CHAPTER THREE

THE WAR ON THE DISOBEDIENT

Throughout his entire presidency, President Obama has not only habitually bullied his political opponents, he’s harassed any person, organization, or industry he perceives as hindering his agenda. Disrespecting the separation of powers doctrine, Obama even threw his weight around the Supreme Court, warning the “unelected” justices that it would be “extraordinary” and “unprecedented” for them to overturn ObamaCare—though, since the individual mandate is manifestly unconstitutional, striking it down would hardly be unprecedented at all; it would just be a big blow to Obama’s agenda. What was unprecedented was for a sitting president to directly comment on a case pending before the Court in an effort either to intimidate the justices into ruling his way, or to lay a foundation to politicize the decision if they didn’t.¹

It doesn’t matter that his domineering approach is inconsistent with his professed bipartisanship or his calls for a new tone in politics. Nor does it seem to matter when others call attention to his intimidation tactics. He was raised in Chicago’s mean streets of “community organizing,” and that is all he knows. His vaunted rhetorical powers that served him so well on the campaign trail have yielded him no fruit since he took office; he has failed to persuade the American people to buy into his agenda no matter how many speeches he has delivered on ObamaCare, his “Jobs Bill,” or any other initiative. And whenever he encounters resistance to one of his transformative government schemes, he always falls back on the same thing: his legacy of political brawling.

HOW MANY OTHER PAPERS HAVE GOTTEN CALLS LIKE THIS?”

No criticism, no matter how small or insignificant, seems to escape the notice of this thin-skinned president. When the Pleasanton Weekly, a small weekly newspaper in California, ran a feature on the presidential helicopter Marine One, the White House bristled that the story reflected poorly on Michelle Obama—because it included one sentence indicating that the first lady acted dismissively toward the pilots. One would think the White House has more pressing concerns than a slightly unfavorable story in a small local paper, but Pleasanton Weekly president Gina Channell-Allen said a White House official asked her to cut that reference from the article. While the first lady’s press secretary, Katie McCormick, denied contact with the paper, Allen stuck by her story, saying she “complied” with the request “because it was not worth making a fuss over.”² HotAir.com raised an interesting question: “How many other papers have gotten calls like this?”³

The administration tries to browbeat bigger newspapers as well, such as its banishment of the Boston Herald from an Obama event in Boston as punishment for its printing a front-page op-ed by GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney. White House spokesman Matt Lehrich unapologetically pronounced, “I think that raises a fair question about whether the paper is unbiased in its coverage of the President’s visits.” Moreover, White House press secretary Jay Carney personally called MSNBC to object to comments political analyst Mark Halperin had made about Obama. According to the Daily Caller, MSNBC immediately suspended Halperin indefinitely.⁴

The White House also blacklisted San Francisco Chronicle reporter Carla Marinucci because she had the audacity to record, via cellphone, a video of protesters at an Obama fundraiser in the Bay Area and post it on the internet. True to form, the White House denied it had threatened Marinucci’s banishment, but the Chronicle’s editor, Ward Bushee, stood his ground. “Sadly, we expected the White House to respond in this manner based on our experiences yesterday,” he said. “It is not a truthful response. It follows a day of off-the-record exchanges with key people in the White House communications office who told us they would remove our reporter, then threatened retaliation to Chronicle and Hearst reporters if we reported on the ban, and then recanted to say our reporter might not be removed at all.” Phil Bronstein, another Chronicle reporter, corroborated Bushee’s story, saying “The Chronicle’s report is accurate.... I was on some of those calls and can confirm Ward’s statement.” Making matters worse, numerous journalists confirmed that the White House had issued implied threats of additional punishment if the story of its banishment of Marinucci became public.⁵

Bronstein noted that the blacklisting “affects the newsgathering of our largest regional paper (and sfgate) and how local citizens get their information,” adding that “Carla cannot do her job to the best of her ability if she can’t use all the tools available to her as a journalist.” Bronstein concluded, “The President’s practice not just with transparency but in other dealings with the press has not been tracking his words, despite the cool glamour and easy conversation that makes him seem so much more open than the last guy.... Barack Obama sold himself successfully as a fresh wind for the 21^st century. In important matters of communication, technology, openness and the press, it’s not too late for him to demonstrate that.”⁶

Clearly, intimidating the press has become standard fare for a president who, ironically, vowed to make his administration “the most open and transparent in history.”⁷ As blogger Keith Koffler observed, “The Obama White House has long practiced the tactic of bullying reporters who write what it doesn’t like.”⁸

“IT’S GOING TO COST YOU”

Consistent with their penchant for class warfare, Obama and his administration have demonized entire industries. As I document in chapter seven, they have launched a sustained assault on oil companies, threatening a criminal investigation into British Petroleum over the Gulf oil spill and vowing to punish the whole industry with higher taxes.⁹ With no place for oil producers in his utopian dreams, Obama has given the Department of the Interior the green light to harass them. Upping the pressure, in 2010 the department created the Office of Natural Resources Revenue, an office exclusively dedicated to extracting royalties from energy companies. The agency’s zealous chief, Gregory J. Gould, issued a threat to oil companies that ran afoul of the department’s edicts, announcing, “We’re sending a message to the industry that if you do cut corners, it’s going to cost you. You could quickly take care of the federal deficit if you use the maximum [penalties].”¹⁰

The industry is well aware that the administration views it as the enemy. Allison Nyholm, a royalty expert with American Petroleum Institute, remarked, “We are worried about an adversarial process. There is huge discretion in the fines. That is where the rub is going to occur.”¹¹ As a big-spending liberal, Obama really ought to be thankful for oil companies, which contribute royalties from thousands of offshore oil and gas leases to the tune of some $10 billion to $13 billion a year, reportedly constituting the government’s second biggest source of revenue after federal taxes.¹²

Aside from oil firms, the administration has also turned investment companies into a favorite whipping boy. Vice President Joe Biden denounced hedge fund managers as people who “play with other people’s money,” and “get taxed at 15 percent because they call it capital gains.”¹³ This was a cheap shot, meant to imply that hedge fund managers enjoy special tax treatment when in fact they are subject to the same capital gains tax rate as everyone else. Capital gains are always subject to a lower rate than ordinary income because they are based on income derived from the sale of assets. The White House consistently conflates the two types of taxes as part of its class war strategy to demonize the “wealthy.”

BUSINESS: THE NEW PUBLIC ENEMY #1

When President Obama nominated M. Patricia Smith for solicitor of the Department of Labor on March 20, 2009, Republicans were concerned by her track record as New York State commissioner of labor, including her cozy relationship with unions. In that position, she created a first-of-its-kind program that involved the deputizing of unions and advocacy groups as watchdogs against private sector businesses, with an eye especially to reporting wage violations. Employing typical liberal euphemisms, Smith insisted the unions and advocacy groups were merely helping the Labor Commission with “education,” but an internal memo revealed that the Commission referred to the groups as “enforcers.” Republicans and businesses regarded this program as an “unprecedented and unwarranted” intrusion on private companies that would not only have a chilling effect on business, but could empower unions to pressure companies into accepting union contract terms or into unionizing their firms. Within weeks of her initiation of the “wage watch” program, numerous trade groups representing restaurants, retail outlets, convenience stores, and other types of business in New York drafted a letter to Smith complaining that the program “steps well over the boundaries of even the most constructive collaboration with community groups and advocates.”

Some GOP lawmakers called on Obama to withdraw Smith’s nomination, saying she misled the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee about the function of the “wage watch” program. Senator Mike Enzi wrote Obama, “If it was her intention to mislead the Senate, then I must oppose her nomination. If she unintentionally gave inaccurate statements to the Senate, then I question her ability to manage a large corporation, since she does not have a clear understanding of what is taking place in her own department in New York.” When pressed at her confirmation hearing, Smith said she had no plans to consider this type of program at the federal level.¹⁴

As it turns out, the Republicans’ concerns were vindicated. Perhaps Smith didn’t recreate a “wage watch” program at the federal level per se, but she went further; under her direction, the Department of Labor staff issued a draft “operating plan” to significantly increase enforcement measures against private sector employers suspected of committing unfair labor practices, a move the National Legal and Policy Center described as a “plan to bully employers.” The think tank, having examined the plan, concluded that its details “indicate Smith, like her boss, Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, views the department’s relationship with business as necessarily highly adversarial.”¹⁵

Smith showcased her anti-business animus in her draft “operating plan,” which was reportedly adopted by the Labor Department. Rife with presuppositions about the inherent improprieties of private sector employers, the plan effectively aimed to turn the department into a menacing enemy of businesses. The plan called for “identifying a public affairs liaison in each regional office to send stronger, clearer messages to the regulated community about DOL’s emphasis on litigation.” One tactic would be for the department’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to “deter (employers) through shaming.” As the Wall Street Journal’s John Fund observed, “Whatever it might involve, it doesn’t sound appropriate for an agency charged with carrying out the law in an even-handed fashion.” The National Policy Center noted, “These liaisons can’t be expected to be even-handed, as their very job depends on threatening employers with lawsuits. They will give working with (as opposed to working against) employers secondary priority.”¹⁶

The plan also directed the department to “engage in enterprise-wide enforcement,” meaning they would target multiple work sites of a single company. It further advocated “imposing shorter deadlines for implementing remedial measures in conciliation agreements and consent decrees.”¹⁷

It also called for the department to “engage in greater use of injunctive relief,” which was practically a mandate for compliance enforcement lawsuits, and would surely involve court-imposed penalties that might exceed heavy administrative fines.

Perhaps the most disturbing provision of the plan is one that called for the department to “identify and pursue test cases” to stretch the meaning of the law. This is an extremely aggressive use of the judicial system to expand the law’s parameters, effectively transforming the department into a vehicle that seeks out trouble rather than trying to quell it. The department has over 400 lawyers throughout the United States who could systematically harass private companies, all as a means of imperiously forcing changes in the employer-employee relationship that conform to the liberal ideological vision.

This decidedly anti-business attitude is in stark contrast to that shown by the Bush Labor Department under Labor Secretary Elaine Chao, who argued that “the best way to protect workers is to help employers understand their legal obligations and promote collaborative working relationships between employers and workers on safety and other issues.” In other words, the Republican approach has not been to deny the role of government altogether, but it certainly hasn’t identified employers as the government’s number one enemy. Bush’s approach worked: workplace injuries and illnesses declined some 21 percent beginning in 2002 and reached record lows at the end of Bush’s second term.¹⁸

The Obama administration’s anti-business bias is even more offensive in light of how favorably it treats unions. It has reversed Bush administration policies requiring greater union transparency, promoted a card check policy to intimidate employees from opting out of union representation, and the Obama Labor Department rescinded its Form T-1, which, in order to promote transparency, required unions to disclose information on strike funds and other accounts under their authority. In addition, the Labor Department intended to shift whistleblowing oversight authority from OSHA to the Office of Labor-Management Standards—conveniently, just as the administration has gutted that office’s staff and funding.¹⁹

The bottom line is this: the Obama administration encouraged and funded transparency, enforcement, and even litigation against private companies while decreasing all those things with respect to unions—all of which reveals not just the administration’s micromanaging approach to governance, but its bitter determination to empower unions and emasculate private firms.

A “TEA PARTY DOWNGRADE”

Credit rating agencies must strenuously safeguard their independence if they are to protect their reputation for unbiased analysis—and that’s a problem for the Obama administration. When Standard & Poor’s decided to downgrade the United States’ credit rating in 2011, the White House and the U.S. Treasury launched a coordinated attack on the agency’s credibility. The campaign first appeared in a memo posted on the Treasury’s website by one of its senior officials, John Bellows. Charging that the downgrade was based on a $2 trillion error, the post said, “Independent of this error, there is no justifiable rationale for downgrading the debt of the United States.... The magnitude of this mistake—and the haste with which S&P changed its principal rationale for action when presented with this error—raise fundamental questions about the credibility and integrity of S&P’s ratings action.”²⁰ Gene Sperling, head of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, leveled a similar attack on S&P, while a senior administration official declared, “This is a facts-be-damned decision. Their analysis is way off, but they wouldn’t budge.”²¹

In defense of its actions, S&P president Deven Sharma said the government’s angry response was “the same you would get from any other country or company.” Sharma told the Wall Street Journal, “We are supposed to be objective, and others are always trying to convince us why the risk is less than we think it is.”²²

While the Obama administration tried to blame the downgrade on the agency itself or on Republican brinksmanship during budget negotiations, the real problem was the government’s failure to devise a plan to restructure long-term entitlements—and that failure can be laid squarely at the feet of President Obama and the Democrats. S&P official John Chambers said the impasse was a factor in the downgrade—without assessing more fault on either the president or Congress—but indicated this problem has been long in the making and centers on entitlements. Moreover, he admitted to the mistake the administration had highlighted, but explained it made no material difference in the long-term debt-to-GDP ratio, which was a tacit admission that the budget impasse was not the cause of the downgrade—it was our overwhelming debt, driven by entitlements.²³

But the White House would not back off. On Face the Nation, Bob Schieffer pressed White House adviser David Axelrod on his claim that Republicans were to blame for the downgrade. Schieffer asked, “Are you saying the President bears no responsibility for this, that this was all the fault of the other side?” Axelrod replied, “Listen Bob, what I’m saying is review the history of what happened here ... this is essentially a Tea Party downgrade. The Tea Party brought us to the brink of a default.”²⁴

As the S&P stood its ground, the administration increased the pressure. The Securities and Exchange Commission asked S&P to disclose all its associates who were aware of the decision to downgrade the U.S. debt before it was announced, ostensibly to examine the possibility of insider trading. This inquiry was initiated even though the SEC admitted it was not aware of any leak from an S&P insider, nor had it heard of any suspicious trading in connection with the downgrade or its announcement.²⁵

Shortly after the SEC began its probe, S&P president Deven Sharma suddenly announced he would resign. An observer might easily conclude he was forced out under government pressure, though Vice President Biden, while claiming to have no direct knowledge of the matter, said his “instinct” was that disgruntled businesses may have influenced the resignation.²⁶

“A CREEPY, AUTHORITARIAN NUTJOB”

In Crimes Against Liberty I discussed how the White House established an official email address and a website dedicated to encourging people to snitch on their neighbors who criticize the administration. Although their campaign died within a few weeks amidst a public outcry, they never gave up.

In September 2011, in a similar spirit, Obama’s re-election campaign launched AttackWatch.com, whereby Obama supporters are encouraged to report all attacks against the administration—meaning any expressions of criticism, no matter how warranted. As one critic noted, “Wow, not only are Obama & Co. incredibly thin-skinned; they’re paranoid.”²⁷

Obama for America national field director Jeremy Bird said that the site, which features Orwellian slogans encouraging people to “support the truth,” aims to provide “resources to fight back” against attacks. Even President Obama himself, never hesitating to avail himself of opportunities to demean the dignity of his office, personally entered the fray, tweeting, “We’ve launched a new way to track and respond to attacks. President Obama: #Attack Watch. Check it out: attackwatch.com.”

The site doesn’t seem to have improved Obama’s standing among the American people, but its associated Twitter account has provided conservatives with a convenient forum for ridiculing the Attack Watch campaign. As one critic tweeted, “There’s a new Twitter account making President Obama look like a creepy, authoritarian nutjob.”²⁸

THE CRUSADE AGAINST VOTER ID LAWS: “AN AFFRONT TO CIVIC ORDER”

The Obama administration may think it’s worthwhile to engage enemy nations in dialogue, but it has found one target deserving of an all-out assult: American states that defy Obama’s will.

This campaign features a concerted attack on states that commit the cardinal sin of passing voter ID laws. Take Arizona, against which the Obama-Holder Justice Department filed a brief in a 9^th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals case arguing that the state’s law requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote pre-empted federal law. Arizona attorney general Tom Horne said the administration was trying to thwart Arizona’s voter ID laws in an effort to boost the vote among illegal immigrants, who would most likely vote Democrat. “Nobody that I’ve talked to, regardless of political persuasion, can understand how a court can tell us that we can’t make sure that people who vote are citizens,” Horne declared, citing evidence proving that illegal immigrants had indeed registered to vote.²⁹

The campaign against Arizona is no isolated act. The Obama DOJ has overturned South Carolina’s voter ID law, rejected a similar law in Texas, and blocked Georgia’s voter ID law before capitulating when the state fought back in court. These laws generally require voters simply to show one of many possible forms of ID to verify their identity, and some oblige the government to provide free ID to those who request it. Yet Obama’s officials baselessly claim that asking someone to show ID to vote—a mundane act, National Review’s Jonah Goldberg noted, typically required to fly on a plane, rent a car, ride Amtrak, or stay at a hotel—is racially discriminatory.³⁰

The DOJ objects to other anti-voter fraud measures as well. When a tea party group in a district of Harris County, Texas, recruited poll watchers to help root out voting fraud, the Justice Department moved against them as fast as a high-speed train. Poll watchers had credible reasons for concern; there were some 24,000 addresses with more than six registered voters each, more than ten times the number of such houses in most districts. Furthermore, many people registered from vacant lots, numerous people were registered in a seven-bed halfway house, and there were registrations by self-admitted non-citizens, along with other peculiarities. Lo and behold, it was later found that tens of thousands of these fraudulent registrations had been manufactured by a union-connected group called Houston Votes.³¹

The Texas Democratic Party was the moving complainant against the tea partiers, but that apparently did not raise the suspicions of the hyper-politicized Department of Justice; instead of focusing on the voter fraud allegations, the DOJ launched an investigation into the poll watchers for allegedly intimidating voters.³² Of course, the DOJ didn’t show the same concern about voter intimidation when it famously dismissed nearly all the charges against the New Black Panther Party, whose members were filmed during the 2008 presidential elections patrolling a Philadelphia voting precinct, one with a nightstick, while taunting white voters that they were about to be ruled by a black man.³³

If the DOJ’s activities end up increasing voter fraud, the votes of all legal voters will be devalued. But there are certain groups whose voting rights are zealously defended by the DOJ—for example, non-English speakers. Citing anecdotal evidence that people had been discouraged from voting, DOJ officials in 2010 compelled Ohio’s Cuyahoga County to print bilingual voting ballots under threat of a lawsuit. To make sure the county got the message, DOJ officials also forced it to agree to hire more bilingual poll workers, create a “community-based Spanish-language advisory committee,” and allow federal observers to monitor the county’s elections.³⁴

While the DOJ found bilingual ballots to be a top priority in Ohio, it didn’t take an interest in press reports that 5,800 dead people still appeared on the state’s voter registration rolls. It had shown the same apathy toward voter fraud the previous year when it abandoned a case against Missouri for failing to clean up its voter rolls, even though a third of the state’s counties reported more registered voters than voting-age residents.³⁵

Meanwhile, where was the DOJ when immigration officials informed an illegal alien in Tennessee he could still become a U.S. citizen even though he had voted illegally? The government merely required him to “submit a letter of explanation of ... when you discovered that you were not a United States Citizen”—as if, opined the Washington Times editors, “he hadn’t known.” They concluded, “The Obama administration and liberal bureaucrats are working to help everybody vote, whether or not they are eligible (or even alive). This undermines the rights of legal Americans whose votes are improperly diluted of value by fraud. The scandals are an affront to civic order.”³⁶

With the 2012 presidential elections approaching, we can expect the Justice Department to continue attacking states that pass voter ID laws and other anti-voter fraud measures, citing the preposterous pretext that such precautions harm minorities. Though a strong majority of Americans—even Democrats—support these laws, Obama and Holder seem anxious to press the matter to pander to their leftist base.³⁷

The DOJ’s antipathy toward states that enforce voter fraud laws or fail to meet its demands for multicultural accommodations reflect the department’s aggressive, politicized law enforcement under the tenure of Attorney General Eric Holder. As J. Christian Adams, a former lawyer for the DOJ’s Voting Rights division, reported in his whistleblower book Injustice, “Holder’s term has been marked by racially discriminatory law enforcement, politicized and ideological hiring, court-imposed sanctions on DOJ lawyers, and corrupt decisions to allow American voter rolls to overflow with deceased citizens and ineligible felons.”³⁸

ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION: “OUR OWN GOVERNMENT HAS BECOME OUR ENEMY”

The Obama administration has also crusaded against states that attempt to stem the in-flow of illegal immigrants. States are forced to adopt their own enforcement measures due to Obama’s manifest refusal to secure the border. But in the face of all evidence, Obama declared in Texas in May 2011 that he’s done everything necessary for border security, and that now it’s time to drop the issue and begin advancing his thinly veiled plans for a massive illegal alien amnesty. Obama’s comments were hard to take seriously considering, as Texas Congressman Michael McCaul observed, that up to 90 percent of the border in the state where Obama was speaking is still not under operational control.³⁹

As documented in Crimes Against Liberty, a primary target of the administration’s campaign has been Arizona and its immigration law, SB 1070. The DOJ’s lawsuit against the state received a major setback in April 2012 when most of the law was upheld by a U.S. appeals court. Nevertheless, the administration continues to argue that the law allows for racial profiling, even though the bill expressly prohibits the practice. Obama officials further allege that SB 1070 pre-empts federal law, an accusation dismissed by Arizona Senator Jon Kyl, who notes, “It’s simply the state of Arizona providing some additional law enforcement assistance for the federal government.”⁴⁰

But the administration doesn’t want this assistance, because it doesn’t want a secure border at all. Sheriff Paul Babeu of Pinal County, Arizona, whose department patrols a portion of the U.S.-Mexico border, said the federal government was not only failing to assist his state with border patrol efforts, but was actually impeding them. “What is very troubling is the fact that at a time when we in law enforcement and our state need help from the federal government, instead of sending help they put up billboard-size signs warning our citizens to stay out of the desert in my county because of dangerous drug and human smuggling and weapons and bandits and all these other things and then, behind that, they drag us into court with the ACLU,” said Babeu, who described the administration’s cooperation with the ACLU against Arizona as “simply outrageous.” He declared, “Our own government has become our enemy and is taking us to court at a time when we need help.”⁴¹

Continuing its assault on the states, in August 2011 the Justice Department filed a lawsuit against Alabama over its new immigration law, alleging it impinges on the federal government’s constitutional authority over immigration. “Setting immigration policy and enforcing immigration laws is a national responsibility that cannot be addressed through a patchwork of state immigration laws,” claimed Eric Holder.⁴² But why should the federal government mind if border states pass laws to aid the enforcement of existing federal laws, so long as they are not in conflict with them? The reason, as noted, is that the Obama administration doesn’t want any state to protect its borders more vigorously than is consistent with the administration’s lax policies, so it speciously invokes the Constitution, in an attempt to elevate a disagreement over policy into a constitutional issue.

House Oversight Committee ranking member Darrell Issa had previously exposed the flaws in the administration’s constitutional argument in discussing the Arizona law. “The administration can’t have it both ways,” he said. “They can’t have e-verify, they can’t have these programs where they’re supposed to take criminals and pass them over to the federal government if they’re illegally in the country and then say, ‘but if you do it wholesale where it actually works, we’re going to come after you.’” Issa also noted that Arizona (like other states with similar laws) “is not incarcerating people for being illegally in the country, they’re offering them up to the federal government to take their responsibility.”⁴³

The administration’s attacks on the Alabama immigration law provide a textbook example of false rhetoric and disingenuousness. For example, the DOJ claimed Alabama’s law would be “highly likely to expose persons lawfully in the United States, including school children, to new difficulties in routine dealings.”⁴⁴ To the contrary, in addition to permitting officials to check the immigration status of students in public schools, the law simply allows authorities to question people suspected of being in the country illegally, which is no different than the routine police procedure of detaining people they have probable cause to believe committed a crime. There is, of course, a chance that some innocents might be detained and later released, but that is the case in any enforcement action, and is hardly a good reason to forego enforcement altogether. The DOJ also blasted the law for “attempt[ing] to drive aliens off the grid,” which is rather like criticizing drug laws for forcing drug dealers to conceal their illegal activities.⁴⁵

The DOJ even argued that the Alabama law could impact U.S. diplomatic relations with foreign countries, warning that “Alabama is not in a position to answer to other nations for the consequences of its policy.” In the upside-down world of the Obama administration, a U.S. state must not take legal actions against illegal aliens if the actions risk offending the government of the illegals’ home country.

And in perhaps its most ludicrous assertion, the DOJ claimed the law’s requirement that officers report suspects to federal immigration officials “unnecessarily diverts resources from federal enforcement priorities and precludes state and local officials from working in true cooperation with federal officials.”⁴⁶

Of course, the “priority” the administration is really defending is its policy not to enforce federal immigration laws.

The DOJ train next pulled into South Carolina, which the administration sued in November 2011 to block its new immigration law. The law does not allow police to go hunting for immigration violators, but only to check the status of someone who the police have detained for another reason. The law specifically forbids officers from holding someone solely on suspicion of being an illegal immigrant, but that didn’t impress the DOJ, which claimed the law is unconstitutional. South Carolinian Rob Godfrey said, “If the feds were doing their job, we wouldn’t have had to address illegal immigration reform at the state level. But, until they do, we’re going to keep fighting in South Carolina to be able to enforce our laws.”⁴⁷

These state laws are widely popular; two Rasmussen surveys from 2011 found that 67 percent of Americans approve of states such as Alabama and Arizona passing immigration laws when the federal government fails to act, and that 60 percent of Americans think the federal government actually encourages illegal immigration.⁴⁸ But overturning these laws remains a major priority for Holder. “The department is committed to evaluating each state immigration law and making decisions based on the facts and the law,” he proclaimed. “To the extent we find state laws that interfere with the federal government’s enforcement of immigration law, we are prepared to bring suit, as we did in Arizona.”⁴⁹ A top DOJ official was even dispatched to Alabama to hunt for evidence the administration could use to strike down the state’s immigration law, thus betraying that the DOJ predetermines its position on these laws.⁵⁰ Perhaps Holder should have said that his DOJ was prepared to enjoin any state that interfered with the federal government’s non-en forcement of immigration law.

Aside from its ideological zeal, the administration, as noted, has a cynical political motivation for this campaign: it helps gin up support from the administration’s leftist base. The move is said to complement Obama’s 2012 campaign game plan to boost turnout among Hispanics in swing states like Florida, Virginia, and North Carolina. As Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies said, the administration “sees every Alabaman as having a Bull Connor on the inside waiting to come out.... They’re attacking Alabama to motivate left-wing voters in other states.”⁵¹

Despite the administration’s hostility, some thirty states have adopted their own immigration enforcement laws since Arizona passed SB 1070 in April 2010. While Obama officials would have us believe this is all motivated by bigotry and other sinister factors, illegal immigration is a major law enforcement and public safety concern that drains state budgets nationwide in the areas of education, healthcare, and other public services. But none of this matters to the Obama administration.

We can surmise that a major reason the administration finds these laws so threatening is that they are working. Since Arizona approved SB 1070 in April 2010, even though some of its provisions were enjoined by a federal judge, crime in Phoenix plunged to a thirty-year low. Just two years ago the city ranked second only to Mexico City for incidents of kidnapping.⁵²

TARGETING RED STATES: “COULDN’T HE PRETEND HE’S PRESIDENT ... OF ALL THE PEOPLE?”

Unsurprisingly, the Obama administration’s war against the states focuses disproportionately on red states—including its jealous approach to immigration enforcement. For example, people have asked why Holder hasn’t taken action against Rhode Island, which has reportedly undertaken local immigration enforcement for years. As the Boston Globe revealed, “From Woonsocket to Westerly, the troopers patrolling the nation’s smallest state are reporting all illegal immigrants they encounter, even on routine stops such as speeding, to US immigration and Customs Enforcement, known as ICE.” The article also indicated that ICE agents, as opposed to their superiors in the Obama administration, actually appreciate state assistance in immigration enforcement: “ICE has repeatedly urged police departments to take advantage of its Law Enforcement Center in Vermont,” the Globe reported.⁵³

The administration also has a habit of denying requested federal aid to red states—a strange practice in light of Obama’s propensity toward budget-busting federal spending. The White House repeatedly denied requests from Texas for disaster relief for destructive wildfires, and it also refused Oklahoma’s request for disaster assistance for record flooding in 2010. As Edmond, Oklahoma resident Rick Machaceck remarked, “It’s not good. They spend money on everything else. Then, when somebody does need help, we don’t get it.” The White House declined to explain why it denied Oklahoma’s request.⁵⁴

Wisconsin may not be a red state per se, but with a Republican governor and Republican legislature, it drew Obama’s attention; specifically, he saw fit to take sides in the 2011 dispute between public sector unions and Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker over the state’s collective bargaining practices. The legislature’s approval of Walker’s collective bargaining reform was a strictly intra-state issue in which the president had no reasonable grounds for intervening, but he just couldn’t refrain. Employing his familiar Alinskite tactics, Obama vigorously supported the unions as tens of thousands of union members flooded the state capitol in a failed effort to pressure legislators to reject Walker’s bill. The unions became increasingly militant, and the president refused to call for restraint even when they began threatening Republican officials and their families, some of whom stopped sleeping in their own houses due to safety concerns. As National Review’s Jay Nordlinger wondered, “Couldn’t Obama say something? Couldn’t he pretend he’s president—president of all the people—and say, ‘We have political disagreements, but we’re going to work them out peacefully and democratically. For example, massing at lawmakers’ homes, to shout and threaten, is out of bounds.’”⁵⁵

Obama’s team apparently gave the Wisconsin unions more than just rhetorical support, bringing Obama’s experience at community organization from the streets of Chicago to Pennsylvania Avenue. When Wisconsin Democrats fled the state in a vain attempt to stop the legislature from approving collective bargaining reform, Wisconsin Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald said that people clearly believed state Democrats were engaged in a stalling tactic in order to give Obama’s Chicago team time to organize an effort to recall Republican legislators. Just four months earlier, the people of the state had democratically elected the Republican officials Obama and Wisconsin Democrats were seeking to recall.⁵⁶

During his 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama portrayed himself as a transformative figure who would usher America—and the world—into a shining new future of international peace, racial harmony, and environmental improvement. With this immodest view of his own historical importance, it makes perfect sense that, as president, he and his team would show little tolerance for dissent or for those who won’t fall in line behind his agenda; after all, these recalcitrants are impeding his glorious vision where the oceans stop rising and the planet begins healing. Surely no one of good will could possibly want to delay that day’s arrival. No, in the Obama administration’s view, those who stand in Obama’s way cannot be reasoned with and certainly don’t deserve an audience. Whether local reporters or the president of Standard & Poor’s, they are the enemy, and are treated as such.