Laws Are for Little People

The Obama administration has been known to treat reporting requirements to Congress as optional. Just recently, the administration was late in giving Congress a report on the effects of sequestration.

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Being late is one thing; how about ignoring reporting requirements altogether?

Despite claiming to be the most transparent administration in history, the White House has failed to give Congress a quarterly report on the $831 billion in stimulus money since last year.

The Weekly Standard:

The $831,000,000,000 economic “stimulus” that President Obama spearheaded and signed into law requires his administration to release quarterly reports on its effects. But “the most transparent administration in the history of our country” is now four reports behind schedule and has so far not released any reports whatsoever in 2012. Its most recent quarterly report is for the quarter than ended on June 30, 2011.

One wonders how the administration would treat a private citizen who acted like such a scofflaw in response to one of Obama’s principal legislative initiatives. It certainly appears that this administration, which is so very fond of regulating Americans’ lives — witness the 13,000 pages of Obamacare regulations it has already penned — doesn’t hold itself accountable to the same set of rules that it’s so eager to compel the American people to obey.

Section 1513 of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (the “stimulus”) explicitly states, “In consultation with the Director of the Office of Management and Budget and the Secretary of the Treasury, the Chairperson of the Council of Economic Advisers shall submit quarterly reports to the Committees on Appropriations of the Senate and House of Representatives that detail the impact of programs funded through covered funds on employment, estimated economic growth, and other key economic indicators.” (The head of the Council of Economic Advisors, currently Alan Krueger, is appointed by the president, confirmed by the Senate, and works within the Executive Office of the President. He is the president’s chief economic adviser.)

Indeed, the old reports that the administration released begin, “As part of the unprecedented accountability and transparency provisions included in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA), the Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) was charged with providing to Congress quarterly reports on the effects of the Recovery Act on overall economic activity, and on employment in particular.”

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Now why do you suppose the administration has forgotten all about informing Congress about monies spent from the stim bill? It couldn’t be that any such report would prove what a colossal waste of money it was, could it?

What stupendous arrogance.

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