listening to religious leaders. “Contraception is about preventing unintended pregnancy,” she said. “I think that they did what they needed to do.”

So up until November Archbishop Dolan was being led to believe that he and the Obama Administration could work together and there would be a conscience exemption in the health care reform regulations and then he gets a call telling him that he’s been played for a chump.

It is really difficult to understate the cultural significance of this decision. If Congress doesn’t intervene and we end up with a pro-abort in the White House, which seems virtually certain regardless of how Obama fares in November, it is hard to see how this precedent will not be applied first to euthanasia, which seems to be the next big thing, and then to abortion. If left as it is, it really marks the end of independent churches in the United States.

The decision even managed to concern the Washington Post’s E. J. Dionne, another of the “smells and bells” Catholics on the left, or Catholycs as my friend Tom Crowe terms them, whose collective ass gets tired when confronted with the whole issue of morality.

One of Barack Obama’s great attractions as a presidential candidate was his sensitivity to the feelings and intellectual concerns of religious believers. That is why it is so remarkable that he utterly botched the admittedly difficult question of how contraceptive services should be treated under the new health care law.

His administration mishandled this decision not once but twice. In the process, Obama threw his progressive Catholic allies under the bus and strengthened the hand of those inside the Church who had originally sought to derail the health care law.

Reading all of this I was reminded of one of my favorite jokes, involving a guy in a bar and leprechaun. I won’t retell it here because this is a family website but I will link to one of the many variations here.

And I’d like to ask Archbishop Dolan and a lot of other members of our heirarchy, “You’re how old? And you still believe in leprechauns?”

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When Pliny the Younger was a provincial governor in the Roman Empire, he wrote a letter to Emperor Trajan asking whether he should execute Christians who refused to burn incense in worship of the emperor. Pliny, in keeping with the customs of the empire, did not care about forcing Christians to believe that the emperor was a god. But in public they had to behave as if they did. Thus, the Christians were in the dock not so much because of their faith in a risen Christ as over their willful refusal to declare themselves part of the reigning social order.

I thought of Pliny when I read that the Obama administration, in creating specific rules to implement Obamacare, will require all employers (with a very narrow exemption discussed below) to offer their employees health insurance that provides FDA-approved contraception, female sterilization, and other “reproductive” services free of charge — even if the employer is a religious organization and doing so violates its doctrine. I also recalled the times that President Obama and other members of his administration have supported “freedom of worship.” However, as in Pliny’s time, “freedom of worship” is not the same thing as “freedom of religion.” The former means that one may believe whatever one wants and worship privately without interference, whereas the latter allows one freedom to live in the world at large consistent with one’s faith tenets, even if they are not endorsed by the state.

Because the administration is knowingly forcing (primarily Catholic) religious organizations to pay for medical services to which they are theologically opposed, the new rules represent a frontal assault on freedom of religion at an institutional level. This is no small matter. To date, public controversies over “conscience” in health care have mostly involved individuals — e.g., doctors, nurses, pharmacists — whose personal morality or religious convictions conflicted with the provision of certain medical procedures or substances. For example, pharmacies in Washington State and Illinois have litigated over the right of owners to refuse to dispense contraception on religious grounds. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against the pharmacies and in favor of a state regulation (since withdrawn for reconsideration) requiring them to dispense legally prescribed medications. An Illinois state court took the opposite view in a similar case.

But the free-birth-control rule goes much further than creating a potential conflict between the general law and individual religious beliefs. Rather, the rule targets the right of religious organizations to conduct their public activities consistently with their religious dogma and moral values — except within the narrow confines of an actual church, synagogue, mosque, temple, or monastery.

This isn’t an accident. The preliminary rule, which will remain unchanged in the final version, created a very narrowly tailored religious exemption (page 46,623 of the Federal Register). To qualify for exemption as a “religious employer,” an organization must meet four criteria:

1. The “inculcation of religious values” is “its purpose.”

2. It “primarily employs persons who share its religious tenets.”

3. “It primarily serves persons who share its religious tenets.”

4. It is a non-profit organization under sections of the code that “refer to churches, their integrated auxiliaries, and conventions or associations, as well as to the exclusively religious activities of any religious order.”

Lest there be any doubt of the limited nature of the exemption, the proposed rule states, “Specifically, the Departments seek to provide for a religious accommodation that respects the unique relationship between a house of worship and its employees in ministerial positions.”

Thus, the group health insurance covering nuns in a Catholic religious order would probably not have to cover contraception. But insurance provided by the same order’s elementary school probably would. Ditto a hospital established by the nuns.

Even more telling: Despite much screaming from opponents, the Department of Health and Human Services has refused to broaden the religious exemption in the final rule — forcing religiously founded organizations to violate their parent church’s teachings, a frontal assault on the freedom of faiths to operate institutional outreach organizations consistent with their beliefs. If this rule stands, it won’t end there. If Catholic organizations can be compelled by federal diktat to violate their religious tenets, so can other religious organizations in different contexts.

Some have argued that a recent 9–0 Supreme Court ruling allowing a Lutheran church to fire a minister who in a secular organization would have been protected by the Americans with Disabilities Act provides shelter against the free-birth-control rule. I think not. That case was not about “freedom of religion,” as I have defined it here, but “freedom of worship” — the Court ruled that churches are free to decide on the criteria for appointing and releasing their own ministers and individual leaders without interference. But the free-birth-control rule isn’t about the “ministerial exception.” Rather, it imposes a legal duty on faith organizations to comply with the values of the state whenever they engage in public action or charitable enterprise among the general society.

In fact, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius declared that the Obama administration intends not only to force churches to do what the state directs, but even to speak as the state directs. From Sebelius’s official statement about the promulgation of the new rule:

We intend to require employers that do not offer coverage of contraceptive services to provide notice to employees, which will also state that contraceptive services are available at sites such as community health centers, public clinics, and hospitals with income-based support.

Thus, the Obama administration is attacking even freedom of worship by forcing exempt organizations to tell their employees where and how they can violate church teaching.

The birth-control rule is the latest and most egregious example of government forcing religious organizations to conform their operations to reigning secular moral values. In this sense, faith organizations are being compelled to participate in a metaphorical Caesar worship. As in the Roman Empire, the government will allow religious organizations general freedom of worship, but, increasingly, not freedom of religion. Pliny would approve.

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Mitch McConnell wanted you to know he was livid on Thursday. The Senate was about to Greece the wheels for adding yet another trillion and change to President Obama’s yet-again tapped-out credit card. “More spending, more debt,” brayed the minority leader. “That’s what we’ve gotten from this administration.” Well, no, Senator, that’s what we’ve gotten from you.

Yes, I know, Obama is the one driving us off the cliff. But as McConnell and his fellow Republicans are well aware, he couldn’t have filled his tank without them — and they are the guys who got us halfway up the summit before handing the president the car keys. No one is falling for this week’s debt-increase “disapproval” charade, the stage for which was set by last summer’s sleight-of-hand, when Republicans agreed to borrow another $2.4 trillion. As if to prove that Obama has not cornered the market on cynicism, the GOP apparently feels the need to insult your intelligence while it helps our latter-day Robin Hood take from the unborn to give to the insatiable.

For the record, it was Republicans who nearly doubled the national debt during the Bush years — increasing it by almost $5 trillion. Some context: It had taken the nation over 200 years to accumulate roughly the same amount of debt rung up from 2001 through 2008 — a time during most of which, besides holding the White House, Republicans held the Senate (with McConnell in the leadership, first as whip and later as leader) and the House (with now-speaker John Boehner in the leadership, first as a committee chairman, then as leader).

Of course, for the Left, enough is never enough. So when Obama took over, he made the GOP look positively stingy — running up more debt in half the time, with perennial trillion-dollar deficits projected as far as the eye can see. With debt rising about $4 billion per day and each citizen’s share nearing $50,000, frightened voters opted to give Republicans a second chance, electing them in historic numbers in the 2010 midterms. This was not because they suddenly loved Republicans. They didn’t — and don’t. It was because the GOP was the only available alternative. And it was because leaders such as McConnell and Boehner, affecting a chastened pose, promised that if given the opportunity, they’d slam on the brakes.

Last summer, they had their big chance: Debt hit $14.3 trillion, the statutory ceiling — “ceiling” being Washingtonese for the point at which the money we’ve borrowed to pay the interest on prior loans for ever-expanding government spending no longer covers the tab because of the added interest on the new loans, necessitating more loans, resulting in more interest, triggering more — well, you get the idea. Now in control of the House and with near parity in the Senate, Republicans were in a position to stop the madness: to decline to authorize more borrowing and thus force spending cuts.

Instead, they did what they always do: They caved. They shriveled in the heat of Obamedia scaremongering about a purportedly imminent sovereign-debt default that would shred the full faith and credit of the United States. It was bogus. As McConnell and Boehner knew, the debt ceiling was scraped only because the total government spending they annually authorize now outstrips revenues by well over a trillion dollars. There was no credible threat of default because revenues remain vastly higher than what it costs to service the government’s bonds. The real threat — the threat too terrible to contemplate — was that our elected representatives might be forced to make hard, accountable decisions about what spending would need to be cut in order to live within their $14.3 trillion limit (i.e., a ceiling about three times as high as what Leviathan cost us in the mid-Nineties, when President Clinton pronounced the era of Big Government over).

So rather than confess that they had no stomach for the fight, McConnell and Boehner settled on two coats of camouflage. The first involved orchestrating the farce we’ve just witnessed: Republicans contrived a byzantine process that enabled them to raise the debt ceiling but dole the new trillions out in installments. As the installments came due, Republicans would pretend to vote against them . . . and hope you didn’t notice that we were talking about installments only because Congress had already voted in favor of the whole debt enchilada.

The second coat is just as disingenuous as the first. With an assist from compliant conservative pundits — who somehow always find a way to rationalize runaway Republican spending for a new entitlement here, a financial-sector bailout there, and a global sharia-democracy enterprise for good measure — GOP congressional leaders treated us to the dolorous refrain that they “control one-half of one-third of the government,” so what could you really expect them to do?

Does that pass your laugh test? Does the Supreme Court’s bloc of reliably progressive jurists ever come to the Left and say, “Gee, we’d love to help you out — maybe create constitutional rights to abortion, to protect murderers against the death penalty, to invent special rights for homosexuals, to curb free speech in election campaigns, to invite terrorist war prisoners to challenge their detention in civilian courts, all those things on your wish list. But as luck has it, we control only one-half of one-third of the government. It just wouldn’t be right to use our power that way”?

I don’t recall our commentariat’s complaining that President Bush controlled only one-third of the government when he decided — against deep congressional and public opposition — to order the surge. I seem to remember the argument being that without the surge, al-Qaeda would achieve a catastrophic triumph in Iraq, and that when the stakes for the nation are that high, elected leaders are obligated to use the power the Constitution gives them to advance the national interest — even if doing so is unpopular, brings down the wrath of the left-wing press, and risks an electoral rout.

The bunkum about controlling only a minority slice of the government is embarrassing. Divided government is not rule by a majority of government officials. Our Constitution’s separation of powers makes different components of government supreme in different areas. The judiciary gets to resolve legal controversies regardless of what the other two branches think. President Obama is convinced he needn’t even consult Congress, much less get authorization, before starting a war in Libya or sending troops to fight in Uganda. Either party in the Senate can reject a perfectly qualified judicial or cabinet nominee even though it is only one-half of one-third of the government.

The same Constitution that gives the judiciary, the commander-in-chief, and the Senate these powers directs that the House of Representatives — the body closest and most responsive to the public — is supreme when it comes to raising revenue. It prescribes, moreover, that money cannot be borrowed on the credit of the United States unless Congress authorizes it. President Obama can demagogue all he likes, but he can’t borrow a dime.

This has nothing to with holding a minority share of the pie; it has to do with holding the share that has primary power over the subject at hand. When it comes to the subjects of borrowing and spending the United States into oblivion, primary power belongs to the Republican-controlled House and to the Senate whose parliamentary procedures ensure that nothing can happen unless 40 Republicans give their assent.

Unbelievably, the United States now has a banana-republic-esque debt-to-GDP ratio of over 100 percent — we’ve borrowed more money than our gigantic economy produces annually. Obama has led us to the edge of the abyss, but Republicans had the wherewithal to stop him. The public’s desperation to stop him was its sole basis for electing them. Republicans know that, yet they couldn’t bring themselves to do the job — and they put a lot more energy into making believe than making the fight.

The debt is America’s existential crisis. For a dozen years, Republicans have been more its cause than its solution. In 2010, they were given a new lease on life based on their assurances that they had changed. But nothing has changed. So remind me what we need them for?

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You would think that with one of the weakest economic recoveries on record, President Obama would be desperately searching for ways to promote economic growth. It is, after all, an election year. Most pundit and pollsters agree that it’s the economy stupid.

But instead, Obama used his State of the Union speech to rail on about fairness, inequality, and redistribution. The Obama strategy is simple: Tax the rich because they don’t pay enough.

The problem is, they do pay enough. According to the Tax Foundation, Americans making $1 million or more pay a 25 percent average tax rate. People in the $50,000 to $100,000 income category — call it the middle class — pay 7 to 8 percent.

But no, Obama’s one big idea in his Tuesday-night speech was a 30 percent minimum tax on millionaires. This, by the way, is really a hike in the capital-gains tax. And this Obama penalty is aimed squarely at his likely election opponent, Mitt Romney. Talk about taxing success. Talk about taxing growth.

The capital-gains tax is the single most important economy-wide tax on wealth, risk-taking, and investment. It’s a tax on seed corn. What a brilliant idea, Mr. President.

I remember the late Jack Kemp always saying you can’t have successful capitalism without capital. But that wasn’t in the president’s State of the Union.

It’s not as though the economy is prepared to a take another tax hit. The fourth-quarter GDP report adjusted for inflation came in at a mediocre 2.8 percent. Wall Street promptly sold off on the news.

And we’re now ten quarters into the tepid Obama recovery, with its average quarterly growth rate of 2.4 percent annually.

Deep recessions are supposed to breed strong snap-back recoveries. But it’s not happening — even after an $800 billion government-spending package, a $2 trillion Federal Reserve balance-sheet expansion, a zero Fed interest rate (for three years and counting), and a whole bunch of temporary targeted tax cuts.

It’s the whole Keynesian bag of tricks, but it’s still a very subpar recovery.

Way back when, Ronald Reagan used the supply-side model, and rejected big-government Keynesianism. He permanently lowered marginal tax rates, deregulated the economy, went to a strong King Dollar that collapsed oil and gold prices, and limited domestic spending (as a share of GDP). After ten quarters of recovery, the Reagan growth rate was 6 percent.

Compare that to Obama’s 2.4 percent. Or compare Obama’s 2.4 percent to the 4.6 percent post-WWII average recovery rate after ten quarters. The average is twice as good as Obama. But Obama is only roughly a third of Reagan. That tells you something.

On top of all this, under current-law Obama policy, the vitally important capital-gains tax is going up, even without the millionaire’s minimum. Next year, the capital-gains tax will revert to 20 percent from today’s 15 percent. Then Obamacare will raise investment tax rates by 4 percent, bringing us up to 24 percent. That equals an 11 percent rollback of wealth and growth incentives.

But that’s not all, since the capital-gains tax is paid on top of the 35 percent corporate tax. So under Obama, a 24 percent cap-gains tax is really a 51 percent tax rate on capital.

As Mitt Romney found out, even today’s 15 percent cap-gains tax is really a 45 percent double tax on top of the corporate levy. But there’s a better way here: Slash the corporate tax rate, and leave the cap-gains rate alone until full-fledged tax reform can take place.

In other words, increase incentives to grow and invest. Make it pay more after tax to invest and take risks. That’s a growth prescription, the exact opposite of Obama’s redistributionism.

Why is it fair or equal to create a lower tide that pulls down all boats?

I interviewed Mitt Romney on CNBC this week, and it’s clear that he gets this. And as he aggressively argued in the Jacksonville, Fla., debate, he is proud of his success and doesn’t want to give it back to the tax man.

More important, Team Romney is cooking up a stronger tax-reform plan. Romney intends to broaden the base by getting rid of deductions, exemptions, and loopholes, and then bring down the rates. I asked him if the plan would be ready during the primary season. He said yes.

There is a growing consensus around the country for full-fledged reform of the personal and corporate tax codes. People yearn for simplicity, competitiveness, and new incentives. Obama’s great mistake in the State of the Union was his low-ball vision of class warfare and redistribution when the country wants growth measures.

This November we’ll see a great debate between a big-government entitlement society that emphasizes fairness and a smaller-government growth society based on free-market capitalism. Pro-growth tax reform is essential to this debate.

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By: Susan Jones

(CNSNews.com) – Witnesses told a House panel on Wednesday that the Obama administration’s definition of a “religious employer” under Obamacare must change immediately, or else Catholic and other

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Liberals had a dim view of Herman Cain’s character long
before this week. They automatically ascribed bad motives to him
and to his GOP supporters. His political views couldn’t possibly be
sincere, they pronounced. He is clearly pandering to racists.
Democratic strategist Karen Finney summed this attitude up by
saying: “One of the things about Herman Cain is, I think that he
makes that white Republican base of the party feel okay, feel like
they are not racist because they can like this guy. I think he is
giving that base a free pass. And I think they like him because
they think he’s a black man who knows his place.”

This is a rich charge, given that putting black
conservatives in their place is one of the chief preoccupations of
liberals. Holding black conservatives to a higher standard than
others in public life is a form of discrimination liberals have
perfected. They consider it very enlightened to ridicule black
conservatives, call them vicious names, even wish for their speedy
death. “I hope his wife feeds him lots of eggs and butter and he
dies early like many black men do of heart disease,” pundit
Julianne Malveaux said about Clarence Thomas in the 1990s. “He is
an absolutely reprehensible person.” Liberals didn’t expel Malveaux
from polite society for this comment that might have even given
David Duke pause. Instead, they feted her in academia. These days
she is a college president at Bennett.

Regulating the blackness of black conservatives is the
divine right of liberals. And so almost anything Cain says or does
is fair game. A white liberal like MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell
feels so empowered by this divine right that he can question the
quality of Cain’s participation in the Civil Rights movement. Why,
he badgered Cain a few weeks back, didn’t you do more to promote
Civil Rights?

The exceedingly smug O’Donnell, however, couldn’t quite
bring himself to demean Cain as “minstrelsy” and musical.
For that task, he needed a black liberal and found one this week in
the single-name fraud Touré, a peddler of quasi-intellectual mumbo
jumbo and cheap shots that he regards as cutting-edge cultural
criticism. Using the pretentious patter of a Henry Louis
Gates, Touré unburdened himself of the deep

insight that “I think that Cain, interestingly, does not exist
without Obama preceding him.” Mortified by having to live under a
smart black man like Obama, conservatives needed to “right the
scales” with the elevation of a “lightweight” like Cain, said
Touré.

Unable to contain his brilliance, Touré continued that
there “is this constant minstrelsy aspect that he keeps bringing
up. This is not something that we’re just making up out of whole
cloth. He is the one who says he wants the Secret Service to call
him Corn Bread. He is the one who says things like ‘oh, shucky
ducky’ when he starts. This is deep black slang that he is using,
that we have not seen on a national public stage before.” This
sounds like a potential doctoral dissertation for Touré under Henry
Gates — the troubling implications of “shucky ducky” in American
politics.

Cain isn’t the first black man to run for the GOP
nomination, though one might think so listening to this nonsense.
In 2000, the Plato-quoting Alan Keyes ran for the GOP nomination.
Where does he fit into Touré’s analysis? Toure didn’t mention him
in his list of “serious intellectuals” who have run for president
even as he numbered Colin Powell, who didn’t run for president, as
one of them: “…Colin Powell, Jesse Jackson, Barack Obama, the
blacks who are running for president have presented themselves as
serious intellectuals…” Notice, by the way, that
he includes Jesse Jackson on the list. Apparently Cain
lacks the dignity, thoughtfulness, and moral probity of that former
aspirant.

Black conservatives just can’t win. Whether they are
“entertainers” like Cain or philosophers like Keyes, they are
marked down as “wacky,” as Maureen Dowd
described the two this week.

The left’s excitement over the sex harassment charges
dogging Cain can’t be explained by moral philosophy, unless
liberals plan to recant eight years of Clintonian apologetics. The
same people who still whine about the “prurient” Ken Starr are now
clamoring for the release of confidential files from twelve years
back. The less actual sex involved in a scandal, the more
interested liberals become in it, particularly if it taints a
conservative and even better if it taints a black one. Clinton’s
cavortings, fumblings, and passes in the Oval Office itself didn’t
interest them. Those were a “private matter.” But the Cain charges
have the potential to be disqualifying, they say.

Even if one were to put the worst possible construction on
the charges, they would constitute a relatively moral day for
Clinton. Nevertheless, Clinton’s boosters eagerly await the
appearance of Cain’s accusers. They want their Anita Hill. They say
that Cain is besmirching the good names of these women even though
the public doesn’t know their names yet. The press is working hard
to correct this injustice so that the names can be known and
properly besmirched.

Perhaps Cain is lying and he did speak improperly to these
women, though that would still fall well short of the Clinton
standard. Remember, “competence” alone qualifies one for the
presidency; crummy character doesn’t matter. Also, Clinton taught
the nation that “lying ” about sex and alleged sexual harassment
(Paula Jones) is no big deal. The press knew Clinton sexually
harassed his way through Arkansas and didn’t care. A few female
reporters, so grateful to him for protecting their right to
abortion, indicated they wished to be harassed too.

Cain enjoys no such ideological immunity. He is an odious
black conservative who threatens the left’s monopolistic hold on
blacks. Also, he is some kind of pro-lifer, which means he is
anti-woman from the start. Political figures are to be judged by
the content of their ideology, decrees the left. The seriousness of
a charge is determined by the rightness of a public figure’s
political views. A Ted Kennedy was entitled to a mulligan or two
after an unwelcome advance since he had done so much to help women
already.

Not so with Cain. The left can’t rest until black
conservatives are put in their place.

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At the Heritage Foundation last week, House Budget Committee
Chairman Paul Ryan demonstrated why he doesn’t need to be running
for President to be framing the debate for 2012. He delivered there
on October 26 a breathtakingly beautiful speech on Saving the
American Idea, which defines the Spirit of 2012.

He began, “The mission of the Heritage Foundation is to
promote the principles of free enterprise, limited government,
individual freedom, traditional American values, and a strong
national defense. These are the principles that define the American
idea. And this mission has never been timelier, because these
principles are very much under threat from policies here in
Washington.”

Ryan, a disciple of and former staffer for the late Jack
Kemp, then explained, “What makes America exceptional — what gives
life to the American Idea — is our dedication to the self-evident
truth that we are all created equal, giving us equal rights to
life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And that means
opportunity.”

Since the early 1700s, America has been the land of
opportunity, offering world leading prosperity, stemming from world
leading freedom. And millions and millions of the dispossessed, the
homeless tempest tossed, and their progeny now totaling hundreds of
millions altogether, have voted for that American Dream with their
feet, crossing oceans, deserts, rivers, and mountain ranges to get
here. As I discuss in my recent book, America’s Ticking
Bankruptcy Bomb:

Which leaves the question, why did they come? And why do they
still come?…. Well, it’s not for the Food Stamps, or the public
housing, or even Social Security and Medicare. America’s world
leading prosperity dates all the way back to the early
18th century. The roots of that prosperity can be seen in the
Declaration of Independence, which recognizes the God-given right
of each man and woman to the pursuit of happiness. That is why
they came. They came because America has always been the land of
freedom and prosperity and opportunity. They came because of the
American Dream, that in this nation every man and woman enjoys the
freedom and opportunity to rise to achieve their dreams, regardless
of family background, class, race, or religion.

Ryan frames the question now facing us in 2012: “Have
those periods of unprecedented prosperity in America’s past been
the product of our Founding principles? Or, as some would argue,
have we made it this far only in spite of our outdated values? Are
we still an exceptional nation? Should we even seek to be unique?
Or should we become more like the rest of the world — more
bureaucratic, less hopeful, and less free?”

Or as I write in my book regarding America’s heritage of
world leading prosperity:

Is that over now? Is America just another nation now, like
Greece, as President Obama has suggested? In fact, just like
Greece? Is the American Dream done? Is that what is meant by the
“New Normal”? Or is that just a phrase to provide political cover
for the realities of a new socialism, where everyone as Churchill
explained shares equally in the curses of misery, rather than
unequally in the blessings of capitalism?

Ryan then discussed at Heritage how Obama is answering these
questions for 2012:

To my great disappointment, it appears that the politics of
division are making a big comeback. Many Americans share my
disappointment — especially those who were filled with great hope
a few years ago, when then Senator Obama announced his
candidacy….Do you remember what he said? He said that what’s
stopped us from meeting our greatest challenges is, “the failure of
leadership, the smallness of our politics — the ease with which we
are distracted by the petty and the trivial, our chronic avoidance
of tough decisions, our preference for scoring cheap political
points instead of rolling up our sleeves and building a working
consensus to tackle big problems.

Imagine if Obama had been true to his political rhetoric
from 2008. Suppose he had been true to his promise that his
economic program would involve a “net spending cut,” several
trillion dollars of wasted unnecessary spending ago. Suppose he had
truly been a non-partisan President working with both parties to
enact a truly effective economic recovery program, like Reagan,
lifting up the poorest of Americans with booming economic
prosperity. Suppose like Ryan, Obama had adopted the inclusive,
pro-growth, prosperity vision of Jack Kemp.

Contrary to the abusive rhetoric of left-wing-extremist
know nothings in media and entertainment, some of them literally
clowns, Obama would be so universally beloved that we would be
clearing space for him on Mt. Rushmore right now. Instead Obama
played us with rhetoric promising prosperity and recovery, when all
along he planned to deliver dependency on his political machine
instead.

Ryan explained his disappointment with Obama in
devastating detail:

Nearly three years into his presidency, look at where we
are now:

Petty and trivial? Just last week, the President told a
crowd in North Carolina that Republicans are in favor of quote
‘dirtier air, dirtier water, and less people with health
insurance.’ Can you think of a pettier way to describe sincere
disagreements between the two parties on regulation and health
care?

Chronic avoidance of tough decisions? The President still
has not put forward a credible plan to tackle the threat of
ever-rising spending and debt, and it’s been over 900 days since
his party passed a budget in the Senate.

A preference for scoring cheap political points instead of
consensus-building? This is the same President who is currently
campaigning against a do-nothing Congress, when in fact, the House
of Representatives has passed over a dozen bills to help get the
economy moving and deal with the debt, only to see the President’s
party kill those bills in the do-nothing Senate.

Note that you never saw President Reagan attacking his opponents
this way. He engineered a truly revolutionary rollback of decades
of runaway liberalism on a bipartisan basis with the House of
Representatives controlled by liberal Democrat majorities for his
entire Presidency.

Obama is so divorced from the reality of America and his
own policies, that he calls essential relief from the regulatory
tsunami he has unleashed on America being for “dirtier air, dirtier
water, and fewer Americans with health insurance.” Do you see yet
why booming economic recovery is now two years overdue, and nowhere
in sight?

The President, indeed, is now denouncing what he calls
“the Republican Congress.” Maybe it is true his Democrat base is so
out of the loop they don’t know that the Democrats have continued
to control the U.S. Senate for going on six years now. But the
President is going to be sorely schooled on Election Day to find
that the great majority of the American people are, in fact, not
that stupid, and cannot be so easily misled by rhetoric that is so
dishonest that it can only be described as dishonorable.

Ryan noted that the House already not only proposed but
passed a 2012 budget this year that would have put the budget on a
path to balance and the economy on the path to prosperity. “But
instead of working together where we agree, the President has opted
for divisive rhetoric and the broken politics of the past. He is
going from town to town, impugning the motives of Republicans,
setting up straw men and scapegoats, and engaging in intellectually
lazy arguments, as he tries to build support for punitive tax hikes
on job creators.”

Exhibit A: between Republicans and moderate Democrats,
there are strong majorities in both houses of Congress for
individual and corporate tax reform exactly as proposed in Ryan’s
House budget. That involves a top 25 percent income tax rate for
families earning over $100,000 a year, with a 10 percent rate below
that, and generous personal exemptions of $10,000 per family
member. And it involves an internationally competitive corporate
tax rate of 25 percent, closer to the rates in Communist China, the
European Union and our neighbor to the north, Canada. These
policies would provide the tax framework for booming economic
growth.

But Obama has done nothing to work on that, even though
his own Simpson-Bowles Commission proposed quite similar reforms.
That Commission was another sham for Obama to pose as a deficit and
spending cutter, when his intentions all along have been just the
opposite. That was yet another example of what I have called
Obama’s calculated deception, taking advantage of what he is sure a
majority at least doesn’t know and won’t find out.

Instead, “The tax increases proposed by Senate Democrats
and endorsed by the President — when combined with the new taxes
in the health care law, and the President’s other tax preferences
– would push the top federal tax rate to roughly 50 percent in
just 14 months, while doing nothing to promote job creation. This
tax increase on so-called millionaires and billionaires would
actually constitute a huge tax hike on the nation’s most successful
small businesses.”

Ryan finally cuts to the heart of the President’s economic
fallacies in saying:

The President has talked a lot about math lately. He’s been
saying that, ‘If we’re not willing to ask those who’ve done
extraordinarily well to help America close the deficit…the math
says…we’ve got to put the entire burden on the middle class and the
poor.’ This is really a stunning assertion from the President. When
you look at the actual math, you quickly realize that the way out
of this mess is to combine economic growth with reasonable spending
restraint. Yet neither of these things factors into the President’s
zero-sum logic.

Ryan here is actually counterproductively polite. In 2007,
before Obama was even elected President, after nearly 40 years of
Reagan Republican tax policy, the top 1 percent of income earners
paid more in federal income taxes than the bottom 95 percent of
income earners combined. The bottom 40 percent of income
earners as a group on net paid exactly zero percent of federal
income taxes. Yet President Obama is running around the country
telling us that Republicans want to put the entire tax burden on
the middle class and the poor.

This rhetoric is far worse than just wrong, or in error.
It is dishonorable calculated deception. It is so divorced from
reality that no other conclusion can be drawn.

Paul Ryan didn’t say the following, but I will. What
understanding Ryan’s speech reveals is that while Barack Obama was
born in Hawaii half a century ago, he is not culturally an
American. Raised during his formative years in the Indonesian
public schools, where he learned to appreciate the beauty of the
Islamic call to prayer, he was kept isolated from mainstream
America the rest of his life. That is why he doesn’t understand the
meaning and beauty of traditional American prosperity, and has no
clue as to how to restore it.

Worse, his model for political machine domination of
America is based not on restoring prosperity, but on fostering
dependency on government. That is why he is not and never has been
on track to restoring booming economic growth, which on the
historical record of America is now long, long overdue. Rush
Limbaugh has been right all along.

Worse still, traditional American prosperity is actually
morally embarrassing to Obama. These are the reasons why it is not
coming back until he and his co-conspirators are removed from
power.

That alienation you feel is because America is under
foreign occupation right now, by the hopelessly outdated
intellectual forces of Marxism rooted in the Eastern Europe of over
100 years ago. America doesn’t need to be transformed. America
needs to be restored. This is a Paul Revere moment, and every one
of you needs to be deputized to bring the word to everyone you
know, so that 2012 may be the year of the Rebirth of
America.

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Saw a headline that made me smile, I swear: “Obama’s team banks on his ‘regular guy’ appeal.” (Article here.) Our president, regular guy? Where? An Antioch faculty lounge?

Herman Cain was explaining to Fox News why he was facing questions about sexual-harassment charges in the past: “A lot of people have a problem with the fact that I’m doing so well and I’m so likable.”

Keep reading this post . . .

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