NEWSMAX
Democrats Poised to Join Holder Contempt Vote as Boehner Presses Ahead
June 26, 2012
House Speaker John Boehner is pressing ahead with a vote this week on whether to hold the government's top attorney in contempt of Congress, a move the White House warned Tuesday is a confrontational political ploy.
But Democrats may be signing up. On Tuesday, the chief Democratic House head counter, Rep. Steny Hoyer of Maryland, declined to tell reporters how many defections he expected, but acknowledged that some in his party would consider heeding the NRA’s call for a “yes” vote.
Attorney General Eric Holder faces a historic censure by the House should a contempt resolution be brought to the floor for a full vote Thursday in what Democrats say is an extraordinarily abbreviated time frame.
The censure focuses on the handling of a botched plan for US agents to track guns smuggled into Mexico, and specifically over the Justice Department's withholding of documents related to the operation's aftermath.
A Republican member of that committee, Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona, tells Newsmax that the full House of Representatives will definitely pass the orders of contempt and calls the Justice Department’s actions regarding Fast and Furious “egregious.”
Gosar, who has been among those calling for Holder to resign, said Fast and Furious “really puts the administration in a quandary, because if the president really wasn’t involved, why would he have executive privilege here?
“This is one of the worst scenarios I could think of because we allowed our federal government to put guns in the hands of convicted criminals and international thugs and did not follow proper protocols for law enforcement.
“That’s why it’s such an egregious action.”
Gosar also tells Newsmax.TV he expects bipartisan support in the contempt citation, despite the earlier party-line committee vote.
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TOWNHALL
A Government of Men, Not Laws
by Ben Shapiro
June 27, 2012
"There is no good government but what is republican," John Adams wrote. "(T)he very definition of a republic is 'an empire of laws, and not of men.'" Adams meant that a government in which law is applied at the discretion of powerful people is a bad government. The law must be applied in a straightforward, nonarbitrary fashion or the entire governmental system should be called into question.
This week, the Supreme Court called the entire governmental system into question.
A couple of weeks ago, President Obama unilaterally declared that he would cease to enforce major provisions of federal immigration law. Now he's campaigning on that reckless disregard for the constitutional structure. "You can decide whether it's time to stop denying citizenship to responsible young people just because they were brought here as children of undocumented immigrants," he told an audience in Boston. "I know where I stand on this."
Actually, we can't decide. That's because President Obama decided for us. And when we try to decide for ourselves via state governments, we are told that we're violating the constitutional order.
That's precisely what happened in the Supreme Court's decision about Arizona's SB 1070. Essentially, the Court found that the state of Arizona couldn't enforce immigration law, even if the federal government refused to enforce its own immigration law. By this logic, if the federal government passed a law regarding kidnapping across state lines, then refused to enforce it, a state which decided to arrest people for kidnapping at all would be in violation of the Constitution. As Justice Antonin Scalia put it in dissent, "(T)o say, as the Court does, that Arizona contradicts federal law by enforcing applications of the Immigration Act that the President declines to enforce boggles the mind."
It does boggle the mind. But not the liberal mind, which is far more interested in placing dictatorial power in the hands of a massive federal government than in preserving the constitutional structure. Every time someone has the gall to mention states' rights, liberals imply that America's just a few steps away from reinstituting slavery; each time somebody has the temerity to suggest that states -- which absorb virtually the entire cost of illegal immigration -- ought to be able to police their own borders when not in conflict with federal law, liberals raise the specter of racial profiling and lynch mobs.
It's sheer nonsense, but it plays into the liberal agenda: maximization of federal power, by any means possible. And the easiest means to maximize federal power is to place unlimited power in the hands of the president of the United States.
Read more: http://bit.ly/Mv6RKM
NATIONAL REVIEW
Obama, the Story-Teller
By Victor Davis Hanson
June 27, 2012
A sign of an undisciplined mind is serial lapses into self-contradiction, or blurting out a thought only to refute it entirely on a later occasion. For a president to do that is to erode public confidence and eventually render all his public statements irrelevant. That is now unfortunately the case with Barack Obama, who has established a muddled record of confused and contradictory declarations.
A sign of an undisciplined mind is serial lapses into self-contradiction, or blurting out a thought only to refute it entirely on a later occasion. For a president to do that is to erode public confidence and eventually render all his public statements irrelevant. That is now unfortunately the case with Barack Obama, who has established a muddled record of confused and contradictory declarations.
Last week, the president invoked executive privilege to prevent the release of administration documents related to the Fast and Furious operation. All presidents on occasion use that tactic, but rarely after they have put themselves on record, as did Senator Obama just five years ago, damning the practice as a de facto admission of wrongdoing. Does President Obama remember his earlier denunciation — or why he thought a special prosecutor was necessary to look into the Scooter Libby case, but not the far greater mess surrounding Eric Holder?
About the same time, President Obama offered de facto amnesty for an estimated 800,000 to 1 million illegal aliens. Aside from his circumvention of Congress and his casual attitude toward his own constitutional duty to enforce the laws as they are written, Obama had on two earlier occasions stated that he not only would not grant such blanket exemptions from the law, but also legally could not. That was then, this is now — the middle of a reelection campaign?
Candidate Obama derided George W. Bush as “unpatriotic” for borrowing $4 trillion over eight years; what term might President Obama use to characterize his own record of borrowing $5 trillion in less than four years? “Extremely unpatriotic”? In his first year in office, Obama announced that he would deserve just a single term if the economy had not improved after his agenda was reified. What then is he to say to that earlier Obama when 8 percent unemployment is now in its 41st consecutive month, GDP growth is flat, and we continue to borrow $1 trillion per year?
Candidate Obama derided George W. Bush as “unpatriotic” for borrowing $4 trillion over eight years; what term might President Obama use to characterize his own record of borrowing $5 trillion in less than four years? “Extremely unpatriotic”? In his first year in office, Obama announced that he would deserve just a single term if the economy had not improved after his agenda was reified. What then is he to say to that earlier Obama when 8 percent unemployment is now in its 41st consecutive month, GDP growth is flat, and we continue to borrow $1 trillion per year?
As a candidate, Obama promised to play by the rules of public campaign financing, only to renounce that pledge when he was well on his way to raising $1 billion. Obama did not just promise to shut down Guantanamo and cease renditions, preventive detention, and military tribunals; he also denounced them in such venomous terms that his later embrace — or indeed expansion — of all these protocols was not so much hypocritical as surreal.
President Obama does not like filibustering in the Senate; Senator Obama apparently felt differently when he was in the minority and tried to stop a vote on the confirmation of a Supreme Court justice. The list of the Obama about-faces and obfuscations grows weekly — the revolving door, lobbyists in the White House, the new transparency, opposition to super PACs, attitudes toward Israel, huge savings from Obamacare. And we are at a point now where no one can verify anything from the president’s past, given that his own memoir was largely mythographic — details about his family, friends, and girlfriends made up to enhance his preferred narrative of racial oppression. If a writer will fudge on the very details of his own dying mother’s seeking to obtain health care, then he will fudge on almost anything. And if the Birthers were unhinged for suggesting that Obama was born in Kenya, what are we to make of Obama himself allowing just that untruth to appear on his literary agent’s biography of him for over a decade?
Read more: http://bit.ly/MuE5Kl
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