Net Neutrality exposes Barack Obama's not so well hidden inner Vladimir Putin

On Thursday the FCC moved to regulate the Internet via what’s commonly called Net Neutrality – although like Obamacare before it was passed, we don’t know everything that’s included in it! Net Neutrality is beyond a doubt the single most despicable thing Barack Obama has done as president. (The FCC is ostensibly an independent agency, but under Obama it’s been anything but.) The big push for Net Neutrality came from Silicon Valley content companies who were whining that ISPs such as Comcast, Time Warner and AT&T were slowing or threatening to slow content that sucked up massive amounts of bandwidth. They are after all the ones who have to invest to expand that bandwidth. These ISPs were at the same time telling companies like Netflix and Google that they could ensure timely delivery of their content if they paid for the extra bandwidth that was being used. The Silicon Valley companies squealed to Barack Obama and he started leaning on the FCC.

Now this should not be viewed as a defense of Comcast or Time Warner. Both are horrible companies when it comes to service and customer service. Terrible! And you might ask how can they survive if they piss off so many customers? Government, of course. In most places they reign as the result monopolies… imposed by government.

This might sound like it’s just about whether you can have House of Cards running simultaneously in three rooms in your house or in every home in your neighborhood. It’s not. It’s about the government seeking to control the Internet, the single most powerful vehicle for the advancement of the human condition in history. That might sound like hyperbole, but it’s not. Today, because of the Internet more people have access to more information, more quickly than at any point since… well, ever. Not only that, they also have access to more products and services, usually at lower cost than any generation ever enjoyed. And perhaps most importantly, they have a vehicle through which they can express their thoughts and share their ideas and highlight oppression & injustice more freely and to more people more quickly than has ever been possible in human history.

A decade from now much of that will be a mere distant memory. Not that the Internet won’t exist, it will. But it will be a government controlled utility rather than the Wild West platform for the free exchange of ideas that it is today. Don’t believe it? Don’t forget, a year ago this same FCC proposed sending “researchers to grill reporters, editors and station owners about how they decide which stories to run.” Six months before that Democrat Senators Dianne Feinstein and Richard Durbin were debating whether bloggers deserved 1st Amendment protections. And of course this is the administration that used IRS commissioners to stifle the free speech of opponents and the Justice Department to go after reporter James Rosen who just happened to be critical of it.

So now, we have Barack Obama’s FCC telling the country that the government gets to be the arbitrators of what can be said or done on the Internet. Imagine if the government decided that WiFi was a bridge too far when we were all hooked up to the Internet by those static filled phone lines. Imagine if the government put the kibosh on online music sharing when record companies complained about declining CD sales. Imagine if the government supported the status quo when Yahoo was the dominant search provider or MySpace was the dominant social networking site. In what universe would have any of that have been a good thing?

As bad as stifling innovation is, that’s not the worst of it. The worst? The death of free speech. Imagine if Richard Nixon had at his disposal the kind of control the FCC says it has now during Watergate. Ronald Reagan during Iran-Contra. Bill Clinton during the Monica Lewinski affair. George Bush in reference to GTMO or Abu Ghraib.

Barack Obama no doubt wishes he had that kind of power during Fast and Furious, the IRS Tea Party Scandal, Benghazi and countless other times. Now he pretty much will have it through his puppets on the FCC. Unfortunately the spineless obsequious leadership in the GOP will likely do nothing to stop this abuse of power. The result will be something slightly less onerous than being perpetrated by Barack Obama’s hero, Vladimir Putin, in Moscow. Putin can simply kill his opponents with little worry of consequence. Here in the United States, thankfully, that’s unlikely to go over as smoothly, however with the FCC’s unconstitutional overreach such measures wouldn’t be necessary. Why kill someone and make a martyr out of them when it’s much easier to simply muzzle them, or if that doesn’t work, label them a criminal and jail them with arbitrary regulations that you’ve set up specifically to target opponents? When government gets to decide who can be its critics or what its critics can say, it’s not a long march to a dictatorship.

Alas, our freedoms aren’t being taken from us by some foreign power with a gun pointed at our collective heads. No, staggeringly, American freedoms are being taken away by the very government a majority of brain-dead voters somehow sent to Washington. What’s worse, the opposition in Congress seems more than willing to capitulate and let the president get away with whatever he does, regardless of what’s in the Constitution, so long as they can stay in power in their little fiefdoms. With Obamacare and what the WSJ dubs the Obamanet, Barack Obama has succeeded in gutting both economic freedom and the freedom of speech in less than six years. Things that largely survived for 220 years... down the drain in six years! The consequences of the mistake that is Barack Obama in the White House will haunt Americans for decades to come, including those who were smart enough not to hand the keys of the greatest kingdom in human history to a petulant man more than willing to lie to get what he wants and a disdain for the very Constitution he swore to uphold.

The road from Republic to Dictatorship is paved with "good" intentions, like Obama's Obamacare delays...

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a watershed piece of legislation in American history. Based on the 15th Amendment, it outlawed discrimination based on racial, ethnic, religious and gender criteria.

You probably don’t realize it, but it’s likely that you encounter aspects of the Civil Rights Act on a regular basis. When you apply for a job, a mortgage, join a club, stay in a hotel room, or buy something online you are often presented with a page of text with a bunch of legalese that you probably don’t read. That text usually says something about non-discrimination, terms and conditions and various other policies. All of that appears because non-discrimination is the law of the land. That means that if a business or group discriminates based on one of those factors, they could be prosecuted by the government. That text you don’t read basically acknowledges as much.

Although Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, it does not enforce it. That is the President’s job. If someone breaks the rules, the Justice Department or the US Civil Rights Commission will most likely be the one that sues them, not some House or Senate committee. It’s the president’s job to execute the laws. That’s because Article II Section 3 states that the president “shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed”.

But what if he didn’t want to do it? Let’s say a president was elected and decided that 50 years was enough and that we didn’t need to focus on discrimination anymore. There would be howls from virtually every quarter of the country. “That’s unconstitutional!”

And of course those howling would be right. Today however, to very few howls, we have the exact same thing, only instead of the Civil Rights Act it’s The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as Obamacare.

President Obama has unilaterally decided that large swaths of his signature legislation will simply not be implemented as the law requires. “But he has good reason though…” one might say. Or “He has to, it’s not quite ready”. One could come up with any one of a dozen good reasons for the president to delay the employer mandate or the out-of-pockets caps. It is, after all, the single worst piece of legislation ever to be signed into law in the United States.

The problem however, is that the legislation does not give the President that option. The law doesn’t say the employer mandate, which requires all businesses with over 50 employees to provide health insurance to their staffs or face fines up to $3,000 per employee, can be implemented when the market is ready. It says they will begin in 2014. The law doesn’t say that the cost caps, which limit annual deductibles to $2,000 per individual and $4,000 per family, can go into place when the President is ready to implement them. It says they go into effect in 2014.

But that has not stopped President Obama from delaying both and other aspects of that highly dysfunctional Obamacare, including exempting Congress and its staff from the law… something else the President does not have the power to do.

“So what!” one might say. “The president is saving us from having to operate under a system that is unworkable for another year until he can fix it.” As reasonable as that might sound at first blush, that is a recipe for tyranny. How? Simple. The United Sates is a nation of laws. Congress passes bills (ostensibly) based on its power afforded under the Constitution and the president either signs them into law or vetoes them. Once they are laws, the president has the responsibility to enforce them.

He does not have the right to enforce only those he likes. His role is not to decide what laws – or what aspects of laws – he is willing to enforce. His job is to enforce the laws as they are written. If he does not like pending legislation he has the option of seeking to influence is writing in Congress before it reaches his desk. Once signed, or for a law signed by a predecessor, a president has the option of seeking to change the law via congressional action which will result in a new law replacing or amending the current law.

What he does not have the right to do is unilaterally change the law. If he did, what would stop a president from simply stopping to enforce Civil Rights Act against employers who only discriminate against blacks? What would stop a president from delaying Social Security checks because the IRS hasn’t collected enough in taxes this year? What would stop the president from enforcing the FDA’s testing regime on drug manufacturers? What would stop the president from giving a $1 million tax break to anyone who bundled $500,000 or more to his campaign? The answer to all of these is the same: Nothing.

If the president can pick and choose the laws he will enforce, then the Constitution is simply dead. If he can ignore the responsibilities it demands of him then so too can he ignore the limitations it puts on him. Habeas Corpus? Gone. Term limits? Gone. Freedom of Speech? Gone. The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures? Gone. Unrestrained absolute power? Hello!

Obamacare is by any measure, bad legislation. Many people were saying that from the start, long before Nancy Pelosi famously said: "We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what’s in it." Nonetheless the monstrosity that is Obamacare passed into law and the Supreme Court contorted common sense to declare it Constitutional. Nonetheless, in order to protect those responsible for this abomination from voter’s wrath the President has chosen to unlawfully delay some of the most onerous parts of the law. From a political perspective that makes perfect sense. The problem is, it’s simply unlawful. If Barack Obama gets away with this, the presidency is no longer simply first among equals in the Republic formed by our Constitution. It will have literally become a dictatorship. One man choosing what the laws are and to whom they apply. Now that is what I call “Fundamentally transforming the United States”… and not, I would suggest, in a good way.