‘The Imperial Presidency’: House Holds Hearing On Executive Overreach Elizabeth Harrington Washington Free Beacon February 27, 2014
Members of Congress and constitutional law experts testified before the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday, warning that the legislative branch is in danger of ceding its power in the face of an “imperial presidency.” The hearing, “Enforcing the President’s Constitutional Duty to Faithfully Execute the Laws,” focused on the multiple areas President Barack Obama has bypassed Congress, ranging from healthcare and immigration to marriage and welfare rules. Jonathan Turley, Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University, testified that the expansion of executive power is happening so fast that America is at a “constitutional tipping point.” “My view [is] that the president, has in fact, exceeded his authority in a way that is creating a destabilizing influence in a three branch system,” he said. “I want to emphasize, of course, this problem didn’t begin with President Obama, I was critical of his predecessor President Bush as well, but the rate at which executive power has been concentrated in our system is accelerating. And frankly, I am very alarmed by the implications of that aggregation of power.” “What also alarms me, however, is that the two other branches appear not just simply passive, but inert in the face of this concentration of authority,” Turley said. While Turley agrees with many of Obama’s policy positions, he steadfastly opposes the method he goes about enforcing them. “The fact that I happen to think the president is right on many of these policies does not alter the fact that I believe the means he is doing [it] is wrong, and that this can be a dangerous change in our
system,” he said. “And our system is changing in a very fundamental way. And it’s changing without a whimper of regret or opposition.” Elizabeth Price Foley, a law professor at Florida International University College of Law, agreed, warning that Congress is in danger of becoming “superfluous.” “Situations like this, these benevolent suspensions as they get more and more frequent and more and more aggressive, they’re eroding our citizens’ respect for the rule of law,” she said. “We are a country of law and not men. It’s going to render Congress superfluous.” Foley said Congress is not able to tackle meaningful legislation out of fear that Obama would “simply benevolently suspend portions of the law he doesn’t like.” “If you want to stay relevant as an institution, I would suggest that you not stand idly by and let the president take your power away,” she said. Panelists and members of Congress dismissed the idea of impeachment, and instead focused on lawsuits to challenge the constitutionality of the president’s unilateral moves. Four House members testified on the first panel during the hearing to highlight legislation they have sponsored to thwart the administration’s executive overreach. Impeachment would “surely be extremely divisive within the Congress and the nation generally, and would divert the attention of Congress from other important issues of the day,” said Rep. Jim Gerlach (R., Pa.). Gerlach, who testified before the committee, introduced H.R. 3857, the “Enforce the Take Care Clause Act,” which would expedite the review and injunction process for federal courts to challenge executive actions. Such a challenge would have to pass a supermajority in both chambers in order to be fast-tracked. “Given the growing number of examples where this President has clearly failed to
faithfully execute all laws, I believe it is time for Congress to put in place a procedure for a fast-track, independent review of those executive actions,” he said. Gerlach said he proposed the bill due to Obama’s repeated alterations to his signature law, the Affordable Care Act. “The ACA has been revised, altered and effectively rewritten by the president and his administration 23 times since July,” he said. “When we have these constant changes at the president’s whim think about what that does to businesses’ planning capabilities and hiring capabilities and their expansion capabilities,” Rep. Tom Rice (R., S.C.) said. “We shouldn’t wonder why our economy is struggling.” Rice has proposed the “Stop This Overreaching Presidency (STOP) Resolution” as a remedy. The resolution, which has 114 cosponsors, would direct the House to file lawsuits against four of the president’s unilateral actions, including the employer mandate delay in Obamacare and deferred action program for illegal immigrants. Turley said Congress must take action to regain their power as the “thumping heart of our system.” “The fact is, we’re stuck with each other,” Turley said. “Whether we like it or not in a system of shared powers. For better or worse we may deadlock, we maybe despise each other. The framers foresaw such periods, they lived in such a period.”
CBS Poll: Nearly 60 Percent ‘Disappointed’ With Obama Infowars.com February 27, 2014
US President Barack Obama can add one more disappointing poll to his resumé. A new CBS News and New York Times poll shows a mere 40 percent of Americans are “Satisfied” with the president’s job performance. 59 percent, on the other hand, are “Disappointed” with the 44th president. From CBS: Disappointment with Barack Obama’s presidency has grown since the summer of 2012, and much of that rise has been among independents. Forty percent of independents say they are very disappointed today, up from 27 percent in August 2012. President Obama’s overall approval rating is now 41 percent, a dip of five points from last month and similar to what it was in December. Fifty-one percent disapprove of the job he is doing, up four points from last month. More specifically, Mr. Obama gets low marks for his handling of both foreign policy (39 percent approve) and the economy (38 percent approve). The survey results add to a long list of abysmal polls revealing Americans reaching their tipping point with the way the president is executing his agenda. - Earlier this month, an Economist/YouGov.com poll revealed over 71 percent of Americans who voted Obama back into the presidency in 2012 now regret doing so. - A Washington Post-ABC News poll showed 63 percent of Americans have little to no confidence in
President Obama to make the right decisions. - Last month a Quinnipiac University poll also found that 53 percent of voters view the Obama administration as incompetent, while more Americans also believe the president himself is not honest or trustworthy. - Another poll of CNN/ORC viewers who watched Obama’s 2014 State of the Union address found that 67 percent oppose Barack Obama’s plan to pursue his political agenda via executive orders. But poll results don’t really faze the president. If so, he wouldn’t have propagated his infamous lie of the year, “If you like your health care plan you can keep it.” A Quinnipiac poll last November revealed 46 percent of people believe Obama “knowingly deceived” the public in declaring that Americans would be able to keep healthcare insurance plans despite the introduction of new laws. With poll after poll showing the American public waking up to the emperor having no clothes, the need to manufacture “extraordinary crisis” scenarios in order to pose as saviors and put faith back in the state increases. CBS Poll: Nearly 60 Percent ‘Disappointed’ With Obama VIDEO BELOW http://www.infowars.com/cbs-poll-nearly-60-percent-disappointed-with-obama/
You Read It Here First: Government Spies On Innocent People Via Webcams, Laptops, Xbox Steve Watson Infowars.com February 27, 2014
Latest Snowden Leak confirms story Infowars first broke EIGHT YEARS AGO The latest revelation concerning mass government spying confirms an issue that Infowars has been covering for close to a decade. British and American governments are spying on people in their own
homes via web cams, laptop microphones and devices such as the X-box. The London Guardian has the details in a report based on information leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. The British surveillance agency GCHQ, with help from the NSA, actively spied on nearly 2 million Yahoo users via webcams built into their computers. The documents show that the agency intercepted millions of images as part of a secret program codenamed OPTIC NERVE. The report also states that Americans were almost certainly targeted as part of the bulk collection of data, and that there is no law to prevent such activity in Britain.
The documents show that images were collected from webcams at regular intervals, one image every five minutes, and were used by the spy agency to trial automated facial recognition programs. The Guardian describes the process as “eerily reminiscent of the telescreens evoked in George Orwell’s 1984.”
The documents dub the practice as “bulk access to Yahoo webcam images/events”, and spies working at GCHQ compared it to a police database of mugshots. “Face detection has the potential to aid selection of useful images for ‘mugshots’ or even for face recognition by assessing the angle of the face,” the papers read. “The best images are ones where the person is facing the camera with their face upright.” Essentially, the spy agency appear to have been building a huge digital database containing the faces of Yahoo users. The documents advise employees at GCHQ on how to use the system, noting “[I]f you search for similar IDs to your target, you will be able to request automatic comparison of the face in the
similar IDs to those in your target’s ID”. In one presentation contained within the documents, more technologically advanced systems, such as iris recognition cameras, are discussed as potential surveillance tools. The paper even chillingly states “think Tom Cruise in Minority Report”. The documents state that Yahoo users were specifically singled out because “Yahoo webcam is known to be used by GCHQ targets”. The papers also note that a large quantity of the data collected contained nudity or sexually explicit imagery. The spy agency seemingly made no effort to prevent the collection of such images. Yahoo described the practice as “a whole new level of violation of our users’ privacy,” and strenuously denied having any knowledge of the program. Infowars first reported in 2006, EIGHT YEARS AGO, that innocent people were being spied on through their computers. We specifically described the practice as Minority Report style technology, as the GCHQ had done. We have since covered the issue consistently, warning that “Hundreds of millions of Internet-active Americans will all be potential targets for secret surveillance.” Of course, some quarters dismissed our reports as “conspiracy theories”, while worried internet users questioned whether the reports were accurate. The GCHQ program was seemingly not limited to Yahoo user web cams either. Another presentation within the leaked internal papers discusses the capabilities of the Xbox 360′s Kinect camera, saying it generated “fairly normal webcam traffic” and that it was being evaluated as a potential surveillance tool. We have also documented the potential use of Xbox for surveillance purposes, noting that Skype calls made on the devices can be intercepted. We have also warned that the ‘always on’ camera of the new Xbox One, which is so powerful it can see through clothing, is wide open to abuse by hackers and government agencies. According to the leaked documents, the OPTIC NERVE program began as a prototype in 2008 and was still active in 2012. There is no indication that the program has been deactivated. Security expert Bruce Schneier writes that this latest revelation highlights how there is no distinction between actively spying on a person and what he called “Eavesdropping by algorithm”, in other words, automated computer surveillance. The NSA and the Obama administration have attempted to argue that what they are doing cannot be called “spying” or even “collecting” data, because when the data is gathered, a person is not looking at it. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper still uses this explanation to claim he never lied to Congress when he answered ‘no’ to the question “Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?” The fallout from the OPTIC NERVE program, the creation of facial recognition databases, and the fact that spooks provably looked at images of people, even NAKED images of people, highlights the fact, Schneier argues, that the “NSA’s definition of ‘collect’ makes no sense whatsoever”, and that our governments are indeed actively spying on us.
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