RUTHFULLY YOURS

We keep reading that Donald Trump poses a unique threat to constitutional norms if he’s elected. His liberal critics would have more credibility if they called out the Obama Administration for its current (not potential) abuses of power, and here’s an opportunity: The Administration is crafting an illegal bailout to prop up the President’s health-care law.

News leaked this week that the Obama Administration is moving to pay health insurers billions of dollars through an obscure Treasury Department account known as the Judgment Fund. This would be a cash infusion for an ObamaCare program known as “risk corridors,” an allegedly temporary provision in the 2010 law that enticed insurers to participate in the exchanges.

The program was supposed to hedge against the risk that insurers would suffer large losses from plans that are limited in how they can price premiums for age or illness. Profitable insurers would pay into a fund that would be redistributed to companies that took unforeseen losses. The Administration said that risk corridors would be budget-neutral because more insurers would benefit than buckle, and the fund might even produce a profit.

Meanwhile back on earth, risk corridors resulted in industry-wide adverse selection, in which there are not enough healthy insurers to subsidize the sick ones. In 2014 the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) collected a mere 12% of what insurers requested, and the fund payed out some $360 million of nearly $2.9 billion in claims.

The agency tried to raid other Health and Human Services funds to make up the shortfall, but legislators blocked that run around the law. Congress has twice stipulated that the Affordable Care Act must be enforced as written: No taxpayer money may be appropriated to risk-corridor payments. Yet CMS said in a memo this year that the payments are “an obligation of the United States government,” and the agency is “open to discussing the resolution of those claims.”

The plan now is to sneak around Congress through publicly financed lawsuit settlements. The Justice Department is eager to end a $5 billion class-action suit from Oregon’s now insolvent co-op, Health Republic Insurance, which demanded full payment of risk-corridor claims. So Justice will likely unload cash from the Treasury Department’s Judgment Fund, a 1950s invention that permanently allows for payment of judgments against the U.S.

This is an illegal move to spend money where Congress wouldn’t. A June memo from the Congressional Research Service notes that plaintiffs would have to wait until the government digs up more money or Congress decides to appropriate it. In a 1998 letter the Government Accountability Office pointed out that the Judgment Fund is not a tool to “circumvent congressional restrictions on appropriations,” which is precisely what the White House is doing.

Black racism is getting worse in America because it is being validated, endorsed, and legitimized like never before.

And it’s not just Barack Obama doing this.

This race-based hatred is promoted by America-hating currency speculator George Soros who has been funding the racist, violent Black Lives Matter movement for years.

Instead of urging crime-fighting, Chris Stone, president of Open Society Foundations, supports disarming the police, a move that would make things worse and leave society at the mercy of criminals.

Black criminals aren’t to blame for rising crime rates because trigger-happy cops are on a killing spree in the U.S., he writes. “Those who kill innocents rarely do so sadistically. There are always excuses and explanations, stretching notions of self-defense, exaggerating threats, claiming mistaken identities.”

Although the U.S. is the least racist nation on the face of the earth there is a discernible shift underway. Too many black Americans and their radical non-black allies feel comfortable routinely spewing anti-white sentiments in public. Their crude, sometimes genocidal statements are becoming increasingly mainstream in the Obama era. In a case of defining deviancy down, antisocial anti-white sentiments are accepted by the media as normal, even admirable. The universities, strongholds of radical leftism and kooky identity politics, cleared the way for this.

American culture used to do a better job organically marginalizing racism. Until Barack Obama began running for president it can be argued racism barely existed at all in the United States.

Sure, the racial grievance industry with Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and groups like ACORN, used to stir up trouble and use racial antagonism to shake down corporations, but these activities never had the feel of legitimacy about them. They were dirty and quite properly looked down upon by most normal Americans but today such activism wins praise from and invitations to the White House.

Recent events seem to confirm this trend in which the public expression of anti-white racist sentiments and violence against whites is being destigmatized.

As Breitbart News reported yesterday:

In an assault captured on video, Feras Jabro, a Donald Trump supporter wearing a “Make America Great Again” baseball cap, was harassed, chased, thrown to the ground and beaten by Black Lives Matter activists at a protest in El Cajon, California. […]

A longer video, shot from the victim’s perspective, shows the man standing in the crowd then being hit from behind, running from an angry mob, and then being beaten on the ground simply for wearing his MAGA hat.

The vicious attack happened on the second night of protests in the San Diego suburb of El Cajon, where Black Lives Matter protesters are angered about the police shooting death of Alfred Olango, 38. El Cajon police say they shot and killed Olango after responding to a call from his sister that he was acting erratically. Olango refused to comply with police orders, then “assumed a shooting stance” with what appeared to be a gun, but later turned out to be a vape cigarette electronic device.

On Wednesday, Congress overwhelmingly nullified President Obama’s veto of legislation that enables 9/11 victims and their families to sue the government of Saudi Arabia. Each chamber easily cleared the two-thirds’ supermajority requirement for override: The vote was 97–1 in the Senate and 348–77 in the House.

In what perhaps is a sign of lame-duck times, it marked the first veto override of Obama’s presidency. To repeat the rueful observation I made two weeks ago, it’s a shame that when the Republican-controlled Congress finally roused itself to oppose the president in a decisive showdown, lawmakers chose an issue on which the president was right.

To be clear, I mean “right” in the sense of maintaining a prudent defense of basic international-relations protocols. Obama is not right insofar as the American–Saudi relationship is concerned. On that score, I want to revisit a point I expressed poorly in the previous column.

There, I went through the multiple reasons why the legislation — the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act (JASTA) — portends major problems: It foolishly delegates the delicate political duty of conducting foreign relations to the courts; it undermines the important concept of sovereign immunity; and it encourages reciprocal foreign-government action against U.S. political officials and military personnel.

On that last blunder, JASTA proponents tirelessly insist the bill is narrowly tailored to the allegedly unique circumstances of Saudi complicity in the 9/11 attacks. Of course, the scale of the attacks aside, there is nothing unique about rogue regimes providing material support to terrorism. But even if there were something to the “narrowly tailored / unique circumstances” claim, JASTA proponents miss the point. Foreign governments that decide to retaliate against the United States over this law will not deem themselves limited to action commensurate with our legislation. Once the principle of sovereign immunity is breached, all bets are off. The Saudis — to say nothing of our enemies in Tehran and our hostile rivals in Moscow and Beijing, all of whom exploit any excuse to make trouble for us — will not be constrained by Congress’s narrow tailoring.

In at least a handful of blue states, a disturbing trend is emerging: Left-wing state attorneys general are acting less like legal representatives of their constituents and more like partisan political activists. Why is this disturbing? Because, unlike your run-of-the-mill community organizer, activist attorneys general have at their disposal broad legal powers (not to mention millions upon millions of tax dollars) that they can use to investigate, subpoena, sue, or prosecute the targets of their political party — and they’re doing just that.

In New York, Attorney General Eric Schneiderman announced this spring that he would be leading a battle on climate change by investigating fossil-fuel companies, such as ExxonMobil, for “[misleading] investors and the public on the impact of climate change on their businesses.” A thin legal theory, to be sure: Unlike cases in which a corporation has unique information about its own products and services, on the issue of climate change there is a vast public trove of articles and analysis for investors to examine. But Schneiderman was able to invoke broad subpoenas and threats of prosecution under the auspices of New York’s infamous Martin Act, an obscure 1921 statute revived by Schneiderman’s predecessor Eliot Spitzer as he assumed the mantle of the “Sheriff of Wall Street” before the financial crisis. And Schneiderman isn’t alone in this particular effort: Other state AGs lined up beside him. Claude Walker, the attorney general for the U.S. Virgin Islands, issued to the Competitive Enterprise Institute a sweeping subpoena that demanded it turn over all communications with nearly every free-market think tank (including the one that employs the authors of this piece) on issues relating to climate change. (This subpoena has since been withdrawn.)

Among Schneiderman’s fellow AGs who demanded documents and testimony from ExxonMobil was Massachusetts attorney general Maura Healey. Healey has recently shifted her attention to another ideological enemy: gun manufacturers, namely Glock Inc. and Remington Outdoor Co. Earlier this year, Healey unilaterally redefined a term in the state’s assault-weapons ban in order to broaden the scope of weapons covered without going through the legislative process. Healey also launched an investigation into Glock and Remington under a product-liability theory – a move that seems to contradict the Democratic presidential nominee’s statements about gun manufacturers’ being “totally free of liability.” Healey’s investigation is now the subject of ongoing litigation initiated by Glock, which has stated its belief that the “true purpose” of her investigation is “to harass an industry that the attorney general finds distasteful and to make political headlines by pursing members of the firearm industry.” The gun company might have a point, given that Glock pistols apparently cannot be sold to consumers in the state of Massachusetts because they do not comply with the state’s handgun safety regulations. This contributes to the impression that the investigation is merely a pretext for punishing a politically disfavored group.

Donald Trump’s supporters see a potential Hillary Clinton victory in November as the end of any conservative chance to restore small government, constitutional protections, fiscal sanity, and personal liberty.

Clinton’s progressives swear that a Trump victory would spell the implosion of America as they know it, alleging Trump parallels with every dictator from Josef Stalin to Adolf Hitler.

Part of the frenzy over 2016 as a make-or-break election is because a closely divided Senate’s future may hinge on the coattails of the presidential winner. An aging Supreme Court may also translate into perhaps three to four court picks for the next president.

Yet such considerations only partly explain the current election frenzy.

The model of the imperial Obama presidency is the greater fear. Over the last eight years, Obama has transformed the powers of presidency in a way not seen in decades.

Congress talks grandly of “comprehensive immigration reform,” but Obama, as he promised with his pen and phone, bypassed the House and Senate to virtually open the border with Mexico. He largely ceased deportations of undocumented immigrants. He issued executive-order amnesties. And he allowed entire cities to be exempt from federal immigration law.

The press said nothing about this extraordinary overreach of presidential power, mainly because these largely illegal means were used to achieve the progressive ends favored by many journalists.

The Senate used to ratify treaties. In the past, a president could not unilaterally approve the Treaty of Versailles, enroll the United States in the League of Nations, fight in Vietnam or Iraq without congressional authorization, change existing laws by non-enforcement, or rewrite bankruptcy laws.

Not now. Obama set a precedent that he did not need Senate ratification to make a landmark treaty with Iran on nuclear enrichment.

He picked and chose which elements of the Affordable Care Act would be enforced — predicated on his 2012 reelection efforts.

Rebuffed by Congress, Obama is now slowly shutting down the Guantanamo Bay detention center by insidiously having inmates sent to other countries.

Respective opponents of both Trump and Clinton should be worried.

Either winner could follow the precedent of allowing any sanctuary city or state in the United States to be immune from any federal law found displeasing — from the liberal Endangered Species Act and federal gun-registration laws to conservative abortion restrictions.

Could anyone complain if Trump’s secretary of state were investigated by Trump’s attorney general for lying about a private e-mail server — in the manner of Clinton being investigated by Loretta Lynch?

Would anyone object should a President Trump agree to a treaty with Russian president Vladimir Putin in the same way Obama overrode Congress with the Iran deal?

If a President Clinton decides to strike North Korea, would she really need congressional authorization, considering Obama’s unauthorized Libyan bombing mission?

What would Americans say if President Trump’s IRS — mirror-imaging Lois Lerner — hounded the progressive nonprofit organizations of George Soros?

Partisans are shocked that the press does not go after Trump’s various inconsistencies and fibs about his supposed initial opposition to the Iraq War, or press him on the details of Trump University.

Conservatives counter that Clinton has never had to come clean about the likely illegal pay-for-play influence peddling of the Clinton Foundation or her serial lies about her private e-mail server.

But why, if elected, should either worry much about media scrutiny?

Obama established the precedent that a president should be given a pass on lying to the American people. Did Americans, as Obama repeatedly promised, really get to keep their doctors and health plans while enjoying lower premiums and deductibles, as the country saved billions through his Affordable Care Act?

More recently, did Obama mean to tell a lie when he swore that he sent cash to the Iranians only because he could not wire them the money — when in truth the administration had wired money to Iran in the past? Was cash to Iran really not a ransom for American hostages, as the president asserted? Did Obama really, as he insisted, never e-mail Clinton at her private unsecured server?

Can the next president, like Obama, double the national debt and claim to be a deficit hawk?