ANNARBOR.COM
SUNDAY, AUGUST 18, 2013 A11
Opinion
Atmosphere of unconstitutionality On health care, the president does whatever he will WASHINGTON POST WRITERS GROUP
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arack Obama’s increasingly grandiose claims for presidential power are inversely proportional to his shriveling presidency. Desperation fuels arrogance as, barely 200 days into the 1,462 days of his second term, his pantry of excuses for failure is bare, his domestic agenda is nonexistent and his foreign policy of empty rhetorical deadlines and redlines is floundering. And at his latest news conference he offered inconvenience as a justification for illegality. Explaining his decision to unilaterally rewrite the Affordable Care Act, he said: “I didn’t simply choose to” ignore the statutory
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OPINION requirement for beginning in 2014 the employer mandate to provide employees with health care. No, “this was in consultation with businesses.” He continued: “In a normal political environment, it would have been easier for me to simply call up the speaker and say, you know what, this is a tweak that doesn’t go to the essence of the law ... it looks like there may be some better ways to do this, let’s make a technical change to the law. That would be the normal thing that I would prefer to do. But we’re not in a normal atmosphere around here when it comes to Obamacare. We did have the executive authority to do so, and we did so.” Serving as props in the
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scripted charade, journalists did not ask the pertinent question: “Where does the Constitution confer upon presidents the ‘executive authority’ to ignore the separation of powers by revising laws?” The question could have elicited an Obama rarity: Brevity. Because there is no such authority. Obama’s explanation began with an irrelevancy: He consulted with businesses before disregarding his constitutional duty to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” That duty does not lapse when a president decides Washington’s “political environment” is not “normal.” When was it “normal”? The 1850s? The 1950s? Washington has been the nation’s capital for 213 years; Obama has been here less than nine. Even if he understood “normal” political environments here, the Constitution is not suspended when a president decides the “environment” is abnormal.
Neither does the Constitution confer on presidents the power to rewrite laws if they decide the change is a “tweak” not involving the law’s “essence.” Anyway, the employer mandate is essential to the Affordable Care Act. Three weeks before his news conference, the House voted 264-161, with 35 Democrats in the majority, for the rule of law — for, that is, the Authority for Mandate Delay Act. It would have done lawfully what Obama did by ukase. He threatened to veto it. The White House called it “unnecessary,” presumably because he has an uncircumscribed “executive authority” to alter laws. In a 1977 interview with Richard Nixon, David Frost asked: “So, what in a sense you’re saying is that there are certain situations ... where the president can decide that it’s in the best interests of the nation ... and do something illegal?”
Nixon: “Well, when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.” Frost: “By definition.” Nixon: “Exactly, exactly.” Nixon’s claim, although constitutionally grotesque, was less so than the claim implicit in Obama’s actions. Nixon’s claim was confined to matters of national security or (he said to Frost) “a threat to internal peace and order of significant magnitude.” Obama’s audacity encompasses a right to disregard any portion of any law pertaining to any subject at any time when the political “environment” is difficult. Obama should be embarrassed that, by ignoring the legal requirement concerning the employer mandate, he has validated critics who say the Affordable Care Act cannot be implemented as written. What does not embarrass him is his complicity in effectively rewriting the act for the financial advantage
OPINION
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WaPo gets a second chance NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE
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any U.S. newspapers were doomed to decline from the moment the Internet arrived on personal computers. But the Washington Post, just sold off unexpectedly to Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, was never really one of them. This is something the sentimental send-offs for the Graham family and its stewardship tended to ignore. As disruptive as the Internet has been for journalism, The Post was uniquely positioned to succeed amid the chaos. It has struggled, in part, because the paper’s leaders failed to step into an online-era role that should have been theirs for the taking. The nature of that role is suggested by a scene in the Thatcher-era British sitcom “Yes, Prime Minister” in which a politician explains who actually reads the British papers. “The Daily Mirror is read by people who think they run the country,” he tells his aides. “The Guardian is read by people who think they ought to run the country. The Times is read by the people who actually do run the country. The Daily Mail is read by the wives of the people who run the country. The Financial Times is read by people who own the country. The Morning
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DOUTHAT OPINION Star” — a paper founded as a communist organ — “is read by people who think the country ought to be run by another country. And The Daily Telegraph is read by people who think it is.” When it aired, this comic analysis didn’t really fit the U.S. journalism scene. There were ideological and interestbased papers, especially in the big cities, but mostly geography rather than identity determined what newspaper you read. With the arrival of the Internet, though, the U.S. media landscape began to look more British. Once you could read any paper from anywhere, the advantage went to properties that could brand themselves nationally, and define themselves by their audience. In this landscape, The Wall Street Journal has a clear role as the paper of the U.S. business class. The New York Times fills a similar role for the intelligentsia and the liberal professional classes. The Huffington Post is basically the nation’s left-wing tabloid, and it has several right-wing rivals and imitators. ESPN.com serves as
the nation’s sports page. And then various outlets, from BuzzFeed to The Atlantic, competing to find or build a general-interest niche. For the Washington Post, and even though the Grahams placed a fierce emphasis on being a local paper, the locality The Post covers is inherently national. It would have been entirely natural for The Post to become, in the new-media dispensation, the paper of record for political coverage — the only must-read for people who run the country, who want to run it, who think they run it, etc. Instead, it’s possible to date the moment when that opportunity slipped away: It happened in 2006, when John Harris and Jim VandeHei left The Post to found Politico. Now, there are many reasons a publication like Politico was easier to build from scratch than it would have been to create inside a traditional, costburdened institution. But that’s also hindsight talking: From the vantage point of 2006, VandeHei and Harris looked like gamblers, and The Post’s grip on what the press critic Jack Shafer called the “political news from Washington” beat still seemed secure. Today, though, it’s Politico rather than the Post that dominates the
D.C. conversation, Politico rather than the Post that’s the must-read for Beltway professionals and politics junkies everywhere, and Politico rather than The Post that matches the metabolism of the Internet. I say this as someone who doesn’t particularly like the Politico style or the role it plays in our gilded capital, and who misses the Post as it was when I arrived in Washington. But nostalgia is for columnists, not publishers: Politico has claimed a big part of the audience that the Post needed in order to thrive in the world the Internet has made. That’s why I’m skeptical of the various theories about how The Post’s new genius owner might invent some new way to deliver content or bundle news or otherwise achieve a profitable synergy between his newspaper and Amazon. Maybe such a synergy exists. But it’s more likely that the best thing Jeff Bezos can offer his paper is more old-fashioned: the money and resources necessary to take back territory lost to a sharpelbowed competitor. What Bezos can deliver, in other words, is a newspaper war, with clear and pressing stakes. For the Post to thrive again, Politico must lose.
Email: georgewill@washpost.com.
Summers of our discontent
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AUCHTER
of self-dealing members of Congress and their staffs. The act says members of Congress (annual salaries: $174,000) and their staffs (thousands making more than $100,000) must participate in the law’s insurance exchanges. It does not say that when this change goes into effect, the federal subsidy for this affluent cohort — up to 75 percent of the premium, perhaps $10,000 for families — should be unchanged. When Congress awakened to what it enacted, it panicked: This could cause a flight of talent, making Congress less wonderful. So Obama directed the Office of Personnel Management, which has no power to do this, to authorize for the political class special subsidies unavailable for less privileged and less affluent citizens. If the president does it, it’s legal? “Exactly, exactly.”
have no doubt that Larry Summers can speak truth to power. I’ve seen him yawn at power. Once, when Vice President Joe Biden was talking to a small group at a holiday party, Summers yawned, checked his watch and walked away while Biden was in midsentence. While he’s not exactly socialized — he had a lot of unhappy colleagues when he ran the Obama White House’s economic team — I have no doubt Summers is genuinely smart and gets some credit for the policies that produced the recovery. I’m sure the imperious economist is more mellow than he used to be, because life has taught him he has to be. But the idea that it is historically inevitable that the chairmanship of the Federal Reserve should go to Summers, that it belongs to him, that he would be an enthusiastic enforcer of bank regulation to protect the little guy? I have my doubts. This idea is being pushed by the boys’ club around President Barack Obama, and also by the bullying cool kids, some of the Wall Street types like former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin who paved the way for the country’s ruin and flatter themselves that they’re smart enough to know how smart Summers is. These days, it’s impolite to mention that all those cool bankers brought the country to the brink of disaster. One person unafraid to recall it is the Divine Miss M, who has been trashing the Disheveled Mr. S in tweets, picked up by Washington Post economic columnist Neil Irwin. BetteMidler 2:34 AM - 10 Aug 2013 HUH. The architect of bank rederegulation, which turned straightlaced banks into casinos and bankers into pimps, may be next Head Fed: Summers. BetteMidler 11:25 PM - 11 Aug 2013 Larry Summers, Mr. Deregulation, has never stepped forward to say ... “Oops! My bad!” Even Bill Clinton has offered an “oops,” saying he got bad advice from Summers and Rubin. In the late 1990s, when the prescient Brooksley Born, then chief of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, wanted to publicly examine derivatives, Summers, who was deputy Treasury secretary, worked with Rubin and Alan Greenspan to block her.
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OPINION Michael Greenberger, a University of Maryland law school professor and former Born lieutenant, told the Post that Summers called and said: “I have 13 bankers in my office, and they say if you go forward with this you will cause the worst financial crisis since World War II.” Instead, these bankers were behind the policies that caused the worst financial crisis since before World War II. As the Times reported, when the 58-year-old Summers joined the Obama White House, he was worth $7 million; when he left at the end of 2010, he “jumped into a moneymaking spree” at a hedge fund and at Citigroup — a bank rescued by a government bailout — so he could be a gazillionaire by the time Ben Bernanke retires and the job is open. His stuffing of his pockets now makes it unseemly for him to lead the Fed in enforcing the important new regulations from the DoddFrank financial reform bill. He is an exemplar of, rather than a solution to, the obscenely lucrative revolvingdoor problem in Washington. The Fed is entering a new era when it is supposed to be getting tough on the banks, even if it means that the banks are smaller and less profitable. Sure, Summers, the son of two economists and nephew of two Nobel laureates in economics, has a high IQ. But there has to be somebody out there to run the economy who wasn’t a part of the culture that ran the economy into the ground. Janet Yellen, the Fed’s vice chair, has generally been more aligned with Bernanke than Summers has been in using monetary policy to revive the economy. If the president passes over the trailblazing and more temperamentally stable Yellen to appoint Summers, he’ll be giving Larry some vindication on his infamous critique of women that helped get him ousted as president of Harvard — a job he got thanks to Rubin. Does the fact that we’ve had no female Fed chairs and no female Treasury secretaries mean that Summers was right when he said women are less likely to have the kind of brains that would allow them to get top jobs requiring math skills? Is that what makes Larry Summers so brilliant?