United, But Divided

by Alan Caruba, Contributing Author: The nation united to celebrate Thanksgiving, but as anyone who follows the polls can confirm, it is sharply divided. In many ways, half of those polled see America opposite to the other half.

In early November the Associated Press reported on a survey of 20,168 voters by Edison Research. It included results from interviews as voters left a random sample of 281 precincts on Election Day, November 4. As we know, the results of the election have been interpreted as a sharp rebuke to President Obama and the Democratic Party. Power in the Senate shifted to the Republican Party that also gained more seats in the House and added to the number of governors, bringing them to 29 of the 50 states.

For conservatives that is very good news. Politically Democrats feel so endangered that one of its top voices, Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York just announced that passing ObamaCare was a big mistake, noting that the Party should have focused on the economy.

That is an extraordinary confession and one that abandons the President whose name is associated with the Affordable Care Act. The Democratic Party has been captured by the far Left, but Schumer seemed to be saying it has to move more to the center if it has any hope in the 2016 elections.

The Associated Press reported that “Fifty-four percent of those who voted for Democrats said the country is headed in the right direction, while 88 percent of Republican voters think it’s on the wrong track.” One has to wonder how anyone could learn that one-out-of-five Americans on Thanksgiving Day was using food stamps and conclude this reflects the right direction.

On November 7 The Washington Post reported “With 214,000 jobs added in October, the unemployment rate ticked down to 5.8 percent, the lowest level in six years, even as more workers entered the job market.” The official unemployment rate is widely believed to be half of what the actual rate is nationwide after one factors in data the bureaucrats ignore or fudge.

Not surprisingly, “Nearly 9 in 10 of those who voted for Republicans think the economy is in bad shape, compared with just over half of Democratic voters.” Here again, the difference is perceptions is dramatic with conservatives having a more realistic point of view, but if more than half the Democratic voters think the economy is bad, that suggests the 2016 elections may reflect the recent midterms.

In some ways the AP poll depicted a difference based on what one might deem a more “mature” take on the state of the nation as opposed to those who ignore its problems to hold a more hopeful one, even if the facts do not support that judgement. “Sixty-four percent of Republican voters, but only 30 percent of Democratic voters, think life for the next generation of Americans will be worse than life today.”

The failure to embrace reality over propaganda was dramatically demonstrated by a question about climate change generated a response of “86 percent of those who backed Democrats” calling it “a serious problem”, while two-thirds of Republican voters said it was not. This means that 19 years into a planetary cooling cycle and a winter that has arrived a month early this year, Democratic voters—liberals—still cling to the belief that climate change, instead of reflecting the lower radiation levels of the Sun, is caused by human activity that generates a trace gas called carbon dioxide, all 0.04% of it in the atmosphere.

In a world where every day brings news of Islamic barbarism in the Middle East and Africa, “only 6 in 10 Democratic voters said they were worried by the threat of terrorism, while “8 in 10 Republican voters” took the threat seriously.

There are social differences between Republicans and Democrats. Of the Republican voters, 87% percent were white, while 61% of voters backing Democratic candidates were; 70% of Republican voters were married, compared with 55% of Democratic ones.

There were other differences among the two sets of voters, but suffice to say that each group lives in its own version of America and there are major gaps in their perception of the nation and the world.

The election reflected that a large portion of the voters demonstrated they prefer a conservative approach to government. If that trend continues—and it likely will—the 2016 elections will represent a major change from the two terms of President Obama and a rejection of his domestic and foreign policies.

Until then America will remain a nation divided politically and, given our diversity, within many social groups defined by gender, race, wealth, and age. Demography, the study of population, suggests that Americans are growing older in larger numbers than other subsets. Those “old folks” may just be the deciding factor in coming elections.
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Alan Caruba is a writer by profession; has authored several books, and writes a daily column, Warning Signs. He is a contributor to the ARRA News Service.

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U.S. Senator-Elect Tom Cotton Delivers Thanksgiving Republican Address

WASHINGTON, D.C. - In the Weekly Republican Address, U.S. Sen.-elect Tom Cotton of Arkansas delivers a Thanksgiving message that recognizes the many blessings bestowed upon America and its citizens while offering special thanks and gratitude to our troops and their families during the holiday season. “For many, there will be no homecoming this week,” Cotton says. “From Afghanistan to Iraq to Korea, our troops continue to patrol the world to bring peace and security for us all. From Marines in Liberia to sailors across the oceans to airmen over the Asian skies to the sentinels standing guard at the Tomb of the Unknowns at Arlington National Cemetery, these troops will sacrifice the comforts of family and home so we can enjoy them. To each of you, on behalf of the people of a grateful nation, I extend our deepest thanks for your honorable and faithful service.” The Weekly Republican Address is available in both audio and video format and is embargoed until 6:00 a.m. ET, Thursday, November 27, 2014. Video

U.S. Sen-Elect Tom Cotton

Full transcript of the address follows:
“Hello, I’m Tom Cotton, Senator-elect from Arkansas. I want to wish you and your family a blessed Thanksgiving holiday. For nearly as long as we’ve been a people, Americans have set aside a day for public thanksgiving for our many blessings

“Many trace our modern Thanksgiving back to the Pilgrims at Plymouth. Despite the hardships of the coming New England winter, the unforgiving terrain and climate, and the dangers of settling a new land, these Pilgrims celebrated a feast to thank God for his provision and protection.

“In the earliest days of our new and untested government, President Washington established a day of Thanksgiving for Americans to, in his words, acknowledge ‘with grateful hearts the many and signal favors of Almighty God.’

“In the depths of the suffering and deprivation of the Civil War, President Lincoln proclaimed the last Thursday of November as a single day for a nationwide Thanksgiving, to help unify a deeply divided nation.

“And just days after the shock of Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt signed a congressional resolution establishing the fourth Thursday of November as our national day of Thanksgiving, a practice which continues today.

“A constant among these Thanksgivings and the one we celebrate today is gratitude for the blessings of a beneficent and loving Lord no matter the adversity of the times. Today, we as nation no doubt face many challenges – too many of our fellow citizens out of work, too many families struggling to make ends meet, too many enemies plotting to do us harm. But we have faced graver challenges and not simply survived, but thrived.

“It’s tempting to be consumed with these challenges – as individuals, as families, as a people – and neglect our many continued blessings. The bountiful harvests from our fields and the amazing fruits of our industry and commerce we all too often take for granted. Nor do we always cherish the even more valuable blessings of our natural rights, civil and religious freedom, and the rule of law. And we can overlook the blessings of family and the love for our children.

“On this day of Thanksgiving, then, let us once again pause and reflect on these blessings, and also remember that we are not their author nor are they the work of our own hands. Rather, they are the gifts of a just and merciful God who loves us in spite of our failings. In deepest gratitude, we thank the Lord for these gifts and humbly petition for His continued Providence.

“And, finally, we prayerfully commend to His care two groups of our fellow Americans in particular: our troops and their families.

“For many, there will be no homecoming this week. From Afghanistan to Iraq to Korea, our troops continue to patrol the world to bring peace and security for us all. From Marines in Liberia to sailors across the oceans to airmen over the Asian skies to the sentinels standing guard at the Tomb of the Unknowns at Arlington National Cemetery, these troops will sacrifice the comforts of family and home so we can enjoy them.

“To each of you, on behalf of the people of a grateful nation, I extend our deepest thanks for your honorable and faithful service.

“And to your families, I extend similar thanks, and this personal assurance. Nine years ago, I was at Ranger School for Thanksgiving; six years ago, it was Mehtar Lam, Afghanistan. While we deeply missed our own families, we also celebrated together as a second, surrogate family.

“As you see the empty seat at your table this Thanksgiving, please know that your sons and daughters, husbands and wives, moms and dads miss you dearly, but are enjoying the next best thing to home: the camaraderie and love of their brothers and sisters in arms.

“God bless them, God bless you, and may God continue to bless the United States of America.”

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Post Thanksgiving 2014 Nightmare . . .

. . . Anytime President Obama shows up at the table, thanking Big Government, it's a nightmare in American.

Editorial Cartoon by William Warren

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Happy Thanksgiving 2014

Happy Thanksgiving and God Bless!


The ARRA News Service is not expected to publish articles on Thursday.  There is minimum expectations for Friday, Saturday and Sunday. It is time for some R and R and catching up with family and friends!

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Thanksgiving Proclamation
President George Washington
City of New York, October 3, 1789

Whereas it is the duty of all Nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey his will, to be grateful for his benefits, and humbly to implore his protection and favor, and Whereas both Houses of Congress have by their joint Committee requested me "to recommend to the People of the United States a day of public thanksgiving and prayer to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many signal favors of Almighty God, especially by affording them an opportunity peaceably to establish a form of government for their safety and happiness."

Now therefore I do recommend and assign Thursday the 26th day of November next to be devoted by the People of these States to the service of that great and glorious Being, who is the beneficent Author of all the good that was, that is, or that will be. That we may then all unite in rendering unto him our sincere and humble thanks, for his kind care and protection of the People of this country previous to their becoming a Nation, for the signal and manifold mercies, and the favorable interpositions of his providence, which we experienced in the course and conclusion of the late war, for the great degree of tranquility, union, and plenty, which we have since enjoyed, for the peaceable and rational manner in which we have been enabled to establish constitutions of government for our safety and happiness, and particularly the national One now lately instituted, for the civil and religious liberty with which we are blessed, and the means we have of acquiring and diffusing useful knowledge and in general for all the great and various favors which he hath been pleased to confer upon us.

And also that we may then unite in most humbly offering our prayers and supplications to the great Lord and Ruler of Nations and beseech him to pardon our national and other transgressions, to enable us all, whether in public or private stations, to perform our several and relative duties properly and punctually, to render our national government a blessing to all the People, by constantly being a government of wise, just and constitutional laws, discreetly and faithfully executed and obeyed, to protect and guide all Sovereigns and Nations (especially such as have shown kindness unto us) and to bless them with good government, peace, and concord. To promote the knowledge and practice of true religion and virtue, and the encrease of science among them and Us, and generally to grant unto all Mankind such a degree of temporal prosperity as he alone knows to be best.

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Open Letter to Senator McConnell and Speaker Boehner

by Phyllis Schlafly: President Barack Obama proudly announced that his policies would be on the ballot in the November 4 midterm elections. He got his answer loud and clear: the American people said, “No thanks.”

The voters gave Republicans a big majority equal only to the stunning congressional victory 68 years ago in 1946. That Congress, known as the 80th Congress, which elected 57 new Republican House Members and 13 new Republican Senators, should serve as a model to the Members elected in 2014 for what a courageous conservative Republican Congress can accomplish.

Elected on the slogan “Had Enough,” the 80th Congress reflected the views of the American people who had had enough of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal and were especially irritated by his imposition of price control. The voters rose up and called for an end to the big-spending, big-government, pro-socialist years of FDR’s four-term regime.

Since we’ve also had enough of Barack Obama, it’s instructive for the current generation to learn how decisively the 1946 Republican winners responded to the challenge thrust upon them. Under the leadership of Senator Robert A. Taft, that Congress made the greatest legislative record of any Congress in the 20th century.

The 80th Congress reduced taxes, balanced the budget, and even reduced the national debt. Congress used congressional investigations to expose Communists in government, such as Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White.

We’re looking for the Boehner-McConnell Congress to do likewise about reducing taxes and spending. We are also looking for the new Congress to use aggressive televised congressional investigations to educate the public about Obama’s unconstitutional and illegal acts, especially his executive amnesty for illegal aliens.

The 80th Congress passed much good legislation over President Harry Truman’s veto, most notably the Taft-Hartley Law. That Congress was staunchly anti-Communist at home and abroad; it launched the Greek-Turkish Military Aid Plan which, under General James Van Fleet, crushed the Communist guerrillas in Greece.

The 80th Congress passed the Twenty-Second Amendment to the Constitution limiting the President to two terms, thereby rebuking F.D.R’s unprecedented four terms. That is a gift that keeps on giving because it meant we didn’t have to worry about Bill Clinton or Barack Obama running for a third term.

Republicans were given a resounding mandate in 1946 to scale back the federal government, which had bulked up to fight World War II. Defying the voters, President Harry Truman greeted the incoming Republican Congress with the arrogant statement in his annual budget message of January 10, 1947: “There is no justification now for tax reduction.”

Republicans passed a bill to cut taxes across the board, while reducing expenditures to keep the budget balanced, but Truman vetoed it. Undeterred, they passed a second tax-cut bill, which Truman also vetoed. On the third try, Congress passed the tax cut over Truman’s veto.

That 1948 Revenue Act provided tax relief for all Americans by raising the personal exemption (which removed 7,400,000 low-income Americans from the tax rolls), lowering the tax rates, and instituting the joint income tax return for married couples. That pro-family innovation helped sustain the great American baby boom.

Running against the “me-too” Republican Tom Dewey in 1948, Truman managed to win a full four-year term as President, but his popularity soon collapsed. The conservative majority in Congress resumed passing bills over Truman’s vetoes, including the great McCarran-Walter Act of 1952, which reinforced strict limits on immigration and required the exclusion of Communists and other dangerous people.

The positive leadership exercised by the 80th Congress encouraged the start of a new grassroots movement. Average Americans formed study groups in private homes to read the hearings and reports of the House Committee on Un-American Activities and the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee.

Conservative newsletters, such as Human Events, informed the grassroots about current issues. Dr. Fred Schwarz presented his unique anti-Communism schools. Dean Clarence Manion gave us a conservative message every week on radio. Even the American Bar Association issued a report on Communist Tactics, Strategy and Objectives, daring to criticize a long list of pro-Communist Supreme Court decisions handed down by the Earl Warren Court.

Three courageous publishers produced books that were widely read: Henry Regnery, Caxton of Idaho, and Devin Garrity of Devin-Adair who published the popular books by John T. Flynn and warnings about school curriculum by Professor Merrill Root. During the 1940s, new organizations were founded that helped to build grassroots political effectiveness: the American Enterprise Association, America’s Future, the Foundation for Economic Education, and the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS).

So three cheers for the new Republican Congress and our hope is that it is ready for the fight. America is depending on you.
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Phyllis Schlafly has been a national leader of the conservative movement since 1964. She founded and is president of Eagle Forum. She has testified before more than 50 Congressional and State Legislative committees on constitutional, national defense, and family issues.

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Ferguson: What Lessons?

by Rick Manning: In an unheard appeal for calm in the wake of a Grand Jury’s decision to not indict Officer Darren Wilson in what was determined to be a justifiable shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., President Barack Obama urged that we learn lessons from the tragedy.

But what lessons will be learned?

One that was readily displayed across the nation’s television sets was that in spite of overwhelming forensic and other physical evidence, those leaders with a vested interest in the victimhood of Brown refused to listen.

Pulitzer Prize winning Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson looked past the evidence presented to the Grand Jury to declare on MSNBC that the choice to not indict the police officer showed that, “If you’re a white person in this country and you feel intimidated by a black person it seems that our system is saying, you know, shoot first and worry about consequences later.”

Forensic evidence be damned, Robinson and others of his ilk for some reason psychologically need Michael Brown to be the embodiment of an entitling victimhood.

This failure is likely a result of a culture frozen in the racist past and unable to see the massive strides that have been made to break down barriers of discrimination.

Attorney General Eric Holder once famously stated, “Though this nation has proudly thought of itself as an ethnic melting pot, in things racial we have always been and continue to be, in too many ways, essentially a nation of cowards.”
This same Attorney General refused to shut the door on future federal legal actions against Officer Wilson by saying that, “the Justice Department’s investigation into the shooting of Michael Brown remains ongoing.”

There never have been any fact-based allegations that Officer Wilson’s actions that night were based upon race, the only racial dynamic is that a white officer of the law shot and killed a black man who attacked in him his vehicle trying to get his gun, and then rather to submit to arrest, turned and ran at the officer.

If Wilson was black, this incident would not be known by many even inside Ferguson, but he wasn’t. And those who profiteer off of hate and misery descended on the small town with Holder amongst them.

Maybe we can have a national conversation about that, if Holder only had the courage to look at it honestly.
Perhaps the media will learn a lesson.

However, the breathless reporting that Brown had his hands up in surrender when he was gunned down became the narrative that drove the lynch mob against Wilson. This reporting was debunked in the end by the Grand Jury, but many misinformed protestors continue to cling to that visual.

The 24/7 media cycle that demands fresh information to feed the beast no longer seems to stop to question whether the information is true or not, or what the consequences of reporting it might be. They merely “report” what they are hearing, spend hours analyzing it until even those talking about it believe that what was a rumor is hard fact, and then move on to the next tidbit. In their wake, professional agitators like Al Sharpton use these fog of war reports to pour salt into the wounds of the grieving family without regard for the injustice they are committing.

Who is naïve enough to believe that the get it first wrong or right news media will learn any lessons as the fruit of their ratings are driven as the controversy driven by those erroneous reports plays out in the burning buildings of Ferguson?
Perhaps President Obama will learn a lesson.

A lesson that when you flout the laws as a regular practice expressing frustration that the Constitution is just too restrictive, you don’t have a lot of credibility when you urge calm using the argument that ours is “a nation built on the rule of law.”

Hollow words coming from someone who days before engaged in one of the greatest usurpations of legislative authority in history. Yet somehow, the President’s teleprompter writers caused most of the nation to snicker in disbelief as he claimed a rule of law for others that he, himself, does not submit.

Perhaps America will learn a lesson.

Don’t believe early reports, and don’t take sides in criminal justice cases. Whether it is the O.J. Simpson murder trial, the George Zimmerman or this Michael Brown case, the public knows significantly less about what happened than someone who is sitting on the Grand Jury questioning witnesses, or in a jury box.

Those sitting in the position of responsibility to determine whether there is probable cause for a case to go to trial or whether the defendant is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt have sworn an oath that they will treat the accused as innocent until proven guilty.

For me, I choose to accept the integrity of that system, even when I don’t agree with their findings, and I choose to reject demagogues on all sides who seek to politicize Ferguson-like situations.

America has a long history of treating juicy criminal trials as a perverse form of reality entertainment, from the folklore of Jesse James to Lizzie Borden to Bruno Hauptman to O.J., we love a good real life Law and Order episode. The cases that catch the public’s imagination have to have a hook. Is the defendant attractive, rich, a celebrity or the trifecta? Is there a racial component that can appeal to base fears and instincts? Is there some unusual perversion or abnormality that catches the 140 character attention span of modern America?

But criminal trials are not sporting events. They are searches for the truth through muddy water with conflicting testimony and viewpoints. They are not television shows where the accused is always clearly innocent or guilty. They are messy judgment calls.

In most countries in the world, the state almost always wins because the accused is presumed guilty unless they can prove their innocence. In America, anything less than the prosecution’s complete and total annihilation of all reasonable doubt about the guilt of the accused is designed to result in a finding of not guilty.

In spite of the obvious fact that sometimes the guilty go free under this system, would anyone have it any other way?
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Rick Manning (@rmanning957) is the vice president of public policy and communications for  Americans for Limited Government. This article was also shared on NetRightDaily.

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Who Gives A Loot . . .

. . . Ferguson Looting is shameful.

Editorial Cartoon by AF Branco

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Be Thankful

"The First Thanksgiving at Plymouth" (1914: by Jennie A. Brownscombe)

by Gary Bauer, Contributing Author: I love Thanksgiving -- a uniquely American holiday.

It's not just a day off work, a day devoted to parades and football, not even to turkeys and pumpkin pies. As the name makes clear, it is about giving thanks to God for the blessings we enjoy.

Thanksgiving traces its origins back to the Pilgrims -- those hardy pioneers who arrived on the shores of North America and, against all odds, carved a nation out of the wilderness. They came to the New World not seeking fortune, but freedom. Specifically, the freedom to worship God as they wished.

Thanking God for His blessings was a routine experience in our early years. The first official National Proclamation of Thanksgiving was issued by the Continental Congress on November 1, 1777 in celebration for the victory against the British at the Battle of Saratoga.

In October of 1863, Abraham Lincoln issued a formal proclamation calling on the country to observe the last Thursday of November "as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens." And as America confronted a world at war in 1941, Congress voted to establish Thanksgiving as a national holiday.

In his first Thanksgiving proclamation, President Ronald Reagan wrote:"America has much for which to be thankful. The unequaled freedom enjoyed by our citizens has provided a harvest of plenty to this Nation throughout its history. In keeping with America's heritage, one day each year is set aside for giving thanks to God for all of His blessings. . . .

"As we celebrate Thanksgiving . . . we should reflect on the full meaning of this day as we enjoy the fellowship that is so much a part of the holiday festivities. Searching our hearts, we should ask what we can do as individuals to demonstrate our gratitude to God for all He has done. Such reflection can only add to the significance of this precious day of remembrance.

"Let us recommit ourselves to that devotion to God and family that has played such an important role in making this a great Nation, and which will be needed as a source of strength if we are to remain a great people.

In spite of the personal and national challenges we face today, I believe all of us can be thankful to be Americans. We are the descendants of the patriots who declared that "All men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."Tomorrow, when Carol and I celebrate Thanksgiving with our family, we will give thanks for America, for our men and women in uniform and for you. We wish each of you all of God's blessings at this special time of year.
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Gary Bauer is a conservative family values advocate and serves as president of American Values and chairman of the Campaign for Working Families

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Who Are The Enemies Of Internet Freedom?

Full image

Via Who nIs Hosting This?: Even though the World Wide Web is over 25 years old, we’re still in the Wild West of the Internet Age.

An ever-expanding network of websites created by people all over the world, the World Wide Web is home to over a trillion gigabytes of data. The total number of websites online has just exceeded 1 billion, with hundreds of new sites going live every day.

And as fast as the Internet is growing, notoriously slow-moving governments have a hard time keeping up.

But that doesn’t stop some governments organizations from trying. Ostensibly in the interest of security, government organizations around the world are trying to monitor everything that happens online so they can stamp out illegal activity.

The NSA is a famous example. In the name of security, they monitor United States citizens’ online activity, both public and private, on Google, Facebook, Skype, and even by spying on your smartphone.

But the US isn’t the only country keeping a close eye on your every move: Countries on every continent have formed special organizations and task forces to monitor the activity of not only their own citizens, but of people around the world.

And they’re not only monitoring activity, but restricting it as well. Any website deemed illegal or harmful to their citizens is blocked, including news sites, blogs, and even social media. In some countries they can even enter your home to search for illegal media if evidence of your activities is found online.

Who’s watching your every move online? The NSA knows what you’re up to — but they’re not the only ones. Even countries you may think of as valuing the freedom of their citizens may not be governed by people who believe in a free Internet.

Think you have Internet freedom? We might for now, but you’re still being closely monitored. Here’s who’s doing the watching.

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Thanks, But ....

by Alan Caruba, Contributing Author: I know that Thanksgiving is the day we are all supposed to review a list of all the things for which we should be thankful and surely each of us has a list, usually family and friends, and, patriotically, for being Americans.

What makes this Thanksgiving different from those that have proceeded it is the reminder from President Obama that, in his opinion, America is not exceptional and, presumably, that means neither are we.

I don’t think this nation has ever celebrated Thanksgiving when its President did not like America.

We’ve had six Thanksgivings with Obama and each one has given us less for which to be thankful in terms of the economy and our national security.

Consider the vast unemployment that exists nationwide thanks to his failure to bring an end to the Great Recession. Forty million will use food stamps to put food on the table. Nearly half of all Americans are receiving government benefits that are paid for by those thankful to have a job. Thanks to ObamaCare millions lost their healthcare plans and millions more will in 2015. There is nothing “affordable” in the Affordable Care Act including the billion dollars spent on its website.

I think this Thanksgiving Day will have a different mood for the many Americans, especially who did not vote for President Obama or the Democratic Party. It is astounding to me that somewhere around 47% of those who presumably voted for him say they approve of his performance in office.

After election results that rejected him and his party, Obama has told them that he is more interested in what the two-thirds of voters in the last election who stayed home had to say. He “heard” them, too. He apparently did not hear what those who voted to give power in the Senate to the GOP while adding more Republicans in the House had to say.

Anyone paying any attention for the past six years knows that he doesn’t much care what any of us say and never has.

He believes his job is to “transform” a nation that did not need any transforming. America was and is a beacon of freedom to the world. That beacon, however, has grown dim for our allies whose leaders can no longer trust him. It has become clear to our enemies that they can do what they want without paying a price.

To drive home that message, he has been reducing our military to pre-World War II levels. Reluctantly he has increased our military presence in Iraq and will maintain troops in Afghanistan after making it clear that abandoning both of those nations to the Islamists was a major element of his foreign policy; if indeed he can be said to have a foreign policy other than retreat and isolation.

Instead of addressing the growing threat of Islamic fascism, Obama is talking about “climate change” as the great threat when, except for the idiots that believe anything he says anymore, people with any intelligence knows that there is nothing anyone can do regarding the climate. The only people who believe there’s any global warming haven’t been paying any attention for the last nineteen years in which the Earth has been in a predictable, natural cooling cycle, just like the Sun.

Closer to home, the White House just released plans for 3,415 regulations, the worst of which are from the Environmental Protection Agency that is destroying our nation’s ability to generate electricity, the one energy on which we all depend. At the same time, the President has just returned from China having signed an agreement to reduce “gashouse emissions” when such a reduction has no basis in science or logic, but translates into higher costs for electricity.

A national holiday should celebrate the ideals of our founding, but this year’s Thanksgiving occurs as the federal government grows ever larger and the amount of regulation of every aspect of our lives and the economy grows with it. This is the exact opposition of what the Founding Fathers intended.

Those Founding Fathers came together to wage a revolution against England’s King George III, a monarch whose commands they did not want to obey any more. This year’s Thanksgiving occurs as Congress is being challenged by a President who wants to ignore the separation of powers in the Constitution and the limits on executive powers. His intention to alter the current immigration laws is totally unconstitutional and must be stopped by every legal means available.

This Thanksgiving America is a less free nation in which a tsunami of regulations and laws continues to reduce our fundamental freedoms. This Thanksgiving, America is a nation that is losing the respect of other nations. This Thanksgiving, we face two more years of a lawless President who threatens the Constitution.

We have two more Thanksgiving Days before we turn America around and restore it to the great nation it was.
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Alan Caruba is a writer by profession; has authored several books, and writes a daily column, Warning Signs. He is a contributor to the ARRA News Service.

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Tags: Thanks, But no thanks, America, less free nation, regulations, laws, deduced freedoms, Thanksgiving Day, Alan Caruba, warning signs To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service. and "Like" Facebook Page - Thanks!

Obama’s Fowl Rardon

Editorial Cartoon by AF Branco

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Why Saul Alinsky Would Deplore Amnesty By "Executive Action"

by Ralph Benko, Contributing Author: President Obama is undertaking an “Executive Action” dramatically reducing deportations. The phrase, and concept of, Executive Action has a very creepy connotation. It implies extralegal action. It was used by the CIA as a euphemism for assassination.

The current Executive Action is called by its adversaries “amnesty.” In fact, it represents a temporary reprieve rather than a pardon, more likely to confound rather than promote a humane resolution. It is highly likely to cause a backlash against durable immigration reform.

And it is likely to trigger a lingering backlash against the Democratic Party. Barack Obama would do well to reflect upon and heed a social philosopher whose wisdom he spurns: Saul Alinsky.

President Obama often falsely is linked with Alinsky. They never met. Alinsky died in 1972, when Obama was around 10 years old, having spent his early life mostly shuttling between Hawaii and Indonesia. One of Alinsky’s direct successors, Arnie Graf, did indeed very briefly mentor a twenty-something Barack Obama. Obama explicitly turned away from the Alinsky way of community organizing. “Obama let Graf know that he was not interested in being an organizer. He hoped to become a great civil rights lawyer or a judge.”

In Alinsky’s magnum opus, Rules for Radicals, Alinsky — a provocateur and agitator, a man of great integrity and also of great practicality — presents a message that President Obama would do well to heed:
Life seems to lack rhyme or reason or even a shadow of order unless we approach it with the key of converses. Seeing everything in its duality, we begin to get some dim clues to direction and what it’s all about. It is in these contradictions and their incessant interacting tensions that creativity begins. As we begin to accept the concept of contradictions we see every problem or issue in its whole, interrelated sense. We then recognize that for every positive there is a negative,” and that there is nothing positive without its concomitant negative, nor any political paradise without its negative side.

Niels Bohr pointed out that the appearance of contradictions was a signal that the experiment was on the right track: “There is not much hope if we have only one difficulty, but when we have two, we can match them off against each other.” Bohr called this “complementarity,” meaning that the interplay of seemingly conflicting forces or opposites is the actual harmony of nature. Whitehead similarly observed, “In formal logic, a contradiction is the signal of a defeat; but in the evolution of real knowledge it marks the first step in progress towards a victory.”Executive Action lacks the dynamic of complementarity. Executive Action is synthetic, rather than organic. It is fragile, rather than resilient. It is the ultimate in trickle down policy. It contains within itself, as Marx once proclaimed of capitalism, the seeds of its own destruction.

President Obama, then a teenager, may have missed it when the term, Executive Action, surfaced in the Church Committee’s Interim Report on a rogue CIA project using the term as a euphemism for assassination.In addition to investigating actual assassination plots, the Committee has examined a project known as Executive Action which included, as one element, the development of a general, standby assassination capability.

… Sometime in early 1961, Bissell instructed Harvey, who was then Chief of a CIA Foreign Intelligence staff, to establish an “executive action capability,” which would include research into a capability to assassinate foreign leaders."Executive Action" was a bad thing. It is still a bad thing. President Obama’s use of Executive Action is not confined to suspension of deportations. It extends to regulatory actions such as the treatment of carbon dioxide by the EPA as a pollutant, pressure on the FCC to impose what could well portend a regulatory “Tragedy of the Commons” on the Internet, the Labor Department’s imposition of higher-than-market-determined wages on federal contractors and subcontractors, among other policy initiatives. Executive Action will end, as it did for the CIA, in tears.

Alinsky well understood the fundamental flaw of Executive Action. He precisely identifies the Achilles’ heel of Obama’s efforts thereby to effect positive, lasting, change. Alinsky:If you respect the dignity of the individual you are working with, then his desires, not yours; his values, not yours; his ways of working and fighting, not yours; his choice of leadership, not yours; his programs, not yours, are important and must be followed; except if his programs violate the high values of a free and open society.President Obama seems sincere in his commitment to improve the life of regular people. He has a blind spot, though: an obsessive belief that he knows best: better than an opposition he appears to consider cynical, corrupt, or stupid. Better than the people (recently categorized as stupid by a chief architect of Obamacare) themselves.

Actually we the people are a lot smarter than you might think, Mr. President. If your policies were good, really, we’d be rallying around you — and re-electing, rather than de-electing, your political allies. It isn’t, as you say, that your administration has done a poor sales job. It’s a mixture of your promoting a product that the majority of us do not want, or a poor quality version of a product (like universal health care) that we do.

It is not, Mr. President, a failure of politics. The recent election is a triumph of politics over a failure of policy.

And this bespeaks more than a utilitarian deficiency. It betrays a philosophical, even a spiritual, deficiency. Alinsky:One hundred and thirty-five years ago Tocqueville gravely warned that unless individual citizens were regularly involved in the action of governing themselves, self-government would pass from the scene. Citizen participation is the animating spirit and force in a society predicated on voluntarism.

… There can be no darker or more devastating tragedy than the death of man’s faith in himself and in his power to direct his future.Executive Action — whether then by the CIA or now by ICE – means recourse to an extralegal, if not quite illegal, means. Going extralegal is toxic to the civic spirit, Mr. President. Pay attention to Speaker Boehner –a real statesman who has expressed forward-leaning sentiments toward comprehensive immigration reform. Do not to “poison the well.”

Executive Action will not end well for the immigrants who you seek to shelter from deportation. Executive Action will not end well for your reputation or for America. Executive Action is the civic equivalent to ordering an assassination. Respect our dignity, Mr. President, and turn back.
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Ralph Benko is senior advisor, economics, to American Principles in Action’s Gold Standard 2012 Initiative, and a contributor to the ARRA News Service. His article first appeared in Forbes.

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Democrats throw Gruber Under The Bus While Universities Try to "Disappear" Gruber

Democrats throw Gruber Under The Bus

M.I.T. Professor Jonathan Gruber has had a rough go in the last couple of weeks. This video offers a quick refresher of the outrageous things the architect of Obamacare has said about the law, the process used to create it, the voters who were duped into believing it would work and how if we would just be patient, everything would turn out great.

Needless to say, Gruber quickly became toxic -- so bad, in fact, that Democrats wasted little time in tossing him over the side:“MIT professor Jonathan Gruber was an intellectual architect of Obamacare,” CBS reporter Wyatt Andrews said. “But here at a conference last year, he said the law was written to hide crucial details from an American public too dumb to understand.”

Andrews noted that “embarrassed” Democrats “quickly distanced themselves from Gruber.” Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) “turned Gruber into a stranger,” while the White House claimed he never worked there.

“But when the bill was being written, the administration paid Gruber almost $400,000 for technical advice on drafting the law,” Andrew said.So don't feel too bad for Mr. Gruber. He was paid very well for doing the Democrats' bidding on Obamacare. His real sin was telling the truth about how the process worked. Inside the Beltway, such honesty is unforgivable (especially when it's on tape).

And as for congressional Democrats..."disappearing" Gruber won't work. With each new video of him saying something disturbingly and disgustingly true about Obamacare, the worse their predicament becomes. After all, Gruber could only put the ideas down on paper. They actually voted for it.

Universities try to "disappear" Gruber

It's not just Democrat politicians who are pretending they have never heard of M.I.T. professor and Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber. Now universities where Gruber made some of his outrageous comments are removing videos of Gruber from their websites:...at least two colleges who hosted the professor have tried to scrub Gruber from the internet. The University of Pennsylvania removed Gruber’s October 2013 panel appearance — in which he laughed about “the stupidity of the American voter” — on November 10, but quickly reposted the video after withering criticism.

On Monday the University of Rhode Island took a page out of Penn’s book, removing (link is external) a 2012 discussion where Gruber explains how the law was passed to “exploit” the American voters’ “lack of economic understanding.” URI offered no explanation on its webpage as to why the video was pulled.The aim is clear: scrub the videos from the Internet, and no more embarrassing quotes will surface. Or so whomever is pulling the videos down hopes.

The fact is nothing ever really disappears from the Internet. If you're curious about what Mr. Gruber, or anyone else, may have said about Obamacare, one resource to check is the Internet Archive, where old sites continue to live on forever.
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Linked articles via the Response Action Network.

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Tags: politics, Obamacare, Democrats, trow, Gruber, under the bus, Universities, higher Education, disappear Gruber, Response Action Network To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service. and "Like" Facebook Page - Thanks!

Turning Climate Into Cash

by Alan Caruba, Contributing Author: As this is being written, all fifty states have freezing weather and nearly a month before the winter solstice on December 21 some northeastern cities are buried in record-setting snowfalls.

At what point will the public conclude that virtually everything that we have been told about “global warming” and “climate change” by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, (IPCC) as well as U.S. government agencies we’re supposed to trust has been bogus, based on computer models, none of which have proven to be accurate?

At what point will the public conclude that climate, a perfectly natural phenomenon so vast and so powerful, is being exploited in order to transfer large amounts of money from wealthy nations to those who are not? It is redistribution of wealth on a global scale. That is the primary reason for the U.N. climate fund. A total of $9.3 billion has been pledged by several nations.

My friend, Marc Morano, said this about the U.N. Green Climate Fund: 'It’s going to be a giant green slush fund of money distributed by the U.N. through political patronage system. It’s all designed to make climate an issue that every government has to pay attention to.”

“This is a new political party—if you will—the climate party, and it’s demanding a lot of fees and it’s demanding a lot of spending. The U.N. bureaucracy loves to spend money, loves to have scandals, loves to empower themselves. So this is all about empowering UN bureaucrats, diplomats and delegates and the UN’s own sense of self importance.”

Morano is the Communications Director for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT) and executive editor and chief correspondent for the award-winning ClimateDepot.com, a global warming and eco-news center founded in 2009. He has been on the front line of combating the lies told about global warming and climate change for many years.

I have been an advisor to CFACT over the years, sharing information that has consistently debunked what I regard as the greatest hoax of the modern era.

The worst part of the hoax was and is the billions that have been squandered on the bogus, useless “scientific” studies intended to keep it going. Then there have been billions more spent on the near useless “renewable” energy projects that have only demonstrated that wind turbines kill hundreds of thousands of birds and solar farms have the same affect. The electricity they produce is minimal and so unpredictable it requires the backup of traditional fossil-fueled energy plants.

The near total lack of the impact of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere on its climate has not stopped the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency from using carbon dioxide as justification for issuing a torrent of regulations that are crippling the provision of energy nationwide, attacking private property rights, and slowing the growth of our economy.

Thanks to Mother Nature, Americans and others around the world experiencing the 19-year-old cooling cycle the Earth has been in are beginning to realize that humans have nothing to do with causing climate change.

Sadly, too many world leaders, including our own, keep talking about climate change as if it was something we can influence by a reduction of “greenhouse gas” emissions. That’s just another way of saying use less energy.

The world leaders are wrong. Some are just flat out lying.

H. Sterling Burnett, Managing Editor, Environment & Climate News, Nov 25, 2014 noted, "According to Weatherbell: More than 85% of the surface area of the Lower 48 reached or fell below freezing Tuesday morning, November 18. All 50 states saw at or below freezing temperatures that day.

"Boston.com reported 1,360 daily low maximum records were set, meaning those 1,360 cities and towns saw their coldest daily highs ever recorded. In addition, snow covered more than 50 percent of the country, more than twice the coverage the U.S. usually experiences in mid-November CNN reported areas in Buffalo, New York, among other cities along the Great Lakes, experienced a year’s snow in just three days."
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Alan Caruba is a writer by profession; has authored several books, and writes a daily column, Warning Signs. He is a contributor to the ARRA News Service.

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Tags: climate change, cash, global warming lie, Alan Caruba, warning signs To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service. and "Like" Facebook Page - Thanks!

Australia Embraces the Less Government-Free Trade Model - We Should Too

Hugs - and Free Trade - All Round

by Seton Motley, Contributing Author: We recently referenced the very good news to come from an otherwise very bad President Barack Obama China trip.U.S., China to Drop Tariffs on Range of Tech Products

The U.S. and China reached an agreement to drop tariffs on a wide range of technology products, in a deal that its backers say could cover $1 trillion in trade and that marks a significant accomplishment amid strained ties between Beijing and Washington.

The two countries late Monday reached a deal to expand the Information Technology Agreement, a global technology trade pact, to cover semiconductors, medical devices, Global Positioning System devices and other newer products, U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman said Tuesday in Beijing.

The deal–reached late Monday after marathon negotiations and more than a year of stalled talks–could be ratified in December by members of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Geneva, Switzerland.Our ally Australia certainly seems to get the myriad advantages of a Less Government-Free Trade existence.Australia and China: Free and Friendly Trade

After ten years of negotiations, Australia and China have agreed to a Free Trade Agreement (FTA).Let’s hope we all can shave a lot of time off these things.Ultimately 95 percent of Australian exports to China will be tariff free within the next decade or so.That is a whole lot of Less Government-Free Trade.In fact, even before the FTA had gone ahead government ministers were announcing a separate “billion dollar” live cattle deal with China.Free trade deals are force multipliers. Deals beget deals - in large part because sitting down and discussing them warms even the coldest of inter-national relationships.

Australia has been on a roll.Education Minister Christopher Pyne told Channel Nine at the time, “This is the kind of thing that happens when you have a government that’s focused on economic outcomes… So we have a Free Trade Agreement with Japan, Free Trade Agreement with South Korea, working on one with China.”We can - and should - global-free-trade the Farm Bill out of existence.

And there are so many other nations with which to trade.Australia's next priority is to conclude a comprehensive trade partnership deal with India, Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott said on Tuesday during a state visit to Canberra by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi….

"We want to go further and that's why the next priority for Australia is a comprehensive economic partnership agreement with India," Abbott said.

"If I may say so, this is a moment in time. This is the time to get this done."Indeed it is. And we too should strike while the iron is hot.

For instance - we Conservatives loathe our domestic Farm Bill. For many, many good reasons. Not the least of which - it is terrible domestic policy that has begotten terrible international policy.The Global Farm Market: A Crony Socialist Nightmare Mess

(Our domestic Farm Bill) has been for seventy or so years a Government-Knows-Best train wreck. To alter slightly Ronald Reagan’s line:

“Government’s view of the (farm) economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.”

Over those seven decades-plus, our lather-rinse-repeat anti-free-market farm policy warped the emerging global farm market. The world’s growers saw our bad moves – and matched them. Subsidy-for-subsidy, tax-for-tax, protectionism-for-protectionism.

Seven decades later, we have a worldwide Crony Socialist nightmare mess.An inter-governmental regulatory arms race. Not good.

Conservatives have tried for at the very least three decades-plus to unilaterally disarm. The results? Not good.Unwinding the government’s crop protectionism regime has been a 30+ year-long nightmare mess. We who wish to make it all go away have in that time gotten absolutely nowhere in our attempts to do so.The solution? We have lots of time - our heinous Farm Bill just passed, and is in place for another four-plus years. We should acknowledge what Australian Prime Minister Abbott has rightly noted - and get to negotiating.The world’s (crop)-producing nations need to sit down together, each with a copy of everyone else’s lists of protectionist policies. And start horse trading.

“Brazil – how about if you get rid of this subsidy, we’ll each get rid of one.”

“Mexico – if you get rid of this tariff, we’ll each get rid of one.”

Let the subsequent discussions ensue. Lather, rinse, repeat.We’ve tried unsuccessfully - for a very long time - to undo our Farm Bill from the inside out. We should now instead try to undo it from the outside-in.

We can - and should - global-free-trade the Farm Bill out of existence.
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Seton Motley is the President of Less Government and he contributes to ARRA News Service. Please feel free to follow him him on Twitter   /   Facebook.

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Tags: Seton Motley, Less Government, Australia, embraces less government, free trade model To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service. and "Like" Facebook Page - Thanks!

It’s Time To Exercise the Legislative “Veto” . . .

The authors of The Federalist expected that in a properly-functioning republic the legislative branch would be the most powerful. Today, it is arguably the weakest--as its responses to the president's attacks on Congressional power demonstrate. In our latest essay, we argue that the Congress should fight back using its control over federal spending to stop President Obama's immigration initiative as part of a broader effort to make the public case for a legislative "veto." This isn't about exercising any new power, but rather pushing back hard against the idea that not giving the president every dollar he wants is tantamount to initiating a "shutdown" crisis--or in other words, from the president's perspective: "heads I win; tails you lose." ~ David Corbin & Matt Parks

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. . . And funding a constitutional government worth funding.Drs. David Corbin and Matthew Parks: The apoplectic and apocalyptic will scoff at the suggestion that this past week’s executive amnesty could help fuel a partial revitalization of our republic. So why is there room for optimism that something can be done–and what?

President Obama’s threatened and now announced executive amnesty has, not for the first time, drawn pundits, politicians, and the American people, Left and Right, back to the Constitution to reflect on what, exactly, the president and Congress are supposed to do. That, in and of itself, is a good thing–an indication that, at some level, we all still recognize the need to square our political behavior with our (collective) political principles.

Judging by the results, those on the Left have not liked what they have found in the Constitution. The leading talking point of the last week has been “Republican presidents (including Ronald Reagan) did the same thing.” A number of people have shown (see here and here) that, in fact, the actions of President Reagan and his successor, George H.W. Bush, are clearly distinguishable from President Obama’s.

But suppose they weren't. Tu quoque (“you too!”) may be good politics, but it’s bad logic and, if possible, worse legal and constitutional reasoning. (It’s not a solid defense against speeding to suggest that you were only keeping pace with the car in front of you.) Better to conclude that both Republican and Democratic presidents have violated the plain intent of the Constitution than to wrench the Constitution into justifying what they did, simply out of partisan loyalty. Are any of us willing to prostitute our integrity for parties so unworthy of the sacrifice?

The president’s (slightly) more sophisticated defenders have resorted to a “devil made me do it” defense. Who’s the “devil” in this case? First choice is, naturally, House Republicans, who, according to outgoing Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, had 510 days to do something about immigration, starting the clock from when the Senate passed an immigration reform bill.

Choosing not to legislate is, of course, a perfectly legitimate legislative act–one that Harry Reid (tu quoque) knows a lot about, with more than 300 House bills awaiting action in the Senate. Surely the House doesn’t have to pass a bill it disapproves to keep the president from implementing part of what it disapproves. Shorter Senator Reid: heads I win; tails you lose.

But if the House’s (in)action is perfectly legitimate and we’re still stuck, then maybe the devil is actually the (founders-designed) system. That, at least, was the suggestion of Garrett Epps, writing for The Atlantic last week. Prof. Epps argues in ominous tones that we could use a “six month moratorium on paeons to the wisdom of the framers,” since they failed to anticipate “divided government”–when one party controls the Congress and another party the presidency–leaving us in a “dangerous” position that will “probably” lead to government “shutdown, perhaps default, and possibly impeachment.”

Much could be said in response to this charge against the founders–starting with the fact that the they didn’t just anticipate divided government, they designed the government to be divided with the separation of legislative, executive, and legislative powers. If they erred, it was in assuming (a) that the government would be divided as much (or more) legislature against executive as Party X against Party Y and (b) that parties would be more numerous and fluid than they have turned out to be.

They hoped, in other words, for something better in congressional leaders than sycophantic ideologues, like Senator Reid, who invite the president to “go big” in usurping legislative authority, but they harbored no illusions that their system would facilitate expansive legislative programs, which were neither needed (see Federalist 53) nor conducive to self-government (see Federalist 62).

Gridlock, most of the time, was a better option that bad or frequent lawmaking–and the occasional times when it frustrated good initiatives were a reasonable price to pay for avoiding the assaults to enterprise and liberty of a voluminous and unstable legal code.

That, in fact, was one of the two reasons Alexander Hamilton gives in Federalist 73 to justify the president’s veto power. The other (and, in Hamilton’s view, even more important) is equally instructive in this case: to protect the president “against the depredations of the [Congress]”–that is, to maintain the separation of powers.

The president needed such protection, both Madison and Hamilton argued, because of the natural strength of the legislative branch in a republican system. As our regime has democratized, we’ve argued elsewhere, the executive branch has become ascendant–indeed all but hegemonic.

As a result, while we still need a presidential veto to protect the executive branch from the (infrequent) assaults of the Congress, we need, much more, an understanding and forthright application of the Congress’s own “veto” power.

The idea of a legislative veto in our system should be something of an absurdity because there are very few places under the Constitution where the executive branch has the initiative–a precondition for a veto power (you veto someone else’s measure, after all).

However, in our day of pseudo-law executive orders and claims of prosecutorial discretion, pseudo-treaty executive agreements, and a dormant Congressional power to declare war, presidents have seized the initiative in almost every area of policy-making. As a result, Congress must consciously and publicly reconceive its appropriation (and correlative defunding) power as not only policy-making, but policy-stopping.

To inactivate or deactivate programs and agencies with the power of the purse is legislative activity fully within its Constitutional authority.

In quiet ways, of course, this is already done. As The Federalist’s Sean Davis writes:Congress adds riders and prohibitions to appropriations bills all the time. Why? Because it can [“Article 1, Section 9 of the U.S. Constitution”]: ‘No money shall be drawn from the treasury, but in consequence of appropriations made by law[.]‘And from that power of the purse come the most powerful words in federal law:“Notwithstanding any other provision of law, no funds shall be appropriated or otherwise made available for ______.”What has yet to happen, however, is for Congress to make the political case, in any kind of systematic or persuasive way, that defunding parts of the federal bureaucracy is not a precursor to a Congress-initiated government shutdown and default, the two horsemen of the Progressive fiscal apocalypse (see Prof. Epps), but a defensive mechanism needed to protect Congress from the “depredations” of the president.

Congressional Republicans, in other words, would improve their ability to respond to the president’s assaults if they spent more time talking about the need for a Constitutional course correction and less time making idle and often insincere threats. When the crisis point in the game of chicken comes, it is too late for a previously chest-thumping Congress, with all the rhetorical disadvantages of diffuse leadership and political division (not to mention a hostile press), to win the sympathy of the general public.

Unfortunately, the lesson Republicans have learned from their previous encounters with President Obama is that a “shutdown” must be avoided at all costs. But if not satisfying the president’s fiscal demands is tantamount to causing a shutdown, we’re back where we started on the immigration question: heads the president win; tails Republicans lose.

Madison wrote in Federalist 48: “It will not be denied, that power is of an encroaching nature, and that it ought to be effectually restrained from passing the limits assigned to it.” This is the state of affairs that President Obama has furthered and taken advantage of in his personal appropriation of legislative power on a host of issues. The One Hundred Fourteenth United States Congress would go down as the one of the finest and most dutifully active and vigilant if it were to employ its power of the purse to ensure that constitutional government of, by, and for the American people did not perish on its watch.
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Drs. David Corbin and Matthew Parks are Professors of Politics at The Kings College (NYC). They are contributors to the ARRA News Service. They edit and write for The Federalist and are on Facebook and Twitter.

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Tags: Constitution, Federalist Today, Filibuster, Garrett Epps, Harry Reid, President Obama, Ronald Reagan, The Federalist, David Corbin, Matthew Parks To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service. and "Like" Facebook Page - Thanks!