The last check and balance on President Obama is the Republican majority in the House of Representatives. He has made clear that he intends to remove that check on his power in the 2014 elections.
Our Founding Fathers wisely provided for a free and independent press as an additional check on government power. But the New York Times, the Washington Post, NBC, CBS and ABC decided they had a better idea. They concluded that it is more important to behave voluntarily like the old Soviet press did under government compulsion, when the socialist party is in power.
Of course, we do still have the freedom in America for now for the alternative media — talk radio, Fox News, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, conservative websites, blogs and a few other media outlets – to air criticism of the reigning socialist regime. But 50% of the country is ensconced in urban enclaves where listening to or reading views that are not friendly to socialist rule is considered socially unacceptable behavior. So, no alternative views, or checks on the reigning regime, ever break through there. That explains why our once grand, world-leading democracy has now been rendered dysfunctional.
An independent judiciary is also supposed to be a check and balance on the abuse of government power. But as his second term drags on, President Obama will have appointed more and more, and eventually a majority of, all federal judges.
Moreover, these won’t just be any judges but liberal judges chosen with a liberal judicial philosophy that their job is not to follow the law, but to do what they think is right, regardless of the law. What is “right” is going to be Obama’s liberal/left agenda.
Holding the line even right now are only five rapidly aging old men on the Supreme Court. Replacing even one of them with a liberal appointee will mean the end of the Reagan majority on the Court. Everything in our society will then change. Gun rights and the Second Amendment, gone in a heartbeat. Property rights and the rule of law, forget about it. Religious freedom? Only for the socialist religion.
These will be replaced by a constitutional right to welfare, and to your money. By gay marriage. And by a right to free contraceptives for everyone, so America can party on right through its decline, just like in Europe.
The Second Mid-Term Hex HeHexz
The second mid-term election of a two term incumbent President, as in 2014, has historically been a disaster for the party of the incumbent President. It was so even for Franklin Roosevelt in 1938. It was so for the war hero Dwight Eisenhower in 1958. Counting Kennedy/Johnson as one Administration, it was true for them as well in 1966. And it was so even for Ronald Reagan, even in the midst of an historic recovery, when the Republicans lost control of the Senate, and even more ground in the Democrat majority House, in 1986.
As University of Virginia political scientist Larry Sabato and Kyle Kondik write in the March 19 Wall Street Journal,
“Since the start of the modern two-party system in the mid-19th century, the party of an incumbent president has never captured control of the House from the other party in a mid-term election. While many presidents have held the House for their party, in 35 of 38 midterms since the Civil War the incumbent’s party has lost ground.”
And that is in any mid-term, not just in the more onerous second mid-terms.
But President Obama has decided to defy that history. He has decided not to try to govern with the Republican House majority, but to devote the next 18 months to political posturing and framing the issues so negatively against the Republicans that America would rally to give Obama total control of the government in November 2014, with a restored Democrat majority in the House as well, leaving no check on Obama’s power at all.
That is because President Obama’s goal is the radical transformation of America from the world’s leading capitalist state, the freest, most prosperous, and mightiest in history, into just another socialist third world country. But he knows he can’t do that with the Republican House majority elected in 2010 precisely to stop his socialist agenda. For that radical, socialist transformation, reflecting what the Democratic Party and their party controlled media lapdogs are really all about, he needs total control of Congress. For that he needs, effectively, a socialist, one-party state, which is actually what he is after in defying history, and seeking a restored Democrat House majority.
Organizing for Action
This is what Obama’s new 501(c)(4) organization, Organizing for Action, is all about. He has transformed his campaign into that organization, giving it the advanced social media technology, contact lists, and grassroots infrastructure of the campaign. Jason Stverak, President of the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity, writes in the March 15 Washington Times, “Organizing for Action is flooding the airwaves with advertisements praising the Obama Administration’s policies, and viewers at home are being inundated with just as many talking points and political attacks as they were during the 2012 campaign.”
Through that organization, Obama has begun an unprecedented fundraising crusade to raise $50 million to be spent in Republican districts to discredit Congressional Republican incumbents. But as a 501(c)(4) social activist organization, Organizing for Action is not subject to campaign financing limits. For half a million in contributions, donors get private meetings with Obama where they can lobby for their personal agendas, crony capitalist favoritism, and other special interest pleading.
This is going to be the ugliest smear campaign in American political history, similar to what we saw in 2012, where the President’s campaign made up Romney’s positions and then campaigned against their own strawmen. Such as the charges that Romney was proposing middle class tax increases, or that he wanted to ban contraceptives. When the real Romney showed up during the first debate to say that those were not his positions, Obama partisans responded that he must be lying.
It is up to conservative activists to respond to this with truth squads to counter and reveal the propaganda. This is not going to be primarily about Republicans, but about preserving the credibility of the conservative philosophy, which is actually what is going to be under attack. Witness the current liberal/left Democrat campaign for gun control and gay marriage. We need to preserve, protect and defend the Reagan economic record, for example. We need to explain the root government causes of the financial crisis, and advocate reforms so it will never happen again. In addition to tax reform, spending control, and entitlement reforms, that would involve monetary reform, so America can once again enjoy a dollar as good as gold.
We also need to promote and defend the national defense doctrine of peace through strength. And we need to more than redouble a positive vision of religious freedom and pro-family values.
The High Stakes Gamble
In defying the long term political trends, President Obama is engaged in a high stakes political gamble, putting his own political credibility on the line. If Obama breaks the historical pattern, and the Democrats take the House, then Obama will be the new Hugo Chavez, in effective authoritarian control of America.
But if the historical patterns hold, and instead of the Democrats taking back the House, the Republicans take back the Senate, then President Obama will be a politically discredited lame duck, facing an entirely Republican controlled Congress. His socialist transformation of America will be over and exposed.
Prospects are actually quite good for the Republicans to take over Senate control. Besides the historical trends, Sabato and Kondik further explain,
“Democrats are defending seats in seven states that Mitt Romney won in last year’s Presidential race: Alaska, Arkansas, Louisiana, Montana, North Carolina, South Dakota, and West Virginia. Mr. Obama won an average of just 40.5% of the vote in these states. In addition, the retirements of longtime Sens. Tom Harkin (D. Iowa) and Carl Levin (D., Mich.) make those previously safe seats much more competitive. Factor in some freshman Democratic Senators elected from swing states in Obama’s 2008 wave (the last time this batch of seats was contested), and Republicans could run competitive challenges in 10 or more Democrat-held seats. Incompetent GOP nominees could change the picture, but almost all of the seats that Republicans are defending are in solid-red states.”
The Bible says, “By their fruits ye shall know them.” Adding to GOP prospects for next year are Obama chickens coming home to roost. Obamacare will be creating chaos in health care next year, with tens of millions losing their employer provided health insurance. Health insurance premiums will be soaring, to double or more for many, particularly young adults. The negative market reaction to those increases will be causing health insurers to collapse and go out of business, resulting in still more government takeover of health care.
Millions will lose their jobs as employers seek to downsize and break up to avoid the economically fatal costs of Obamacare. Millions of others will be reduced to part time workers for the same reason. That will mean further declining real wages and incomes for working people and the middle class, with poverty soaring still higher.
If the Obama economy falls back into recession in the second term, as Obama deserves, it will be the Democratic Party that will be on the verge of extinction. Unemployment would explode into double digits, and deficits would soar to over $2 trillion.
And then there will be a new front regarding chaos in foreign policy. Iran is likely to break out as a nuclear power before the mid-terms, which may mean nuclear war in the Middle East. At best, it would mean nuclear proliferation efforts spreading to Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt and other Middle Eastern nations. North Korea’s nuclear breakout would extend that to Japan, South Korea, and maybe Australia (especially as the American nuclear umbrella fades under Obama policies). The formerly progressive citadels of San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle will have new reasons to begin to question Obama’s foolish national defense policies.
In my opinion, Obama is primarily motivated by ideology and power, and not by the trappings of office. I predict that if we aggressively advance the conservative philosophy over the next two years, do our job in the midterms (electing not just Republicans, but true Tea Party Republicans), and make the historical patterns stick, Obama won’t want to be a time server for the last two years, battling Republicans with no ability to advance his socialist agenda.
I predict in that case, Obama will resign, ending the Marxist assault on America as a failure. He will let Biden run for reelection as an incumbent, with Hillary on the ticket. Then it will be time for the rest of us to clean house, everywhere Marxists have already infiltrated American society and culture, from the Democrat Party controlled media, to Hollywood, to “academic” cloisters of taxpayer financed Marxism.
If this generation of Americans cannot rise to defend traditional American freedom and prosperity, we will lose both. And deserve to.
[First Published at American Thinker]
Peter Ferrara, J.D., is a senior fellow at The Heartland Institute and an advisor for entitlement reform and budget policy at the National Tax Limitation Foundation.
