Bill Clinton vents on Obama.....
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/national/gets_hill_bullied_EjhPAdD8Ati7RRkMlNqHbM
One set of lawsuits accuses the Internal Revenue Service of illegally implementing new subsidies to help people buy insurance. Separately, more than 60 lawsuits have been filed challenging the law’s mandate for health plans to cover birth control.
A loss for the administration on the contraception mandate would undermine a key selling point for the law that Democrats used to court women in the 2012 elections.
The challenge to the law’s insurance subsidies, while more obscure, poses a far bigger and more dangerous threat to the Affordable Care Act.
Simon Lazarus, senior counsel at the Constitutional Accountability Center, has argued that there’s a very real chance the Supreme Court’s conservative majority would strike down the IRS’s approach to insurance subsidies if it gets the chance.
Lazarus supports the healthcare law and believes the IRS has taken the right approach to implementing its subsidies. But it’s easy to see how the case could play out under the strict “textualist” approach championed by Justice Antonin Scalia, he said.
“One has to be concerned about that,” Lazarus said.
If the Supreme Court or judges in the lower courts adopt a narrow reading of the healthcare law, the consequences could be “devastating,” Lazarus said.
That’s exactly why the people behind the lawsuit think they have a real chance to win.
The healthcare law sets up new marketplaces where people can buy health insurance. Most people who use the marketplaces will be eligible for a subsidy to help pay for their premiums.
The law’s challengers say subsidies should only be available to people who get insurance through a state-run marketplace. If the federal government runs a state’s marketplace — which it will in the majority of states — no subsidies should be available, the lawsuit argues.
Why not? Because the text of the Affordable Care Act refers to subsidies flowing through exchanges “established by the state.”
The IRS has said subsidies will be available in all 50 states, no matter who runs the exchanges. The law’s critics say that clearly contradicts the text of the statute.
“The IRS rule we are challenging is at war with the Act’s plain language and completely rewrites the deal that Congress made with the states on running these insurance exchanges,” attorney Michael Carvin said in a statement when his clients filed their challenge to the subsidies.
The law’s supporters say the context of the entire statute makes clear that Congress intended for all 50 exchanges to function the same way.
“There are layers of reasons why this claim would and should be rejected,” Lazarus said.
But a judge or Supreme Court justice like Scalia could easily hone in on the “established by the state” language, making the case for “textualism” — adhering strictly to the specific words used in a statute, rather than trying to determine its intent.
“It’s a way of taking one isolated provision of a statute and just reading that one provision,” Lazarus said.
Lazarus has been urging the left to focus aggressively on the subsidies challenge, even though the lawsuits are still in their early stages.
Two suits have been filed challenging the subsidies; neither has gotten a hearing yet in court. There’s a chance the cases would have to wait until at least next year, for procedural reasons.
Although they don’t believe the suits stand much chance of success, some supporters of the healthcare law believe their side lost the public relations battle over the Supreme Court’s ObamaCare case, in part because liberal academics didn’t take the challenge seriously.
“However such maneuvers play out in court, the administration and its allies need to play their game out of court as well. Specifically, they need to not repeat their near-death experience with the individual mandate challenge, when they left their adversaries free to frame the legal issues, unanswered, for the media, politicians, and the public,” Lazarus wrote in a recent op-ed.
The more immediate legal threat to the Affordable Care Act comes from challenges to its birth control mandate.
The contraception mandate is a relatively small part of the overall healthcare law, but it is a major talking point for the White House.
Obama focused extensively on the birth-control mandate during the 2012 campaign, and Democrats made the policy a cornerstone of their aggressive pitch to female voters.
An eventual Supreme Court decision on the contraception policy might not have huge implications for the rest of the healthcare law, but it would be politically explosive.
Two federal appeals courts have heard oral arguments over the contraception policy, and challengers have filed 60 lawsuits in courts across the country.
The plaintiffs, most of whom are business owners, say the policy violates their First Amendment right to religious liberty by forcing them to provide a service they find immoral.
The Obama administration has given an exemption to churches and houses of worship, and has carved out a middle ground for religious-affiliated employers like Catholic hospitals and universities.
For-profit companies are also challenging the policy. Those cases have moved faster, and though courts have been split on the issue, several have questioned whether business owners can invoke religious liberty over healthcare plans they don’t provide personally, but rather through their companies.
The 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals heard a case this week filed by a cabinet-making company whose owners object to providing contraception. The lower court in that case sided against the company, saying religious liberty belongs to people — not corporations.
"Religious belief takes shape within the minds and hearts of individuals, and its protection is one of the more uniquely 'human' rights provided by the Constitution,” the lower court said.
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/national/gets_hill_bullied_EjhPAdD8Ati7RRkMlNqHbM
Obama was pushed by Clintons into endorsement of Hillary in 2016: book
- Last Updated: 9:12 AM, June 2, 2013
- Posted: 11:07 PM, June 1, 2013
EXCLUSIVE
President Obama made a secret deal to support Hillary Clinton when she runs for president in 2016, campaign sources say, payback for the support her husband gave him in 2012.
Bill Clinton’s animosity toward Obama is legendary. A year before the last election, he was urging Hillary to challenge the sitting president for the nomination — a move she rejected.
According to two people who attended that meeting in Chappaqua, Bill Clinton then went on a rant against Obama.
“I’ve heard more from Bush, asking for my advice, than I’ve heard from Obama,” my sources quoted Clinton as saying. “I have no relationship with the president — none whatsoever. Obama doesn’t know how to be president. He doesn’t know how the world works. He’s incompetent. He’s an amateur!”
AP
HUB-BUBBA: “The Amateur” says Bill Clinton’s animosity toward the president cooled only with a promised endorsement and a fawning January spot on “60 Minutes” with Hillary.
Getty Images
Obama and Bill Clinton
For his part, Obama wasn’t interested in Bill Clinton upstaging him during the presidential campaign. He resisted giving him any role at the convention.
But as last summer wore on, and Democrat enthusiasm waned, chief political strategist David Axelrod convinced the president that he needed Bill Clinton’s mojo.
A deal was struck: Clinton would give the key nominating speech at the convention, and a full-throated endorsement of Obama. In exchange, Obama would endorse Hillary Clinton as his successor.
Clinton’s speech was as promised; columnists pointed out the surprising enthusiasm in which he described the president. It also lived up to Obama’s fears, as more people talked about Clinton’s speech in the weeks following than his own.
But after his re-election, Obama began to have second thoughts. He would prefer to stay neutral in the next election, as is traditional of outgoing presidents.
Bill Clinton went ballistic and threatened retaliation. Obama backed down. He called his favorite journalist, Steve Kroft of “60 Minutes,” and offered an unprecedented “farewell interview” with departing Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
The result was a slobbering televised love-in — and an embarrassment to all concerned.
It is just one of the debacles that have marked Obama’s second term, from Benghazi to the IRS scandal. While he was effective on the campaign trail, once in the Oval Office, he becomes a different person, one who derives no joy from the cut and thrust of day-to-day politics and who is inept in the arts of management and governance.
Obama has made a lot of promises — and nothing ever happened.
He once boasted that he’d bring the Israelis and Palestinians to the negotiating table and create a permanent peace in the Middle East. Nothing happened.
He said he’d open a constructive dialogue with America’s enemies in Iran and North Korea and, through his special powers of persuasion, help them see the error of their ways. And nothing happened.
He said he’d solve the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression and put millions of people back to work. And nothing happened.
He may yet try to back out of his promise to Hillary Clinton. But as Obama’s presidency sinks deeper into scandal and inaction, the question is — will Clinton even still want his endorsement?
Adapted from the new paperback edition of Edward Klein’s “The Amateur: Barack Obama in the White House” (Regnery Publishing), out this week.
Eric Holder in focus.....
http://pjmedia.com/blog/holders-worst-week-ever/
Eric Holder in focus.....
http://pjmedia.com/blog/holders-worst-week-ever/
Holder’s Worst Week Ever?
The House Judiciary Committee will wait for the attorney general's response, due by Wednesday, “before passing judgment" on "perjury.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/02/us/politics/goals-to-fulfill-and-foes-to-foil-keep-holder-going.html?pagewanted=all
( White House Insiders trying to push Holder out the door ? )
Seeking a Fresh Start, Holder Finds a Fresh Set of Troubles
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. is said to have earned President Obama’s appreciation for his integrity and policy battles.
By PETER BAKER, CHARLIE SAVAGE and JONATHAN WEISMAN
Published: June 1, 2013 41 Comments
WASHINGTON — At the end of last year, with the election decided and the Obama administration in office for four more years, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. considered stepping down. He decided against it, in part because before he left he wanted to move beyond the disputes that had characterized his tenure, accomplish some of the goals he had set for the job and leave on his own terms.
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Contentious Episodes in Holder’s Tenure
Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. has faced criticism for several polarizing decisions made under the Obama administration.
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If Mr. Holder really thought he could escape controversy, the last few weeks have reinforced how inescapable controversy has become for the nation’s chief law enforcement officer. A furor over tactics in leak investigations, including secretly obtaining phone logs for reporters at The Associated Press and Fox News, has again engulfed the attorney general in allegations, investigations and calls for resignation.
Over the course of four and a half years, no other member of President Obama’s cabinet has been at the center of so many polarizing episodes or the target of so much criticism. While the White House publicly backed Mr. Holder as he tried to smooth over the latest uproar amid new speculation about his future, some in the West Wing privately tell associates they wish he would step down, viewing him as politically maladroit. But the latest attacks may stiffen the administration’s resistance in the near term to a change for fear of emboldening critics.
The White House views the attacks on Mr. Holder as a “political agenda” and “would not hasten the departure of someone who’s competent and runs the department and is a friend because there’s a drumbeat,” said William M. Daley, a former White House chief of staff under Mr. Obama. “Whoever Barack Obama puts in there, these people will try to drumbeat him out of there, no matter what.”
But that does not mitigate the frustration of some presidential aides. “The White House is apoplectic about him, and has been for a long time,” said a Democratic former government official who did not want to be identified while talking about friends.
Some advisers to Mr. Obama believe that Mr. Holder does not manage or foresee problems, the former official said. “How hard would it be to anticipate that The A.P. would be unhappy?” the former official said. “And then they haven’t defended their position.”
Denis McDonough, the White House chief of staff, said through a spokesman Saturday that Mr. Holder “has the intellect, experience and integrity to efficiently run the Department of Justice and not get distracted by the partisans who seem more interested in launching political attacks than cooperating with him to protect the security and constitutional rights of the American people.”
Mr. Holder declined through a spokeswoman to be interviewed for this article.
His saving grace through years of controversies has been the friendship of two women close to Mr. Obama. Valerie Jarrett, the president’s senior adviser, grew close to Mr. Holder during the 2008 campaign and, as one former Obama adviser put it, “was always his protector” inside the White House. Michelle Obama has become good friends with Mr. Holder’s wife, Sharon Malone, and the two couples go out to dinner from time to time.
The president is also said to appreciate Mr. Holder’s integrity and his positions during some of the big debates over antiterrorism policies and other volatile issues. The White House also points to his department’s successful defense of the president’s health care program before the Supreme Court and prosecutions in high-profile terrorism, financial crimes and corporate wrongdoing cases.
Moreover, advisers said, Mr. Obama after a full term in office is less likely to worry about political flare-ups that will eventually die down. “It’s very easy sitting in that town to overestimate the longevity and impact of these issues,” David Axelrod, Mr. Obama’s political strategist, said from Chicago. “I don’t think Americans are sitting around their kitchen tables clamoring for Holder’s head because of the A.P. or Fox subpoenas. It’s not water-cooler discussion.”
But it is more fuel for Republican critics on Capitol Hill, who have had repeated clashes with Mr. Holder and his Justice Department.
Under his leadership, the department scaled back a voter-intimidation lawsuit from the Bush era involving the New Black Panther Party, a decision that conservatives used to portray the black-nationalist fringe group as a political ally of the Obama administration. He reopened criminal investigations into the Central Intelligence Agency’s interrogations of terrorism suspects and tried to prosecute five men accused of plotting the Sept. 11 attacks in civilian courts rather than military tribunals, which provoked accusations that he was soft on terrorism. And he abandoned the legal defense of a law barring federal recognition of same-sex marriage that social conservatives viewed as a bulwark against attacks on the traditional family.
The party-line furor peaked with hearings into Operation Fast and Furious, a botched gun-trafficking investigation by federal agents based in Arizona. When Mr. Holder, after Mr. Obama invoked executive privilege, refused to provide department e-mails relating to the fallout after the operation ended, the House voted to hold him in contempt of Congress. A report by the Justice Department’s independent inspector general essentially exonerated Mr. Holder of accusations that he had sanctioned risky investigative tactics that were used in the case, but that did not satisfy Republican lawmakers who are still pressing for a court order for the e-mails.
The eruption last month over the investigations into news leaks added to the burdens. Representative Trey Gowdy, a South Carolina Republican and longtime critic of Mr. Holder, said the trouble facing the attorney general was different now.
“There is a coalescing of the disappointments,” Mr. Gowdy said. “The longer you stay in any office, the tougher it gets.”
More so than in the past, Democrats have joined in on the criticism. “I am very leery about any investigative tool that involves even the appearance of an investigation directed at journalists,” said Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, a member of the Judiciary Committee.
Yet Democrats remain reluctant about furthering what they see as a partisan campaign against the attorney general. “There is a set of recurring patterns on the Republican side trying to grind him into the dust, so we’re a bit dubious of their complaints,” said Representative Peter Welch of Vermont.
Friends said Mr. Holder did not look forward to leaving the government because he did not particularly enjoy private practice. Mr. Holder grew up in the Justice Department and has said wistfully that he recognizes that this will be his final position there. As the first black attorney general, he also cares deeply about civil rights law and, according to the friends, wants to stay on the job long enough to participate in this month’s 50th anniversary commemoration of the integration of the University of Alabama by two black students, one of them his sister-in-law, who died in 2005.
And, in Mr. Holder’s view, last year’s presidential re-election was a cathartic event that would cool some of the passions of the first term and give him a chance to make progress on a policy agenda, like revising lengthy prison sentences for some nonviolent and older inmates.
Though several factors drove Mr. Holder to stay, Tracy Schmaler, his spokeswoman until she stepped down in March, said one of them “was to get some distance from the controversies of the first term, to continue to work on the issues that matter to him into a second administration, and still accomplish what he would like to do so that he could leave on his own terms.”
Mr. Holder seems to have wavered on how long that would be; some friends said they had heard this fall, others after the 2014 elections. But he signaled that he would move ahead on his remaining priorities, including voting rights, gun-safety measures and sentencing changes in the criminal justice system. “Too many people go to too many prisons for far too long for no good law enforcement reason,” he said in a speech in April.
To that agenda, he has added tightening Justice Department rules for leak investigations to increase protections for journalists. He spent recent days meeting with editors, reporters and media lawyers to explore changes, making clear that he believed the department had gone too far.
But he is also clearly irritated that the issue has revived the first-term disputes. At a contentious May 15 hearing before the House Judiciary Committee, he gave almost as much as he got.
Confronted by one of his Republican tormentors, Representative Darrell Issa of California, the attorney general said the lawmaker’s behavior was “too consistent with the way in which you conduct yourself as a member of Congress. It’s unacceptable, and it’s shameful.”
When another Republican, Representative J. Randy Forbes of Virginia, pressed him on Operation Fast and Furious, Mr. Holder retorted: “Hindsight is always 20/20. It’s always accurate. And it’s an easy thing to stand up or sit up where you are and do that. I’ve got to run an agency of 116,000 people.”
And after Representative Louie Gohmert, Republican of Texas, suggested that the Justice Department was culpable in the Boston Marathon bombings because the F.B.I. had failed to fully pursue a tip from the Russian government, Mr. Holder responded assertively.
“You don’t have access to the F.B.I. files,” he said, later adding: “I know what the FBI did. You cannot know what I know.”
http://thehill.com/blogs/healthwatch/health-reform-implementation/302895-court-challenges-could-tear-down-major-pieces-of-obamacare
Court challenges could tear down major pieces of ObamaCare
- 06/02/13 06:00 AM ET
President Obama’s healthcare law is under attack in the courts even as the administration sprints toward full implementation.
Despite surviving a stiff challenge at the Supreme Court last year, some of the law’s biggest provisions remain at risk from legal challenges.
Despite surviving a stiff challenge at the Supreme Court last year, some of the law’s biggest provisions remain at risk from legal challenges.
A loss for the administration on the contraception mandate would undermine a key selling point for the law that Democrats used to court women in the 2012 elections.
The challenge to the law’s insurance subsidies, while more obscure, poses a far bigger and more dangerous threat to the Affordable Care Act.
Simon Lazarus, senior counsel at the Constitutional Accountability Center, has argued that there’s a very real chance the Supreme Court’s conservative majority would strike down the IRS’s approach to insurance subsidies if it gets the chance.
Lazarus supports the healthcare law and believes the IRS has taken the right approach to implementing its subsidies. But it’s easy to see how the case could play out under the strict “textualist” approach championed by Justice Antonin Scalia, he said.
“One has to be concerned about that,” Lazarus said.
If the Supreme Court or judges in the lower courts adopt a narrow reading of the healthcare law, the consequences could be “devastating,” Lazarus said.
That’s exactly why the people behind the lawsuit think they have a real chance to win.
The healthcare law sets up new marketplaces where people can buy health insurance. Most people who use the marketplaces will be eligible for a subsidy to help pay for their premiums.
The law’s challengers say subsidies should only be available to people who get insurance through a state-run marketplace. If the federal government runs a state’s marketplace — which it will in the majority of states — no subsidies should be available, the lawsuit argues.
Why not? Because the text of the Affordable Care Act refers to subsidies flowing through exchanges “established by the state.”
The IRS has said subsidies will be available in all 50 states, no matter who runs the exchanges. The law’s critics say that clearly contradicts the text of the statute.
“The IRS rule we are challenging is at war with the Act’s plain language and completely rewrites the deal that Congress made with the states on running these insurance exchanges,” attorney Michael Carvin said in a statement when his clients filed their challenge to the subsidies.
The law’s supporters say the context of the entire statute makes clear that Congress intended for all 50 exchanges to function the same way.
“There are layers of reasons why this claim would and should be rejected,” Lazarus said.
But a judge or Supreme Court justice like Scalia could easily hone in on the “established by the state” language, making the case for “textualism” — adhering strictly to the specific words used in a statute, rather than trying to determine its intent.
“It’s a way of taking one isolated provision of a statute and just reading that one provision,” Lazarus said.
Lazarus has been urging the left to focus aggressively on the subsidies challenge, even though the lawsuits are still in their early stages.
Two suits have been filed challenging the subsidies; neither has gotten a hearing yet in court. There’s a chance the cases would have to wait until at least next year, for procedural reasons.
Although they don’t believe the suits stand much chance of success, some supporters of the healthcare law believe their side lost the public relations battle over the Supreme Court’s ObamaCare case, in part because liberal academics didn’t take the challenge seriously.
“However such maneuvers play out in court, the administration and its allies need to play their game out of court as well. Specifically, they need to not repeat their near-death experience with the individual mandate challenge, when they left their adversaries free to frame the legal issues, unanswered, for the media, politicians, and the public,” Lazarus wrote in a recent op-ed.
The more immediate legal threat to the Affordable Care Act comes from challenges to its birth control mandate.
The contraception mandate is a relatively small part of the overall healthcare law, but it is a major talking point for the White House.
Obama focused extensively on the birth-control mandate during the 2012 campaign, and Democrats made the policy a cornerstone of their aggressive pitch to female voters.
An eventual Supreme Court decision on the contraception policy might not have huge implications for the rest of the healthcare law, but it would be politically explosive.
Two federal appeals courts have heard oral arguments over the contraception policy, and challengers have filed 60 lawsuits in courts across the country.
The plaintiffs, most of whom are business owners, say the policy violates their First Amendment right to religious liberty by forcing them to provide a service they find immoral.
The Obama administration has given an exemption to churches and houses of worship, and has carved out a middle ground for religious-affiliated employers like Catholic hospitals and universities.
For-profit companies are also challenging the policy. Those cases have moved faster, and though courts have been split on the issue, several have questioned whether business owners can invoke religious liberty over healthcare plans they don’t provide personally, but rather through their companies.
The 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals heard a case this week filed by a cabinet-making company whose owners object to providing contraception. The lower court in that case sided against the company, saying religious liberty belongs to people — not corporations.
"Religious belief takes shape within the minds and hearts of individuals, and its protection is one of the more uniquely 'human' rights provided by the Constitution,” the lower court said.
http://www.politico.com/story/2013/05/eric-cantor-hearings-administration-scandals-92083.html?hp=l4
Eric Cantor promises more hearings on administration scandals
House Majority Leader Eric Cantor sent a memo to fellow Republicans on Friday afternoon pledging not to let up on the trio of Obama administration scandals that attracted so much attention in May.
Republicans held more than 100 hearings in May, Cantor wrote, and he sees no lack of issues to investigate going ahead.
Continue Reading
During June and the coming months, the House will continue to hold the Administration accountable,” Cantor wrote. “We will continue our work to determine who directed IRS employees to target conservative groups, why it was done, and who knew about it.”
House panels will also continue to investigate Benghazi and the Justice Department’s efforts to obtain phone records and other information from journalists.
“We will follow the facts and continue in our efforts to uncover the truth behind the attacks in Benghazi,” Cantor wrote. “We will explore DOJ’s actions in seizing phone records and emails of the news media. We will also continue our oversight of the implementation of Obamacare and the administration’s energy policy.”
The House has already held five hearings on Benghazi. In the last month, the Oversight and Government Reform Committee held hearings on both the Benghazi attacks and the IRS targeting of conservative groups. And Ways and Means got into discussing the IRS scandal as well.
Overall, Cantor warned a busy month ahead with floor legislation including four appropriations bills, energy measures, Defense and Intelligence authorization measures and the farm bill.
“We have a busy month ahead of us and July will be just as busy, with our continued focus on making life work for Americans through our conservative solutions,” Cantor wrote.
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