President Obama and his liberal cohorts are noticeably puffed up after his re-election and are making their move on a wide array of fronts. The liberals' voracious appetite is incapable of satiety.
Obama's cockiness was on full display during the fiscal cliff negotiations, during which he treated Republicans, the only ones remotely serious about addressing our deficits and debt, as annoying stepchildren he has to endure as a nuisance. Actually listening to their ideas is not on his playlist.
We've also seen Obama's cockiness in his behaving as though he is above the law and doesn't have to answer to Congress, the courts or the Constitution. Obama has brazenly ignored his legal duty to submit a budget, as if he were King Henry VIII. This is not some ministerial function, mind you, but the budget, which is at the heart of the nation's problems today.
Obama's hubris is particularly conspicuous in his approach to immigration policy. He used the full force of his executive power during his first term to wage war against states, especially Arizona, that wouldn't comply with his dictates on enforcement. Indeed, Chris Crane, who is the president of the union for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, confirmed on Sean Hannity's Fox News Channel show, "(The Obama administration is) ordering us not to enforce the law."
Usually, Obama's worldview soul mates in the Senate are in lock step with his every whim, but on immigration, a few of them at least nominally joined forces with a few Republicans to propose a bipartisan solution to the problem, about which, for the record, I remain a skeptic.
But Obama was not about to be upstaged. Everything must be about him. He had to rush out to Las Vegas and give a speech to make his own proposal on immigration reform, quick to point out, "If Congress is unable to move forward in a timely fashion, I will send up a bill based on my proposal and insist that they vote on it right away" -- as if he has the constitutional power to force Congress to act when he so demands.
Obama has made clear that he will not agree to make amnesty conditional on border enforcement. So he will press forward for amnesty and presumably millions more Democratic voters in his ongoing quest to fundamentally transform America so that by the completion of his eight-year reign, it will barely be recognizable to those in love with its founding principles.
But in no area of policy are Obama and his leftist cabal more highhanded than in their fervor to diminish our Second Amendment rights after the mass shooting in Newtown, Conn. In keeping with their typical strategy of exploiting a crisis to achieve major policy change, they have put on a full-court press on gun rights, which won't do much of anything to solve the problem of gun violence, especially mass shootings in schools.
In this top-down liberal climate, leftist elements at the state level are evidently feeling the authoritarian love, as well, for a number of states are considering such new laws as requiring gun owners to purchase liability insurance to cover damages from gun incidents. What could any of this possibly have to do with curbing gun violence? If I didn't know better -- and I don't -- I'd think the left were on a vindictive witch hunt against gun owners, those evil bitter clingers they love to hate.
If all this weren't bad enough, we're also learning about the unfolding nightmares being unleashed with Obamacare -- nightmares that conservatives warned about and that Obama deceitfully denied. Betsy McCaughey, who has studied this bad dream exhaustively, informs us that four federal agencies -- the Department of Labor, the Internal Revenue Service, the Congressional Budget Office and the Department of Health and Human Services -- have released new projections showing that the costs of Obamacare are skyrocketing -- significantly higher than the Obama administration promised. The IRS is indicating that family plans on the health insurance exchange will cost at least $20,000 per year by 2016 and that the children of many people covered under their employer's plan will be ineligible for a subsidy from the exchange, which will result in many children without insurance even though their parents are covered. Also, many who thought they would be covered for Medicaid expansion won't be eligible for that, either.
Finally, in line with the administration's imperious approach to governance, the IRS and the HHS released a 73-page list of those who will be exempt from Obamacare's insurance mandate. "Flaws and contradictions in the law," says McCaughey, "will cause millions of people to be uninsured."
Yet I firmly believe that despite Obama's overconfidence today, his political day of reckoning is coming. As the ravages of Obamacare materialize, the consequences from Obama's refusal to address the debt unfold, and his economy continues to falter under his oppressive policies, he will get his comeuppance, and it may be sooner than it now appears.
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