• The Inspector General reported that, contra Eric Holder’s assertions, top Justice officials in Washington *did* have damning knowledge of Fast and Furious, the gun-walking scandal that has left at least one American law enforcement official, and hundreds of Mexicans, dead.
• Our ambassador to Libya, who was barely guarded, was murdered in Benghazi in a coordinated assault; and our embassy in Cairo was breached in an attack by a mob that we pretty much knew were coming.
  • Despite the warnings we had, which the President didn’t hear since he had skipped so many intelligence briefings, our government insisted it was all caused by a film trailer on YouTube.
• A filmmaker was taken from his home by a cadre of sheriff’s deputies for producing a film that the government didn’t like (please, drop the pretense that the midnight visit, on that day, from that many deputies, surrounded by TV cameras, downtown to answer questions from the FBI, was strictly because of a probation violation).
• Our embassies have come under attack throughout the Middle East and are seeing loud protests in Europe and Asia.
  • While this was happening, the President of the United States was hopping a jet to a fundraiser in Las Vegas, avoiding a meeting with the Israeli Prime Minister (he later changed course, after being duly embarrassed publicly), and prepping for an appearance on Letterman.
    • During this appearance the head of the executive branch of the federal government played dumb about the size of he federal debt. He didn’t lie, precisely, when Dave asked if it were around $10 trillion, but “$16 trillion or something like that” or even, “more than that, Dave, and that’s too much,” would have been an acceptable answer.
• Our military has temporarily suspended conducting joint operations with Afghan forces because, well, the Afghanis have this tendency to shoot our guys.
  • Sidenote: more than twice as many Americans have died in Afghanistan in the three-plus years since Obama took office than did in the seven years we were there before he took office.
• We found out that Obamacare will cost 6 million taxpayers an additional $7 billion in taxes in 2016. And it rises to $8 billion the following year.
• A video has emerged that shows Barack Obama committing himself to the idea of wealth redistribution. (Not that this is news, but it bears repeating.)
• Obama held a fundraiser at a place with a $280,000 sculpture constructed with golden champagne bottles worth $300 each. Because nothing serves to underscore your opponent’s out-of-touch richness like raising money next to a stack of golden champagne bottles.
• Emails secured under a FOIA request have proved that officials at the Department of Justice colluded with Media Matters for America to target and discredit journalists who were covering scandals at the DOJ

But none of that appears to be as important as Mitt Romney’s 47% comment.

Now. Romney’s comment has plenty of problems—the 47% of Americans who do not pay income taxes cannot be uniformly characterized as lazy moochers who will all vote for Obama no matter what. Likewise, the remaining 53% are not all perfectly virtuous, industrious, assured Romney voters.

I’m not defending the comment. It was tin-eared. It was wrong. I wish he hadn’t said it and I wish he didn’t think it. Even if there is some truth to it as well: there is, statistically speaking, about 47% of the voting public that will definitely vote for Obama. Perhaps a little more, perhaps a little less, but right around there. That 47% definitely has some overlap with the 47% who do not pay income taxes, but not perfect coincidence. The task of political campaigns is to identify who is in that group who are unpersuadable and not waste resources on them. So from an electoral perspective he wasn’t wholly wrong: he doesn’t need to worry about them, for good reason. But I still wish he hadn’t said it.

That said, I’m wondering why that comment has been *so* dominant in the news cycle with all these other things going on. Perhaps it’s a rhetorical question. I’m sure some of our august commenters will have ideas.

You got it: the world is burning and I'm yukking it up with Dave and hob-nobbing with Jay-Z and Beyonce!

This woman seems not to have any shame.

Nancy Pelosi today said that the investigation by Congress into the Department of Justice’s coverup of the Fast and Furious debacle was intended to prevent Attorney General Eric Holder and the DOJ from stopping the suppression of voter turnout in the upcoming election. Really, that’s her charge.

It’s a fantastic charge that suffers mortal wounds on a few fronts, and helps highlight another shortcoming of Eric Holder as AG.

First, it assumes that all the lawyers and bureaucrats at the DOJ are spending a significant chunk of their time on Congress’ investigation and subpoenas. Considering Holder himself seems to be spending the barest amount of time possible on the investigation it beggars belief that he would require or allow that many underlings to spend much time on it. Unless, of course, the time is spent devising new strategies to stonewall Congress.

Second, it ignores that the Obama campaign has stricter rules about who can get into campaign events than we have for who can vote—photo ID is required to get into Obama campaign events, but it is apparently racist to require an ID to vote. Why is Obama racist? Why doesn’t Nancy care about attendee suppression?

Third, and most devastatingly, Holder’s DOJ has already shown that it does not care about prosecuting voter suppression and intimidation.* Does “New Black Panther Party” and “Philadelphia” ring a bell?

In sum, some members of the NBPP stood outside a Philly polling station in paramilitary garb, one wielding a baton (not the kind majorettes twirl at halftime), and shouting things like, “You’re about to be ruled by the black man, Cracker,” at white people attempting to exercise their sovereign right to vote. It’s on YouTube. And here. All of this was in sworn affidavits, made its way to the appropriate portion of the Bush-era DOJ, where it was handled by a team of lawyers that included Bartle Bull, a left-leaning lawyer and veteran of civil rights and voter rights law. After the four defendants failed to show up or respond at all the DOJ had a default judgment against them and all that remained was the sentencing.

But by this point Eric Holder was the attorney general and his people were in charge. They ordered the lawyers handling the case to drop all charges, saying the evidence did not support them. Which was utterly false. Nothing ever happened and no good explanation as to why nothing happened ever emerged from the Holder DOJ.

So no, Eric Holder and his DOJ are not credible enforcers of voter intimidation laws.

I suppose we’re all accustomed to this by now from Nancy Pelosi, but still. At least she could try to come up with a better line. Or, perhaps, she could apply some pressure to get the DOJ to come clean on Fast and Furious since it has resulted in the murders of hundreds of Mexican nationals and at least two Americans, including two American law enforcement agents, Customs and Border Protection Agent Brian Terry and Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agent Jaime Zapata, and possibly a third, rancher Larry Link.

Too much to ask, it seems. Decency loses out to partisanship. And the people of Mexico and the U.S. are the ones who suffer.

————–

*That is, provided the intimidators are black and the intimidatees are white, it seems.

Syrians are rising up against their dictator and being shot down. Shouldn't that elbow out at least a little of the wall-to-wall Herman Cain coverage?

Did you know that Herman Cain is facing accusations of sexual harassment from back when he was the head of the National Restaurant Association?

If you don’t, welcome back from that black hole.

Ever since this broke I wasn’t entirely interested in whether or not Cain had made a gesture or made someone feel uncomfortable. I’m far more interested in his 9-9-9 plan, the modified 9-0-9 plan, whether he can bone up on foreign policy and perhaps learn the name of the president of Uzbekistan, and if he could clarify once and for all his position on abortion.

Also, we’re still facing unruly riotous crime-ridden mobs squatting in major cities, harming local business and charity work; headlines have suggested a collaboration among the US, UK, and Israel for a strike on Iran; a top Obama donor and former Democrat governor of New Jersey just bankrupted his multi-billion dollar company; race-baiter and habitual liar Eric Holder is still attorney general and is stonewalling over ‘Fast and Furious’; the economy added a paltry 80,000 jobs last month, which did not keep pace with the number of people who have simply stopped looking for work and therefore aren’t counted against the unemployment rate; the Department of Health and Human Services continues its assault on religious liberty; Democrats in the Senate have introduced legislation to repeal DOMA; the Department of Energy and the White House are still stonewalling over Solyndra; Europe is on the verge of economic collapse, unless China (!) can bail them out; Bashar Assad has begun using tanks against protesters in Syria; the Horn of Africa isn’t exactly peaceful at the moment; then there’s Kim Kardashian and Justin Bieber who are having bad weeks…

Okay, maybe the last two don’t rise to the level of the rest.

But seriously: keep an eye on the Cain allegations? Sure. If they’re true, and the behavior was worse than presently alleged, it speaks to his character in an unfavorable way. But there is so much more to talk about that is far more important.

The only reason this is still such a story is because of the horrible crisis management done by the Cain campaign. I don’t think they could have drawn up a worse response strategy than they have executed if they had tried.

And that may prove to be more politically damaging than the salacious allegations.

But seriously: Move. On.

I have in mind here the myth of the special status of, or independence of, the Department of Justice.  Notice that the letter released by Attorney General Eric Holder last week says that the President has “instructed” the Justice Department no longer to defend the constitutionality of DOMA in federal courts.  But wait!  Earlier in the administration, when Holder announced a decision to try terror suspects in civilian courts, the question was raised: did the President sign off on this decision?  On that question Holder was rather evasive, saying only that he had informed the President of his decision.  Then came a chorus in defense of Holder, and seeking to protect the President from the political unpopularity of that decision: the President could not properly “interfere” with the decisions of the Attorney General or the operations of the Justice Department.  The same thing was said even earlier when Holder announced investigations of CIA officials who had, during the Bush administration, carried on enhanced interrogations that they had thought lawful at the time.  The President, the claim went, could not properly call a halt to such investigations, because that would amount to an improper tampering with the work of the DOJ.

All of this is bad and erroneous constitutional theory, invented largely by liberals for political purposes.  The President is the head of the executive branch of government.  The Justice Department is a part of the executive branch of government.  Therefore the President has a right to control the discretionary operations of the Justice Department as much as he has the right in relation to any other executive branch department.  Sometimes it is said, in defense of the supposed special status of DOJ, that the Attorney General is the nation’s chief law enforcement official.  But this is wrong.  The President is the nation’s chief law enforcement official, and he has every right to order his subordinates at the DOJ to carry out the policies upon which he settles.

The idea that the President may not interfere with the work of the DOJ was first invented, to my knowledge, in order to criticize President Nixon for his efforts to impede the Watergate investigation.   Then his firing of the Watergate special prosecutor and other high ranking DOJ officials was presented as a “constitutional crisis.”  But it was not.  It was, to be sure, a corrupt and self-seeking act, but nevertheless perfectly within his constitutional powers as President.  If he exercised those powers for bad reasons, the proper course was to criticize him (and perhaps even impeach him and remove him from office) on that basis — but not to deny the existence of the power itself.

Something similar happened during the Bush II administration.  George W. Bush accepted some interpretations of law submitted to him by government lawyers other than those in the Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel.  For this some liberal commentators acted as if he had somehow violated the law or the constitution.  But this is silly.  The Office of Legal Counsel exists to advise the President on the meaning of the law and the constitution, but in the end he has to make his own decisions on those weighty questions.  If he is wrong it is because he is wrong on the merits, not because the Justice Department has some kind of authority over him.  Similarly, liberals complained about decisions to fire some U.S. Attorneys during the recent Bush administration, again acting as if the President should somehow have no say in who in the Justice Department gets to keep his or her job.  But without the power to fire executive branch officers who do not implement the President’s directives, how can the President reasonably be held accountable for the conduct of his office?

Again, this is a bogus account of Presidential power that has been concocted primarily for political reasons — as a tool by which to criticize Republican presidents and insulate Democratic presidents from criticism.  We can, then, at least be grateful that President Obama’s decision last week — a decision by which he asserted presidential authority over DOJ — repudiates this theory in a public manner that should not be forgotten and that we should not let be forgotten.  For President Obama, like any president, should be held accountable for all the actions of the Justice Department, for which he really is ultimately responsible.  And, looking forward, we should expect any conservative president in the future to exert a similar authority over the Justice Department, establishing its policies in accordance with his own principles and those of the movement that will have elected him.

The DOMA directive also undermines another myth about the Constitution — the myth of judicial supremacy.   I will discuss that issue in a subsequent post.

That’s fairly standard, basic U.S. government 101, right? I mean, any school kid knows that stuff, so you’d expect a person who supposedly taught Constitutional law would especially know that, right?  So what the heck is the executive branch doing declaring a duly enacted law unconstitutional, stipulating its own interpretation of the Constitution, and refusing to defend and enforce that law?

It seems some Con Law professors and lawyers are like so many theologians who get “so smart” that they forget to be orthodox and suddenly they’ve formulated a doctrine that makes sense to them (or at least fits their hoped-for reality), but doesn’t at all resemble the original material upon which it was built. But I digress…

The abandonment of DOMA and the reasoning for it is what we call a “naked power grab.” They didn’t even do it surreptitiously by defending the law poorly and letting it be struck down in court. While underhanded, that would at least be defensible. No, they boldly proclaimed themselves unrestrained by the strictures of their Constitutional role and did that which is reserved to the judicial branch.

Some have pointed out that this could backfire on Obama at some later date. They say it opens the way for Congressional Republicans to insert their own lawyers into the defense of DOMA, who would undoubtedly mount a more robust defense of the law, thus saving what was otherwise a sabotaged defense.

Another says both a) that it may backfire on Obama’s when a future Republican president simply decides that Obamacare is unconstitutional and therefore not to be enforced or implemented; and b) that since Elena Kagan was likely party to conversations regarding DOMA during her recent tenure as solicitor general she will be under great pressure to recuse herself on any future DOMA-related case before the Supreme Court.

A friend of mine also pointed out that this really puts any Supreme Court action on this topic in a new light because of the jurisprudential tendencies of Justice Anthony Kennedy. Kennedy, the only real “swing” vote on the present Court, frequently decides and reasons in ways more focused on defending and expanding the prerogative of the Court rather than offering worthwhile opinions on the merits. Any incursion upon that prerogative will not play well with him, and this decision by Obama is beyond an incursion: it’s a taking, bypassing, ignoring of the Court. Justice Kennedy won’t take kindly to that. So this decision is a loser there as well.

But those are all long-term ramification thoughts. What about right now?

Ed Whelan suggests something I had thought immediately, but would go further than he does.

See, along with the separation of powers we have “checks and balances.” The President must sign acts into law, but if the President is recalcitrant on a manifestly worthy law and vetoes it, the Congress can override the veto and make the act a law in spite of the President’s opposition.

Also, while the executive branch is charged with carrying out the work of governance, it cannot raise or apportion its own money: that is up to Congress to apportion and provide. Specifically, all spending initiatives must originate in the House of Representatives. If the House does not want something to get money, it does not get money.

If the President and his attorney general have refused to do what they swore they would do and have overstepped their specific duties, the Congress can, and ought to, simply defund their activities. Cut the President’s salary. Cut the salary of anyone involved in the non-defense of a duly enacted law. If they are specifically refusing to do their job and are specifically violating the principle of separation of powers they ought not get paid as though everything is operating properly.

It really is not hard to do, especially with the continuing resolution to fund the government through the remainder of this year still in the works. Simply remove the line items that apportion monies to those accounts and it’s done.

We’re looking to cut costs on ineffective and poorly performing parts of the government: the President and Attorney General have presented a good example of ineffective, poorly performing government.