Obama is clear in The Audacity of Hope about his progressive view of the Constitution. After acknowledging the merits of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s originalism, he wrote: “I have to side with Justice Breyer’s view of the Constitution—that it is not a static but rather a living document, and must be read in the context of an ever-changing world.” This constitutional philosophy is consistent with the idea touched on earlier about Obama’s Dewey-like “pragmatism” and is directly reflected in his appointments of Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.
Several other themes come to the forefront throughout Obama’s addresses: an emphasis on “shared prosperity” and the struggle for “social justice”; a belief in “global citizenship” and the idea that all nations, not just America, are “exceptional”; an acknowledgment of America’s past sins across the world and a belief that to rectify them requires apology, multilateralism, diplomacy, and treating even our mortal enemies with “mutual respect.”
Most critical of all for Obama is the power of “change.” Claremont-McKenna Professor Charles Kesler wrote that the president “believes that change is almost always synonymous with improvement, that history has a direction and destination, that it’s crucial to be on the right side of history . . . and that it’s the leader’s job to discern which is the right side and to lead his people to that promised land of social equality and social justice.”
Kesler continued:
Obama says, “Yes, we can” to slaves, abolitionists, immigrants, western pioneers, suffragettes, the space program, healing this nation, and repairing the world—and that’s in one speech. . . . “Yes, we can” takes the place in his thought that “all men are created equal” held in Lincoln’s thought. Insofar as it is America’s national creed, it affirms that America is what we make it at any given time: America stands for the ability to change, openness to change, the willingness to constantly remake ourselves. . . . The country’s saving principle, then, is openness to change.
But Obama’s obsession with change reflects a belief that America’s fundamental principles of individual liberty, limited government, and peace through strength are rotten to the core. As a result, progress in his view can only be achieved by minimizing or, ideally, eliminating these principles from the American mind-set.
And that is exactly what Obama would seek to do as president.
OBAMA’S DOMESTIC POLICY: ROOSEVELTIAN BIG GOVERNMENT FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
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One political figure is mentioned more than any living Democrat in Obama’s autobiography: Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
It should come as no surprise, then, that in many respects, Obama’s domestic policy has paralleled that of the great progressive leader, beginning with his approach to the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.
In Obama’s first inaugural address, the newly minted president called for, what else, action. He declared:
For everywhere we look, there is work to be done. The state of our economy calls for action, bold and swift. And we will act, not only to create new jobs, but to lay a new foundation for growth. We will build the roads and bridges, the electric grids and digital lines that feed our commerce and bind us together. We’ll restore science to its rightful place, and wield technology’s wonders to raise health care’s quality and lower its cost. We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories.
Note the progressive implication here that jobs come from government rather than from private enterprise. Also note that everything the president advocates is about “we,” that is, the collective, under the aegis of the state.
The president continued: “The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works—whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified.”
Once in office, President Obama moved swiftly so as not to let this crisis go to waste. His first task was to address the financial sector, a place where George W. Bush had set the tone and where, like Herbert Hoover, Bush deserves scorn for abandoning “free market principles to save the free market system.”
The key piece of Bush’s bank bailout was his Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). The bailout of the private sector by the state was a major coup for progressives. Obama expanded this initiative, appropriating hundreds of billions of more dollars and overseeing the bailout of the auto industry. TARP was supposed to be limited to financial institutions, but the program provided an opportunity for Obama to expand the government’s tentacles into other industries on behalf of “powerless” political allies. Specifically, Obama ran roughshod over the bankruptcy code on behalf of the United Auto Workers union that had bankrupted Chrysler and General Motors in the first place, and he did so while abrogating the property rights of creditors.
FDR had taken a similar view of state power during times of crisis and, as Obama would, he had done so on behalf of his progressive union allies. Labor’s priorities are progressive priorities.
The sweeping Dodd-Frank financial regulation bill was purportedly created to help ensure that no financial institution would become “too big to fail.” But again, just like FDR’s, the Obama administration’s hyperregulation of the financial-services industry, purported to protect Americans against needless risk-taking, instead ensures that bailouts will become a regular part of the system.
Dodd-Frank’s Title II allows federal regulators to “seize troubled financial firms—with minimal judicial review—and close down their affairs.” Taxpayers will be on the hook for the most troubled assets on financial institutions’ books should the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation seize them. In other words, government’s power to intervene rather than letting market forces work has only grown, and moral hazard has grown right along with it.
Perhaps more insidiously, the Obama administration has used its “crackdown” on the financial-services industry to pay off its community-organizing friends as part of settlements that several large banks have reached with the Department of Justice. So not only has punitive justice been brought against these firms, but the Obama administration has then gone on to redistribute their wealth to its friends. Remember, do as I say, not as I do. It’s a hallmark of progressives everywhere.
On the other hand, the notion that implementing more onerous financial regulations would help make for a healthier banking system has, in reality, served to benefit the big banks, just as the regulatory framework that FDR implemented during the Great Depression helped turn the financial-services industry into a cartel. Small institutions have paid the price, with community banks seeing their total assets decline by forty percent since 1994, while big banks have only grown even bigger.
Obama’s “stimulus” projects represented another Rooseveltian throwback, reflecting the progressive belief in the state as the employer of last resort. And just as with Roosevelt, the bang for the collective taxpayer buck was minimal, unless one was politically connected. According to George Mason University professor Veronique de Rugy, Democratic congressional districts received an average of $471.5 million in stimulus funds, while Republican congressional districts received an average of $260.6 million.
Billions more from the stimulus was doled out in the form of pork for Senate Democrats. Of the 594,754 jobs allegedly “created or saved,” more than two-thirds were to be found in the Department of Education. One study even suggests that the stimulus destroyed or forestalled one million private-sector jobs.
Obama also took a page from the FDR playbook by using the IRS to chill political dissent, with the agency targeting Tea Party groups that were seeking tax-exempt status. The IRS’s “slow-walking” of such groups’ applications prevented many of them from being able to participate in the 2010 and 2012 federal elections. Progressives purport to believe in tolerance and diversity, but those things usually extend only to those who are progressive.
On the Second Amendment, Obama has tried rep
eatedly to take advantage of virtually every crisis and tragedy to work to limit Americans’ gun rights, including taking executive action. Progressives argue that such restrictions will increase public safety. In reality, progressive enclaves such as Chicago, which have some of the most stringent gun laws in the nation, also have some of the highest rates of “gun violence.” Harvard’s John Lott, Jr., meanwhile has shown time and again that “more guns equal less crime.” (See my book Control for every stat and study you’ve ever wanted to know about refuting the gun-grabber arguments that always appear after a tragedy.) And in another case of “do what I say,” those in dangerous communities are left unarmed while “Operation Fast and Furious” authorized gun dealers to sell two thousand weapons to drug cartels, weapons that were used in the murders of hundreds of Mexicans, as well as U.S. Border Patrol agent Brian Terry.
Speaking of the Mexican border, Obama’s unconstitutional executive amnesty reflects the progressive ethos that we are all citizens of the world, that there are no borders, and that the executive must be able to act in the face of an intransigent legislature. Amnesty is really about two things: multiculturalism, one of progressivism’s highest values, and ensuring a permanent progressive majority in the country by adding millions of new likely Democratic voters to the rolls. (Not to mention the implications of the Cloward-Piven strategy of overloading the system to force a collapse.)
The Obama administration has also gone about purging individuals and documents describing the jihadist threat in the jihadists’ own terms. Language has been removed, for example, from federal law-enforcement training materials because Muslim groups—including at least one with known ties to terror—told the FBI that they found it offensive. Among the “offensive” language? A mention of al Qaeda’s connection to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing attempt.
Obama has repeatedly refused to acknowledge that jihadists have anything to do with Islam, calling their ideology “nihilistic.” This view is consistent with the (contradictory) progressive idea that we should not judge another’s religion but that Islam is a religion of peace and Muslim terrorists are merely perverting it. Worse, he put the very front groups that advanced the agenda of Islamic supremacists in America in charge of the “outreach” efforts created in order to “counter violent extremism.”
Meanwhile, as jihadists have waged war on America’s homeland, the Obama Justice Department has expressed its gravest concern over hostile speech toward Muslims by Americans, threatening that it could prosecute those who use such language. There is little more progressive than whitewashing a serious threat emanating from the Muslim community while then presenting the Muslim community as the victim and threatening the so-called aggressors by infringing on their constitutional rights.
Environmentalism is another key part of progressive ideology, dictating that ecological concerns trump economic ones. The Obama administration has argued that global warming is the greatest threat to the planet, requiring that Americans eschew economic progress by drastically curtailing their activities in order to prevent its acceleration. Ignored is that in order to achieve such goals, there are billions of public dollars, including $2.5 billion in annual “federal climate change expenditures” alone, being doled out (translation: redistributed) to advance this narrative.
Obama finally killed the job-creating Keystone Pipeline, after slow-walking it for years, citing environmental concerns. He did, however, use government funding to back “green jobs” initiatives that resulted in hundreds of millions of dollars and thousands of jobs being lost and/or outsourced, including those at Solyndra.
Meanwhile, economic costs of the policy aside, the president agreed to a deal with the Chinese in which America would reduce its emissions by between twenty-six percent and twenty-eight percent compared with 2005 levels by 2025. Who would pay for this drastic reduction? The coal industry, in theory, but ultimately, we all will pay. Obama’s power-plant provisions associated with emissions reductions are expected to cost America 125,800 jobs and create a GDP loss of $650 billion over a ten-year period. This was consistent with Obama’s 2008 statement that his cap-and-trade plan would bankrupt those who sought to build coal plants. Progressives are willing to destroy industries in the service of their ideological agenda.
And then there is perhaps the progressive movement’s most important victory, the culmination of an obsession that began with FDR’s Second Bill of Rights. It was Obama’s analogue to Roosevelt’s Social Security and Lyndon Johnson’s Medicare and Medicaid, his great entitlement, now cast as a civil rights issue: Obamacare.
True to FDR’s aim, Obamacare sought, at least superficially, to provide health care for all by way of government force, something those on the left had been pushing for more than a century. It treated health care as a right to be granted by the state. As Vice President Joe Biden clearly articulated it, it was a “big f*cking deal.”
While not the vaunted “single-payer, universal health care” that Obama and his progressive allies relished, the deceptively named Affordable Care Act did fundamentally change not only market-based health insurance but the entire American health-care system itself. It laid the groundwork for a collapse (à la Cloward-Piven) that will inevitably shepherd in a more pure version of socialized medicine down the road. And most important, it made Americans begin to question those key principles of individual liberty and limited government and ask themselves, if the state can take control of health care, what can’t it take control of?
Kesler makes the case that Obamacare is an echo of FDR’s National Industrial Recovery Act, in that it gave the state power over “a huge swath of the economy through collusive price-fixing, restraints on production, aversion to competition, and corporatist partnerships between industry and government.” Also in line with FDR’s anticapitalist actions during the Great Depression, the multiple-thousand-page Obamacare bill created a staggering 159 new bureaucracies—programs, commissions, and boards. This massive expansion of the administrative state and the corresponding reduction in individual liberty grants unelected “enlightened technocrats” unprecedented power over Americans from pregnancy through old age. Woodrow Wilson could have only dreamed of such a system.
Obamacare, with its newly empowered and unaccountable bureaucrats, is what passes for law when you believe in a living constitution. At root, it turns the American system—where every man is supposed to be king—on its head by making us subjects of the state. All in the name of “progress” and change.
The undemocratic process by which Obamacare was rammed through, without any Republican votes in either house of Congress, was characteristic of progressives who shun the checks and balances enshrined in the Constitution. As revealed by MIT professor Jonathan Gruber—an architect of the legislation who traveled around the country shilling for it as a paid spokesman for the Obama administration—the promises of the law, namely lower health-care costs and the idea that “if you like your health plan, you can keep your health plan,” were knowingly fraudulent claims. Just more evidence that, for progressives, the ends always justify the means.
Then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi made clear the Democrats’ intent to ensure Obamacare’s passage, no matter what: “We’ll go through the gate. If the gate’s closed, we’ll go over the fence. If the fence is too high, we’ll pole vault in. If that doesn’t work, we’ll parachute in but we’re going to get health care reform passed for the American people.” When questioned about the constitutionality of the legislation, Pelosi’s response was only, “Are you serious?”
In granting government control over one-sixth of the economy (and, in particular, the one-sixth that affects every individual in the most personal way), Obamacare, in its passage, substance, and implementation, has proven to be the most progressive piece of legislation in U.S. history. It cost the Democrats the House of Representatives and ultimately the Senate, but those are just battles. The war itself was won.
In addition to this game-changing entitlement, there are numerous other progres
sive policies that Obama has pursued, echoing Depression-era governmental programs. Just like FDR, Obama purported to help struggling Americans with these policies, but what he primarily accomplished was growing government and executive power. Consider some of the other progressive wins Obama has racked up:
• Using recess appointment power when the Senate was not in recess—thwarting constitutional checks and balances.
• Seeking to force public schools to use racial quotas to determine how and when to punish students for misbehaving—thwarting the federalist structure in an attempt to socially engineer based on progressive notions of “fairness” and “justice.”
• Forcing universities nationwide to strip protections from college students accused of sexual misconduct—violating due process rights.
• Ignoring the law requiring that the president give thirty days’ notice to Congress before releasing jihadists from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba—thwarting the system of checks and balances.
• Attempting to impose an unconstitutional nationwide speech code on college campuses—thwarting the First Amendment.
PROGRESSIVE “HELP” FOR THE NEEDIEST
What were the ultimate outcomes of policies designed to support society’s underdogs? In 2009, 33.5 million Americans were on food stamps. By 2015, the average participation rate had risen to 45.8 million.
The unemployment rate, which was once as high as ten percent, has now fallen to five percent, but the numbers are misleading. The falling rate appears to have been driven by a mass increase in the number of people who have dropped out of the workforce altogether. In late 2009, as unemployment peaked, there were about 82.5 million people out of the workforce. That number has now grown to 95 million. Obama’s “recovery” has been one of the slowest in American history. Blacks and Hispanics, constituencies that broadly supported the president’s progressive agenda, have been hit particularly hard.