Just in case you have not heard the news, Barack Obama, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi are gearing up for the mother of all battles just after the election. They know that the American people are about to go to the polls and hand them a massive repudiation of their left-wing agenda, and they’re not happy.
Refusing to accept defeat, these three are planning a counter attack. Instead of taking to heart the unmistakable message of the American people, they’re moving, full steam ahead, in the opposite direction.
Digging in with unprecedented and arrogant defiance, they’ve planned a legislative blitzkrieg during the coming lame-duck session of Congress in order to shove as much of their radical agenda, as humanly possible, down your throat before the new Congressmen and Senators can be sworn into office.
Barack Obama says there’s going to be “hand-to-hand combat.” As David Karki with The North Star National writes: “He [Obama] is not going to make like President Clinton in 1995 and move to the center to survive. He will force upon us everything else he can, whatever way he has to.”
To put it in the words of columnist Charles Krauthammer: “How then to prevent a runaway lame-duck Congress? Bring the issue up now – applying the check-and-balance of the people’s will before it disappears the morning after Election Day.”
Can it happen? You better believe it. Krauthammer cautions: “They could then vote for anything – including measures they today shun as the midterms approach and their seats are threatened – because they would have nothing to lose. They would be unemployed. And playing along with Obama might even brighten the prospects for, say, an ambassadorship to a sunny Caribbean isle.”
As scribe Ben Johnson points out, the threat doesn’t end even with the lame-duck session: “All indications are, if Obama cannot get his legislative agenda enacted by the lame-duck Congress, he will impose it by decree.”
In an L.A. Times piece Peter Nicholas and Christi Parsons make clear the “fresh strategy” borders on government by executive fiat. It begins, “As President Obama remakes his senior staff, he is also shaping a new approach for the second half of his term: to advance his agenda through executive actions he can take on his own, rather than pushing plans through an increasingly hostile Congress.”
This rule by edict is confirmed by Obama strategist David Axelrod, who said, “It’s fair to say that the next phase is going to be less about legislative action than it is about managing the change that we’ve brought.”
The LA Times continues:“So the best arena for Obama to execute his plans may be his own branch of government. That means more executive orders, more use of the bully pulpit, and more deployment of his ample regulatory powers and the wide-ranging rulemaking authority of his Cabinet members.”
Nicholas and Parsons note how the president has replaced the few appointees with ties to Capitol Hill in place of Chicago insiders. They specifically state the “the Environmental Protection Agency is determined to use its regulatory power…to begin lowering [carbon] emissions, in the absence of congressional action.”
The Associated Press also reported, “The Obama administration says it would prefer that Congress enact climate change legislation, but has used the threat of EPA regulations to goad lawmakers into action.”
Congressional Republicans have accurately called the regulations “job-killers,” and Democratic Senator Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia has sponsored a two-year freeze on certain EPA regulations. Now it looks as though the president will ignore Rockefeller, the Republicans, and the will of the voters.
Rather than triangulate as Bill Clinton successfully did or take an electoral chastening, Obama plans to ram his agenda down the American people’s throats “by any means necessary.”
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