Is there anything about the Obama administration that doesn't reek of discriminatory application and enforcement of laws and the arbitrary and capricious abuse of power?
Obama's best defense against the charge that he's doing outrageous things is that to correctly accuse him of committing these actions makes one look like a kook. Viewed alone, they are quite disconcerting. Taken together, especially with levels of audacity and arrogance that would impress any tyrant, they are immensely troubling.
Obama's selective and inequitable wielding of governmental power suggests that he's on a mission to correct perceived injustices, to settle the score or to exact revenge. His attitude lends credence to this.
Everything about his governance smacks of picking winners and losers and defying accountability — just because he can and no one is going to stop him. On the accountability point, consider that his Department of Justice didn't bother to file responsive pleadings until way past the default deadline in a major lawsuit by Missouri officials against the feds on Obamacare.
Now he's openly defied Rep. Darrell Issa's document request deadline — sending a signal that these executive thugs can just do whatever they darn well please without consequences.
It's one thing for a branch of government to hold its own against another on a matter involving a bona fide separation of powers issue, but this case is hardly that dramatic. Issa is requesting information from Department of Homeland Security officials about alleged political interference with Freedom of Information Act requests. Adding insult and outrage to injury, Issa believes that top DHS officials instructed career employees not to search for the requested documents.
You've also doubtlessly read about the ongoing discriminatory exemptions from Obamacare the Department of Health and Human Services has granted to entities — the number now exceeding 700, with more than 2 million enrollees — many of which are heavy contributors to Obama's political campaign.
CNSNews.com reports that the administration gave one-year waivers to 28 separate local chapters of the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, exempting them from an Obamacare requirement that bans annual limits on what insurance plans will pay for coverage. The UFCW's political action committee spent $673,309 in independent expenditures promoting Obama's 2008 election. Further, columnist Michelle Malkin reports that one-fourth of waivers have been in favor of Big Labor groups.
Do you suppose there's any possibility under the sun the administration was upfront with the Congressional Budget Office about these upcoming waivers when it submitted its data seeking a passing score on Obamacare's budgetary impact?
Then there's the matter of Obama's lawless Environmental Protection Agency's issuing global warming rules in January, which is a flagrant circumvention of the will of the people, who, through their duly elected representatives in Congress, have rejected radical environmentalist cap-and-trade legislation. As if that weren't bad enough, in February, this same EPA granted an exemption to Obama pal Jeff Immelt's General Electric for its stalled power plant project in California. If the agency is so worried about greenhouse gas emissions, why would it go out of its way to "grandfather" a plant under the old regulations?
Even the administration's new "Startup America" program, designed to help struggling small businesses with infusions of capital and other federal assistance, involves the federal bureaucracy's sticking its nose in the private sector and making itself the sugar daddy and arbiter of who gets government aid. This money bureaucrats will be doling out will be coming from other taxpayers trying to pay their own bills and meet their own needs — all in service to the failed notion that private business can't suck its thumb or survive without federal beneficence.
None of this should surprise us, because this is the administration that selectively applies civil rights laws based on the victims' and actors' race, punishes government watchdogs for uncovering corruption of friends of the administration, crams down a restructuring of Chrysler to favor unsecured union buddies and discriminate against secured creditors, holds border enforcement hostage to Republican capitulation on its open-border demands, subsidizes clunkers, picks winners and losers in the housing market, defies federal court orders on drilling, doles out federal "stimulus" money as if it were Don Corleone's private stash, pledges $140 billion of your money to the International Monetary Fund for redistribution to Third World countries in defiance of Congress, is already attacking and thumbing its nose at the federal order (and its issuing judge) invalidating Obamacare, and selectively targets segments of the population (the rich) and industry (fat-cat banks, discriminatory insurance companies) for government mistreatment. I'm leaving so much out.
As disturbing as are this administration's bankrupting policies, its abuses and discriminatory applications of power are a very close second.
David Limbaugh is a writer, author and attorney. His new book, "Crimes Against Liberty," was No. 1 on the New York Times best-seller list for nonfiction for its first two weeks. To find out more about David Limbaugh, please visit his website at www.DavidLimbaugh.com. To read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.
