SIRC
True Perspectives
-first
2015 session-
Thursday,
March 26
5:00
PM - Plantation Ballroom
The Threat of ISIS and Shaira
Law to State Sovereignity
Featuring
David Bores
A presentation covering the threat of ISIS, the
growing acceptance of various Islamic influences within America, and how both
increasingly threaten our sovereignty.
The presentation covers the historical roots of the Islamic State, its
ideology, and how it has infiltrated its members into the United States.
In
addition, the presentation will address how ISIS has recently influenced
numerous lone wolf attacks against police officers and how it has promoted the
social unrest and violence in Ferguson MO. Further, it will discuss the
brutality of ISIS and offer comment on our current President’s comparison of
their actions to the Crusades.
We know
Mr. Bores, as he has spoken to us before. He has been in public service for
over 45 years, having served most recently as the Chief of Police for the City
of Woodstock. Other experience includes other police work and 23 years in the
US Military.
Please
join your friends and neighbors.
Member/cash bar will be available at 4:45. Come early and mingle. Free
to sustaining members, $5 for SIRC regular members. $10 to others.
For
reservations:
Russ
Peterson
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Why Netanyahu needs to be heard and must talk. (See 1, 1a and 1b below.)A dear fiend and now a fellow memo reader and my last knee surgeon, who also graduated from West Point , sent me " Killing Patton" on tape. I listened to it while I drove to and from Orlando. Though Patton had flaws he was a great general and leader. We need such men now but Obama has done his best to force their retirement so that the leadership of our military has been decimated with those who have experience and have a proven record of leadership. In my humble opinion, this is not an idle move on Obama's part. This is a purposeful attempt at making the military weak and those at the top submissive.
Consequently, Netanyahu is not blind to what Obama and Congress have done to allow our military to be weakened and down sized. Netanyahu's address this Tuesday should be an eye opener for those who care to see. After reading "Killing Patton" it reminded me how unprepared and unwilling America was to get involved in WW2 after our experience in WW1. It also reminded me how Roosevelt and Eisenhower trusted Stalin and allowed Russia to place Eastern Europe under its control and what ensued thereafter.
Weakness will always be taken advantage of by some power hungry leader and/or group and the price paid is always greater than need be. We are on the precipice of another similar situation because of Obama's predilection of favoring Muslim terrorists and giving them the benefit of the doubt when evidence and common sense dictates otherwise. (See 1c, 1d and 1e below.)
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Who defends Israel? (See 2 below.)
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More Obama government usurpation.
Once again a large part of our economy is being subsumed by government intrusion. The Internet has been successful so that is every more reason fro Obama to control it as he has our health system.
Furthermore, Congress, under Republican control, have demonstrated an utter inability to act in the nation's best interest. They are pitiful. (See 3 below.)
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I have been consistent in writing since we cannot depend upon Congress hopefully the Federal Judiciary will save our Union. - King vs Burwell. (See 4 below.)
God help us because we can't depend on them: http://safeshare.tv/w/oHbxeOtsOP
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Dick
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1) Netanyahu is coming to Washington next week because Obama left him no choice
By Caroline B. Glick
It is hard to get your arms around the stubborn determination of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu today. For most of the nine years he has served as Israel’s leader, first from 1996 to 1999 and now since 2009, Netanyahu shied away from confrontations or buckled under pressure. He signed deals with the Palestinians he knew the Palestinians would never uphold in the hopes of winning the support of hostile US administrations and a fair shake from the pathologically hateful Israeli media.
In recent years he released terrorist murderers from prison. He abrogated Jewish property rights in Jerusalem, Judea, and Samaria. He agreed to support the establishment of a Palestinian state west of the Jordan River. He agreed to keep giving the Palestinians of Gaza free electricity while they waged war against Israel. He did all of these things in a bid to accommodate US President Barack Obama and win over the media, while keeping the leftist parties in his coalitions happy.
For his part, for the past six years Obama has undermined Israel’s national security. He has publicly humiliated Netanyahu repeatedly.
He has delegitimized Israel’s very existence, embracing the jihadist lie that Israel’s existence is the product of post-Holocaust European guilt rather than 4,000 years of Jewish history.
He and his representatives have given a backwind to the forces that seek to wage economic warfare against Israel, repeatedly indicating that the application of economic sanctions against Israel – illegal under the World Trade Organization treaty – are a natural response to Israel’s unwillingness to bow to every Palestinian demand. The same goes for the movement to deny the legitimacy of Israel’s very existence. Senior administration officials have threatened that Israel will become illegitimate if it refuses to surrender to Palestinian demands.
Last summer, Obama openly colluded with Hamas’s terrorist war against Israel. He tried to coerce Israel into accepting ceasefire terms that would have amounted to an unconditional surrender to Hamas’s demands for open borders and the free flow of funds to the terrorist group. He enacted a partial arms embargo on Israel in the midst of war. He cut off air traffic to Ben-Gurion International Airport under specious and grossly prejudicial terms in an open act of economic warfare against Israel.
And yet, despite Obama’s scandalous treatment of Israel, Netanyahu has continued to paper over differences in public and thank Obama for the little his has done on Israel’s behalf. He always makes a point of thanking Obama for agreeing to Congress’s demand to continue funding the Iron Dome missile defense system (although Obama has sought repeatedly to slash funding for the project).
Obama’s policies that are hostile to Israel are not limited to his unconditional support for the Palestinians in their campaign against Israel. Obama shocked the entire Israeli defense community when he supported the overthrow of Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, despite Mubarak’s dependability as a US ally in the war on Islamist terrorism, and as the guardian of both Egypt’s peace treaty with Israel and the safety and freedom of maritime traffic in the Suez Canal.
Obama supported Mubarak’s overthrow despite the fact that the only political force in Egypt capable of replacing him was the Muslim Brotherhood, which seeks the destruction of Israel and is the ideological home and spawning ground of jihadist terrorist groups, including al-Qaida and Hamas. Obama then supported the Muslim Brotherhood’s regime even as then-president Mohamed Morsi took concrete steps to transform Egypt into an Islamist, jihadist state and end Egypt’s peace with Israel.
Israelis were united in our opposition to Obama’s behavior. But Netanyahu said nothing publicly in criticism of Obama’s destructive, dangerous policy.
He held his tongue in the hopes of winning Obama over through quiet diplomacy.
He held his tongue, because he believed that the damage Obama was causing Israel was not irreversible in most cases. And it was better to maintain the guise of good relations, in the hopes of actually achieving them, than to expose the fractures in US-Israel ties caused by Obama’s enormous hostility toward Israel and by his strategic myopia that endangered both Israel and the US’s other regional allies.
And yet, today Netanyahu, the serial accommodator, is putting everything on the line. He will not accommodate. He will not be bullied. He will not be threatened, even as all the powers that have grown used to bringing him to his knees – the Obama administration, the American Jewish Left, the Israeli media, and the Labor party grow ever more shrill and threatening in their attacks against him.
As he has made clear in daily statements, Netanyahu is convinced that we have reached a juncture in our relations with the Obama administration where accommodation is no longer possible.
Obama’s one policy that Netanyahu has never acquiesced to either publicly or privately is his policy of accommodating Iran.
Since Obama’s earliest days in office, Netanyahu has warned openly and behind closed doors that Obama’s plan to forge a nuclear deal with Iran is dangerous. And as the years have passed, and the lengths Obama is willing to go to appease Iran’s nuclear ambitions have been left their marks on the region, Netanyahu’s warnings have grown stronger and more urgent.
Netanyahu has been clear since his first tenure in office in the 1990s, that Iran’s nuclear program – as well as its ballistic missile program – constitutes a threat to Israel’s very existence. He has never wavered from his position that Israel cannot accept an Iran armed with nuclear weapons.
Until Obama entered office, and to an ever escalating degree since his reelection in 2012, preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons has been such an obvious imperative among both Israelis and Americans that Netanyahu’s forthright rejection of any nuclear deal in which Iran would be permitted to maintain the components of its nuclear program was uncontroversial. In some Israeli circles, his trenchant opposition to Iran’s acquisition of nuclear capabilities was the object of derision, with critics insisting that he was standing strong on something uncontroversial while buckling on issues like negotiations with the Palestinians, where he should have stood strong.
But now we are seeing that far from being an opportunist, Netanyahu is a leader of historical dimensions. For the past two years, in the interest of reaching a deal, Obama has enabled Iran to take over Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen. For the first time since 1974, due to Obama’s policies, the Golan Heights is an active front in the war against Israel, with Iranian military personnel commanding Syrian and Hezbollah forces along the border.
Iran’s single-minded dedication to its goal of becoming a regional hegemon and its commitment to its ultimate goal of destroying the US is being enabled by Obama’s policies of accommodation. An Iran in possession of a nuclear arsenal is an Iran that can not only destroy Israel with just one or two warheads. It can make it impossible for Israel to respond to conventional aggression carried out by terrorist forces and others operating under an Iranian nuclear umbrella.
Whereas Israel can survive Obama on the Palestinian front by stalling, waiting him out and placating him where possible, and can even survive his support for Hamas by making common cause with the Egyptian military and the government of President Abdel Fattah al-Sissi, the damage Obama’s intended deal with Iran will cause Israel will be irreversible. The moment that Obama grants Iran a path to a nuclear arsenal – and the terms of the agreement that Obama has offered Iran grant Iran an unimpeded path to nuclear power – a future US administration will be hard-pressed to put the genie back in the bottle.
For his efforts to prevent irreparable harm to Israel Netanyahu is being subjected to the most brutal and vicious attacks any Israeli leader has ever been subjected to by an American administration and its political allies. They are being assisted in their efforts by a shameless Israeli opposition that is willing to endanger the future of the country in order to seize political power.
Every day brings another serving of abuse. Wednesday National Security Adviser Susan Rice accused Netanyahu of destroying US relations with Israel. Secretary of State John Kerry effectively called him a serial alarmist, liar, and warmonger.
For its part, the Congressional Black Caucus reportedly intends to sabotage Netanyahu’s address before the joint houses of Congress by walking out in the middle, thus symbolically accusing of racism the leader of the Middle East’s only liberal democracy, and the leader of the most persecuted people in human history.
Radical leftist representatives who happen to be Jewish, like Jan Schakowsky of suburban Chicago and Steve Cohen of Memphis, are joining Netanyahu’s boycotters in order to give the patina of Jewish legitimacy to an administration whose central foreign policy threatens the viability of the Jewish state.
As for Netanyahu’s domestic opponents, their behavior is simply inexcusable. In Israel’s hour of peril, just weeks before Obama intends to conclude his nuclear deal with the mullahs that will endanger Israel’s existence, Labor leader Yitzhak Herzog insists that his primary duty is to defeat Netanyahu.
And as far as Iran is concerned, he acts as a free loader ad a spoiler. Either he believes that Netanyahu will succeed in his mission to derail the deal with or without his support, or he doesn’t care. But Herzog’s rejection of Netanyahu’s entreaties that he join him in Washington next week, and his persistent attacks on Netanyahu for refusing accommodate that which cannot be accommodated shows that he is both an opportunist and utterly unworthy of a leadership role in this country.
Netanyahu is not coming to Washington next Tuesday to warn Congress against Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran, because he seeks a fight with Obama. Netanyahu has devoted the last six years to avoiding a fight with Obama, often at great cost to Israel’s national security and to his own political position.
Netanyahu is coming to Washington next week because Obama has left him no choice. And all decent people of good will should support him, and those who do not, and those who are silent, should be called out for their treachery and cowardice.
1a) Former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin wrote:"I believe the lessons of the Holocaust are these,
First, if an enemy of our people says he seeks to destroy us, believe him. Don’t doubt him for a moment. Don’t make light of it. Do all in your power to deny him the means of carrying out his satanic intent. (Note: one month later, Begin dispatched Israel’s Air Force to destroy the Iraqi nuclear facility at Osirak.)
Second, when a Jew anywhere in the world is threatened or under attack, do all in your power to come to his aid. Never pause to wonder what the world will think or say. The world will never pity slaughtered Jews. The world may not necessarily like the fighting Jew, but the world will have to take account of him.
THIRD, A JEW MUST LEARN TO DEFEND HIMSELF. HE MUST FOREVER BE PREPARED FOR WHENEVER THREAT LOOMS.
Fourth, Jewish dignity and honor must be protected in all circumstances. The seeds of Jewish destruction lie in passively enabling the enemy to humiliate us. Only when the enemy succeeds in turning the spirit of the Jew into dust and ashes in life, can he turn the Jew into dust and ashes in death. During the Holocaust it was after the enemy had humiliated the Jews, trampled them underfoot, divided them, deceived them, afflicted them, drove brother against brother, only then could he lead them, almost without resistance, to the gates of Auschwitz. Therefore, at all times and whatever the cost, safeguard the dignity and honor of the Jewish people.
Fifth, stand united in the face of the enemy. We Jews love life, for life is holy. But there are things in life more precious than life itself. There are times when one must risk life for the sake of rescuing the lives of others. And when the few risk their own lives for the sake of the many, then they, too, stand the chance of saving themselves.
Sixth, there is a pattern to Jewish history. In our long annals as a nation, we rise, we fall, we return, we are exiled, we are enslaved, we rebel, we liberate ourselves, we are oppressed once more, we rebuild, and again we suffer destruction, climaxing in our own lifetime in the calamity of calamities, the Holocaust, followed by the rebirth of the Jewish State.
So, yes, we have come full circle, and with G-d’s help, with the rebirth of sovereign Israel we have finally broken the historic cycle: no more destruction and no more defeats, and no more oppression – only Jewish liberty, with dignity and honor. These, I believe, are the underlying lessons to be learned from the unspeakable tragedy of the Holocaust.”
AND THIS IS WHY P.M. NETANYAHU MUST AND WILL SPEAK TO CONGRESS ON Tuesday!
1b) Speech of the Year
Team Obama turns the Netanyahu address into a global event.
Speeches by foreign leaders to Joint Meetings of Congress are routine events, and often among the more forgettable. So it might have been with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ’s address to Congress next Tuesday. But leave it to the political wizards of the Obama Administration to turn it into the global diplomatic event of the year.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin NetanyahuPHOTO: ASSOCIATED PRESS
From the moment House Speaker John Boehner invited Mr. Netanyahu, the Obama Administration has made its displeasure plain, first accusing the Israeli government of breaching diplomatic protocol and leaning on Congressional Democrats to boycott. Then this week the Administration unleashed a withering personal and political attack that is unprecedented against a close ally. National Security Adviser Susan Rice even said the speech is “destructive of the fabric of the relationship” between Washington and Jerusalem.
That’s some claim against one speech, and it’s worth asking why the Administration has gone to such extraordinary lengths to squelch it. Mr. Netanyahu is expected to make the case against President Obama’s looming nuclear deal with Iran, and perhaps the Administration knows how vulnerable it is to such a critique.
In January the Senate Banking Committee voted 18-4 in favor of the bipartisan Kirk-Menendez bill to impose new sanctions on Iran if negotiations fail, and other Senators are working on a bipartisan bill to ensure that the Senate is able to vote on a final agreement as it has other nuclear arms-control pacts.
The Administration’s tactic seems to be to peel off some of these Democrats by accusing Mr. Netanyahu of injecting partisanship into U.S. politics. But the Prime Minister did nothing more than accept an invitation from a co-equal branch of government, with its own important foreign-policy role. If there is partisanship here, it is from a President whose Iran policy is no longer trusted by much of his own party.
The Administration also seems to think that manufacturing a crisis of relations might defeat Mr. Netanyahu in Israel’s elections next month. A similar crisis between then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir and the George H.W. Bush Administration contributed to Shamir’s defeat in 1992.That tactic may work again, since Israelis are naturally wary of becoming estranged from their most important ally. Then again, Israelis are even more wary of a nuclear Iran, and a recent poll by the Times of Israel found that 72% of Israelis “do not” trust Mr. Obama to ensure that Iran won’t get a bomb. Some 59% of Israelis also hold an unfavorable view of the U.S. President.
This suggests that Mr. Obama’s attempts to interfere in Israeli politics by personalizing his differences with the Prime Minister may backfire. The trashing of Mr. Netanyahu has done nothing but increase public interest in his speech, no matter how many Democrats boycott. Recent polling finds Americans overwhelmingly in favor of giving the Israeli leader a fair hearing in Congress.Assuming Mr. Netanyahu’s argument and rhetoric prove equal to the occasion, Mr. Obama may have done him and his cause a political favor.
1c) Arabs: Why is Obama Siding with Supporters of Terrorism? by Khaled Abu Toameh
Many Arabs and Muslims see the meeting between Obama and Qatar’s al-Thani as a gift to Qatar for its continued support of Islamic radical groups across the Middle East, including Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Lebanon and the Gaza Strip.On the eve of Obama’s meeting, Egyptian sources revealed that Qatar was providing weapons and ammunition to members of the Islamic State in Libya. The sources said that 35 Qatari aircraft were involved in the resupply.Arab political analysts are also concerned about Obama’s ongoing attempts to appease Iran, which continues to expand its presence in Arab countries such as Yemen, Iraq and Lebanon — as well as in Syria, where it is deeply involved in backing Hezbollah and operating along the border with Israel. A Reuters report revealed that Iran also has hundreds of advisors in Iraq.Qatar is also one of the biggest funders of Hamas, whose leader, Khaled Mashaal, is based in Qatar’s capital, Doha. During the past few years, Qatar has provided Hamas with hundreds of millions of dollars — money used to purchase and develop weapons to attack Israel.By the time Obama leaves the White House, Iran will most likely be in control of more Arab countries, and Qatari-backed terror groups will be much stronger.
The Egyptians are furious with President Barack Obama for meeting in the White House this week with the emir of Qatar, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani. They say that the Obama Administration has once again turned its back on moderate Arabs and Muslims by endorsing those who support and fund Islamic terror groups.
The meeting between Obama and the emir of Qatar came shortly after Egypt accused the emirate of supporting terrorism.
Obama was quoted as saying that “Qatar is a strong partner in our coalition to degrade and ultimately defeat ISIL. We are both committed to making sure that ISIL [ISIS/Islamic State] is defeated, to making sure that in Iraq there is an opportunity for all people to live together in peace.”
Obama’s decision to host the emir of Qatar and his ensuing statements in praise of the emirate’s role in “combating” ISIS have drawn sharp criticism from the Egyptians and other Arabs and Muslims.
 U.S. President Barack Obama shares some laughs with Qatar’s Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani at the White House, February 24, 2015. (Image source: C-SPAN video screenshot) |
Many Arabs and Muslims see the meeting between Obama and al-Thani as a gift to Qatar for its continued support of Islamic radical groups in different parts of the Middle East, including Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Lebanon and the Gaza Strip.
The meeting came less than a week after the Egyptian envoy to the Arab League, Tareq Adel,accused Qatar of supporting terrorism. In response, Qatar recalled its ambassador to Cairo for “consultations.”
The latest crisis between Cairo and Doha erupted after Qatar expressed reservations about Egypt’s airstrikes against Islamic State targets in Libya in retaliation for the beheading of 21 Egyptian Coptic Christians.
On the eve of Obama’s meeting with the emir, Egyptian sources revealed that Qatar was providing weapons and ammunition to members of the Islamic State in Libya. The sources saidthat 35 Qatari aircraft have been transferring the weapons and ammunition to the terror group.
Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi and his regime consider Qatar to be one of the main supporters and funders of Islamic terror groups. They believe that without Qatar’s support and money, Islamic terror groups would not have been able to launch numerous attacks on Egyptian soldiers in Sinai and Hamas would not be in control of the Gaza Strip.
But el-Sisi and his regime are equally furious with Obama for his public embracement of the Qatari emir.
Sisi is expected to travel to Saudi Arabia next week to hold urgent talks with King Salman bin Abdel Aziz on the crisis between Egypt and Qatar. According to reports in the Egyptian media, el-Sisi is also expected to complain to the Saudi monarch about Obama’s support for Qatar at a time when Egypt and other Arab countries are engaged in fighting Qatari-backed terror groups.
The Egyptian president is hoping that the Saudis would use their influence to convince Obama to stop supporting a country that openly backs terror groups.
The government-controlled media in Egypt is now full of articles and cartoons strongly denouncing Obama’s policy toward Qatar. Such attacks on Obama could not have surfaced in the media had they not been approved by el-Sisi and his top aides in Cairo.
One cartoon, for example, features Obama standing next to the emir of Qatar at a press conference and declaring: “We have recalled our emir from Qatar for consultations.” This cartoon is intended to send a message that Obama and the Qatari emir, a major supporter of Islamic terrorism, are buddies.
The Egyptian condemnations of Qatar are also directed at the Obama Administration, which seems to be losing one Arab ally after the other because of its perceived support for Qatar and its proxy, Muslim Brotherhood.
Writing in the Al-Makal newspaper, columnist Ahmed al-Faqih launched a scathing attack on Qatar and the US in an article that carried the title: “The Qatari dwarf that feeds the ISIS monster.”
Al-Faqih claims that Qatar is nothing but a pawn in the hands of the US and Mossad, and that Qatar uses its resources to support terrorism.
Another columnist, Ahmed Musa, wrote that Qatar, “which is allied with Israel and the US,” was being used to fight Arab countries such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Libya and Syria.
“Qatar us conspiring against Egypt to serve the interests of terror groups and organizations,” Musa said, noting the close ties between the Qataris and the US Administration. “The Qatari regime has aligned itself with the murderers of the Muslim Brotherhood and the terrorists of Islamic State and Al-Qaeda, and is paying them billions of dollars.”
Arab political analysts are not only concerned about Obama’s close relations with Qatar, but also his ongoing attempts to appease Iran. They argue that what is needed now is a serious US policy to counter terrorism and a new and harsh approach toward Iran.
As Obama was welcoming al-Thani, Qatar was continuing to face charges of supporting Islamist groups. The Egyptians say Qatar provides “financial, logistical and media support for terrorist leaders.”
Qatar is also one of the biggest funders of Hamas, whose leader, Khaled Mashaal, is based in Qatar’s capital, Doha. During the past few years, Qatar has provided Hamas with hundreds of millions of dollars – money used to purchase weapons to attack Israel.
Meanwhile, Iran continues to expand its presence in Arab countries such as Yemen, Syria, Iraq and Lebanon.
Iranian-backed Al-Houthi militias have contributed to the collapse of the governments there, Secretary of State John Kerry said this week.
In Syria, Iran is deeply involved in backing the regime of Bashar el-Assad and Hizbullah in their fight against the opposition. Iranian generals and military experts are also operating in the Golan Heights along the border with Israel.
A Reuters report revealed that Iran has hundreds of advisors in Iraq. The report quoted Iraqi officials as saying that Tehran’s involvement (in Iraq) is driven by its belief that Islamic State is an immiedate danger to Shi’ite religious shrines. The Iranians helped organize the Shi’ite volunteers and militia forces to defend their country against Islamic State terrorists.
As for Lebanon, the Iranian-backed terror group Hizbollah continues to maintain a powerful security and political presence there.
“The Islamic Republic of Iran has helped Iraq, Syria, Palestine and Hizbullah by exporting the technology that it has for the production of missiles and other equipment,” Revolutionary Guard Air Force commander Brig. Gen. Amir Ali Hajizadeh was quoted recently.
By the time Obama’s term in office ends, Iran will most likely be in control of more Arab countries. And by the time Obama leaves the White House, Qatari-backed terror groups will be much stronger, killing more Muslims and non-Muslims.
1d) Obama’s Failure
By Stephen F. Hayes
Barack Obama wants us all to simmer down about Iran. He wants Senator Bob Menendez, a fellow Democrat, and the donors he represents to butt out of the sanctions debate. He wants Republicans to quit crying wolf about Iran’s nuclear weapons program. He wants the media to stop hyping terror threats. He wants the American people in the dark about the secret correspondence he’s had for years with Iran’s supreme leader. He wants John Boehner to be mindful of protocol. And most of all, he wants Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to stop questioning his accommodationist approach to Tehran.
With the breezy confidence that is his trademark, the president has repeatedly delivered a reassuring message on Iran to the country and the world: Trust me.
With respect, Mr. President: No.
From the earliest moments of his first term, Obama sought to convince the country that threats from our erstwhile enemies were overblown. He forged an approach to jihadist attacks and rogue regimes meant to be a stark contrast from that of his predecessor. He ended the war on terror, quietly sought rapprochement with radical Islamist movements like the Muslim Brotherhood and the Taliban, and ostentatiously undertook a more conciliatory approach to terror-sponsoring regimes like Syria and Iran.
Notwithstanding periodic drone strikes on bad guys, Obama has demonstrated repeatedly that his instinct is to ignore, dismiss, or downplay threats to the United States and its interests and allies. The record over six years is a long list of mistaken judgments, awkward euphemisms, and false assurances.
So when Nidal Hasan opened fire at Fort Hood it wasn’t a terrorist attack but “workplace violence.” And when Omar Farouk Abdulmutallab tried to blow up a Northwest Airlines flight over Detroit, he was an “isolated extremist.” And when Faisal Shahzad attempted to detonate an SUV in Times Square five months later, it was a “one-off” attack. And when jihadists attacked the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, it was a simple protest gone awry.
The problem in each of these instances wasn’t just that the descriptions were incorrect. It’s that the administration knew they were wrong and made the false claims anyway.
Numerous eyewitnesses reported that Hasan shouted “Allahu Akbar” as he shot. According to court documents in the case of the Christmas Day bomber, Abdulmutallab confessed that he’d been trained and dispatched by Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula a full three days before Obama publicly labeled him an isolated extremist. The administration was aware that the Pakistani Taliban had claimed responsibility for Shahzad even before he attempted his bombing. And top intelligence officials on the ground in Libya repeatedly reported that al Qaeda-affiliated terrorists participated in the attacks and that there was no demonstration.
In the year before the 2012 presidential election, the Obama administration and campaign officials routinely claimed that al Qaeda was “on the run” or “on the path to defeat” or “decimated.” But top analysts at the Defense Intelligence Agency were regularly providing Obama detailed assessments showing that the opposite was true. “When asked if the terrorists were on the run, we couldn’t respond with any answer but ‘no,’ ’’ said Lieutenant General Mike Flynn, former director of the DIA, after he was forced out of his job a year early. “When asked if the terrorists were defeated, we had to say ‘no.’ Anyone who answers ‘yes’ to either of those questions either doesn’t know what they are talking about, they are misinformed, or they are flat-out lying.”
Or all three. There’s little question that the administration misrepresented what it knew about our jihadist enemies. It’s equally clear that the administration chose to set aside information that contradicted its campaign narrative.
The U.S. government captured more than one million documents during the May 2011 raid that killed Osama bin Laden. Top administration officials initially described it as “a treasure trove” of intelligence on al Qaeda and its affiliates. But more than three years later, the senior DIA official who ran the project, Colonel Derek Harvey, says the intelligence community has fully analyzed less than 10 percent of the collection. Top DIA officials were told directly to stop providing analyses based on the bin Laden documents. The administration had decided to end the war on terror, and no amount of new intelligence about threats from al Qaeda was going to change their minds. So they chose ignorance.
A central element of the efforts to “end the wars” was peace talks with the Taliban. Initially, top officials said the Taliban must satisfy certain preconditions—disavow al Qaeda, recognize the Afghan constitution—before talks could proceed. The Taliban never agreed to the preconditions, so the administration dropped them. Mullah Omar’s men simply demanded that the United States free their top five commanders held at Guantánamo. In May 2014, the administration did just that, releasing the Taliban Five in exchange for Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl. Top intelligence officials testified that the five Taliban commanders were almost certain to return to the fight against the United States. President Obama portrayed the exchange as potentially opening the door to “reconciliation” talks. Indeed, this was the first reason the Obama administration wanted to release the Taliban Five—as a confidence-building measure to jumpstart negotiations with one of al Qaeda’s strongest allies. This desperate attempt at diplomacy—preemptive capitulation—has failed. On February 24, the Taliban rejected press reports saying they were willing to negotiate with the Afghan government and decried the “occupation” of Afghanistan, a reference to the U.S.-led international presence in the country. They had simply wanted their leaders freed—and they have been.
In early 2011, the Obama administration formalized its hopes for improved relations with Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad by restoring a diplomatic presence in Damascus. Ambassador Robert Stephen Ford presented his papers to Assad on January 25, 2011. Four months later, even as the Syrian regime was engaged in the slaughter of its own people, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton suggested that Assad was a “reformer.” As the U.S. government accumulated evidence of Assad’s role in the widespread killing, Obama called for him to go and warned that the movement or use of chemical weapons would be a “red line.” But when the United Nations and the U.S. government confirmed reports that the Syrian regime had repeatedly used chemical weapons, the administration balked. Top Obama officials acknowledge that Assad was a puppet of the Iranian regime. In spite of that fact—or more likely because of it—Assad was allowed to cross the red line and continue the carnage. Although Assad agreed to ship some of his chemical munitions out of Syria, his regime has continued to slaughter Syrians with conventional weapons and barrel bombs. In the four years since the United States sent its ambassador, more than 200,000 people have died in the civil war.
In a January 2014 interview with David Remnick of the New Yorker, Obama famously suggested that the radical Islamist group amassing territory in Syria and Iraq and brutally killing those trying to stop it was nothing to worry about. Remnick asked Obama about the implications of the Iraqis’ losing Falluja to the Islamic State. Said the president, “The analogy we use around here sometimes, and I think is accurate, is if a jayvee team puts on Lakers uniforms that doesn’t make them Kobe Bryant.”
But ISIL was not jayvee. And by early summer, the Iraqis were urgently asking Washington for help. The State Department casually responded by noting that the United States would be training some Iraqi soldiers later in the summer. Even as vast swaths of Iraq were falling to ISIL— including Mosul, the country’s second-largest city—Obama continued to boast that he had “ended the war in Iraq.”
By September 2014, it was no longer plausible for the administration to downplay ISIL. The group had become such an urgent threat that Obama delivered a prime-time address to the nation to describe his efforts to address this “cancer.” After months of dithering, Obama said: “I know many Americans are concerned about these threats. Tonight, I want you to know that the United States of America is meeting them with strength and resolve. . . . We will hunt down terrorists who threaten our country, wherever they are.” But even as Obama finally acknowledged the threat from the Islamic State, he sought to portray it as just another violent group: “ISIL is not Islamic.”
In his speech that night, Obama pointed to Somalia and Yemen as models of successful U.S. counterterrorism efforts. Five months later, Iran-backed Houthi separatists had overthrown the Yemeni government and the United States shuttered its embassy in Sanaa. And just last weekend, homeland security secretary Jeh Johnson warned Americans against visiting the Mall of America, just outside Minneapolis, in response to a video threatening attacks by al Shabaab, the al Qaeda franchise in Somalia. Models no more.
Today, senior administration officials speak of a campaign against the Islamic State that will take decades, and top intelligence officials testify that attacks from members of the Islamic State potentially represent an immediate and grave threat to the homeland. FBI director James Comey said last week that the “siren song” of ISIL’s call for jihadist warriors has led to FBI investigations in each of the 50 states. The president is now calling for a new Authorization for the Use of Military Force for a group he dismissed just a year ago as terrorist poseurs.
The administration’s efforts have reached new levels of absurdity in recent weeks. When the president of Uruguay agreed to accept high-risk Guantánamo detainees on humanitarian grounds because they’d been the victims of “a heinous kidnapping” by the United States, not only did the Obama administration fail to rebuke him for the slander, it expressed gratitude. White House spokesman Josh Earnest argued strenuously that the Taliban, which provided safe haven for al Qaeda before 9/11 and has fought alongside it against the United States ever since, isn’t a terrorist group but merely “an armed insurgency.” The president claimed that the victims of the attack on the kosher supermarket in Paris were “randomly” shot, despite the fact that the attacker himself said he’d chosen the target in order to kill Jews.
Obama claimed in an interview with Vox in late January that the world was transitioning to a new, more peaceful era. “The trajectory of this planet overall is one toward less violence, more tolerance, less strife, less poverty.” But in recent months, his top defense and intelligence officials said the opposite. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel said: “The world is exploding all over.” The assessment from Director of National Intelligence James Clapper was even more alarming. “Looking back over my more than half a century in intelligence, I have not experienced a time when we have been beset by more crises and threats around the globe.”
To call Obama delusional at this point seems generous because it implies that the president is unaware of the reality he is so determined to ignore. But as these many examples make clear, he is not.
Perhaps nowhere is this willful self-deception more obvious than Iran. The very framework of the administration’s approach to Iran—“decoupling” diplomacy over its nuclear program from the many other troublesome aspects of the mullahs’ regime—exemplifies this approach. And once again, the problem isn’t just that the administration is ignoring reality. It’s that it is creating and selling an alternative, fantastical world that bears little relation to the real one.
For much of the decade before Obama took office, Iran was at war with the United States. The targeting of American military and diplomatic personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan was approved at the highest levels of the Iranian government. Iran is responsible for more than one-third of all U.S. troop deaths in the region, according to a retired general with vast experience there.
But two months into the Obama administration, top officials made clear their willingness to set aside that history. The Iranians were invited to a conference on Afghanistan, and State Department officials repeatedly claimed that the Iranians could play a “constructive” and “positive” role in Afghanistan and the region. Six years later, administration officials still say the same thing despite a steady stream of evidence that the opposite is true.
“Iran is mounting an aggressive campaign to fuel anti-American sentiment here and convince Afghan leaders that a robust, long-term security partnership with Washington would be counterproductive,” theWashington Post reported in 2012, noting “the Iranian initiative involves cultivating closer relations with the Taliban” and buying off politicians and media outlets.
More striking is Iran’s support for al Qaeda. Last week, for the first time in nearly three years, the public saw new information from the bin Laden raid. Documents released as part of a terror trial in New York City show, in the words of the al Qaeda leaders themselves, Iran’s availability for training and safe haven. One letter from a senior al Qaeda operative to bin Laden in June 2010 lays out the plans of a core al Qaeda leader to travel to Iran. The letter notes that “Sheikh Yunis” is ready to travel and “the destination, in principle, is Iran. And he has with him six to eight brothers that he chose. I told him we are waiting for final complete confirmation from you to move and agree on this destination (Iran). His plan is: stay around for three months in Iran to train the brothers there then start moving them and distributing them in the world for their missions and specialties.”
This comes on top of what we already know about Iran and al Qaeda. As Thomas Joscelyn reported here last week, at least three al Qaeda plots targeting Western interests were hatched in Iran since Obama took office. As the administration pined for Iran to rejoin the community of civilized nations, the Treasury was churning out reports showing Tehran had no such interest. In its designation of Yasin al-Suri, “a prominent Iran-based al Qaeda facilitator,” Treasury wrote in December 2011: “Operating under an agreement between al Qaeda and the Iranian Government, al-Suri moves money and al Qaeda recruits from the Middle East through Iran and on to Pakistan and Afghanistan.”
In February 2012, Treasury designated Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security a terror-sponsoring organization. “MOIS has facilitated the movement of al Qaeda operatives in Iran and provided them with documents, identification cards, and passports,” not to mention “money and weapons,” Treasury explained, “and negotiated prisoner releases of AQI [Al Qaeda in Iraq] operatives.” AQI, of course, would later become the Islamic State or ISIL.
The MOIS doesn’t just sponsor terrorism, it also protects Iran’s nuclear program. According to a profile of the ministry published by the Library of Congress Research Division in December 2012, it focuses on Iran’s internal affairs but plays an “integral” role in operations abroad as well. The MOIS identifies “external threats, specifically those aimed at Iran’s nuclear activity,” and specializes in “countering foreign intelligence agencies such as the CIA and [Israel’s] Mossad,” both of which have worked to undermine Iran’s nuclear program. Tehran even established an elite counterintelligence agency that “likely operates” as part of the MOIS and is “exclusively responsible for protecting all relevant information about Iran’s nuclear program, nuclear facilities, and the scientists working in nuclear facilities against threats, including threats from domestic opposition groups and foreign intelligence agencies.”
So the same agency responsible for Iran’s robust terror activities has crucial responsibilities in protecting and hiding its nuclear program. Obama may insist on “decoupling” Iran’s nuclear program from its terrorism. Iran doesn’t.
Iran’s centrifuges have been spinning throughout the lengthy negotiations over its nuclear program, and it has continued to make progress on its plutonium program. The administration has backed away from previous U.N. Security Council resolutions requiring Iran to suspend its nuclear activities. In the fall of 2014, the IAEA discovered that Iran was feeding hexafluoride gas into the IR-5 centrifuge at Natanz. When the State Department inquired about this prohibited activity, Iran stopped—a tacit acknowledgment that it had been caught red-handed.
And yet in his State of the Union, Obama claimed that the Iranian program had been “halted” and that the Iranians hadn’t violated the interim deal. What incentive do the Iranians have to abide by the terms of the deal if the American president will make excuses for them when they don’t?
The day after that speech, House speaker John Boehner invited Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to address a joint session of Congress. White House officials howled in protest, calling the invitation a breach of protocol. It was a rich argument from a White House that had enlisted British prime minister David Cameron to lobby members of Congress against additional sanctions on Iran and a president who had invited the president of South Korea to address a joint session of Congress before asking congressional leaders for their blessing.
White House officials aren’t concerned about protocol. They understand that Netanyahu will give Congress and the American people exactly what the Obama administration has worked hard to avoid for six years: a detailed assessment of the threat from Iran.
Consider this question: When was the last time a senior Obama administration official gave a speech devoted to laying out the threat from Iran? It simply hasn’t happened. Perhaps the most extensive comment on the subject from the president himself came in October 2009, after Iran’s secret uranium enrichment facility at Qom was exposed. Obama appeared at a press briefing with French president Nicolas Sarkozy and British prime minister Gordon Brown, both of whom condemned the Iranian violations in the strongest terms. “The level of deception by the Iranian government, and the scale of what we believe is the breach of international commitments, will shock and anger the whole international community, and it will harden our resolve,” said Brown.
Even Obama sounded resolute, saying, “It is time for Iran to act immediately to restore the confidence of the international community by fulfilling its international obligations,” and, “To put it simply: Iran must comply with U.N. Security Council resolutions and make clear it is willing to meet its responsibilities as a member of the community of nations.”
But these flashes of rhetorical toughness were invariably paired with comedowns—Obama offering Iran a “clear path toward greater international integration if it lives up to its obligations.” Administration officials in briefings with reporters emphasized the “opportunity” the breach had given Iran.
An opportunity despite the fact that for the third time in a decade Iran had been caught lying about its nuclear program. An opportunity despite the regime’s crushing of the peaceful revolution four months earlier after the mullahs fixed the elections. And an opportunity despite our knowledge of Iran’s support for al Qaeda and its policy of targeting and killing Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan.
It was clear before he’d been in office a year that Obama would not seriously address the threat presented by Iran.
Netanyahu will. For that reason, and because of this context and the enormous stakes, John Boehner’s invitation was less a breach of protocol or partisan ploy than it was an act of statesmanship.
Long before he was elected president, Obama and his supporters complained bitterly about the lack of public debate before the Iraq war. It was a bogus claim on the particulars—that debate lasted well over a year, and the congressional authorization for war came nearly six months before the invasion. The principle they invoked, however, is a valid one and it ought to apply to Iran. If it’s important to have an extended debate about the threat from an aggressive rogue state before going to war, it’s equally important to have such a debate before deciding to capitulate.
Let it begin.
1e) LOOK AT THESE PICTURES, ISIS IS KILLING CHRISTIAN CHILDREN, ONE WAS CRUCIFIED.
I find it inconceivable that we have a president and Secretary of State who are indifferent to this and they have people in high places that are willing to serve in an administration that is impotent.
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The People Who Keep Israel Safe – The IDF
“When you go to war against your enemies and see horses and chariots and an army greater than yours, do not be afraid of them, because the Lord your God, who brought you up out of Egypt, will be with you.” (Deuteronomy 20:1)
After the six-day war in 1967 there was a popular bumper sticker put out which read “Way to Go – IDF!”. Just six years later came the long and difficult Yom Kippur war and the new bumper sticker read “Israel Trusts in God”.
And so the Bible in Deuteronomy continues and explains what how the Israeli People are to go into battle:
The High Priest would go out to battle with the soldiers. As a reminder. For as sophisticated as the army is, and as courageous, strong and capable as the soldiers are; the Israeli army must never forget that the word for defense is the same word as “trust in God”. IDF soldiers will always remember that. And that’s what makes them truly great.
“When you go to war against your enemies and see horses and chariots and an army greater than yours, do not be afraid of them, because the Lord your God, who brought you up out of Egypt, will be with you.” (Deuteronomy 20:1)
It’s interesting that the Hebrew word for “defense” is “bitachon”. Bitachon is also the Hebrew word for trust in God. It’s almost as if it was intended for us to confuse the two. Because, in fact, as far as Israel goes, trust in God and national defense are interchangeable terms.
After the six-day war in 1967 there was a popular bumper sticker put out which read “Way to Go – IDF!”. Just six years later came the long and difficult Yom Kippur war and the new bumper sticker read “Israel Trusts in God”.
Yes, the Israeli Defense Force is an incredible and highly developed army. What makes it so amazing are the highly motivated soldiers, the sons and daughters, fathers, brothers and sisters of the people of Israel. And every one of them knows that Israel must win, and it must always defend itself or it will cease to exist. That’s a sobering thought to live with.
And so the Bible in Deuteronomy continues and explains what how the Israeli People are to go into battle:
“When you are about to go into battle, the priest shall come forward and address the army. He shall say: “Hear, Israel: Today you are going into battle against your enemies. Do not be fainthearted or afraid; do not panic or be terrified by them. For the Lord your God is the one who goes with you to fight for you against your enemies to give you victory.”
The High Priest would go out to battle with the soldiers. As a reminder. For as sophisticated as the army is, and as courageous, strong and capable as the soldiers are; the Israeli army must never forget that the word for defense is the same word as “trust in God”. IDF soldiers will always remember that. And that’s what makes them truly great.
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3)
Meantime, Mr. Wheeler will exercise what FCC lawyers call “editorial privileges,” allowing him to craft his arguments after reading the two dissents. Taxpayers might prefer that regulators analyze the pros and cons beforevoting to impose something on the whole country, and we hope judges feel the same way when the rules are challenged in court.
And while “net neutrality,” the fuzzy concept used to justify these rules, was originally sold as a way to ensure that consumers are treated well, the rules will go well beyond those customers. Digital communications networks that exchange Internet traffic will also have to be “just and reasonable” with each other. The bureaucrats will exercise their discretion to define those words case-by-case, always listening to the best-paid lobbyists.
It’s hard to imagine a more just and reasonable market than today’s Internet. According to the website DrPeering, which tracks the agreements among communications companies to move information, the price of moving data across the Internet has been falling roughly 30% a year since the late 1990s. That collapsing cost per bit is a big reason Internet usage has skyrocketed. Consumers downloading huge volumes of video are paying bills not much different than when they were mainly visiting static websites.
That isn’t good enough for the likes of Netflix , which now generates more than a third of all Internet traffic, and other major bandwidth users that are the chief lobbyists for the new FCC rules. Netflix doesn’t detail its spending on Internet transport, though a telecom source estimates Netflix spends less than a penny for every movie it sends to a customer. But now CEO Reed Hastings has succeeded in subjecting the entire Internet economy to regulations that will be far more expensive.
The FCC’s Democrats promise—for now—to “forbear” from enforcing 700 of the most onerous and unnecessary of the old telephone regulations. But dissenting GOP Commissioner Mike O’Rielly calls it “fauxbearance” because the authorities the FCC is assuming are so broad it can still dictate conditions and practices that were subject to the old rules. And even if they do forbear, activists will sue to force the FCC to regulate under the “just and reasonable” standard.
Under the new rules, an Internet company must be sure that its innovations and actions don’t “unreasonably disadvantage” others. Would Apple even exist if the government had forced Steve Jobs to be “reasonable” with all of his competitors?
The FCC’s power grab is so comprehensive that Google and the other Silicon Valley grandees who promoted regulation may soon come to regret it. Mr. O’Rielly says the agency could enforce the rules against website operators like Google or Facebook . The new rules will also unleash a torrent of lawsuits, and nobody is better at maneuvering through the bureaucracy than giant companies like AT&T and Verizon . The losers will be the smaller companies that can’t afford a lobbying machine.
The Federal Communications Commission’s decision Thursday to regulate the Internet as a public utility is a depressing moment for American innovation and economic liberty. The FCC is grabbing political control over a vibrant market that until now has been driven by inventors and consumers. Welcome to the Obamanet.
The rules are ostensibly to prevent Internet companies from blocking customer access to particular websites or slowing down service. But the FCC has presented no evidence that this is occurring, so the power grab is being justified by some theoretical future harm.
By the way, the FCC hasn’t released the text it has now approved as a final rule, which according to dissenting Republican Commissioner Ajit Pai runs to more than 300 pages. It’s not clear when the public will be permitted to see what Washington has done, and the normal comment period has been bypassed on a plan that is vastly different than what Mr. Wheeler has previously proposed.
King focuses on the subsidies that help people pay increased premiums, one ACA pillar that the administration has toppled. Because Congress couldn’t constitutionally command states to establish exchanges, it authorized these credits for people who buy insurance “through an Exchange established by the State.” If a state didn’t establish an exchange, its residents—who would instead use the federal exchange Healthcare.gov—wouldn’t be eligible for subsidies.
But a funny thing happened on the way to utopia: Only 14 states set up exchanges, meaning that the text of the law denied subsidies in nearly three quarters of the states. This result was untenable to an administration intent on pain-free implementation. And so the administration engaged in its own lawmaking process, issuing an Internal Revenue Service rule that nullified the relevant ACA provision, making subsidies available in all states.
Executive lawmaking of this sort poses a severe threat to the separation-of-powers principles enumerated in the Constitution. The president has acted on the belief that legislative gridlock allows him to transcend his constitutional limits. A ruling that upholds this behavior would set a dangerous precedent for the nascent health-care law, which will be implemented for years to come by administrations with different views. More troubling, such a precedent could license virtually any executive action that modifies, amends or suspends any duly enacted law.
King, which the Supreme Court is expected to decide in June, is thus about much more than interpreting statutory language or evaluating the “deference” that judges owe bureaucrats. It isn’t a technical debate over the finer points of administrative law; it is an existential one about the rule of law itself.
Chief Justice John Roberts was correct in 2012 when he wrote in the NFIB v. Sebelius decision that it isn’t the court’s role to “express any opinion on the wisdom of the Affordable Care Act.”
But he also correctly noted “the Framers created a Federal Government of limited powers, and assigned to this Court the duty of enforcing those limits.” The court’s duty is to be a bulwark against arbitrary rule.
This is especially true in disputes between the political branches; the judiciary thus provides the ultimate safeguard of the separation of powers. Or, as Justice Robert Jackson put it in the famous Youngstown case of 1952 that rebuked President Truman ’s unilateral seizure of steel mills: “With all its defects, delays and inconveniences, men have discovered no technique for long preserving free government except that the Executive be under the law, and that the law be made by parliamentary deliberations. Such institutions may be destined to pass away. But it is the duty of the Court to be last, not first, to give them up.”
The president has shown deliberate indifference toward the plain text of the law. The Supreme Court must strike down the IRS rule and confirm the principle that, like King John at Runnymede, all political leaders are bound by the rule of law.
Mr. Shapiro is a senior fellow in constitutional studies at the Cato Institute. Mr. Blackman is a constitutional law professor at the South Texas College of Law in Houston. They recently filed a brief on Cato’s behalf in King v. Burwell.
3)
Welcome to the Obamanet
The FCC snatches political control over more of the economy.
Meantime, Mr. Wheeler will exercise what FCC lawyers call “editorial privileges,” allowing him to craft his arguments after reading the two dissents. Taxpayers might prefer that regulators analyze the pros and cons beforevoting to impose something on the whole country, and we hope judges feel the same way when the rules are challenged in court.
But based on an FCC summary, it’s clear that the agency has done administratively what Congress has always refused to do: make the old telephone and broadcasting overseer the general regulator of the Internet. Providers of broadband services will be barred from employing any “unjust or unreasonable practices,” whatever FCC bureaucrats decide those words mean. The FCC release also makes clear that government attorneys—not engineers—will decide what “reasonable network management” is.
And while “net neutrality,” the fuzzy concept used to justify these rules, was originally sold as a way to ensure that consumers are treated well, the rules will go well beyond those customers. Digital communications networks that exchange Internet traffic will also have to be “just and reasonable” with each other. The bureaucrats will exercise their discretion to define those words case-by-case, always listening to the best-paid lobbyists.
It’s hard to imagine a more just and reasonable market than today’s Internet. According to the website DrPeering, which tracks the agreements among communications companies to move information, the price of moving data across the Internet has been falling roughly 30% a year since the late 1990s. That collapsing cost per bit is a big reason Internet usage has skyrocketed. Consumers downloading huge volumes of video are paying bills not much different than when they were mainly visiting static websites.
That isn’t good enough for the likes of Netflix , which now generates more than a third of all Internet traffic, and other major bandwidth users that are the chief lobbyists for the new FCC rules. Netflix doesn’t detail its spending on Internet transport, though a telecom source estimates Netflix spends less than a penny for every movie it sends to a customer. But now CEO Reed Hastings has succeeded in subjecting the entire Internet economy to regulations that will be far more expensive.
The FCC’s Democrats promise—for now—to “forbear” from enforcing 700 of the most onerous and unnecessary of the old telephone regulations. But dissenting GOP Commissioner Mike O’Rielly calls it “fauxbearance” because the authorities the FCC is assuming are so broad it can still dictate conditions and practices that were subject to the old rules. And even if they do forbear, activists will sue to force the FCC to regulate under the “just and reasonable” standard.
Under the new rules, an Internet company must be sure that its innovations and actions don’t “unreasonably disadvantage” others. Would Apple even exist if the government had forced Steve Jobs to be “reasonable” with all of his competitors?
The FCC’s power grab is so comprehensive that Google and the other Silicon Valley grandees who promoted regulation may soon come to regret it. Mr. O’Rielly says the agency could enforce the rules against website operators like Google or Facebook . The new rules will also unleash a torrent of lawsuits, and nobody is better at maneuvering through the bureaucracy than giant companies like AT&T and Verizon . The losers will be the smaller companies that can’t afford a lobbying machine.
***
Congress likely won’t be able to stop the FCC, so the best near-term response will have to come in the courts. In the best case, the lawsuits will delay the new rules until after the 2016 election. Then a new President less set on political control can appoint a new FCC and rewrite this effort to subject this great engine of American innovation to the untender clutches of the same folks who brought you ObamaCare.
The Federal Communications Commission’s decision Thursday to regulate the Internet as a public utility is a depressing moment for American innovation and economic liberty. The FCC is grabbing political control over a vibrant market that until now has been driven by inventors and consumers. Welcome to the Obamanet.
President Obama demanded this result in a November speech, and FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler and Democrats Mignon Clyburn and Jessica Rosenworcel have now dutifully voted to apply last century’s monopoly telephone rules to Internet service providers. They have in the process made a mockery of the agency’s supposed independence.
The rules are ostensibly to prevent Internet companies from blocking customer access to particular websites or slowing down service. But the FCC has presented no evidence that this is occurring, so the power grab is being justified by some theoretical future harm.
By the way, the FCC hasn’t released the text it has now approved as a final rule, which according to dissenting Republican Commissioner Ajit Pai runs to more than 300 pages. It’s not clear when the public will be permitted to see what Washington has done, and the normal comment period has been bypassed on a plan that is vastly different than what Mr. Wheeler has previously proposed.
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4) A Litmus Test for ObamaCare and the Rule of Law
The president has ignored the law’s plain language. Now the Supreme Court decides if that’s all right.
JOSH BLACKMAN
This spring will mark the 800th anniversary of the signing of the Magna Carta, the landmark agreement by King John of England at Runnymede ceding certain rights to rebel barons. Liberty will have another chance to shine on Wednesday when the Supreme Court hears a case with momentous implications about another sort of executive power. In this instance, though, it is the rebels who have the royal name: King v. Burwell raises questions about how President Obama has enforced the ObamaCare law—or, more precisely, modified, delayed and suspended it.
This will be the third challenge to the Affordable Care Act to reach the court. But King is different. The law’s constitutionality was challenged in NFIB v. Sebelius, 2012, and the way certain regulations burden particular types of plaintiffs was addressed by Burwell v. Hobby Lobby last year. Now comes King, challenging the administration’s implementation of the law. Even though the ACA gives wide latitude to the executive branch over implementation, its most important parts—coverage rules, mandates and subsidies—were addressed by Congress with specific dates, formulas and other directions. None of these provisions has gone into effect as Congress designed, simply because the plan conflicted with the president’s political calculus.
President Barack Obama PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES
For example, the executive branch delayed the “minimum essential coverage” provision for two years, suspended the requirement that millions maintain qualifying insurance, and modified the employer mandate into something very different than what the law demands. Through a series of memorandums, regulations and even blog posts, President Obama has disregarded statutory text, ignored legislative history and remade ObamaCare in his own image.
King focuses on the subsidies that help people pay increased premiums, one ACA pillar that the administration has toppled. Because Congress couldn’t constitutionally command states to establish exchanges, it authorized these credits for people who buy insurance “through an Exchange established by the State.” If a state didn’t establish an exchange, its residents—who would instead use the federal exchange Healthcare.gov—wouldn’t be eligible for subsidies.
But a funny thing happened on the way to utopia: Only 14 states set up exchanges, meaning that the text of the law denied subsidies in nearly three quarters of the states. This result was untenable to an administration intent on pain-free implementation. And so the administration engaged in its own lawmaking process, issuing an Internal Revenue Service rule that nullified the relevant ACA provision, making subsidies available in all states.
As documented in a detailed 2014 report by the House Oversight Committee, at least one Treasury Department official recognized that there “was no direct statutory authority to interpret federal exchanges as an ‘Exchange established by the State.’ ” But the rogue rule was released anyway, as if the law meant whatever the executive chose. No matter how unmoored from statutory authority, the administration justified these actions because they “expanded coverage” and fit into the ACA’s “broader purpose.”
Executive lawmaking of this sort poses a severe threat to the separation-of-powers principles enumerated in the Constitution. The president has acted on the belief that legislative gridlock allows him to transcend his constitutional limits. A ruling that upholds this behavior would set a dangerous precedent for the nascent health-care law, which will be implemented for years to come by administrations with different views. More troubling, such a precedent could license virtually any executive action that modifies, amends or suspends any duly enacted law.
King, which the Supreme Court is expected to decide in June, is thus about much more than interpreting statutory language or evaluating the “deference” that judges owe bureaucrats. It isn’t a technical debate over the finer points of administrative law; it is an existential one about the rule of law itself.
Chief Justice John Roberts was correct in 2012 when he wrote in the NFIB v. Sebelius decision that it isn’t the court’s role to “express any opinion on the wisdom of the Affordable Care Act.”
But he also correctly noted “the Framers created a Federal Government of limited powers, and assigned to this Court the duty of enforcing those limits.” The court’s duty is to be a bulwark against arbitrary rule.
This is especially true in disputes between the political branches; the judiciary thus provides the ultimate safeguard of the separation of powers. Or, as Justice Robert Jackson put it in the famous Youngstown case of 1952 that rebuked President Truman ’s unilateral seizure of steel mills: “With all its defects, delays and inconveniences, men have discovered no technique for long preserving free government except that the Executive be under the law, and that the law be made by parliamentary deliberations. Such institutions may be destined to pass away. But it is the duty of the Court to be last, not first, to give them up.”
The president has shown deliberate indifference toward the plain text of the law. The Supreme Court must strike down the IRS rule and confirm the principle that, like King John at Runnymede, all political leaders are bound by the rule of law.
Mr. Shapiro is a senior fellow in constitutional studies at the Cato Institute. Mr. Blackman is a constitutional law professor at the South Texas College of Law in Houston. They recently filed a brief on Cato’s behalf in King v. Burwell.
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