Abu Wabu

From Big Government comes a typically thoughtful and informed essay by Hillsdale College History Professor Paul Rahe, who credits the relentless despotism of Obama, Pelosi, Reid and Emmanuel with having ignited and fed the growth of the Tea Party Movement.

The measures undertaken by the Obama administration and by its supporters in Congress that gave rise to and sustained the Tea-Party Movement all have this in common. They constitute an assault – evident to anyone who cares to look – on our inherited political order. They transgress on the two great principles constitutive of that order. They are inconsistent with federalism and the separation of powers, and nothing speaks to their character more eloquently than the fact that they were crafted in camera behind closed doors, that those who voted on them had not read them, and that they were of such a length as to be incomprehensible even to their putative authors.

Let me be a bit more precise. The two great measures passed since January, 2009 – the healthcare reform bill and the financial-regulation reform bill – presuppose that the federal government can do anything. Both run roughshod over the prerogatives of the states. Neither is consistent with federalism as a principle of governance.

The same can be said with regard to the separation of powers. Both bills presuppose a massive delegation of legislative power to executive agencies. Both presuppose that appointed officials can and should be empowered to issue regulations having the force of law. Both presuppose on the part of both houses of Congress an abdication of the legislative power. Both require a concentration of executive, legislative, and judicial power within a single agency that operations, in effective, behind closed doors. Both promise to give rise to a government that is invisible and unaccountable. The combination of these powers is, Montesquieu asserted, the very emblem of despotism.

What John Boehner, Mitch McConnell and their Republican colleagues must begin doing immediately, Rahe asserts, is educate American citizens to the furthest possible extent on the Democrats' ongoing attack on the Constitution, so as to facilitate a lasting return to first principals.

What those who joined the Tea-Party Movement sense must in the course of the midterm campaign be made manifest in all of its horror.

Read Restoring Constitutional Government.

More from Paul Rahe.

Power Line contributor Hillsdale College Professor Paul Rahe comments on the "grave misgivings" developing among Obama's group of high-level economic and finance advisers, who are now being ignored by the man who sought their cover during the financial crisis:

In Tuesday's New York Post, Charles Gasparino reports that, although they will not admit anything of the sort in public, people like Morgan Stanley's John Mack, BlackRock's Larry Fink, Greg Fleming (once at Merrill Lynch), JP Morgan's Jamie Dimon, and Goldman Sachs' Lloyd Blankfein, who backed Obama at the time of the financial crisis last Fall, are now, in private, expressing grave misgivings.

Rahe counsels all the players named in Gasparino's report to do the right thing:

At some point, if these men have any self-respect, they will have to separate themselves from the current administration. At the time of the campaign, there were plenty of indications of Obama's radicalism. But the Democrats on Wall Street and many of our leading economists chose to look the other way. Now a number of the latter find themselves associated with an administration that cares far less about American prosperity than about rearranging economic, social, and political relations in the country to their own liking.

Here is a question to ponder. If Barack Obama had a fully free hand, what would he do? I suggest that we should pay close attention to developments over the last few years in Venezuela - for the direction in which Obama's proposals point is the one followed by Hugo Chavez. That he admires what Chavez has done is evident from the fact that he has lent Chavez a hand in his attempt to export the Venezuelan revolution to the Honduras.

This is truly a grave omen for the future, news only made worse by Greenspan's prediction today of further slowing in the economy - exactly what Obama wants.

Read Paul Rahe: Obama's Wrecking Crew

In America and Israel: Tick, Tock, Paul Rahe games Obama's trashing of U.S. relations with Israel and his implicit blessing of Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons based on an all-too-familiar template.

There are two brute facts that are pertinent. First, like Hitler’s remilitarization of the Rhineland, Ahmadinejad’s acquisition of nuclear weapons and long-range missiles would profoundly alter the balance of power. Is there anyone who seriously thinks that, when it had a relatively free hand, the Islamic Republic of Iran would conduct its affairs in the manner of a saturated power? In assessing the significance of what is about to take place, one must keep in mind the strategic importance of the Persian Gulf and just how large a percentage of the oil that fuels the world economy is exported through that narrow body of water.

The second brute fact is no less easy to discern: In matters such as the one that concerns us here, diplomacy is bound to be ineffectual if it is not backed by a credible threat that, if one’s requests are refused, one will resort to force.

Rahe concludes that Obama has abandoned that post and left it to the Israelis. Read it all.

Power Line on Obama's C-SPAN Lie, the consequences of which are proving decidedly disastrous:

How many times have we seen images of Barack Obama with his nose in the air, offering "hope"? Obama promised to be different--not worse, but better!--and his pledge to invite television cameras to observe behind-the-scenes legislative deliberations exemplified that image.

Today, Obama's message to voters is: "Don't tell me you actually believed that s***?!"

We didn't, but millions of those who did are feeling betrayed.

Meanwhile, over at Big Gov my favorite Professor Paul A. Rahe studies another seed of Obama's impending fall:

When this shot is shown in high resolution, as one perceptive observer soon noted, “Obama looks like he has contempt for Biden” –which, he added, may be the case “given Joe ‘The Gaff Machine’ Biden’s performance this year.” I am, he concluded, once again reminded “of how this administration seems to have become oblivious to the images they project to the public.”

I wonder whether this last point is right.

Obama and his minions are certainly capable of stumbling. Their handling of the recent attempt by Al Q’aeda to bring down a Northwest Airlines flight originating in Amsterdam is a case in point. But the posting of this photograph is by no means the first time that the current President of the United States has seized upon an opportunity to display in a manner oblique but unmistakable his disdain for another public figure.

As I tried to document last year in a series of posts on Powerline — here, here, here, here, here, and here — Barack Obama is, in fact, a master of the insulting gesture and the calculated insult.