39 House Republicans join 12 Senate Republicans to pass Democrat bill overthrowing the Defense of Marriage Act

 The Respect for Marriage Act passed the Democratic-led House in a 258-169-1 vote, as 39 Republicans joined all Democrats in supporting it. It also won bipartisan support in the Democratic-controlled Senate in late November: 12 GOP senators crossed party lines to vote for the legislation. ...

The Respect for Marriage Act formally repeals the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, which was signed into law by then-President Bill Clinton. That bill denied same-sex couples federal benefits and permitted states to refuse to recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states.

The Supreme Court would later go on to invalidate the key provisions of DOMA in two watershed rulings, United States v. Windsor and Obergefell v. Hodges in 2013 and 2015, respectively.

Roberts, Scalia, Thomas and Alito dissented in Windsor against Kennedy in 2013, same in Hodges in 2015.

There's always a minority of Republicans who exist only to advance the Democrats' godless agenda. 

It's never the other way around, unless it has to do with money.

Story.

Democrat Leader In Senate Makes Unprecedented Change To Centuries-Old Filibuster Rule

Senate majority leader Democrat Harry Reid has just thrown out the rule book for filibusters in the Senate.

Story here:

By a vote of 52-48, the Senate invoked the so-called “nuclear option” to change the historic filibuster rules of the upper chamber. As a result, the minority party will be prevented from filibustering any nominations other than those to the Supreme Court.

"It's time to change the Senate before the institution becomes obsolete,” Majority Leader Harry Reid said Thursday morning on the Senate floor ahead of the unprecedented alteration to centuries-old rules regarding the power of the minority party to contest Senate business.

“The need for change is so, so very obvious,” he said. “It’s manifest [that] we have to do something to change things.”

... lawmakers lamented that if the party in power can change the rules, then rules are meaningless. 

The NY Sun Reminds Yellen Congress Regulates The Value Of Money, Not The Fed

The wimps in the Senate are rolled yet again, but The Sun shineth, here:

What needs to be confronted is the scandal of Federal Reserve independence. Where in the Constitution does it say that monetary policy is supposed — or permitted — to be independent of politics? If the Founders of America had wanted the monetary power to be given to a body independent of politics, they could have given it to the Army or the Navy or the Supreme Court. But they sat down in Philadelphia and gave the power to “coin money and regulate the value thereof and of foreign coin” to, in the Congress, the single most political institution in the entire constitutional system.

Should Chief Justice John Roberts Have Recused Himself On ACA Because Of Epilepsy?

Should Chief Justice of the Supreme Court John Roberts have recused himself from the ObamaCare case because he has epilepsy? He had a seizure as early as 1993, and another in 2007.

You know, a guy with a pre-existing condition like that may have felt compelled to help other people with pre-existing conditions by upholding ObamaCare. His own condition may have interfered with his judgment on the merits of the Affordable Care Act.

Striking it down would have meant that that provision of the Act guaranteeing coverage to people with pre-existing conditions such as his would have gone down with it.

Supremes Slap Down Imperial Obama 3x In Last 18 Months In Property Cases 9-0

Story here:

"Horne was the administration's third unanimous defeat in a property rights case in 18 months."

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It's not just the Fifth Amendment which has been under attack by the Obama regime, either. The Supremes also handed down two unanimous defeats in First and Fourth Amendment cases in 2012.

America, are you listening? Your president hates your constitution.

A Third Federal Court Strikes Down Obama's Recess Appointments As Unconstitutional

Reported here:

A third federal appeals court ruled Wednesday that President Obama violated the Constitution last year when he made recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Board, adding more weight to the case as it goes before the Supreme Court in the justices’ next session.

Sleeper Story Of The Day: Q1 GDP Revised DOWN To 1.8% From 2.4%

While everyone was fixated on Supreme Court rulings involving homosexuality, the third and final report of GDP for Q1 2013 got buried in the avalanche. A good place for it, too, seeing how bad it was.

The BEA reported here:

Real gross domestic product -- the output of goods and services produced by labor and property located in the United States -- increased at an annual rate of 1.8 percent in the first quarter of 2013 (that is, from the fourth quarter to the first quarter), according to the "third" estimate released by the Bureau of Economic Analysis.  In the fourth quarter, real GDP increased 0.4 percent.

The GDP estimate released today is based on more complete source data than were available for the "second" estimate issued last month.  In the second estimate, real GDP increased 2.4 percent.  With the third estimate for the first quarter, the increase in personal consumption expenditures (PCE) was less than previously estimated, and exports and imports are now estimated to have declined (for more information, see "Revisions" on page 3).

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Poor growth is entirely apropos to the situation. Preoccupied by our own narcissism, we aren't PRODUCING.

Hillary, Holder and Shulman: Obama's Know-Nothing Government Zoo?

Hillary Holder and Shulman

Jonathan Turley in The Washington Post, here, warns about the growth of Leviathan, the administrative state, which makes monkeys out of its politically appointed overseers (or does it?):

There were times this past week when it seemed like the 19th-century Know-Nothing Party had returned to Washington. President Obama insisted he knew nothing about major decisions in the State Department, or the Justice Department, or the Internal Revenue Service. The heads of those agencies, in turn, insisted they knew nothing about major decisions by their subordinates. It was as if the government functioned by some hidden hand.

Clearly, there was a degree of willful blindness in these claims. However, the suggestion that someone, even the president, is in control of today’s government may be an illusion. ...

For much of our nation’s history, the federal government was quite small. In 1790, it had just 1,000 nonmilitary workers. In 1962, there were 2,515,000 federal employees. Today, we have 2,840,000 federal workers in 15 departments, 69 agencies and 383 nonmilitary sub-agencies. ...

[T]he Supreme Court ruled in 1984 that agencies are entitled to heavy deference in their interpretations of laws. The court went even further this past week, ruling that agencies should get the same heavy deference in determining their own jurisdictions — a power that was previously believed to rest with Congress. In his dissent in Arlington v. FCC, Chief Justice John Roberts warned: "It would be a bit much to describe the result as ‘the very definition of tyranny,’ but the danger posed by the growing power of the administrative state cannot be dismissed.”

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Doesn't this line of argument smell just a little like a pre-emptive defense of the bad monkeys who were actually up to no good? Perhaps a diversionary tactic? Throughout the article, Turley constantly refers to the untouchable agencies as "the fourth branch" of the government. Isn't this a deliberate rhetorical shift? The fourth estate, the press, has been the traditional conception from the time of Carlyle. The fourth branch appears to be a recent innovation, a neologism originating in a leftist critique of the media when captured by the elected, usually Republican, government (as fine a description of the current Obama regime as any, which might be a reason Turley seeks to redeploy the term for what conservatives have long termed the managerial state to keep the focus off the compromised media--it's more prudent for a liberal to change the subject from media complicity when it's media complicity with liberalism we're talking about).

It's also suspicious when liberals start talking like conservatives just when their side starts getting its feet held to the fire. And isn't it also a little rich to hear John Roberts warning about the growing power of the administrative state when on behalf of the third branch of government he basically shoved ObamaCare down the throats of the American people against their will? Or is Leviathan so irresistable that the judiciary follows the legislative in ceding its own power to the faceless bureaucracy?

It would probably behoove the cause of liberty more to forego a special prosecutor in the IRS scandal at this time simply in order to keep televised hearings before the eyeballs of all. Educating the people about the malfeasance of the so-called fourth branch under Obama is job one in order to pierce the fourth estate's media halo around their hero Obama.

ObamaCare Has Its Own Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy Moment

ABCNews reports the following here:

The Kaiser Family Foundation released results of a non-partisan study today finding more than 40 percent did not even know the law was in place.

“Four in ten Americans (42%) are unaware that the ACA [Affordable Care Act] is still the law of the land,” the report says, “including 12 percent who believe the law has been repealed by Congress, 7 percent who believe it has been overturned by the Supreme Court and 23 percent who say they don’t know enough to say what the status of the law is.”

Since ObamaCare Was Upheld 2.03 Million Jobs Have Simply Disappeared

Ho-ney? I shrank the workforce!

The Supreme Court upheld ObamaCare on June 28, 2012.

Since July 1, 2012, full-time jobs are down 1.335 million over the eight months.

Part-time employment for economic reasons is down 607,000.

And part-time for noneconomic reasons is down 84,000.

So ObamaCare appears to be more negative for full-time jobs, but part-time employment is down also, by 691,000.

ObamaCare doesn't yet appear to be transforming the workforce into part-time. It just appears to be shrinking it, period.

How About A National Minimum Wage Of $4.34 As In Obama's American Samoa?

"The first attempt at establishing a national minimum wage came in 1933, when a $0.25 per hour standard was set as part of the National Industrial Recovery Act. However, in the 1935 court case Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States (295 U.S. 495), the United States Supreme Court declared the act unconstitutional, and the minimum wage was abolished."

So says the Wikipedia article on the minimum wage, here.

Adjusted for inflation according to the Consumer Price Index since 1933, the minimum wage in 2011 should have been just $4.34, not $7.25.

So if we should do anything, we should lower the minimum wage, not raise it to $9.00 as President Obama hypocritically calls for. I say hypocritically because President Obama already thinks the lower level around $4.00 is just fine for the residents of American Samoa, who by law make between just $2.68 and $4.69, which is where even now he aims to keep them:

On September 30, 2010, President Obama signed legislation that delays scheduled wage increases for 2010 and 2011. On July 26, 2012, President Obama signed S. 2009 into law, postponing the minimum wage increase for 2012, 2013, and 2014. Annual wage increases of $0.50 will recommence on September 30, 2015 and continue every three years until all rates have reached the federal minimum.

This is thought to be a favor to Rep. Nancy Pelosi, the former Democrat Speaker of the House, which keeps her business pals there (tuna canners) more profitable than they otherwise would be if they had to comply with the federal minimum wage legislation.

Claiming the mantle of the working poor is so much easier than actually vetoing a bill which keeps workers impoverished indefinitely. He didn't veto it but signed it, and the residents of American Samoa remain second class citizens as a result, under the first black president. There's a new massa in town, but it's the same old shit.

A Rationale For Ending The Tax On Corporate Profits

John Steele Gordon provides a helpful survey of the history of American taxation, here, including the chronically avoided topic of how the tax on corporate profits (ruled constitutional as an excise tax "on the privilege of doing business as a corporation") was meant to be a temporary tax on the rich:

In the first decade of the 20th century, the stock of corporations was owned almost entirely by the rich. So taxing corporate profits was, in a very real sense, taxing the rich. Congress passed the legislation and in 1911 the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the tax was constitutional. ...

Unfortunately, the [subsequent] personal income tax did not replace the corporate income tax that had originally been intended only as a stopgap. Nor did Congress integrate the two taxes so that income, whether corporate or personal, was only taxed once. The two taxes simply ignore each other as if corporations are owned by Martians, not people.

At the tax levels of the early 20th century, the harm was inconsequential. But when tax levels rose dramatically to fund the great wars that soon followed the personal income tax, the pressure to legally avoid taxes rose equally. As a result, the two separate, uncoordinated tax systems became a uniquely powerful engine of complexity as accountants and lawyers have played the two systems off each other and Congress has tried, unsuccessfully, to close or regulate the resulting “loopholes.” ...

The two income taxes have been the main reason that the tax code has exploded to a 4-million-word incomprehensible mess.

ObamaCare Is Fascism? So Is The Federal Reserve.

And TARP. And Dodd-Frank.

So says Robert Romano for Investors.com here:

[ObamaCare] guarantees customers to large companies, in this case insurance providers that supported passage of the legislation, and in the process cartelizes the system.

In other words, private profits are being embedded into the law, and enforced by the bureaucracy, which will levy fines on individuals and employers that fail to comply with the mandates. ...

[T]he level of state control in this new system, and insurance industry participation in implementing it to its own benefit, is undeniable. It is corporatism defined.

One could compare it to the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 that implemented the National Recovery Administration, which may have been patterned after Mussolini's labor laws, as summarized in a 1991 Yale Law School study by James Whitman, before it was subsequently overturned by the Supreme Court.

Or the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, which gave privately owned banks the power to appoint regional Fed chairmen and outsourced creation of the public currency to a banking cartel.

Or more recently, one might examine the Troubled Asset Relief Fund (TARP), Dodd-Frank's "orderly liquidation fund" and the Fed's continued mortgage-backed securities purchase program — all bailout programs that privatize profits and socialize losses in the financial sector. More corporatism.

This country has been a veritable cornucopia of fascism since the days of Woodrow Wilson and FDR.

Has free market capitalism failed in the United States? It's hardly been tried.