Napoleobama

On one hand, the Supreme Court got it right on the Obamacare mandate today: Congress cannot use the Commerce Clause to force people to engage in private commerce. Where they got it wrong was in reinterpreting the law to essentially call the mandate a tax. Since the IRS would collect a fine for not complying with the mandate, Chief Justice Roberts said the penalty is a tax, and therefore, the mandate falls under Congress' constitutional authority to assess and collect taxes.

The problem is that the law as written never characterized the penalty as a tax. Obama himself railed against the notion that the mandate amounted to a tax:

Of course, Obama also campaigned against a health-care mandate in the first place, but then he's made it clear that his hypocrisy knows no bounds.

The Court's dissenting opinion calls out the majority for essentially creating new law out of thin air:

[T]o say that the Individual Mandate merely imposed a tax is not to interpret the statute but to rewrite it. Judicial tax-writing is particularly troubling.

[...] 

The values that should have determined our course today are caution, minimalism, and the understanding that the Federal Government is one of limited powers. But the Court's ruling undermines those values at every turn.

[...] 

The fragmentation of power produced by the structure of our Government is central to liberty, and when we destroy it, we place liberty at peril. Today's decision should have vindicated, should have taught, this truth; instead, our judgment today has disregarded it.

In short: judicial activism at its worst.

The obvious slippery slope the court has created here is that Congress can now compel the people to engage in any type of activity they want, so long as there's a "tax" imposed for noncompliance.

Willard Mittens Romney claims that if he's elected, he'll repeal the whole Obamacare debacle -- but keep in mind this is the guy who launched Romneycare back in Massachusetts.

If Rand Paul can hold his nose and back the guy, would others do the same just to get this ridiculous mandate off our backs? Keep in mind that the guy has about as much disdain for the Constitution as Obama does, considering that he endorsed the NDAA bill allowing indefinite detention of American citizens, and that he doesn't think the president needs a Congressional declaration to go to war. And his party is still doing everything it can to disenfranchise Ron Paul supporters -- the most recent example being in Romney's own back yard. If nothing else, maybe Rand's endorsement of Mitt will get him a VP nomination, and that would put Rand in a really good spot to make his own run for the Oval Office -- and as far as I'm concerned, Rand is still a friend of liberty.

Not that things could get much worse under Obama. Not only does his health-care travesty survive, but in a brazen act of election-year pandering, he also just decides to override Congress and grant amnesty to thousands of illegal immigrants. You wonder if there's anything he won't do to push through his agenda. As the Christian Science Monitor reports:

Jonathan Turley, who usually sides with progressive ideals, tells Politico: "This is a President who is now functioning as a super legislator" who is "effectively negating parts of the criminal code because he disagrees with them. That does go beyond the pale."

And:

"This isn't about immigration but about constitutional order," says Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, a conservative-leaning think tank. "One problem is that even Democrats in Congress now have no right to complain about future usurpations -- they might as well all go home and have Napoleon run the country."

Makes you wonder what would have happened had the Supreme Court ruled his health plan unconstitutional. Would he have just decreed that he was going to enforce it anyway?

This is the kind of thing that tyrants and dictators do. Not democratically elected leaders of free, law-abiding nations.

Of course, Candidate Obama said his administration would never act like this:

Salient quote:

The issue of executive power and executive privilege is one that is subject to abuse, and in an Obama presidency, what you will see will be a sufficient respect for law and the co-equal branches of government  .

Ha! Oh, if only.

As for executive privilege, he blasted Shrubby for invoking it so much:

Salient quote:

There's been a tendency on the part of this administration to try to hide behind executive privilege every time there's something a little shaky that's taking place.

Fast-forward to today, and we have Barky invoking executive privilege to shield his attorney general from having to turn over subpoenaed documents to Congress. Operation Fast and Furious funneled guns into Mexico in an attempt to track them to drug cartels, and the program blew up in the administration's face when two of those guns were found at the scene of the murder of a U.S. Border Patrol agent. To their credit,  members of the House found the attorney general in contempt of Congress.

So much for "the most transparent administration in history." Lies upon lies upon lies.

You know things are bad when a TSA groper brings one woman to tears, another laughs when she spills the human remains of a man's grandfather after poking her finger through the ashes, and the agency has the audacity to charge a passenger with battery for giving an agent a taste of her own medicine -- and it's not the most outrageous news of the week.

And for Obama, you know it's really bad when not just a fellow president, but one from his own party, criticizes America's abusive and reckless foreign policy:

Former president Jimmy Carter has blasted the United States for anti-terror strategies such as targeting individuals for assassination and using unmanned drones to bomb suspected targets, saying they directly flout the basic tenets of universal human rights and foment anti-US sentiment. 

In an article written for the New York Times headlined "A Cruel and Unusual Record", Mr Carter, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002 for his work trying to resolve conflicts around the globe, suggested that the US is in violation of 10 of the 30 articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

[...]

"Revelations that top officials are targeting people to be assassinated, including American citizens, are only the most recent, disturbing proof of how far our nation's violation of human rights has extended," Mr Carter wrote, concluding that the US is "abandoning its role as the global champion of human rights".

How does this clown even have any supporters left anymore?