John Roberts: What Was He Thinking?

Roberts Rules To Avoid The Appearance Of Politics In His Court

By CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER
Posted 06/28/2012 06:13 PM ET

It's the judiciary's Nixon-to-China: Chief Justice John Roberts joins the liberal wing of the Supreme Court and upholds the constitutionality of ObamaCare. How? By pulling off one of the great constitutional finesses of all time.

He managed to uphold the central conservative argument against ObamaCare, while at the same time finding a narrow definitional dodge to uphold the law — and thus prevented the court from being seen as having overturned, presumably on political grounds, the signature legislation of this administration.

Why did he do it? Because he carries two identities. Jurisprudentially, he is a constitutional conservative. Institutionally, he is chief justice and sees himself as uniquely entrusted with the custodianship of the court's legitimacy, reputation and stature.

As a conservative, he is as appalled as his conservative colleagues by the administration's central argument that ObamaCare's individual mandate is a proper exercise of its authority to regulate commerce.

That makes congressional power effectively unlimited. Mr. Jones is not a purchaser of health insurance. Mr. Jones has therefore manifestly not entered into any commerce. Yet Congress tells him he must buy health insurance — on the grounds that it is regulating commerce. If government can do that under the Commerce Clause, what can it not do?

"The Framers ... gave Congress the power to regulate commerce, not to compel it," writes Roberts. Otherwise you "undermine the principle that the Federal Government is a government of limited and enumerated powers."

That's Roberts, philosophical conservative. But he lives in uneasy coexistence with Roberts, custodian of the court, acutely aware that the judiciary's arrogation of power has eroded the esteem in which it was once held.

Most of this arrogation occurred under the liberal Warren and Burger courts, most egregiously with Roe v. Wade, which willfully struck down the duly passed abortion laws of 46 states. The result has been four decades of popular protest and resistance to an act of judicial arrogance that, as Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg once said, "deferred stable settlement of the issue" by the normal electoral/legislative process.

More recently, however, few decisions have occasioned more bitterness and rancor than Bush v. Gore, a 5-4 decision split along ideological lines. It was seen by many (principally, of course, on the left) as a political act disguised as jurisprudence and designed to alter the course of the single most consequential political act of a democracy — the election of a president.

Whatever one thinks of the substance of Bush v. Gore, it did affect the reputation of the court. Roberts seems determined that there be no recurrence with ObamaCare. Hence his straining in his ObamaCare ruling to avoid a similar result — a 5-4 decision split along ideological lines that might be perceived as partisan and political.

National health care has been a liberal dream for a hundred years. It is clearly the most significant piece of social legislation in decades. Roberts' concern was that the court do everything it could to avoid being seen, rightly or wrongly, as high-handedly overturning sweeping legislation passed by both houses of Congress and signed by the president.

How to reconcile the two imperatives — one philosophical and the other institutional? Assign yourself the task of writing the majority opinion. Find the ultimate finesse that manages to uphold the law, but only on the most narrow of grounds — interpreting the individual mandate as merely a tax, something generally within the power of Congress.

Result? The law stands, thus obviating any charge that a partisan court overturned duly passed legislation. And yet at the same time the Commerce Clause is reined in. By denying that it could justify the imposition of an individual mandate, Roberts draws the line against the inexorable decades-old expansion of congressional power under the Commerce Clause fig leaf.

Law upheld, Supreme Court's reputation for neutrality maintained. Commerce Clause contained, constitutional principle of enumerated powers reaffirmed.

That's not how I would have ruled. I think the "mandate is merely a tax" argument is a dodge, and a flimsy one at that. (The "tax" is obviously punitive, regulatory and intended to compel.) Perhaps that's not how Roberts would have ruled had he been just an associate justice, and not the chief. But that's how he did rule.

ObamaCare is now essentially upheld. There's only one way it can be overturned. The same way it was passed — elect a new president and a new Congress. That's undoubtedly what Roberts is saying: Your job, not mine. I won't make it easy for you.

ObamaCare: Higher Taxes Coming Your Way!

ObamaCare's Hidden Taxes

Posted 06/28/2012

Taxation: The high bench has confirmed that ObamaCare's individual mandate is a massive tax on the American middle class. But let's not forget the 20 other new taxes that are embedded in the law.

Though President Obama never sold it as a tax hike, the Supreme Court ruled the mandate is exactly that. Unfortunately, the majority argued it's legal under Congress' taxing authority.

Forcing citizens to buy health insurance "is absolutely not a tax increase," Obama insisted in 2009. Earlier, he assured the public that raising taxes on the middle class to support his health care plan was "the last thing we need in an economy like this." "Folks are already having a tough enough time," Obama added.

Indeed they are. But his plan, which subsidizes some 30 million uninsured, amounts to a $1.8 trillion whammy on working families. And that's just for starters.

The court was silent about the 20 other different taxes hidden in ObamaCare, more than half of which affect families earning less than $250,000 a year.

The new taxes, which cost some $675 billion over the next decade, include:

• A 2.3% excise tax on U.S. sales of medical devices that's already devastating the medical supply industry and its workforce. The levy is a $20 billion blow to an industry that employs roughly 400,000.

Several major manufacturers have been roiled, including: Michigan-based Stryker Corp., which blames the tax for 1,000 layoffs; Indiana-based Zimmer Corp., which cites the tax in laying off 450 and taking a $50 million charge against earnings; Indiana-based Cook Medical Inc., which has scrubbed plans to open a U.S. factory; Minnesota-based Medtronic Inc., which expects an annual charge against earnings of $175 million, and Boston Scientific Corp., which has opted to open plants in tax-friendlier Ireland and China to help offset a $100 million charge against earnings.

• A 3.8% surtax on investment income from capital gains and dividends that applies to single filers earning more than $200,000 and married couples filing jointly earning more than $250,000.

• A $50,000 excise tax on charitable hospitals that fail to meet new "community health assessment needs," "financial assistance" and other rules set by the Health and Human Services Dept.

• A $24 billion tax on the paper industry to control a pollutant known as black liquor.

• A $2.3 billion-a-year tax on drug companies.

• A 10% excise tax on indoor tanning salons.

• An $87 billion hike in Medicare payroll taxes for employees, as well as the self-employed.

• A hike in the threshold for writing off medical expenses to 10% of adjusted gross income from 7.5%.

• A new cap on flexible spending accounts of $2,500 a year.

• Elimination of the tax deduction for employer-provided prescription drug coverage for Medicare recipients.

• An income surtax of 1% of adjusted gross income, rising to 2.5% by 2016, on individuals who refuse to go along with ObamaCare by buying a policy not OK'd by the government.

• A $2,000 tax charged to employers with 50 or more workers for every full-time worker not offered health coverage.

• A $60 billion tax on health insurers.

• A 40% excise tax on so-called Cadillac, or higher cost, health insurance plans.

All told, there are 21 new or higher taxes imposed by Obama's health care law — and 21 more reasons to repeal it.

ObamaCare: "A Vast Judicial Overreaching"

It's Now Up To Voters To Throw Out The ObamaCare Mess

Posted 06/28/2012

Health Care: Ignoring the Constitution it swore to defend, the Supreme Court has affirmed ObamaCare, making the already important fall elections even more critical. A new president and Congress are needed to rid the country of this meddlesome law.

By a 5-4 vote, the court ruled that the individual mandate is not allowed under the Constitution's Commerce Clause. But it stunningly decided, right out of the ether, that Congress has the power to impose the mandate as a tax — even though Congress never defined it as a tax.

In essence, the Supreme Court's majority rewrote the law for the president and the Democrats who passed the bill. This wasn't lost on the dissenting justices. In their opinion, the court decided "to save a statute Congress did not write" and one the public does not expect.

The president even denied the mandate is a tax.

ObamaCare authors and supporters claimed that the Commerce Clause was the constitutional foundation for the mandate. The argument that it falls under Congress' power to tax was used only when the administration was forced to defend the law in court.

The argument is a thin one. The purpose of a tax is to raise revenues, not compel certain government-approved behavior. While ObamaCare is riddled with trillions in revenue-raising taxes, the cost of ignoring the individual mandate is not among them. Failure to comply with the mandate is met with punishment, a fine intended as a coercive act. That's not a tax.

Chief Justice John Roberts, the George W. Bush appointee who wrote the majority opinion, acknowledged that calling the mandate a tax isn't "the most natural interpretation of the mandate."

But, as if he were trying to help the White House's defense of the legal challenge, which had taken a desperate turn in the courts, he said that the interpretation needed to be only "fairly possible."

Judicial activism? Yes, it was right there on shameless display in the biggest court decision since the Franklin Roosevelt era. As the dissenters said, a ruling that keeps ObamaCare in place is "strained," "invented" and "amounts ... to a vast judicial overreaching."

There is speculation that Roberts sided with the justices on the left because he didn't want his to be the court that struck down a president's signature legislation and upset what he sees as a collegial relationship between the branches of the government. If so, he is not a man equipped with the proper temperament to be a Supreme Court justice, much less chief justice.

The dissenting judges colorfully called the mandate-as-a-tax a "a creature never hitherto seen in the United States" because it is "a penalty for constitutional purposes that is also a tax for constitutional purposes." They further noted that the Supreme Court has "never held — never — that a penalty imposed for violation of the law was so trivial as to be in effect a tax."

The dissenters — Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Anthony Kennedy — pointed out as well that the fine imposed for failure to comply was never intended to be a tax by its authors, as "the statute repeatedly calls it a penalty."

Calling it a tax not only tortures reasoned thought, but also means that candidate Barack Obama broke his promise that he wouldn't raise taxes on anyone earning less that $250,000 a year.

But that's OK. He'll never be called on it by the media. He will be too busy soaking up the press' fawning adulation in the glow of his victory.

The distinction between the Commerce Clause and the power to tax might make a lawyer happy. But what the court has done is give Congress the power to do whatever it wants, to impose any mandate and abridge any freedom as long as it says the legislation falls under its power to tax. Let the implications of that sink in.

While it's easy to condemn the court for its abuse of constitutional standards, we have to remember that four justices said the "central provisions of the act — the individual mandate and Medicaid expansion — are invalid."

They noted, "It follows, as some of the parties urge, that all other provisions of the act must fall as well."

Those justices also had a problem with ObamaCare's "dramatic expansion of the Medicaid program," which they said "exceeds Congress' power to attach conditions to federal grants to the states."

Finding both the individual mandate and the Medicaid expansion unconstitutional, they wrote that the entire law should be invalidated.

Had a single justice, say one appointed by President George W. Bush to defend constitutional liberty, grasped ObamaCare's obvious conflicts with the American system and had not chosen this case to try to make a novel legal argument, the outcome would have been flipped. But one man's poor judgment has helped an unnecessary burden on the country become more deeply entrenched.

With a majority of the Supreme Court refusing to protect American freedom from a predatory Congress, it is now up to the voters to restore lost liberty. They have to fire the president and turn Congress over to lawmakers who respect limited government and will pass policies that will in fact bring down medical costs and expand coverage. Health care must be left to the private sector, not commanded and controlled, and consequently choked, by a central planning committee.

Patients deserve full authority over their medical care. They don't need, nor do they deserve, congressional mandates, decrees from bureaucratic planners and costs driven higher by poor government policy. Affordability and wider coverage are possible, but they have to be promoted by policies that make sense, not a muddle.

If the court won't throw out this mess, then the voters will have to throw out its architects. We hope average Americans will be smarter in November than five highly educated justices were in June.

Obama: Liar-in-Chief

Is President Obama A Pathological Liar?

Posted 06/20/2012

The Obama Record

The Obama Record: The most frightening aspect of this president may not be his radical ideology but his rank dishonesty in selling that ideology. Now he's been caught lying about family racism.

In "Dreams from My Father," his 1995 memoir, Obama used the story of his paternal grandfather's imprisonment and torture at the hands of British colonists in Kenya as an example of white cruelty. He claimed Hussein Onyango Obama was unjustly detained for six months before being released a crippled, lice-ridden "old man."

In fact, none of it is true, according to Washington Post editor and biographer David Maraniss, who traveled to Kenya to investigate the tale. His grandfather was not detained or beaten by his "white rulers," as Obama, writing as a 34-year-old lawyer, claimed.

This is only the latest example of a growing body of fabrications, embellishments and outright lies told by this president, who has a real and possibly pathological problem with the truth.

Stacked up, his whoppers would make even Bill Clinton blush. Here's a sampling:

Lie No. 1: Obama has repeatedly claimed his white grandfather, Stanley Dunham, "fought in Patton's army," when he was a clerk with no combat in WWII.

Lie No. 2: Obama claimed Dunham, a communist sympathizer, signed up for duty "the day after Pearl Harbor," when in fact he waited six months.

Lie No. 3: Obama claimed his father "fought when he got back to Kenya against tribalism and nepotism, but ultimately was blackballed from the government," when in fact he fought against capitalism and lost his job when he advocated communism.

Lie No. 4: Obama has claimed his late mother's health insurer refused "to pay for her treatment" for cancer while citing a "pre-existing condition," when Cigna paid all her hospital bills and never denied payment.

Lie No. 5: Obama claimed he and a black high school friend named "Ray" were ostracized in Honolulu, when in fact the friend, Keith Kakugawa, was half-Japanese, and neither of them experienced discrimination.

Lie No. 6: Obama claimed the father of his Indonesian stepfather was killed by Dutch soldiers while fighting for Indonesian independence, when in fact the story turns out to be "a concocted myth in almost all respects," Maraniss found.

Lie No. 7: Obama claimed his parents decided to marry in the excitement of the Selma civil-rights march of 1965 — and that he personally has "a claim on Selma" — when in fact they were married several years earlier.

Lie No. 8: Obama claimed his father got to study in the U.S. thanks to JFK's efforts to bring "young Africans over to America," when in fact the Kenyan airlift his father participated in occurred in 1959 under Ike.

Lie No. 9: Obama submitted a phony bio to his book publicist claiming he was "born in Kenya."

Lie No. 10: Obama denied being a member of the socialist New Party, when a member roster of the Chicago chapter of the party lists him joining on Jan. 11, 1996.

Lie No. 11: Obama claimed he had only a passing acquaintance with Weather Underground terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, when in fact they held a fundraiser for their Hyde Park neighbor in their living room, and years later, while Obama served in the U.S. Senate, hosted a barbecue for him in their backyard.

Lie No. 12: Obama claimed he never heard Rev. Jeremiah Wright spew anti-American invectives while sitting in his pews for 20 years, when in fact Obama was moved to tears hearing Wright condemn "white folks" and the U.S. for bombing other countries and even named his second book after the sermon.

Lie No. 13: Obama claimed he got in a "big fight" with old white flame Genevieve Cook, who after seeing a black play asked "why black people were so angry all the time," when in fact she never saw the play nor made the remark.

In both his autobiographies, Obama paints a false portrait of a still-racist America and West, where he, his friends and relatives are victimized by that racism. Conveniently, his remedy is redistributive justice through bigger government.

An Outlaw in the White House: Part 2

Obama’s amnesty-by-fiat: Naked lawlessness

By Charles Krauthammer, Published: June 21


“With respect to the notion that I can just suspend deportations [of immigrants brought here illegally as children] through executive order, that’s just not the case, because there are laws on the books that Congress has passed.”


— President Obama, March 28, 2011


Those laws remain on the books. They have not changed. Yet Obama last week suspended these very deportations — granting infinitely renewable “deferred action” with attendant work permits — thereby unilaterally rewriting the law. And doing precisely what he himself admits he is barred from doing.


Obama had tried to change the law. In late 2010, he asked Congress to pass the Dream Act, which offered a path to citizenship for hundreds of thousands of young illegal immigrants. Congress refused.


When subsequently pressed by Hispanic groups to simply implement the law by executive action, Obama explained that it would be illegal. “Now, I know some people want me to bypass Congress and change the laws on my own. . . . But that’s not how our system works. That’s not how our democracy functions. That’s not how our Constitution is written.”


That was then. Now he’s gone and done it anyway. It’s obvious why. The election approaches and his margin is slipping. He needs a big Hispanic vote and this is the perfect pander. After all, who will call him on it? A supine press? Congressional Democrats? Nothing like an upcoming election to temper their Bush 43-era zeal for defending Congress’s exclusive Article I power to legislate.


With a single Homeland Security Department memo, the immigration laws no longer apply to 800,000 people. By what justification? Prosecutorial discretion, says Janet Napolitano.


This is utter nonsense. Prosecutorial discretion is the application on a case-by-case basis of considerations of extreme and extenuating circumstances. No one is going to deport, say, a 29-year-old illegal immigrant whose parents had just died in some ghastly accident and who is the sole support for a disabled younger sister and ailing granny. That’s what prosecutorial discretion is for. The Napolitano memo is nothing of the sort. It’s the unilateral creation of a new category of persons — a class of 800,000 — who, regardless of individual circumstance, are hereby exempt from current law so long as they meet certain biographic criteria.


This is not discretion. This is a fundamental rewriting of the law.


Imagine: A Republican president submits to Congress a bill abolishing the capital gains tax. Congress rejects it. The president then orders the IRS to stop collecting capital gains taxes and declares that anyone refusing to pay them will suffer no fine, no penalty, no sanction whatsoever. (Analogy first suggested by law professor John Yoo.)


It would be a scandal, a constitutional crisis, a cause for impeachment. Why? Because unlike, for example, war powers, this is not an area of perpetual executive-legislative territorial contention. Nor is cap gains, like the judicial status of unlawful enemy combatants, an area where the law is silent or ambiguous. Capital gains is straightforward tax law. Just as Obama’s bombshell amnesty-by-fiat is a subversion of straightforward immigration law.


It is shameful that congressional Democrats are applauding such a brazen end run. Of course it’s smart politics. It divides Republicans, rallies the Hispanic vote and preempts Marco Rubio’s attempt to hammer out an acceptable legislative compromise. Very clever. But, by Obama’s own admission, it is naked lawlessness.


As for policy, I sympathize with the obvious humanitarian motives of the Dream Act. But two important considerations are overlooked in concentrating exclusively on the Dream Act poster child, the straight-A valedictorian who rescues kittens from trees.


First, offering potential illegal immigrants the prospect that, if they can hide just long enough, their children will one day freely enjoy the bounties of American life creates a huge incentive for yet more illegal immigration.


Second, the case for compassion and fairness is hardly as clear-cut as advertised. What about those who languish for years in godforsaken countries awaiting legal admission to America? Their scrupulousness about the law could easily cost their children the American future that illegal immigrants will have secured for theirs.


But whatever our honest and honorable disagreements about the policy, what holds us together is a shared allegiance to our constitutional order. That’s the fundamental issue here. As Obama himself argued in rejecting the executive action he has now undertaken, “America is a nation of laws, which means I, as the president, am obligated to enforce the law. I don’t have a choice about that.”


Except, apparently, when violating that solemn obligation serves his reelection needs.

Obama, Climate Change, and Money

Left-Wing Foundations Dictate Obama's Misplaced Priority

By DAVID HOROWITZ AND JACOB LAKSIN
Posted 06/19/2012

President Obama recently outlined his policy priorities for his second term, but if you think it's anything as practical as jobs or the economy, you are greatly mistaken. Instead, according to the New Yorker, Obama believes that "the most important policy he could address in his second term is climate change."

This choice of focus might seem bizarre, especially when one recalls that the so-called scientific consensus on manmade global warming and climate change was fatally shaken by the 2009 "Climategate" scandal that revealed the world's leading climatologists had conspired to cover up data and research that undermined warming dogma.

Persistently high unemployment and sluggish economic growth also suggest more critical policy prerogatives.

But as we report in our new book, "The New Leviathan," what seems like a case of stunningly misplaced priorities becomes explicable, if not defensible, once one understands the outsize influence that environmental groups and their sponsors in progressive foundations have in dictating the focus and content of our public policy on environmental issues, all the way up to the White House.

To see how that's possible, follow the money.

Left-wing foundations are the place to start. Though ostensibly apolitical, these tax-free charities have spent millions of dollars promoting environmental causes, most notably the dubious threat of global warming and climate change.

In 2007, for example, the New York-based Doris Duke Foundation created an ambitious $100 million program to fight the threat of global warming. That investment was nearly matched in 2010, when the the Ford Foundation committed $85 million over five years to "combating climate change."

That the president now prioritizes climate change policy — despite tenuous scientific evidence of a problem and at the expense of more urgent economic concerns — is a testament to the effectiveness of the foundations' campaigns.

More broadly, it is a tribute to the green army of environmental groups that left-wing foundations' funds helped create and whose collective activism has elevated climate change from a marginal issue into a national agenda.

It is no exaggeration to say that the Ford Foundation almost alone created the modern environmental movement.

For instance, the environmental powerhouse National Resources Defense Council had no members in the early years of its existence in the '70s and subsisted entirely on Ford funding. Ford's early support paved the way for contributions from other major foundations like Heinz Endowments and the Turner and MacArthur foundations.

Fueled by millions from these mega-rich charities, NRDC today is the country's largest environmental group, with annual revenues of $97 million and an influence rivaling that of the government's own environmental agency — a reality reflected in the NRDC's self-embraced honorific: the "shadow EPA."

As the NRDC's Ford-funded rise to prominence suggests, grants from left-wing foundations have given environmental groups a tremendous advantage in setting the country's political agenda — even when the science is not on their side.

Our investigation reveals that the net assets of the 553 left-wing environmental groups total $9.5 billion. That is substantially more than the EPA's 2011 federal budget of $8.7 billion.

By contrast, there are 32 free-market and moderate environmental groups, and their net assets total $38.2 million. The environmental left's assets are 249 times larger.

If that didn't tip the scales enough, the federal government annually provides nearly $569 million in grant money to 247 progressive environmental groups.

Flush with foundations' cash and enjoying an incestuous relationship with the government, it's not surprising that environmental groups have succeeded in making their priorities and the president's one and the same. In this context, Obama's pledge to make climate change his top policy aim is neither startling nor even new.

Within a week of Obama's victory in the 2008 election, environmental groups like Earth Justice and the NRDC were demanding that the president take the unprecedented step of regulating carbon dioxide emissions under the Clean Air Act, even if it meant bypassing congressional approval. In February 2009, the administration moved to do just that.

Later the administration showed its deference to environmental groups by backing a doomed cap-and-trade scheme and funding "green jobs" through the stimulus bill.

It speaks to the power of the environmental movement that Obama is making climate change a top policy pursuit at a time when the need for greenhouse gas emission regulation has never been less urgent. Recently released EPA data shows that astounding strides have been made in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, all without the regulations like cap-and-trade.

On a per capita basis, greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. have declined by 16% over the last decade, with the result that the U.S. has reduced its emissions output to levels of the mid-1990. That reduction is almost 50% better than what the 15 richest nations in Europe achieved in the same time frame, even though Europe had a cap-and-trade program in place.

Evidence of environmental progress, coupled with anxiety over the economy, helps explain why the public is not on board with Obama's climate change agenda. Polls show that Americans overwhelmingly consider jobs and the economy the most pressing issues, with global warming ranking dead last in importance.

Still, it's less odd than it may seem that Obama sees it in reverse. Environmental groups and their million-dollar funders have ensured that their voice is heard louder than the public's.

• Horowitz, a conservative activist, and Laksin are the authors of "The New Leviathan: How the Left-Wing Money-Machine Shapes American Politics and Threatens America's Future." (Crown Forum).

Obama: Four More Years!

Obama's Massive Debt Bodes Ill For Long-Term Growth

Posted 06/19/2012

Economy: Anyone who's checked the latest jobless data knows President Obama's massive stimulus failed to stimulate anything but $5 trillion in new debt. Now it turns out this debt could hamper growth for years to come.

The study, published recently by the National Bureau of Economic Research, looked at 26 episodes in advanced economies since the early 1800s where gross public debt levels exceeded 90% of GDP for at least five years.

What they found was alarming: When countries run debt levels that high, average growth rate is significantly below low-debt years — 2.3% on average vs. 3.5%.

Worse, the study also found that once countries run debt up to that level, it can take years, if not decades, to bring it back down. In fact, 20 of those high-debt episodes lasted more than a decade, and the average duration was 23 years.

Combine the two, and what you get is "a massive cumulative output loss," according to the study's authors.

Where does that leave the U.S.? Thanks to Obama's fiscal policies, the U.S. gross public debt is now more than 100% of GDP. And, according to the Congressional Budget Office, under current policies there's no end in sight.

And what does Obama have to offer? Absolutely nothing. In fact, his latest budget plan called for adding $143 billion in new deficit spending next year and more than $1 trillion over the next decade.

At the same time, Obama has provided zero leadership on entitlement reform. Instead, he's simply fed the entitlement beast through ObamaCare, which if left in place will add more than $1.7 trillion in costs over the next decade.

Obama appears to be taken in by liberal economists such as Paul Krugman and Larry Summers, who say the country should borrow more, since interest rates are so low. As Krugman put it: "This is a time for the government — which can borrow at negative real interest rates! — to be spending more."

But the NBER study found this to be pure folly, since the adverse growth effects of high debt occurred even with low real interest rates, which the authors conclude "certainly casts doubt on the view that soaring government debt is a non-issue simply because markets are presently happy to absorb it."

Bottom line is that Obama's policies — which already produced the worst recovery in history — could bequeath the country decades of substandard growth.

The REAL Obama

The Hidden Obama


A young man more introspective than ambitious, the future president took a long time to choose a direction in life.


By Jonathan Karl


Republicans often criticize Barack Obama for his lack of experience in the business world.  As Mitt Romney puts it: "The president's a nice guy, but he's never had a job in the private sector." That's not quite true.  After all, Mr. Obama met the future first lady while working in the Sidley Austin law firm in Chicago.  And right after graduating from Columbia University, he put his bachelor's degree to work at a place called Business International Corp. in midtown Manhattan.


The job at Business International wasn't exactly like running Bain Capital—Mr. Obama was paid an $18,000 salary to help to write and edit newsletters for American companies doing business overseas—but it was a private-sector job. And the young Barack Obama hated it. As he wrote in his memoir, "Dreams From My Father" (1995): "Sometimes, coming out of an interview with Japanese financiers or German bond traders, I would catch my reflection in the elevator doors—see myself in a suit and tie, a briefcase in my hand—and for a split second I would imagine myself as a captain of industry, barking out orders, closing the deal, before I remembered who it was that I wanted to be and felt pangs of guilt for my lack of resolve."


Barack Obama: The Story
By David Maraniss
Simon & Schuster, 641 pages, $32.50


Mr. Obama lasted only a year, fulfilling his initial commitment and not a day more. When he went in to the company's vice president, Lou Celi, to tell him he would be leaving and didn't know what he would be doing next, Mr. Obama got a lecture on career planning. "He just seemed not exactly clear of what he wanted to do," Mr. Celi recounted, decades later, in an interview for David Maraniss's "Barack Obama: The Story." "I told him he might be making a mistake, leaving a job when he did not have any plans except a vague notion that he maybe would do some public sector work." Mr. Ceci had no way of knowing that the person ignoring his career advice was a future president of the United States.


Mr. Maraniss's 641-page opus is an exhaustively reported journey through Mr. Obama's early past—a past that, until now, has been little explored despite David Remnick's 2010 biography of Mr. Obama and Janny Scott's 2011 biography of his mother. "Barack Obama: The Story," the first volume in what will supposedly be a multivolume biography, begins long before he is born—and, yes, just to be certain, Mr. Maraniss interviews people who worked on the maternity ward when Mr. Obama's mother gave birth to him in Honolulu in 1961—and ends when he is accepted into Harvard Law School in 1988.


Mr. Maraniss tracks down Mr. Obama's family history—his mother's side of the family in Kansas, his father's in Kenya—and interviews relatives, friends and acquaintances. He traces Mr. Obama's footsteps from Hawaii to Indonesia to college in California and New York and his first visit to his father's Kenyan homeland. The author finds the words "Obama" etched in a cement sidewalk at his old high school in Hawaii, the work of a schoolmate who was trying to make trouble for Barry, as he was then known. Mr. Maraniss unearths Mr. Obama's long letters to one girlfriend and the diaries of another. "Barack Obama: The Story" is a careful, thorough account in which the author treats his subject with sympathy but not reverence. The result is an admiring portrait, to be sure, but some of the details that Mr. Maraniss discovers raise questions about the carefully crafted story that Mr. Obama has told about himself.


As we know, Mr. Obama has a family background entirely unlike that of any other U.S. president. Mr. Maraniss describes Mr. Obama's charismatic great-grandfather, Obama Opiyo, who had five wives, two of whom were sisters, and his grandfather, Hussein Onyango, who was a convert to Islam and who also had five wives. If Mr. Obama's charisma came from this side of his family, his calm, cool demeanor did not. Mr. Obama's grandfather, Mr. Maraniss writes, "had a reputation for pummeling enemies with his fists, smacking children who did not show proper manners at the dinner table, and beating women who failed to meet his standards, including his five wives."


When Mr. Obama's father—Barack Hussein Obama Sr.—came from Kenya to study at the University of Hawaii in 1959 (with the help of Christian missionaries), he left behind a young daughter and a pregnant wife. The elder Obama immediately became a striking figure on campus who excelled academically, making Phi Beta Kappa and eventually earning a fellowship to Harvard. Mr. Maraniss says that Obama Sr. "had a captivating voice, a mesmerizing presence, and a certainty that he was correct, and a love of argument." But when he married a pregnant 18-year-old named Stanley Ann Dunham (her unusual first name inspired by a Bette Davis movie about two sisters named Stanley and Roy), the Immigration and Naturalization Service demanded to know how he could get married when he had said on his visa application that he already had a wife back in Kenya.


The elder Barack Obama got out of that mess by claiming that he had divorced his Kenyan wife, but Mr. Maraniss says that he never bothered to divorce his first wife and probably never told her about his new marriage. And he was ill-prepared to be a father to the younger Barack Obama, born six months later. Just a month after he was born, Mr. Obama's mother left his father because, Mr. Maraniss speculates, he had become abusive. He moved on to Harvard, where he married another woman—and abused her, once holding a knife to her throat.


For Mr. Obama's early years, much of what the world knows up to this point comes from his "Dreams From My Father," published years before he ran for political office. Mr. Maraniss finds the book to be an unreliable guide to what actually happened in Mr. Obama's early life. The book, he says, "falls into the realm of literature and memoir, not history and autobiography." This is not a complete surprise: In the book's introduction, the author acknowledges taking liberties—changing names and chronology and compressing multiple people into single characters for the sake of narrative flow and dramatic effect.


Consider Mr. Obama's own description of his time working at Business International and those meetings with "Japanese financiers" and "German bond traders" and that reflection in the elevator mirrors of himself wearing a suit and tie. In reality, Mr. Maraniss finds out, Mr. Obama worked out of a tiny office barely large enough to fit a desk, dressed casually and didn't have meetings with financiers or bond traders. "The part about seeing his reflection in the elevator doors?" recalled one supervisor. "There were not reflections there. . . . He was not in this high, talk-to-Swiss-bankers kind of role. He was in the back rooms checking things on the phone."


In the memoir, Mr. Obama's experience at Business International, mentioned only briefly, is used as a device to portray a great temptation—he is almost seduced by the allure of a business career that would have forced him to sell his soul. The reality discovered by Mr. Maraniss is less dramatic but reveals Mr. Obama's state of mind. He was an efficient worker and an aloof colleague. Unlike many of his young co-workers, he never arrived at work late—and never stayed late. He did what the job required, "no more and no less." When one co-worker, knowing that Mr. Obama was a runner, suggested that they jog together after work, Mr. Obama declined, saying: "I don't jog, I run." It appears that he was simply biding time in a world he did not like. In a letter found by Mr. Maraniss, Mr. Obama's mother wrote a friend: "He calls it working for the enemy because some of the reports are written for commercial firms that want to invest in [Third World] countries."


Elsewhere, Mr. Maraniss finds that Mr. Obama's memoir "accentuates characters drawn from black acquaintances who played lesser roles in his real life but could be used to advance a line of thought, while leaving out or distorting the actions of friends who happened to be white." And so Mr. Obama wrote of commiserating with a fellow African-American in high school over the fact that white girls would not date either of them when, in reality, neither had a problem dating white girls and the friend was half-Japanese and had a black grandfather. And Mr. Obama wrote in the memoir of being denied a starting role on his Hawaiian high-school basketball team—which went on to win the state championship—because of his "black" style of play. Mr. Maraniss discovered the real reason: "He was one of the few players on the team who could not jump high enough to dunk the ball."


Mr. Obama's memoir recounts lots of pot smoking in his high-school days, and Mr. Maraniss gets the details—again, exhaustively. Barry Obama and his buddies formed what they called "the Choom Gang." In this case, "choom" is a verb meaning to smoke pot. And they seemed to smoke it everywhere—especially when driving around Hawaii in a VW microbus they called the Choomwagon.


One night they tried a little drag racing, pitting the Choomwagon against a friend's Toyota on a road snaking up Honolulu's Mount Tantalus. Mr. Obama was in the Toyota. The Choomwagon made it to the top first. When the other car didn't show up, the kids in the Choomwagon went looking for the Toyota. "On the way down," Mr. Maraniss writes, "they saw a figure who appeared to be staggering up the road. It was Barry Obama. What was going on? As they drew closer, they noticed that he was laughing so hard he could barely stand up." His friend driving the Toyota, it turned out, had rolled the car. Fortunately, nobody was hurt. Everyone avoided trouble by leaving the driver alone to deal with the police. It was, for Mr. Obama, a near miss, the kind of incident that might have ended badly, with injury or legal trouble or both.


In his high-school yearbook, in a section where students were supposed to record their gratitude to those who had helped along the way, Mr. Obama wrote: "Thanks Tut,"—his grandmother—"Gramps, Choom Gang, and Ray for all the good times." Mr. Maraniss notes: "Ray was the older guy who hung around the Choom Gang, selling them pot. A hippie drug dealer made his acknowledgments; his mother did not."


As Mr. Obama heads off to college, first at Occidental in Los Angeles and then at Columbia in New York, there is more studying, less pot and a lot of writing—journals and letters to a girlfriend filled with adjective-laden descriptions of what he sees in New York that read as if he is practicing to write a novel. He gives his first political speech at Occidental—two minutes deploring apartheid in South Africa—but spends more time on personal introspection than political activism.


The years at Columbia in particular are something of an enigma in the Obama story, barely mentioned in "Dreams From My Father" and sometimes called his dark years. Mr. Obama's first roommate at Columbia compared him to the main character in Walker Percy's novel "The Moviegoer," "where you're not participating in life but you're kind of observing, one step behind." He was a member of the school's Black Student Organization, but the other members contacted by Mr. Maraniss have little or no memory of him; neither, it seems, did he make much of an impression on his professors.


But in the diary of one girlfriend and the letters he wrote to another, a portrait emerges of someone struggling with his own identity and not sure where he fits in among his old Choom Gang buddies, who were "moving to the mainstream," and among college friends heading toward the business world. His letters are long and self-absorbed but strike the themes that would fill his memoir 10 years later.
In one letter to his girlfriend in 1983, he writes: "Caught without a class, a structure, or tradition to support me, in a sense the choice to take a different path is made for me. . . . The only way to assuage my feelings of isolation are to absorb all the traditions [and all the] classes; make them mine, me theirs." That's heady stuff for a love letter but also a first glimpse of the "post-partisan" Obama who would take the stage at the 2004 Democratic convention.


The recurring theme that runs throughout "Obama: The Story" is just how unlikely is was that someone with Mr. Obama's exotic and tangled family history—whatever his race—would end up in the Oval Office. But perhaps the most striking thing about this story is how much it differs from the story told in "First in His Class" (1995), Mr. Maraniss's acclaimed biography of Bill Clinton. Bill Clinton was the kid who knew he was going to be president when he was 9 years old and acted that way. In Mr. Obama's early years, there are precious few hints of the kind of ambition that would lead him to the White House. For that, we'll have to wait for volume two.


—Mr. Karl is a senior correspondent for ABC News.


A version of this article appeared June 16, 2012, on page C5 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: The Hidden Obama.

An Outlaw in the White House

Obama's Lawless Presidency Close To Totalitarianism

2012 June 18

The Obama Record

The Obama Record: The chief executive who swore to faithfully execute the nation's laws picks those he'll ignore and makes up others through regulation and executive order. He sees no need for a Congress or Constitution.

Maybe it's because Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts stumbled a bit in leading President Obama through the oath of office that the president doesn't feel bound by it.

But through the awkwardness these words were heard: "I, Barack Hussein Obama, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."

It would not take Obama long to make clear he meant his interpretation of the Constitution, not the Supreme Court's, a principle established in Marbury v. Madison, the 1802 case that formed the basis for the exercise of judicial review in the U.S. under Article III of the Constitution.

In his State of the Union address a year later on Jan. 27, 2010, he shamefully scolded the justices on national television for "having reversed a century of law" in the Citizens United ruling in which the court was protecting the freedom of political speech enshrined more than two centuries ago in the First Amendment. We agree with Justice Samuel Alito's eloquent rebuff of the president, in which he was seen mouthing the words "Not true."

Then came ObamaCare, which would prove to be a monumental assault on the First and 10th Amendments to the Constitution. Virginia, along with other states, filed suit challenging the landmark health care reform law on the grounds the law's requirement that its residents have health insurance violates the Commerce Clause of the Constitution. Never before had a citizen of the United States been required to purchase a product just for being a citizen of the United States.

The Constitution according to President Obama also requires a suspension of the First Amendment guarantee that Congress shall make no laws restricting the free exercise of religion. Arguably, the Congress did no such thing in passing ObamaCare. But it left the door open when it replaced "We The People" of the Constitution with "the Secretary shall determine," a phrase that appears in the bill a mind-boggling 1,563 times.

One of the things Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius determined was that religious institutions be required to provide health coverage in violation of their faith and religious conscience. HHS argues that churches are exempt, but the 43 Catholic institutions that filed suit argue the government has no right to define what a church is and that acting on their faith through everything from hospitals to colleges to soup kitchens is constitutionally protected.

The role of the president, according to Article II, Sec. 3 of the Constitution, is to "take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed." Laws were intended by the Founders to be passed by Congress and signed by the president. Obama finds this a mere inconvenience.

"Whenever Congress refuses to act, Joe and I we're going to act," Obama said in February at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, with Vice President Joe Biden off to the side. "In the months to come, wherever we have an opportunity, we're going to take steps on our own to keep this economy moving."

Obama took that opportunity regarding immigration when he announced he was unilaterally suspending the deportation of some young illegal aliens and allowing others to apply for green cards, essentially implementing the provisions of the so-called Dream Act he has been unable to get through Congress, including one in his first two years dominated by his own party.

Article 1, Sec. 8 of the Constitution, which enumerates the power of Congress, states that "Congress shall have the Power To ... establish an (sic) uniform Rule of Naturalization." Congress has passed numerous laws pertaining to immigration and naturalization, including laws requiring the deportation of illegals. Congress? Obama don't need no stinkin' Congress.

Can't get cap-and-trade or the Kyoto Protocol through Congress? Let the EPA implement through regulations and then ignore the courts when they think your energy policy has crossed the legal line.

Louisiana Federal District Court Judge Martin Feldman found the Obama Interior Department in contempt of his ruling that the offshore oil drilling moratorium, imposed by the administration in 2010, was unconstitutional. After Feldman struck down the initial drilling ban, the Interior Department simply established a second ban that was virtually identical.

In January, the president illegally appointed a director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, along with three appointments to the National Labor Relations Board, all without the approval of a Senate still legally in session, as the Constitution requires.

The president also selectively decides which laws he'll enforce and which he won't. Regarding education, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan recently granted waivers to 10 states, freeing them from the strict requirements of the 2002 No Child Left Behind Act.

In February 2011, the Justice Department announced it would not defend the Defense of Marriage Act against court challenges. Last August, Obama's DHS announced it would no longer deport the noncitizen spouses of gay Americans — a direct contradiction to DOMA as well.

Maybe all this works in Venezuela, but it won't wash here. We still have free elections, and there's one in November when we can fundamentally restore respect for the law and the Constitution.