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By Kevin Mooney — Here, in a nutshell, is what several astute commentators on the right, including George Will, Charles Krauthammer, and others have told readers in the aftermath of the Supreme Court ruling on ObamaCare:

Associate Justice John Roberts would have ruled to strike down the federal health care law, but Chief Justice John Roberts felt an institutional obligation to shield the high court from political criticism. Fear not; there is cause for encouragement because Roberts imposed restrictions on the Commerce Clause that will advance the cause of limited government over time.

If Mitt Romney is elected president, and if the Republicans win control of Congress, and if GOP leaders follow through on their pledge to repeal the legislation, Justice Roberts could go down in history as a shrewd tactician. But those are a lot of “ifs” and constitutional conservatives know better than to put too much stock into Republicans who elevate bipartisanship over principle.

After equivocating on repeal, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell backpedaled on his equivocation and is now solidly back in the fold. At least, this is what he told National Review in a recent interview.  With a little push from the Tea Party, he may yet follow through. Roberts did make it clear in his ruling that it is ultimately up to the American people, operating through the political process, to uproot the legislation.

“We do not consider whether the Act embodies sound policies,” he wrote. “That judgment is entrusted to the Nation’s elected leaders…”Members of this Court are vested with the authority to interpret the law; we possess neither the expertise nor the prerogative to make policy judgments. Those decisions are entrusted to our Nation’s elected leaders, who can be thrown out of office if the people disagree with them. It is not our job to protect the people from the consequences of their political choices.”

Fair enough, except that Team Obama did not exactly play by the rules in passing legislation that has been unpopular since its inception.  After Scott Brown (R-Mass.) scored an upset electoral victory, largely in the back of his opposition to government-run health care, to become a U.S. Senator in 2010, the administration did not yield to public opinion. Moreover, the weight of evidence suggests that Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.), with a little helped from an ACORN-backed secretary of state, stole the 2008 election from Norm Coleman who was the Republican incumbent. Without Franken, the Democrats would not have had the 60 seat filibuster proof majority needed to pass ObamaCare.

U.S. Supreme Court judges are given lifetime appointments so they have the ability to stand outside of politics and to safeguard the freedom enshrined within the U.S. Constitution.  That is why legal scholars on both sides of the political spectrum ardently support the concept of judicial review, which was established in Marbury v. Madison.

Even conservatives who are comforted by the “considerable consolation prize” described by Will in recent piece, acknowledge that chief justice twisted  himself into pretzel to uphold the health care mandate. There is no getting around the fact that Roberts did take politics into account. So much for the insulation supposedly ingrained within lifetime appointments. Rush Limbaugh speculates that Roberts succumb to elite opinion in Washington D.C. and to media pressure. If this turns out to be true, it can be said that Net Right Daily was way out in front of warning against a campaign that specifically targeted Justice Roberts.

As Net Right Daily previously reported, “This effort began in earnest with a front page hit piece on the New York Times,” which ran July 24 2011. The article was built around a database created by the National Science Foundation (NSF) that gauges the ideological complexion of court rulings and the leanings of individual members. “In the database, votes favoring criminal defendants, unions, people claiming discrimination or violation of their civil rights are, for instance, said to be liberal,” the report explains. “Decisions striking down economic regulations and favoring prosecutors, employers and the government are said to be conservative.”

President Obama himself personally attacked the court during a State of the Union address, and in other settings, with more vigor than any other chief executive since Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

On his radio program, Limbaugh has suggested that the chief justice is now controlled by the media. Krauthammer, who maintains faith in Roberts, is inclined to believe that the chief justice was driven more by perceived institutional obligations.

“Roberts’s concern was that the Court do everything it could to avoid being seen, rightly or wrongly, as high-handedly overturning sweeping legislation passed by both houses of Congress and signed by the president,” Krauthammer wrote.

In the words, the anti-constitutional campaign organized on behalf of ObamaCare out of the White House in concert with sympathetic press organs succeeded.

Kevin Mooney is a contributing editor for NetRightDaily.com. You can follow Kevin on Twitter at @KevinMooneyDC.

Their daring won the hearts of voters two years ago, in large part based on what they did while they were in the minority — to oppose the $800 billion “stimulus”, to stop the “cap-and-trade” restrictions on carbon energy emissions, and to slow down the health care and financial regulation laws.

After the election, Republicans gained momentum with pledges by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Speaker John Boehner to use the debt ceiling and continuing resolutions as leverage to extract real, offsetting spending cuts.   They made it their Maginot Line, and a showdown was assured.

Everyone knows what happened after that.  One short year later, congressional Republicans and GOP presidential candidates, are on their heels.  One by one, they have ceded issue after issue to the Obama Administration — and it will likely have big implications on the outcome of the 2012 election.

Case in point is the Obama Administration’s most recent request to increase the national debt ceiling by another $1.2 trillion from its current $15.194 trillion level.

So bad was the debt deal reached over the summer that even if the House votes against this new increase, it will become law.  And the supposed sequester “cuts” set to take effect will only slightly reduce the growth rate of spending — that is, if Congress even ratifies them.

That, coupled with the failure to obtain real spending cuts in the continuing resolutions — spending actually increased in 2011 — has all but taken the spending and debt issues off the table, robbing Republicans of their narrative.

Adding insult to injury, recently Barack Obama requested permission to consolidate six agencies: rolling the Small Business Administration, the U.S. Trade Representative’s Office, the Export-Import Bank, the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, and the Trade and Development Agency into the Commerce Department.

Much of this is for show, to help Obama portray himself as some sort of stalwart in favor of limited government — and it backs Republicans into a corner.  If the House votes for the proposal, it helps to bolster Obama’s narrative.  If it votes no, then House Republicans make Obama look even better and themselves petty.

Obama successfully did the same thing on taxes when it came to the payroll tax holiday.  Because Republicans did not stand on any principle — for example that they did not wish to defund Social Security without there being offsetting budget cuts — they missed an opportunity to galvanize seniors against Obama like they did in 2009 and 2010 over cuts to Medicare to help pay for Obamacare.

Worse, even when Republicans voted to extend the payroll tax holiday for another year, they managed to lose any credit for it and achieved the remarkable feat of helping to portray Obama as a tax-cutter.

On Obamacare, Republicans are now risking taking that issue off the table, too — including the much-hated individual mandate — as Mitt Romney, their presumptive standard bearer  as Governor signed into law practically the same plan in Massachusetts in 2006.

With so many issues seemingly neutralized, it leaves voters to wonder what, if anything, Republicans will be running on in 2012.  They must reclaim their narrative if they are to have any shot of reclaiming the White House.

For losing so much ground, the fault lies singularly with the Republican establishment, who appears almost to want to lose every battle.  Their weak mantra of “not upsetting the Independents” is a false excuse; a dodge to cover their cowardice or complicity — or both.  It is the GOP establishment, the old bulls and their army of “professionals” that have stolen the genuine demands of the American people for meaningful reform.  And it is they who are setting up a certain defeat.

Defeat will come in one of two ways.  Either the GOP will fail to capture the White House and make gains in Congress.  That would be the conventional definition of “defeat.”  Or, they will fail — even with the White House and Congressional majorities — to turn back the assaults on liberty that have become the hallmark of the Obama regime.  Either way, America loses.

Time is running out.  Conservatives in Congress need to reassert control over the narrative.  If the leadership and establishment bulls won’t do it, then hopefully the freshmen will.

Bill Wilson is the President of Americans for Limited Government. You can follow Bill on Twitter at @BillWilsonALG.

Here is what it looks like so far:

Harry Reid’s appointments: Patty Murray of Washington, John Kerry of Massachusetts and Max Baucus of Montana

Mitch McConnell’s appointments: Jon Kyl of Arizona, Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania and Rob Portman of Ohio

John Boehner’s appointments: Ways and Means Chairman Dave Camp (R-Mich.), Energy and Commerce Chairman Fred Upton (R-Mich.) and Republican Conference Chairman Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas)

The 12 member committee will be comprised of 6 Democrats and 6 Republicans.

Harry Reid and Barack Obama

By Rick Manning – When it takes about five minutes for President Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) to sign on to a new debt deal, perhaps Republicans should look for the trapdoors.

Based upon press reports, here are just four.

Contrary to what the deal states, it actually guarantees a tax increase. The “deal” sets the CBO economic assumptions up as the inviolable guideline that Congress must follow. The CBO has the expiration of the 2003 tax cuts cooked into the books effective 2013. So Congress will now be forced to allow taxes to rise, a guaranteed tax increase.

To make matters worse, the triggered cuts in defense spending unless there is an alternate agreement passed give 40 Democrats in the Senate absolute power over the rest of Congress. In order to prevent the level of defense cuts proscribed in the deal, Republicans will end up having to agree to additional tax increases. It is also highly likely that Medicare cuts will never occur, being replaced by additional taxes.

The deal doesn’t allow Medicaid to be cut — the same Medicaid that is now extended to couples who make $64,000 a year. Effectively, the “deal” would institutionalize the massive expansion of middle-class welfare under the Pelosi-Reid four-year reign of fiscal terror.

Finally, the deal doesn’t solve the problem because a credit downgrade becomes a certainty under it. If the rosy GDP growth assumptions of the CBO are realized (hint: They didn’t forecast a .4 percent growth rate in the first quarter of 2011), then our nation will only have a $21 trillion national debt in 2021, not counting the $4.5 trillion owed to the Social Security and Medicare trust funds. That is the best-case scenario under this debt “deal.”

Ironically, the Democrats won’t pay a political price for a bad deal, because their constituencies are protected for the time being.

However, the Republican Party will go the way of its predecessor, the Whigs, if they allow our nation’s fiscal solvency to be destroyed all in the name of getting a deal.

Hopefully, House Republicans will listen to Nancy Reagan on this one and just say no, because a little short-term pain is worthwhile if it stops the long-term pain that this “deal” is guaranteed to create.

Rick Manning is the Communications Director of Americans for Limited Government, you can follow him on twitter @rmanning957. This post was originally featured at The Hill’s Pundits Blog.

It leaves the American people short-changed; who in 2010 voted to rein in government at all levels, most importantly, from spending far more than it takes in. While families struggle with their monthly balance sheets, the federal government has been on an unprecedented spend-a-thon that would wipe out anyone else who tried it.

Since Barack Obama had his first budget passed (accounting for two years of spending), he has accumulated $2.4 trillion in new debt. That’s over $1 trillion a year in new debt, a number that will continue unabated through 2021 when the debt reaches $26 trillion.

That is, if the government’s rosy economic projections turn out as everyone hopes, with a robust economic recovery and millions of new jobs created. If the projections are wrong, and the economy does not double in size in the next ten years, revenues will fall far short of expectations.

Aside from the lack of spending cuts, an essential feature of any plan a family would follow to reinstate fiscal prudence, the other essential ingredient missing from the deal is a recipe to get the economy growing again. It will do nothing to reduce the exorbitant cost of doing business in America, with corporate taxes among the highest in the developed world. Where the federal regulatory overkill threatens to shut down millions of more jobs. And where the new costly healthcare entitlement, ObamaCare, threatens to topple the federal treasury once and for all.

With 0.4 percent revised growth in the first quarter, and an anemic 1.3 percent increase in the second, the economy is already falling well short of expectations. Barack Obama promised that unemployment would not get higher than 8 percent, but it went much, much higher. In fact, this is the longest period of sustained high joblessness since the Great Depression.

House and Senate members who wish to turn the Ship of State around can still take a stand in opposition to a deal that will neither get the economy moving again nor avert a Triple-A downgrade by credit rating agencies, including S&P, which was looking for a plan at least $4 trillion in size.

By issuing their warnings, some criticized the rating agencies for previous failures. But, rating debt is not science. It is prospective. Markets were pounding European debt auctions long before raters issued further downgrades on troubled sovereigns. Greece was just downgraded again as the situation continues to deteriorate.

But these private companies do serve an important function to their customers, who understand that risk assessment is not 100 percent and can never be. What they can get is an assurance that certain bonds are more likely to pay out than others through objective, independent means.

Which is the sort of scrutiny Washington wants to avoid. Any frank accounting of the federal books would find that we are not meeting our obligations honestly now. In the past two fiscal years, the government only made ends meet with a printing press, selling three-quarters of Treasuries to the Federal Reserve, according analysis done by one of the biggest bond-buyers, Pimco.

If we are indeed downgraded, it will be on the heads of every politician in Washington who accepted this deal, or who signed it into law without putting the structural reforms necessary to affirm our creditworthiness through the future.

Republicans in effect have ceded their only leverage for the next two years to have restored order to the nation’s fiscal house. They are to be credited with extracting the spending cuts they did, which may save a little less than $1 trillion over the next ten years. But those savings will most likely be made irrelevant by weak economic growth and less-than-expected revenues.

In the end, what will matter for the American people is whether they get their finances back in order, or if they deteriorate beyond reckoning. A brave few will stand up and say, “No deal,” to their leaders in Washington, but they will not be enough to stop the debt from growing unabated.

The danger is that the debt is already too large, and will be a permanent weight that slows the economy down and restricts desperately-needed job growth. We needed a solution, but instead just got another cockamamie deal that won’t stop the spending.

Bill Wilson is the President of Americans for Limited Government. You can follow Bill on Twitter at @BillWilsonALG.

Boehner is supposedly concerned that the deal would cut too much from the Pentagon, and is still considering whether he will support the legislation. Further trouble for the compromise plan arises in the Huse when Nancy Pelosi issues tepid support at best for the deal, “We all may not be able to support it or none of us may be able to support it.”

Still looming though is the prospect that the U.S. credit rating is downgraded. Further, Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s have all cautioned that all debt plans to date have not met requirements to avoid a credit rating downgrade.

On July 22, just minutes after defeating the House-passed “Cut, Cap, and Balance” plan to trim the deficit by $5.8 trillion over the next ten years and balance the budget by amending the Constitution, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid took to the floor to proclaim that his work was done.

Calling the legislation “dead,” Reid then made headlines by also taking his and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s proposal off the table for Senate action that would have let Barack Obama raise the debt ceiling without any spending cuts of substance included. He also made no mention of the so-called “Gang of Six” proposal.

Instead, Reid alluded to ongoing negotiations between House Speaker John Boehner and the Obama White House. He said, “The product on which they are working would address, as I understand, both taxes and spending. And under the Constitution, the House of Representatives must originate all revenue measures.”

Reid continued, “Therefore, the path to avert default now runs first through the House of Representatives.”

If Reid had a proposal of his own, he easily could have offered it as an amendment to the “Cut, Cap, and Balance” bill, had it passed, and then gone to conference to work out the differences between the House and Senate versions of the same bill.

Instead, Reid punted. Because he has no plan. He’d rather have Republicans negotiating against themselves. Instead, both houses of Congress must work on legislation that cuts borrowing, puts a ceiling on spending, and eventually, balances the budget.

But Speaker Boehner can take at least part of Reid’s advice, and pass legislation in the House that would indeed avert a default on the $14.3 trillion national debt, especially now that talks with the White House have completely failed.

The only possible way the government would default on its debts would be if the Obama Administration consciously decided not to make interest payments and refinance existing debt up to the limit when the debt ceiling is reached. So, the House should simply enact a temporary extension of the debt ceiling of about $200 billion (which probably buys about 30 days), attached to no less than $400 billion of immediate spending cuts, along with the “Full Faith and Credit Act.”

The bill would take default off the table by instructing the Treasury as a matter of law to make interest payments first and to refinance debt up to the limit. Then, there couldn’t possibly be a missed payment to creditors, because there’s more than enough revenue coming in to prioritize the redemption of principal and interest on the debt. The bill would simply say what must be done with that revenue if the debt ceiling is reached.

What’s left over in revenue would prioritize entitlement recipients and the military. This would eliminate the possibility of denying Social Security checks to seniors or veterans’ benefits or combat preparedness, meanwhile providing ample time to negotiate a longer-term solution — without a loaded gun on the table.

If Obama wanted to veto that, he would be telling the American people that he would rather hold the country hostage until he gets his tax increases. He would in effect tip his hand and tell the nation that what he really wants is to keep his leverage.

The bond markets and credit agencies don’t care what deal is enacted in Washington per se, just that principal is redeemed and interest is paid, and that the growth of the debt not become unsustainable. So long as interest is paid out of revenue and principal refinanced, there’s no default.

A solution is not the same thing as a deal, and is something that needs to also be on the table as the House and Senate hash out differences. What ultimately passes must cut at least $4 trillion in borrowing, and then S&P, and Fitch will not have to make good on their threat to downgrade the nation’s Triple-A credit rating.

Obama’s leverage right now on this issue is default and withholding entitlements checks; the “Full Faith and Credit Act” takes those threats off the table by prioritizing how revenue is spent, and a mere short-term extension with $400 billion of immediate cuts will provide both houses the time to enact a long-term measure that adheres to the principles of “Cut, Cap, and Balance.”

So, Boehner should take away Obama’s loaded gun — before someone gets shot.

Bill Wilson is the President of Americans for Limited Government. You can follow Bill on Twitter at @BillWilsonALG.

To the Members of the House of Representatives:

Representative Joe Walsh is distributing a letter to Speaker Boehner urging him to reject the McConnell Senate debt ceiling proposal.  Moody’s has warned that the McConnell proposal fails to prevent a credit downgrade of the United States, and your signature will help ensure that the Speaker remains focused upon the only serious legislation to avoid this catastrophic outcome – cut, cap and balance.

Americans for Limited Government urges you to sign the Walsh letter today so it will be clear to the Speaker that even if passed in the Senate, the McConnell proposal is dead on arrival in the House.

Thank you for your consideration.  We will be scoring this letter, as it will be the only vehicle that the House should have to go on record regarding this ill-conceived idea which if passed, would ensure that our nation’s debt would be downgraded, making balancing the budget dramatically more difficult and painful.

Sincerely,

William A. “Bill” Wilson

President

Americans for Limited Government

From The Hill:

House Democratic leaders are attacking Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-Ky.) debt-ceiling fallback plan, characterizing it as a political ruse intended to scapegoat Democrats and taint them at the polls.

“I’m not a fan of the McConnell proposal,” Rep. Chris Van Hollen (Md.), the senior Democrat on the House Budget Committee, said Tuesday during a press briefing in the Capitol. “It’s designed to protect mostly Republican members of Congress from taking responsibility for votes that they’ve already made.”

It appears that the only debt ceiling plan that can pass the House already has–the ‘Cut, Cap, and Balance Act’.