As the late Ed Koch, former mayor of New York City, once famously said; “The people have spoken, and they must be punished.”
President Obama’s lame duck administration poured on thousands more new regulations in 2016 at a rate of 18 for every new law passed, according to a Friday analysis of his team’s expansion of federal authority.
While Congress passed just 211 laws, Obama’s team issued an accompanying 3,852 new federal regulations, some costing billions of dollars.
The 2016 total was the highest annual number of regulations under Obama. Former President Bush issued more in the wake of 9/11. The proof that it was an overwhelming year for rules and regulations is in the Federal Register, which ended the year Friday by printing a record-setting 97,110 pages, according to the analysis from the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
The annual “Unconstitutional Index” from Clyde Wayne Crews, CEI’s vice president for policy, said that it was much higher under Obama than under former President George W. Bush.
While Congress leaves much to be desired, it’s not the passing of useless laws that’s the real disgrace in Washington. That honor belongs to the regulatory agencies, the unconstitutional means through which petty dictators like the Emperor Hussein torture their subjects with next to zero political accountability. As I wrote about the agencies here at PJ Media:
The Constitution doesn’t matter to them, nor do legalistic protestations, nor simple human decency. No, armed with nothing more than their own impunity, agents from EPA or OSHA or any other federal agency with a SWAT team (which is most of them) can simply make demands on citizens in the name of “regulations.”
This is the inevitable result of ceding representative government to cabals of empowered clerks. Recall that while Republicans talk a good game about “limited government,” in fact they’re almost as big proponents of Big Government as the Democrats, and promises to the contrary are just a ruse to sucker the rubes into voting for the junior wing of the Permanent Bipartisan Fusion Party, so we all can pretend to believe in democracy.
But democracy is null and void in the face of faceless tyranny like the EPA, which cannot reform itself, and will never stop until it is put out of business, dismantled and its buildings pulled down around its ears. “Mission creep” is the order of the day for the creeps who run these rogue enterprises; I’ll believe in smaller government the day I see wrecking balls outside the departments of energy and education, for starters.
Obama’s final three weeks in office are already shaping up as a prolonged temper tantrum against a country he’s long despised: stabbing Israel in the back, grabbing land in the Mountain West, ruling the Arctic off-limits for energy exploration, trying to pick a fight with Russia — these things, alas, are just prologue for what is to come. Look for more CIA-sponsored trouble in the international arena, including another spat with Britain, and be very afraid of what will certainly be the largest mass pardon of dangerous criminals in American history as he sashays out of office and into a comfortable, if activist, retirement, courtesy of the American taxpayer.
The eight years of Barack Obama will go down in American as the strangest aberration in our electoral politics — a man of dubious background, no accomplishment, no administrative skills, no vision except for the warmed-over cultural Marxism of his youth. A man who preferred to golf, party and vacation, as if the presidency was the first prize in a television game show. A “Being There” president whose “legacy” will whisk away in the wind like the gold dust at the end of The Treasure of the Sierre Madre, except that the joke’s been on us all along.
Happy New Year.
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