Today in Washington, D.C. - June 21, 2010 - Obama's Prior Gov't Expansions Don't Inspire Confidence - Don't Tread on Me!

The Senate will reconvene this afternoon at 2 AM today and begin consideration of 3 district court nominees. Around 6 PM, the Senate is scheduled to begin a series of up to 3 roll call votes on the nominations. Later this week, the Senate will return to the debt-extending “tax extenders bill” (H.R. 4213).

Appearing on Fox News Sunday yesterday, Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell commented , “[T]he President has been advocating expansion of government across the board in virtually every area. If you are going to advocate expansion of the government, then you look not so good when the government you're already in charge of doesn't function very well.”

Believe it or not, liberal New York Times columnist Frank Rich made a similar point yesterday. Rich wrote, in this crisis, “[I]t’s not just the future of the gulf coast, energy policy or [Obama’s] presidency that’s in jeopardy. What’s also being tarred daily by the gushing oil is the very notion that government can accomplish anything. The current crisis in that faith predates this disaster. In the short history of the Obama White House, two of its most urgent projects, reducing unemployment and pacifying Afghanistan, have yet to yield persuasive results. The dividends on the third, health care reform, won’t be in the mail for years.”

Rich is right to identify the administration’s shortcomings on unemployment, but doesn’t mention the White House’s key initiative there, the $862 billion stimulus bill. At the time this massive bill was passed, Americans were assured that passage of the bill would result in 3-4 million jobs “saved or created” and that the unemployment rate wouldn’t exceed 8%. Instead the unemployment rate is still 9.7% and hasn’t even been close to 8% since early last year.

And while Rich says the results of the unpopular health care bill won’t really be measurable for years, there are many indicators that the bill isn’t functioning very wel and in fact may never function well.. Not only has the health care bill violated nearly every major promise made by President Obama and Democrats in their sales pitch, many of the unintended consequences are undermining what little confidence there was in the legislation to begin with. We’ve seen that the health care law won’t control costs, could harm Medicare beneficiaries through $500 billion in cuts, raises taxes, will almost certainly increase premiums, and is going to cost jobs. Meanwhile, Americans are also finding out that two of the most heavily promoted provisions of the bill, help for small businesses to get their employees health insurance and allowing adult children to stay on their parents’ health insurance aren’t likely to meet the expectations created about them.

And now the President and Democrats are looking to use the crisis in the Gulf to sell their national energy tax, which is a massive expansion of government. Yet with the track record the Obama administration has just on their signature government expansions, the stimulus and health care bills, Americans should not only be skeptical of any assurances of competence on implementing a carbon cap-and-trade scheme, they should be very afraid of this governments desire to take over all aspects of American lives and limit freedoms.  Reflect and ask yourself two questions, 1) would our founding fathers have taken us down this past and 2) where in the Constitution does it give Congress and the Executive Branch authority to do what they are continuing to do with respect to redistribution of wealth and limitation of free choice and free speech and more. Our government is becoming like King George and it is time to raise the Don't Tread on Me flag!

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