It’s Monday, January 9th, 2012….but before we begin, another brief request for your support by clicking on our home page at www.thedailygouge.com. You’ll find both our regularly-updated Cover Story as well as a number of video clips you’re certain to find of interest.

Now, here’s The Gouge!

First up, Jonah Goldberg’s take on what can only be described as….

An Imperial Sham

Carl Polizzi’s view of Douches Rex

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a man whose political success is largely attributable to the aura of befuddled incompetence he uses to disarm his adversaries, was a failed Watergate baby.

In 1974, a slew of often sanctimonious and very liberal Democratic politicians rode the tide of understandable national disgust with Richard Nixon to Congress. Then the lieutenant governor of Nevada, Reid ran for the U.S. Senate, hoping to tie his opponent to the “imperial presidency” that had allegedly sprung up ex nihilo under Nixon.

Given Nevada’s inherent conservatism (at least back then), Reid cast himself as an incorruptible champion of limited government and political honor. The New York Times reported on Oct. 24, 1974, that Reid “would cut government spending by reducing the maze of federal agencies, a bureaucracy that controls much of Nevada life and that, according to Mr. Reid, has become a dangerous fourth branch of government.” (Ahhh….the Times; dead-on, balls-accurate yet again!)

Reid has made some adjustments since he lost that election. Last year, he insisted that Congress had cut the federal government to the bone and could not cut any further lest we hit such vital arteries of the body politic as the federally subsidized cowboy poetry festival in northern Nevada.

But let’s get back to the imperial presidency for a moment. Nixon’s was indeed a good example. But, for liberals, presidencies are only imperial when Republicans are at the helm. Nixon’s error (Among many, MANY others….) was to continue the inexorable growth of the executive branch hatched by Woodrow Wilson and set loose by Franklin Roosevelt. During the height of the Watergate hearings, liberal Democratic Sen. Alan Cranston observed, “Those who tried to warn us back at the beginning of the New Deal of the dangers of one-man rule that lay ahead on the path we were taking toward strong, centralized government may not have been so wrong.”

Reid is as incapable of such honest introspection as he is of cracking a smile that doesn’t make its recipients feel unsafe.

In 2007, the Democrats controlling the Senate were fed up with George W. Bush’s recess appointments. Majority Leader Reid, feigning great sadness over the sorry state of our republic, resorted to the extraordinary tactic of keeping the Senate in pro-forma session so as to prevent the imperial Bush from doing an end-run around the confirmation process. The move was celebrated by liberal commentators as a brave and necessary assertion of congressional power and was supported by then-Sen. Barack Obama.

Fast-forward to this week. The Senate has once again been in pro-forma session in order to keep President Obama from making recess appointments. Reid agreed to the tactic as part of negotiations with Republicans last year.

Arguing that the maneuver is nothing more than a gimmick, Obama ignored the Senate’s authority and appointed Robert Cordray to the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which was created by the Dodd-Frank legislation allegedly to prevent the excesses that led to the financial crisis. If it wasn’t clear enough that the appointment was nakedly political, Obama made the announcement at a campaign rally in the swing state of Ohio, Cordray’s home state.

With the alacrity one normally associates with court jesters and royal spittoon cleaners, Reid immediately endorsed the president’s decision, accepting the logic that calls a maneuver he invented a sham.

But the spectacle is so much more sordid than that. The CFPB is a constitutional affront, the crowning achievement of this White House’s mantra of never letting a crisis go to waste.

The agency has the power to regulate any practices it deems “unfair” — primarily the practices of institutions and businesses that had nothing whatsoever to do with the financial crisis.

Indeed, it has blank-check power to write the rules it wants to enforce. Worse, it cannot be reined in by Congress, because Dodd-Frank gave it a self-funding mechanism. It can simply take up to 12 percent of the Federal Reserve’s operating expenses to do whatever it wants. The power of Congress is ultimately the power of the purse. But in their finite wisdom, Democratic lawmakers gelded themselves. They also insulated the rogue agency from the courts, requiring that judges defer to the CFPB’s legal theories. (A constitutionality question that just BEGS the consideration of the SCOTUS.)

So here we have Reid, a man who tried to enter the national stage by promising to be an honorable foe of the imperial presidency and the metastasizing growth of federal bureaucracies, thriving on the national stage by enabling exactly those trends when it suits his party. And it all it cost was his honor.

Assuming Harry ever had any.

In a related item, the WSJ details what it terms….

Obama’s Reckless Recess Ploy

No president has resorted to recess appointments when Congress is in session. Expect serious legal challenges to new financial regulations.

President Obama’s appointments of Richard Cordray as head of the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and of three new members of the National Labor Relations Board, are all unconstitutional. (A point we’ve made from the first.)

Each of these jobs requires Senate confirmation. The president’s ability to fill them without that confirmation, using his constitutional power to “fill up vacancies that may happen during the recess of the Senate,” depends upon there actually being a recess. Both the House of Representatives and the Senate are open for business. The new appointees can pocket their government paychecks, but all their official acts will be void as a matter of law and will likely be struck down by the courts in legal challenges that are certain to come.

The Constitution’s Framers assumed that Congress would convene only part of each year, and that there would be long stretches during which the Senate would be unavailable to play its critical “advice and consent” role in the appointment of federal officials. Their solution was to allow the president to make temporary, “recess” appointments permitting the individuals chosen to serve for up to two years, until the end of Congress’s next session. This, it was thought, would give the Senate time to act upon actual nominees for the offices once it reconvened without leaving these—perhaps critical—posts vacant for many months.

Presidents have used this authority with alacrity, especially in recent times, as a means of putting a favored nominee on the job even in the face of significant Senate opposition. Historically, the president’s lawyers have advised that this is a constitutionally permissible exercise of his recess-appointment power, so long as the Senate is actually in recess.

The Constitution does not define a “recess,” but in view of the original purpose of the recess-appointment power, a senatorial absence of more than a few days has been considered a necessary prerequisite. This is particularly the case because the Constitution also provides (in Article 1, section 5, clause 4) that neither house of Congress can “adjourn for more than three days” without the other’s consent—thus ensuring that the flow of legislative work cannot be unilaterally interrupted. The Senate can hardly be in recess in the absence of such an agreement—and there is none now.

In more recent years, and especially during President George W. Bush’s administration, the Senate has attempted to limit recess appointments even further by remaining “in session” on a pro forma basis. Whether such sessions are inherently sufficient to defeat a presidential recess appointment is debatable. However, in circumstances where the Senate is not merely in session as a theoretical matter, but is actually conducting business—albeit on the basis of agreements that measures can and will be adopted by “unanimous consent” without an actual vote—there can be no question that it is not in recess.

That is the situation today. The traditional test, as articulated in a 1989 published opinion by the Justice Department’s own constitutional experts in the Office of Legal Counsel, is “whether the adjournment of the Senate is of such duration that the Senate could ‘not receive communications from the President or participate as a body in making appointments.'” Today’s Senate, which is controlled by the president’s own party, is fully capable of performing both functions in accordance with its rules. Indeed, the Senate is so much in session that on Dec. 23—three days after beginning its pro forma session—it passed President Obama’s current highest legislative priority: a two-month payroll tax holiday, which the president promptly signed.

Mr. Obama is claiming an open-ended authority to determine that the Senate is in recess, despite that body’s own judgment and the factual realities. That is an astonishing and, so far as we can tell, unprecedented power grab.

It is not up to the president to decide whether the Senate is organized properly or working hard enough. However much the supposedly power-hungry President George W. Bush may have resented the Senate’s practice of staying “in session” to defeat his recess-appointment power, he nevertheless respected the Senate’s judgment on the point.

The president has done his new appointees and the public no favors. Both the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau are regulatory agencies with profound real-world impact. Those individuals and businesses subject to regulations and rulings adopted during the tenure of Mr. Obama’s recess appointees can challenge the legality of those measures in the courts, and they will very likely succeed.

Only two years ago in New Process Steel v. NLRB, the Supreme Court undercut hundreds of NLRB decisions by ruling that the board had not lawfully organized itself after the terms of two recess appointee members expired, leaving it without a quorum. Similar issues will arise when both the new financial bureau and the NLRB begin to act with members whose appointments are constitutionally insupportable.

The fact that the president has apparently triggered the constitutional crisis without really expecting to produce any lasting policy impact, and for no better reason than to bolster his claim of running against a “do-nothing” Congress (the key part of his re-election campaign), makes his behavior all the more reprehensible.

Politics is a dirty game, and the Chicago-style politics under which The Obamao learned his trade are the dirtiest.  However, in this case, the Boy Blunder’s actions aren’t merely dirty, they’re blatantly unconstitutional; and a direct violation of the oath he took to support and defend the Constitution of the United States.

Contrary to what this self-described constitutional scholar believes, No Barry,….

….you obligation is to support, defend and FOLLOW the Constitution of the United States!

Speaking of an incredibly poor defense….

The Future Military: Your Budget Strategy

The Pentagon has committed to $450 billion in reduced spending over the next 10 years, but may have to come up with a total of $1 trillion in cuts if Congress follows through with deeper reductions. Make your own plan to reduce the budget by choosing some of the most common, interesting or provocative cuts that have been proposed by various parties.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/01/02/us/you-cut-the-defense-budget.html

Are we the only one who finds it curious Defense is the only area in the budget with fat to cut?!?  And can anyone ever remember the Times offering a checklist for discretionary or entitlement cuts?!?  After all, if military pensions, benefits and bands can be trimmed, should not the pensions and benefits of teachers, first responders and other government bureaucrats be subject to the same scrutiny….not to mention PBS, NPR and the NEA?!?

Meanwhile, as this next item from Carl Polizzi and Info Wars details, like every other Marxist concern, Team Tick-Tock clearly views the internal enemy as the most dangerous:

Armed DHS Officers Set Up Unannounced ID Checkpoint

Residents of Leesburg, Florida were shocked to see their local Social Security office turned into a random Homeland Security checkpoint Tuesday morning, as DHS officers armed with semiautomatic rifles and accompanied by sniffer dogs checked identifications of locals.

“With their blue and white SUVs circled around the Main Street office, at least one official was posted on the door with a semiautomatic rifle, randomly checking identifications. And other officers, some with K-9s, sifted through the building,” reports the Daily Commercial. The activity was part of Operation Shield, an unannounced drill conducted by the DHS’ Federal Protective Service centered around “detecting the presence of unauthorized persons and potentially disruptive or dangerous activities.”

Thomas Milligan, district manager for the Social Security Administration office, said staff were not informed their offices were about to be stormed by armed FPS officers. DHS officials refused to answer questions asked by local media and left with no explanation at noon.

In the interests of objectivity, we find “stormed” a bit strong.  But the fact remains DHS, a gift to future generations from George II, has, particularly under The Obamao’s direction, viewed “bitter” Americans “clinging to their religion and guns” as a greater threat to national security than all the Islamic extremists ever born.  And from Tick-Tock’s view, they’re right….assuming the DHS’s primary duty is to ensure The Anointed One’s uninterrupted reign rather than U.S. national security. 

On the Lighter Side….

And in the “Your Tax Dollars At Work” segment, we learn….

DC City Council Wants to Force Students to Apply for College

Lawmakers in the nation’s capital have floated a plan to require high school students to apply to college or trade school — even if the students have no interest in attending. The proposal is a bid to ensure students in the troubled Washington, D.C., school system at least have the know-how to navigate the admissions process.

D.C. Council Chairman Kwame Brown, who introduced the bill, said the proposal would establish a “mandatory workshop” to teach teenagers how to apply for aid and admission. It would then require everybody to apply to at least one post-secondary school before graduation. “I believe that every child should have the opportunity, even if they don’t go, to at least apply to a college,” he said as he introduced the bill Wednesday.

The bill would also require every high school student to take the SAT or ACT tests. While the admissions and test-taking process would entail fees, Brown said he would work with the school system to make sure students have the “resources” to apply.

Brown argued Wednesday that some D.C. students aren’t going to college simply because they “don’t know how to navigate the enrollment process.”

Which would be the fault of….whom?!?  Certainly not the public school system with the highest per-student spending in the nation?!?  As one blogger put it….

This is a logical turn in a country where people want to force private citizens to buy health insurance. I have to ask: Will there be prison time for those who refuse to apply to college? How about the death penalty for those who skip the SATs?

Finally, in a curiously related item, James Taranto inquires….

What’s in a Name?

A poorly chosen baby name can lead to a lifetime of neglect, reduced relationship opportunities, lower self-esteem, a higher likelihood of smoking and diminished education prospects, according to a new study of nearly 12,000 people,” Canada’s National Post reports:

The research, which appears in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science, is thought to offer the firmest conclusions to date that “unfortunate” first names evoke negative reactions from strangers, which in turn influence life outcomes for the worse.

The story’s headline adds even more ill effects: “Bad Baby Name Could Leave Your Child Sadder, Dumber: Study.”

Hmm. We have a president named Barack Hussein, and as of a month ago the two leading contenders to challenge him were Willard Mitt and Newton Leroy. That ought to clear things up for anyone having difficulty fathoming the rise of Richard John Santorum.

Then again, could the baby names simply reflect….

….the social standing and relative ignorance of the child’s progenitor?  And yes, we used the singular form because almost 80% of all Black babies enter the world knowing only their mother.

It’s not the name….it’s the condition of she who bestows it!  Case in point: “Kwame” is a name of Ghanian origin denoting a child born on Saturday.  Kwame Brown entered the world on October 13, 1970….a Tuesday.

Magoo