A Modest Proposal to Get the President's Attention

How do you get this president’s attention or change his mind?

The ObamaCare mandate battle has exposed a bedrock truth about Barack Obama and his administration. We have a derelict Congress, at least on the Democratic side in its leadership, and a president who refuses to heed the Constitution. For more than 1000 days we have had no national budget, and though passing one is a Constitutional responsibility of Congress, Obama has no opinion whether one should be passed or not. Yet has an implacable and unmovable opinion on how religious institutions should spend their budgets. He rants that we should be our brother’s keeper, quoting a murderer who was being sarcastic with God, when he doesn’t even help his own actual brother living on $12 a year in a shack in Africa. He is a rank hypocrite whose promises are absolutely worthless, from ObamaCare to super PACs. He is the betrayer in chief, of personal promises made directly to church leaders, as well as his legal commitments. He even overruled his own vice president and chief of staff on the contraceptive mandate. Now religious leaders including the reverend who delivered the invocation at Obama’s inauguration are contemplating jail rather than compliance.

If the combination of the individual mandate and now the contraceptive mandate stand, you can be ordered to purchase a product and your church can be ordered to pay for things that violate your and its beliefs, both under threat of fines and imprisonment. The Catholic hospitals fighting today’s mandate will face another one, probably surgical abortions, and then another and another. What’s left of our freedoms? How do you reason and compromise with the man who defended infanticide and is now pushing this mandate? After three years, the evidence says that you don’t, at least where certain issues are concerned, and abortion is one of them. You either yield to him, or you defeat him. That’s his definition of “compromise“: Obey.

The evidence suggests that the only things this president listens to are his leftist advisers and ideals, and the only things likely to get his true attention are the tactics he used as a community organizer. The democratic process doesn’t mean anything to him, our shared body of traditions and laws appear to be foreign to him, and he is such a committed leftist that he has no regard for the beliefs and opinions of others who disagree with him. He refuses to listen, even to members of his own party and his own inner circle, when disagreements arise. He sticks to his ideology, and he lies to get his way.

Obama’s mentor says she wants riots in the streets. Well. Maybe it’s time to deliver those riots.

Here’s a modest proposal for those hospitals and institutions objecting to the ObamaCare abortifacient mandate, and frustrated by the president’s stubbornness and tin ear: They could shut down. Now. Just shut their doors and turn away those they are serving. This president wants to build up dependence on the federal government gradually. Force his hand by ramping that dependence up, hard. Cloward-Piven the man who is Cloward-Pivening us. And when they shut down, they should blast the blogs and legacy media with information explaining exactly what they’re doing, why, and what the consequences will be.

The images created will split the screen — Democrats demonizing church leaders for “throwing people out in the streets” etc, Americans genuinely suffering as institutions they depend on close up, church leaders standing up for the freedoms guaranteed by our Constitution and pointing squarely at the president and highlighting his choice to pick this fight. The media will make demons of the church leaders, but maybe this is a fight we need to have out. Are we a nation of our laws, or not? Can our leaders openly violate the Constitution or are they bound by it? Do ephemeral polls and mores run the country, or do we have a firmer foundation?

I’m not entirely serious about this. I’m just not optimistic that those protesting Obama now will hold together long enough, or that the normal rules of politics will win out. Our remaining presidential candidates don’t seem up to the task of pinning the president’s ears back. Despite the reservations about this policy lodged by officials as high as the vice president and SecDef Leon Panetta, none have resigned in protest and none seem to be persuading the president to change. One resignation on principle could make the difference, but no one in the administration has the courage to do it.

It’s becoming clearer that the president intentionally picked this fight to create political divisions he finds useful. He knows he is deeply offending some, but knows he is satisfying others at the same time, and that’s worth more to him than preserving the laws he swore to uphold and defend. That’s the choice he has clearly made here. The options at this point seems to be to keep pushing against a very stubborn president who has no respect for the country’s laws and traditions, or trust the Republicans in Congress to do something when their history isn’t encouraging and the Democrats stand in the way, throw up your hands and give up, wait and hope he is defeated in the fall and then undo what he has done, or take more radical steps to force his hand, even if there is a high likelihood of them backfiring. Sometimes playing it safe just won’t do the job.