Hey World....welcome to the party.
Posted on 11/14/2014 11:18:41 AM PST by Kaslin
WASHINGTON - After the thrashing Barack Obama and his party got in last week's elections, it is now clear that the Democrats are leaderless and in disarray and he is no longer relevant in the domestic policy battles of his last two years in office. The Republican-run House and Democratic Senate now plan to vote to bypass Obama's stubborn opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline -- that would be seen as a stunning, bipartisan rebuke of the president's failed energy policies.
Leading the charge for the oil pipeline is the politically embattled Sen. Mary Landrieu, Democrat of Louisiana, who is being forced into a runoff against GOP Rep. Bill Cassidy. Nearly a dozen Democrats support her demand for a vote, along with the entire Senate GOP caucus, to complete the pipeline.
"The project would bring billions of barrels of western Canadian oil to Gulf ports and refineries and create thousands of high paying jobs," says University of Maryland business economist Peter Morici.
Meantime, one of the key architects of Obamacare, the president's signature legislative achievement, is quoted as saying that Democrats used a deceptive strategy to hide details of the law in order to get it through Congress.
"Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage," said economist Jonathan Gruber, who helped shape the health care law. "And basically, call it the 'stupidity of the American voter' or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical to getting the thing to pass."
Gruber's remarks, made last year in a video-taped panel discussion at the University of Pennsylvania, has ignited a political firestorm that went viral on the Internet, giving the GOP new ammunition in their war to repeal Obamacare and replace it with a scaled-down health care reform bill of their own.
Gruber has since said his remarks were "off the cuff" and inappropriate, but he did not recant them. In 2009, when Obama and the Democrats were promising voters that their law would lower health care costs, Gruber said that the legislation "really doesn't bend the cost curve."
"The strategy was to hide the truth from the American people," said GOP Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama who will chair the Senate Budget Committee next year.
Republicans have demanded investigative hearings on the Democrats' shady legislative strategy and said Gruber will be called to testify about his critical remarks.
Obamacare is already running into trouble over whether the system faces insolvency if far fewer people, especially younger, healthier adults, sign up for coverage. The administration estimated Monday that the number of Americans covered by the Affordable Care Act is going to be significantly below its earlier estimates by the end of this year.
Of the eight million who enrolled last spring, only about seven million remained signed up by mid-October. Many had stopped paying their premiums, and 112,000 or more immigrants lost coverage because they couldn't prove they were eligible. But Obamacare faces an even more serious challenge from the U.S. Supreme Court which just announced it will reexamine the program's subsidies to determine if they pass Constitutional muster.
Yet Obama continuous to make exaggerated claims for his health care law, as he did last week at a White House news conference. "Health care inflation has gone down every single year since the law was passed," he said.
Washington Post fact checker Glenn Kessler gave him three Pinocchios for that remark, saying "the impact of his health-care law remains unclear." Elsewhere, the president is under fire from a Democrat in his own administration over regulatory policy.
Just a few hours after Obama had called on the Federal Communications Commission to approve sweeping new regulations on high-speed Internet providers, the head of the FCC rejected his approach -- saying he preferred a softer approach than the strict regulations the president wants.
"What you want is what everyone wants: an open Internet that doesn't affect your business," FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler, appointed by Obama, told a meeting of top officials representing the nation's biggest Web companies. And, as if to remind Obama, who still thinks he is master of the universe, Wheeler repeatedly told the corporate big wigs that the FCC is one of a select group of government agencies who take no orders from the White House.
"I am an independent agency" he said, "and ultimately this decision is [ours] alone."
There were two other major deals that dominated the president's agenda during his trip to an economic summit in Beijing this week that spoke volumes about Obama's disappearing relevance on the international stage.
One was the sweeping climate change agreement with China to cap carbon emissions that was repudiated by the incoming Republican Majority Leader Mitch McConnell as a job-killing deal that will hurt the U.S. economy.
Needless to say, this agreement is going nowhere next year in the GOP-controlled Congress which is focused like a laser beam on restricting the Environmental Protection Agency's rule-making authority.
The other deal Obama was hoping to promote at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit was his Trans-Pacific Partnership free trade agreement.
But negotiations over TPP collapsed, in large part due to fierce political opposition at home from his party's labor bosses and the Democrats, but also because Obama has given free trade deals little more than lip service during his presidency. He is no longer seen as a serious negotiator on the world stage.
Democrats may still be in charge of the Senate in the lame-duck Congress for the rest of this year. But the GOP is already flexing its political muscles on Capitol Hill where Obama has clearly lost his power base for the remainder of his presidency
Hey World....welcome to the party.
Hey dims....welcome to the party
NO!! He IS VERY RELEVANT!!!! HE is going to be the catalyst that shows the STUPID VOTERS how STUPID THEY WERE!!!
“Obama has clearly lost his power base for the remainder of his presidency”
Wishful thinking. He still has the media and the bureaucracy.
If some in the old media stop slavishly supporting him, he will have lost his power base.
With His Policies Under Attack in His Own Party, Obama is
Either way, it's not too difficult to dispute, at last not based on the philosophical principle: "I think therefore I am".
As long as Landrieu wants so bad to transform herself into a conservative Republican for the LA runoff, let’s get her to “take the lead” in repealing Obamacare and overriding Zero’s veto, too. She’ll be a shoo-in if she gets that done.
Perhaps true in the normal course of events.
Who thinks we are presently in the normal course?
Who thinks he will not try to rule via EO?
Who thinks he believes there are limits to his pen?
Who thinks the nation is safe because he faces serious, effective political opposition?
Who thinks any political effort to constrain him could be a bit like our 1940's tightening of embargos on Japan? (It should have worked except a) we misread them or b) "we" actually desired the result.)
Yet, the tone of their columns exude a sense of cutting edge epiphany. This is what we get when “stupid Americans” don't know they're stupid.
But his has lost none of the powers of the Presidency. And he will use and abuse those powers until he is dragged out of the White House!
A president would have to go to Congress if he wants to use his executive order powers to seek amnesty for more illegals than that.
There is a way we can stop Obama in his tracks. Ready? Boycott the main advertisers for the NY Times and CNN. Yup, a nationwide boycott will force them to make a decision on whether they want to spend shareholder money on a losing proposition.
Go public with it. Remember what the left tried to do with ChikFila? We have the horses to destroy any advertiser because we do one thing the libeerals cannot or will not do. And that is spend their own money.
“........he is no longer relevant”....
He is relevant all right and dangerous to boot. He still has two more years with pen and phone in hand and will use every day to inflict as much on this nation as he can.
A snake isn’t dead until you cut off the head and then they are still dangerous.
Keep in mind, the eternal quest of the self-hating liberal---to "feel good" about oneself.
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FREEPER EDWINLAND CAME UP W/ THIS GEM---The Republican Senate leadership should say: "If the president moves to augment the power of the Executive Branch in an unprecedented and unconstitutional manner (via E/O'ing amnesty--or some such nonsense), then the Legislative Branch will need to increase its powers in order to maintain the balance of powers called for in the US Constitution.
The Senate will do this in an unprecedented but completely constitutional manner, by providing that the filibuster rule is suspended completely until such time as the president withdraws his executive aggrandizeme
RATIONALE-- Obama's temporary E/O (can be negated by the next president) requires temporary suspension of the rule. That should also include Congress passing laws without the president signing the bill.
Ergo, if it is okay for the president to overreach, then it is okay for Congress to overreach.
Obama forgets that the Congress---and Americans---can also say, “We have been patient, as well.”
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