In God We Trust

President Shouldn't Remind People of His Re-Election

 

IBDEditorials.com

Corruption: President Obama dares his critics to "go out there and win an election." Does he mean the way he "wins," by misusing the IRS to muzzle the voices of those who dare to oppose him?

To someone from Mars, the president's recent taunt of his opponents might sound oh-so-reasonable: "Let's work together to make government work better, instead of treating it like an enemy or purposely making it work worse."

Evoking the Founding Fathers, Obama said, "You don't like a particular policy or a particular president? Then argue for your position. Go out there and win an election. ... Don't break what our predecessors spent over two centuries building."

But everyone with eyes open has witnessed this administration taking a wrecking ball to what our illustrious predecessors established.

What would the Framers of our Constitution, which until the 16th Amendment of 1913 prohibited income taxes, think of the U.S. government's powerful tax collection agency treading all over groups with "Tea Party" in their name?

Notes from the constitutional convention tell us James Madison believed it "probable" that a president "might pervert his administration into a scheme of peculation or oppression." Such corruption "might be fatal to the Republic," which is why Madison argued that Congress be given impeachment powers.

The American Center for Law and Justice, representing 41 groups in 22 states, is suing the IRS and a large group of federal officials. Their complaint features a damning timeline recounting Obama's public warnings three years ago of "shadowy groups with harmless-sounding names," and his absurd suggestions that they were "foreign-controlled."

The president's remarks are juxtaposed with the unusually "burdensome, intrusive" demands the IRS made just weeks later, seeking "irrelevant information to which the IRS was not entitled" from Tea Party groups requesting tax-exempt status.

Win an election? The way Democrat powers-that-be used a six-month recount to allow hundreds of illegal votes of convicted felons to push ex-comic Al Franken barely over the top in his 2008 Senate race in Minnesota, after which he became the deciding vote in imposing ObamaCare on the country?

Winning elections by letting Black Panthers in Philadelphia intimidate voters at polling places in 2008, with no Justice Department action against them?

Or winning by castigating Supreme Court justices seated a few feet away from him in his 2010 State of the Union for reaffirming the First Amendment in the Citizens United decision?

The less this president brings up his tainted re-election, the better for him.