"Kill The Bill"

That was the advice various conservative activists and leaders are offering House Republicans regarding today's planned vote on an emergency spending bill to address the border crisis. Writing at The Weekly Standard, Bill Kristol makes the following points:

"[The bill] doesn't deal in any way with the core cause of the problem, the president's 2012 executive amnesty for minors or his pending huge expansion of that amnesty. … But the overwhelming reason to kill the bill is that it's not going to become law anyway. The president and the Senate leadership have made clear they'll never accept it. So what's the point of passing it?"

It seems Kristol's thinking carried the day. Just after 2:00 p.m., news broke that today's vote had been cancelled. But as we go to press, House Republicans are in a closed-door meeting and anything is possible.

It's not just conservatives who are worried about Obama's overreaching on immigration. MSNBC's Ed Schultz said: "Hold the phone -- this would be a mistake if the president were to do this. … The Brits don't just hand out work permits; the Germans don't do it… Tell me: Who around this globe just hands out work permits to people to try to solve a problem of immigration? They don't do that."

Mark your calendars, friends. This may be the first time (and the last time) Ed Schultz and I agree!

See You In Court, Mr. President

Last night, the House approved a resolution authorizing a federal lawsuit against President Obama for abusing his executive authority. The resolution cites President Obama's repeated waivers of statutory language in Obamacare. Obama's actions were not simply exercises of regulatory discretion, but direct violations of the plain language of the law.

With Congress divided between the Democrat Senate and the Republican House, it is hard for Congress to respond to Obama's abuses. But the president's critics have had some success in the courts.

For example, the Supreme Court declared that Obama exceeded his authority when he made certain recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Board. One columnist noted that the Obama Administration has lost 13 cases on 9-to-0 votes before the high court in the last two terms.

In the critical Halbig case, the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia recently declared that taxpayer-funded subsidies granted through the federal Obamacare exchange are unconstitutional because the law is very clear that subsidies are supposed to be available only through state-based exchanges.

By the way, while liberals claim that conservatives are pushing an absurd interpretation in Halbig, a key Obamacare architect told various audiences that that was exactly what the law meant.

Supporters of Boehner's lawsuit also point to two Supreme Court cases, one striking down the line-item veto and a recent opinion on the EPA's authority.

In 1998, the Supreme Court struck down the line-item veto because it essentially permitted the president to amend legislation, a power the Constitution did not grant to the executive branch. Obama's executive orders have had the same effect -- essentially amending Obamacare without Congress' assent.

In the EPA decision, Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for the majority, declared, "The power to execute the laws does not include a power to revise clear statutory terms that turn out not to work in practice." Justice Scalia could have been referring to the administration's haphazard implementation of Obamacare -- making it up as it goes along and ignoring whatever isn't working or causing too much political pain.

Lerner's Contempt

Former IRS official Lois Lerner has been held in contempt for refusing to testify about her role in the IRS Tea Party targeting scandal. Yesterday the House Ways and Means Committee released excerpts of newly discovered emails that put her contempt for conservatives on full display.

In the messages, Lerner refers to conservatives as "a—holes." During an exchange with a friend about the "rabid callers" on "scary right wing radio shows," Lerner adds, "So we don't need to worry about alien terrorists. It's our own crazies that will take us down."

That is typical of many leftists – they are more concerned about conservative Christian homeschoolers [the "crazies"] than Al Qaeda!

There is a history here with Lois Lerner. Before joining the IRS, she worked at the Federal Election Commission. During the Clinton years, Lerner led the FEC's legal jihad against the Christian Coalition.

Government employees are certainly entitled to their own opinions. But one of the most important "good government" reforms was the Hatch Act. Passed in 1939, it was intended to prevent career civil servants from using the brute force of government power to punish political enemies. In the case of Lois Lerner, you'd have to be utterly naive to think she was acting within the limits of the law.