The Week in Pictures -- March Madness Edition

From the guys at Powerline Blog:

Eight Thoughts On Scalia

From Jonah Goldberg at National Review via H/t at Instapundit:

3. The double-standard for Republicans is not shocking but it remains galling. As Jim Geraghty notes in today’s Jolt, Chuck Schumer took exactly the same position on any further Bush appointments in 2007. I don’t seem to recall the shock and outrage we’re seeing today.

4. On that note, Ruth Marcus — an often independent-minded liberal — offers some classic concern trolling of the GOP today in her column. She writes:

Finally, a Senate work stoppage would, in fact, be bad for Republicans. In the nation’s capital these days, everything is political, every institution politicized. That may be inevitable and irreparable, yet tables here have a way of turning. One party’s obstructionism ends up hurting it down the road.

Marcus is surely right that tables can turn. What she leaves out is the simple, glaring, fact that the tables are turning on Democrats who’ve been playing outrageous games with appointment process for a quarter century. When Robert Bork was defenestrated by Joe Biden, despite having said he would have no choice but to vote for someone so well-qualified, he was setting the tables for payback. When Harry Reid pulled the trigger on the nuclear option (on lower court appointments) he was warned that this would come back to haunt him. When Democrats disgustingly blocked Miguel Estrada from the bench solely because he was a Hispanic, they set the table to be turned. When Barack Obama voted to filibuster Alito, he set the table to be turned.

Cry me no tears now that Republicans are finally putting their shoulders to the table.

And note this: “If Scalia’s interpretation of the Constitution held sway in the land, the Court and the government would have much less power over our lives. And that, more than anything else, explains why the left hated him so much.”

Read the whole thing.

The Real Reason Americans Oppose Gun Control

From The Federalist via H/T at Instapundit:

The War on Drugs has failed to prevent tidal waves of narcotics from infiltrating every nook and cranny of these United States. Why should a War on Guns prove any different?
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We were assured that ISIS is contained, yet only days after that assurance the dead both here and across the pond were being buried. We have asked that our borders be secured to protect both our autonomy and our economy, yet in return we have received only empty promises and an influx of millions. Obama has failed to control his own Internal Revenue Service, yet assures us with the confidence of a man under constant armed protection that he can control who will be allowed to own a machine that is capable of killing indiscriminately.

Sorry, but we’ve seen this movie before. After all, weren’t we just recently led to believe that if we liked our doctor, we could keep him? As millions of Americans can attest, that promise, too, went unfulfilled.

It wasn’t so long ago that headlines were filled with a federal operation known as “Fast and Furious,” in which the very same administration that proselytizes regulating a particular class of rifle was caught red-handed supplying Mexican gangsters with those very weapons. Got that, America? You can’t have them, but homicidal narco traffickers can, on your dime.
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Obama, Pelosi, Boxer, and the rest have no right to strip us of our last line of defense from their incompetence.

Obamacare’s Cadillac Tax, Designed to Fool ‘Stupid’ Voters, Faces 2-Year Delay

From Breitbart's Big Government:

The Cadillac tax was made famous last year by Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber who said it was a ploy designed to fool “stupid” American voters. Now the tax is facing a 2-year delay as part of a congressional budget deal, with leading Democrats helping push the deal forward.

The White House spokesman said on Wednesday that the administration would “strongly oppose” any effort to repeal the Cadillac tax, but that is sounding more and more like an empty threat. Congress is working out a last-minute budget deal which, if it goes through, could delay the start of the Cadillac tax from 2018 to 2020.

The problem for the Obama administration is that the tax is as unpopular with Democrats as it is with Republicans. Hillary Clinton called for its repeal in September. More recently, both Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) and Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA)came out against the tax and are leading Democratic efforts to delay it as part of the current budget deal. Democratic opposition appears to stem from unions which are against the tax because it impacts the type of generous health plans they negotiate with employers to secure for workers.

The Cadillac tax probably took a fatal PR blow last year when Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber revealed it was created as an accounting gimmick so that progressives could claim it was a tax on insurers rather than individuals. On three separate occasions, caught on video, MIT economist Jonathan Gruber explained the tax was intended to take advantage of Americans’ stupidity. “Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, you know, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever,” Gruber told an academic conference at the University of Pennsylvania in 2013.

The Cadillac tax was also dishonest in another way. It was initially sold, as the name implies, as a tax on the very wealthiest and most generous plans. However, the intent all along was to have the number of plans which fell under the proposed limit grow so that, over time, all employer-provided plans were hit with the tax. CNN’s Jake Tapper explained how this was intended to work in an excellent video clip published last year.

Looks like the Dear LEader is not the only congenital liar.

Harry Reid -- Kate’s Law ‘Yet Another Attack on the Immigrant Community’

From National Review:

Senator Ted Cruz skirmished with Senate minority leader Harry Reid Wednesday over a bill that would impose mandatory-minimum sentences on criminal immigrants who return to the United States following deportation.

The Texas Republican took to the Senate floor to celebrate last night’s electoral defeat of San Francisco sheriff Ross Mirkarimi, who defended the city’s sanctuary policy this summer after Kathryn Steinle was killed there by an immigrant who had been deported five times. “That is a striking statement of where the American people are on this issue,” he said Wednesday.
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Reid dismissed the legislation as “yet another attack on the immigrant community” when he objected to Cruz’s unanimous consent request. “The new mandatory minimum sentences . . . would have a crippling financial effect — and that’s an understatement,” he said. “We have no evidence that they would actually deter future violations of the law.”

Dingy Harry, the law will deter future violations by KEEPING THE ILLEGAL IMMIGRANT IN JAIL.

Filibusted

From Kurt Schlichter at Townhall:

Obama uses the filibuster, with the aid of his Senate minority minions, as a way to prevent accountability. By refusing to allow a vote on any issue Obama disapproves of, the Democrats are able to leverage the slobbering assistance of their mainstream media friends into placing the blame for a “dysfunctional” Congress onto the GOP despite the fact that the only people preventing the Congress from passing anything are the Democrats. Obama never has to take a real stand. He never has to veto popular legislation. He never has to explain why he is refusing to sign a bill, or why he is shutting down the government.

Instead, you GOP sad-sacks find yourselves selling out the people who sent you to Washington time and time again because Obama can use the filibuster to ensure that the blame for everything lands squarely on you. And you just take it. It’s like an abusive relationship. “Gee, maybe if I was nicer to him he’d let me govern,” you whimper just before he pushes another half-grapefruit in your collective faces.

During the first two year of the Dear Leader's Regime, Harry Reid and the Dims controlled both houses of Congress. Then in 2010, Reid changed the rules to stack the DC appeals Court. Reid set a precedent. Follow it and make him regret his decision.

What’s worse is that we all know that the filibuster is a dead tradition walking. The Democrats aren’t going to be so fussy next time they get a majority. They are going to kill it dead the second it becomes useful to do so and not pause to mourn. You GOP weasels are simply setting yourselves up for a royal shafting when your enemies choose the time and place to drive a stake through its flailing heart.

Take advantage of the majority and make Obama answer why he want to fund Planned Parenthood to the tune of $500,0000,000 and still chop up babies, for parts, like they are cars.

McConnell Faces More Calls for ‘Nuclear Option’ in Senate

From Roll Call via H/T at Instapundit:

It would be nice to see McConnell act as aggressively has Harry Reid did when he was majority leader. It might also discourage such action by future Democratic majority leaders.

Punch back twice as hard!

With Boehner Squeezed, Pelosi, Reid, Obama Unified on Shutdown Strategy

From Roll Call via H/T at Instapundit:

If they passed a normal budget, with separate spending bills for each department, instead of continuing resolutions, there wouldn’t be a credible threat of a shutdown. So why don’t they do that? . . .

Boy, that makes sense. No more omnibus bills, regular budgets, one piece at a time. Put the Dims on record voting on every piece of the budget. They will get calls and the Drive-By Media CAN'T smear the Republicans.

OOPS! Politico Still Thinks Reid Is Majority Leader

From The Daily Caller:

Politico’s Morning Energy newsletter apparently still thinks Harry Reid (D-Nev.) is Senate Majority Leader. Hint…the majority leader strongly resembles a turtle.

The Week in Pictures - Negligence Edition

From the guys at Powerline Blog:

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

What Does the Left Think the Supreme Court Is?

From Charles C. W. Cooke at National Review:

Hobby Lobby exposes mass incomprehension of the role of courts in a constitutional republic.

Conspicuously absent from yesterday’s post-Hobby Lobby hullabaloo was the acknowledgment on the left that the decision was the product of a court. Distilling into a single line what was a popular and widely disseminated critique, the New York Times’s Nick Kristof tweeted a picture of Justices Kennedy, Roberts, Scalia, Thomas, and Alito, sardonically labeling the quintet as “The experts on women’s health on the Supreme Court who ruled today against contraception coverage.” A few hours later, Senator Harry Reid’s office pushed out an assessment that was cut from the same unlovely cloth. “It’s time that five men on the Supreme Court stop deciding what happens to women,” Reid tweeted.
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The justices are jurists not doctors — they are nine appointed attorneys whose role in the American settlement is to provide legal answers to legal questions. Man or woman; straight or gay; handsome or ugly; Jew, Catholic, or protestant — the law must remain the law, regardless of in whose name its intricacies are decided. The alternative would be disastrous. Does Harry Reid aspire to see Roe v. Wade, which was decided by nine men, overturned?

I wish someone would ask Dingy Harry that question.

Why Democrats insist on lying about how ‘poor’ they are

From the NY Post via Instapundit:

Hillary Clinton claimed that, at the moment she and her husband were signing up for $18 million in book deals, that they were “dead broke.”

Harry Reid (who lives in the Ritz-Carlton Hotel) said liberals are getting bullied by Republican billionaires but the Democratic Party “doesn’t have many billionaires” behind it.

Joe Biden (family earnings: $407,000 last year plus a free house, driver, meals, etc.) claims he “I don’t own a single stock or bond. . . . I have no savings accounts . . . I’m the poorest man in Congress.” (Triple fail: Joe isn’t poor, isn’t in Congress and wouldn’t be the poorest member of it if he were.)

Right here in New York, we’ve learned that City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito, the daughter of a wealthy doctor who left a $6.7 million inheritance, took advantage of a no-interest loan intended for underprivileged New Yorkers to buy a Harlem townhouse. Then she forgot to declare the rental income on required city disclosure forms. The townhouse you and I helped buy her for $240,000 is today worth $1.2 million.

The more Democrats insist on their proletarian cred, the more absurd it gets. They’re no longer just holier than thou: Now they’re prolier than thou.

They believe the rules don't apply to them.

The Week in Pictures -- Graduation Edition

From the guys at Powerline Blog:

 

 

The Week in Pictures -- The Royal Baby Edition

From the guys at Powerline Blog:

Take This, Harry Reid - Senate Republicans FINALLY fight back ! ! !

From Breitbart's Big Government:

Senator Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania figured out how to get a little payback from Senate Majority Leader "Dingy" Harry Reid Wednesday for the czar-like way he runs the Senate. Introduce what are known as “third degree” amendments to must-pass legislation being debated, and when they are ruled out-of-order, appeal the ruling and call for a roll call vote, effectively tying the place up, delaying what is going on, and forcing vulnerable Democrats to cast votes that may hurt them in the next election.

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So for the first time in months, Republicans went on the offensive. Toomey offered an amendment Wednesday to the bill now being debated to extend unemployment benefits that prohibits such benefits going to people making over $1 million a year – not exactly controversial. As expected, the amendment was ruled out of order, since Reid doesn’t allow Republican amendments.

However, surprise to Reid, Toomey appealed that order, which under the arcane Senate rules he is allowed to do. So what did Democrats do? At Reid’s demand, they started filibustering the appeal, which prohibited a vote in order to preserve Reid’s prohibition against Republican amendments.

The significance of what Toomey did was to demonstrate that no one senator may block amendments in the Senate like the Rules Committee does in the House. If senators can do it once, they can do it again, and again and again, forcing votes on amendments to must-pass legislation, in the process essentially ending the majority leader's ability to block Republican amendments.

Harry, paybacks a bitch and you just got pwn'd.

Veterans’ Benefits in Order to Enable Fraud By Illegal Aliens

From John Hinderaker at Powerline Blog:

Even if, like me, you are beyond being shocked by anything the Democrats do, this is remarkable. For the second time, Harry Reid and his Senate Democrat cohorts have refused to allow an amendment to revise the Ryan-Murray spending deal to be voted on. The amendment would restore the cuts in veterans’ benefits that are part of the deal, and instead raise the money by closing a loophole that makes it easy for illegal aliens to defraud the federal government out of billions of dollars. It seems like a pretty easy choice: keeping our promises to veterans, versus enabling fraud by illegal immigrants. But the Democrats have again chosen, not just to prioritize illegal immigrants over veterans, but to prioritize fraud by illegal aliens over maintaining existing veterans’ benefits. You almost have to see it to believe it.

It is remarkable that on a day when our news media are consumed by a lane closure on a bridge, the Democrats’ support for billions of dollars in fraud by illegal aliens isn’t even a news story.

The Drive-By-Media must protect the Dims at all costs. It does show the Dims only care about power, not what is best for the country.

An outbreak of lawlessness

From Charles Krauthammer of the Washington Post:

Barack Obama may be remembered for something similar. His violation of the proper limits of executive power has become breathtaking. It’s not just making recess appointments when the Senate is in session. It’s not just unilaterally imposing a law Congress had refused to pass — the Dream Act — by brazenly suspending large sections of the immigration laws.

We’ve now reached a point where a flailing president, desperate to deflect the opprobrium heaped upon him for the false promise that you could keep your health plan if you wanted to, calls a hasty news conference urging both insurers and the states to reinstate millions of such plans.

Except that he is asking them to break the law. His own law. Under Obamacare, no insurer may issue a policy after 2013 that does not meet the law’s minimum coverage requirements. These plans were canceled because they do not.

The law remains unchanged. The regulations governing that law remain unchanged. Nothing is changed except for a president proposing to unilaterally change his own law from the White House press room.

That’s banana republic stuff, except that there the dictator proclaims from the presidential balcony.

Remember how for months Democrats denounced Republicans for daring to vote to defund or postpone Obamacare? Saboteurs! Terrorists! How dare you alter “the law of the land.”

So that means, the Democrats in Congress should be calling the Dear Leader a terrorist, right? Krauthammer continues,

After indignant denunciation of Republicans for trying to amend “the law of the land” constitutionally (i.e. in Congress assembled), Democrats turn utterly silent when the president lawlessly tries to do so by executive fiat.

I guess you can never expect consistency from Democrats. More from Krauthammer,

Nor is this the first time. The president wakes up one day and decides to unilaterally suspend the employer mandate, a naked invasion of Congress’s exclusive legislative prerogative, enshrined in Article I. Not a word from the Democrats. Nor now regarding the blatant usurpation of trying to restore canceled policies that violate explicit Obamacare coverage requirements.

And worse. When Congress tried to make Obama’s “fix” legal — i.e., through legislation — he opposed it. He even said he would veto it. Imagine: vetoing the very bill that would legally enact his own illegal fix.

It's about power and the Dear Leader's Legacy.

The Nuclear Option and Political Responsibility for Obamacare

From Randy Barret of the Volokh Conspiracy Blog:

Seth Barrett Tillman writes:

The Senate’s use of the nuclear option pins any defects in the Affordable Care Act (“ACA”) on the Democrats. Until the nuclear option was used, Democrats said that they had to pass an arguably defective bill because they could not get around a minority Republican-led filibuster in the Senate. In other words, although the Senate was able to invoke cloture and pass the ACA when it had Senate Ted Kennedy’s vote, once he died and was replaced by Senator Scott Brown, the Democratic majority in the Senate was unable to pass an alternative bill or substantively amend the ACA.

But the use of the nuclear option undercuts that narrative. We now know that the Democratic majority always had the ability to change the rules and to end debate on any amendment or amendments to the ACA. The Senate Democratic majority always had the power to terminate debate—it is just that the Senate Democratic majority refused to exercise that power.

If Obamacare is defective, it is not because the Republicans filibustered or threatened to filibuster any amendments, but because the Senate Democratic majority refused to terminate debate using a power which was always within their reach. It follows that political responsibility for any virtues or defects in the ACA rests entirely with the Democrats who passed it.

Unintended consequences.

Reid Drops Nuclear Bomb and His Party Will Rue its Fallout

From Clarice Feldman at the American Thinker Blog:

Why, Besides Partisan Political Expedience, Did Reid Do This? 

 As I noted, behind the scenes the leftmost wing of the Democrat party is smarting and pressed Reid to do this. Ostensibly, however, the impetus was the refusal of the Republicans to go along with a court-packing scheme to add three judges to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. This court, because it hears appeals from federal administrative actions, is the most important federal court below the U.S. Supreme Court and it has been a hindrance to some of the administration's more lawless moves. The three nominees blocked before the institution of the new, less rigorous rule on cloture are Patricia A. Millett, Cornelia Pillard, and Robert L. Wilkins. Even with the new rule, Millett will not be confirmed before the Senate reconvenes on December 9. After that the other two are expected to be up for reconsideration. Behind them, as the Washington Post noted on Saturday, there are "189 Obama judicial nominations awaiting confirmation" and "53 Obama judicial nominations moving through the Senate." How many will make it through the Senate before the 2014 election results are in and a new (possibly Republican) Senate is sworn in is anyone's guess. Nor is it a sure thing that the House will increase the D.C. Circuit's budget to include what it considers the three new extraneous, political appointments.

6 Questions to Ponder About the Senate’s Nuclear Winter

From David Hawking at Roll Call:

5. Why didn’t Democrats eliminate filibusters on legislation?

There is nothing, procedurally, to prevent them from doing so. As Thursday’s developments show, changes in the Senate rules, which are supposed to be fully debatable and subject to a two-thirds-majority vote, can effectively be changed by a simple majority.

But there does not appear to be any move afoot by the Democrats to take the next logical step by ending the filibuster altogether. The main reason is that they would reap no benefit from dropping that second nuclear bomb. Because nominations aren’t handled by the House, the new rules give the Democrats uncheckable ability to give their president what he asks for. Not so with legislation, which of course has to be passed in identical form by both the House and Senate to become law. Democrats have nothing to gain by streamlining the system so their bills can get more quickly across the Capitol, because the current House GOP majority would still be likely to shelve the measures in opposition to the policy changes being proposed.

But, to drive the point home, Speaker John A. Boehner, R-Ohio, has declared that he House would not touch a bill, no matter its merits, if it had been passed by the Senate without having to run the current cloture-first gantlet.

6. Why the exception for Supreme Court nominees?

Democrats were willing to accept that someday a Republican Senate will be able to quickly fill lower-court vacancies with the super-conservative nominees from a GOP president. But they were unable to acquiesce in that same scenario for the highest court in the country — especially at a time when its ideological balance is on a knife’s edge, and when advocates for abortion rights and other liberal causes were expressing wariness of the risk.

The tradeoff is that, by preserving the filibuster as a tool to stop Supreme Court nominees, Reid has made it potentially significantly difficult for Obama to install a new justice for the rest of his presidency. Especially if an opening unexpectedly occurs soon, while the pain of nuclear winter is still palpable, Republicans would be very tempted to unite against anyone Obama might choose — even if that meant leaving one of the court’s nine seats empty for a time.

Of the two liberal anchors of the court, Ruth Bader Ginsburg would be 83 at the time of the next presidential election, and Stephen G. Breyer 78. Both Anthony M. Kennedy, the only genuine swing vote, and Antonin Scalia, the leader of the conservative bloc, will turn 80 in 2016.