Without Firing a Shot?

By David Limbaugh (Archive) · Tuesday, March 16, 2010

During the height of the Cold War, some feared the communists would take over the United States without firing a shot. Could it be that nearly a half-century later, we're on the verge of that becoming a reality?

President Barack Obama and Democratic congressmen won their respective elections -- no shots were fired -- and they are feverishly attempting to dismantle this nation's institutions, brick by brick.

The American people are getting a bird's-eye view of what the left, which completely dominates the Democratic Party, thinks of the Constitution, freedom and the right of the people to self-governance.

The people now attempting to govern us with an iron fist are Marxist-leaning in terms of not only the policies they support but also the ruthless tactics they employ to enact those policies into law.

As long as it served Obama's Machiavellian purposes to maintain a semblance of unity for his ambitious agenda, he donned his bipartisan cap. But as soon as he encountered intractable opposition from Republicans, God bless them, he began to show his true political colors.

Barack Obama's congenial, compromising facade has disappeared. What remains, in plain view, is a narcissistic, arrogant and inflexibly ideological man who is determined to cram his socialist agenda down our throats by whatever means necessary -- irrespective of the legality of the procedures he utilizes, the truth of the words he speaks and the will of the people.

Obama doesn't care what we think -- and I'm not just talking about the majority of Americans who oppose Obamacare. Everyone who gets in his way is expendable, including principled Democrats who dare to oppose him.

Obama and his congressional cronies are systematically subverting the Constitution to advance their agenda. They have tried every trick in the book to pass Obamacare, such as lying about many substantive provisions in the bill and their inevitable effects on quality, price and choice.

They are also using accounting shenanigans to make the bill look budget-neutral. One such distortion is to count $52 billion in higher Social Security tax revenues that are reserved for Social Security benefits as offsets. Another is to rob a half-trillion dollars from Medicare to subsidize Obamacare, which Medicare's chief actuary estimates would cause 20 percent of Medicare's providers to either go out of business or discontinue seeing Medicare beneficiaries. Another is to defer certain outlays for about four years while beginning taxes immediately in order to achieve an artificial fiscal balance the first 10 years. There are many others.

But none of their chicanery has worked to fool the American people into allowing them to pass the bill through proper procedures. So they are prepared to do it illegally through improper application of the reconciliation process. If that fails, they're considering the even more outrageous idea of a "Slaughter Solution," which would deem the Senate's bill as having passed the House, even when it hasn't.

Remember Obama's showing contempt for the Constitution and Senate rules during his silly health care summit, when he flippantly argued that people care more about results than process, as if the Constitution were just an annoying little detail? His senior adviser David Axelrod showed similar contempt for the people when he said on NBC's "Meet the Press," "The one thing I am sure of is that the American people don't know or care much about the sequencing of parliamentary procedures."

Just look at how this administration is trying to do an end run around the people by having the Environmental Protection Agency impose stringent regulations when it couldn't even get the overwhelmingly Democratic Congress to pass the socialist cap-and-trade bill. And if its underhanded efforts to pass Obamacare in Congress fail, it reportedly has contingency plans to implement parts of it through a series of executive orders and administrative regulations -- just as it is planning to do, by its own admission, "across a front of issues."

Liberal cynicism aside, the Constitution's safeguards to limit government will only work if the ruling class remains honorable. If it continues to ignore its constitutional restraints and no one holds it accountable, the Constitution will degenerate into meaninglessness and be powerless to preserve our liberties.

Indeed, as fiscally devastating as Obamacare would be, cost is not the most important reason to oppose the monstrosity.

Obamacare is about government versus the people. It is about achieving that tipping point from a free market economy to a socialized one and from constitutional self-governance to something far less democratic.

The recklessness of Obamacrats in trying to shove through another -- and by far the biggest -- government entitlement at a time when existing entitlements and other government expenditures threaten to bankrupt the nation is staggering.

But they're just getting warmed up. Stay tuned for their education and immigration "overhauls."

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