Secretaries Who Rule The Country

I don’t think anyone would have difficulty conceding that a President with only a couple years of national political experience and a record of voting “present” should surround himself with strong and active advisers who can help him run the country.  But at what point does advising turn into an outright takeover of unelected secretaries? This dangerous precedent set by the TARP legislation under the Bush administration is now becoming the norm.

When the economy neared a terrible collapse, or at least a short-term and painful correction, conservative capitalist President George W. Bush decided to give up both conservatism and capitalism and set aside a several hundred billion dollar slush fund of our tax dollars to bail out major bank CEOs so that they would continue to lend to companies who couldn’t afford to pay them back.  Subsequently, the Democrat party reversed years of their own party’s policy by attacking banks for being greedy and making loans to people who couldn’t pay them back.  What they used to call community reinvestment had become white man’s greed running a world in need. This of course led to the bi-partisan TARP legislation.

Who did congress and our President decide should handle ALL of the TARP funds and decision making?  The Secretary of the Treasury.  Of course, that was back when the Secretary of the Treasury wasn’t an incompetent tax cheat; he was merely incompetent.  After Obama was elected, Tim Geithner became the man in charge of unrestrained government waste.  Having perhaps financed a car at one point, Geithner mistook GM and Chrysler for banks and proceeded to funnel billions in bank bailout tax dollars to them.  Of course, when this didn’t work, he sold the companies at a discount to the overseas competitors of the last standing American auto giant and gave the proceeds to the union bosses who put his boss in power.

With the new health bill, we will see this story replayed with Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius.  Obamacare will see the HHS Secretary become responsible for regulating the insurance industry (a task formerly and constitutionally delegated to the states), determining where government will fund and provide abortions, cutting or expanding medicare and medicaid without congressional authorization or oversight, determining how much private insurance companies can charge for premiums, and deciding how your care should be rationed.  Devon Herrick, a health care expert at the National Center for Policy Analysis, says that Obamacare “…lists 1,697 times where the Secretary of Health and Humans Services is given the authority to create, determine or define things in the bill,”

I don’t remember Kathleen Sebelius or Tim Geithner being on the ballot.  In fact, Sebelius was not even Obama’s first choice.  It just so happens that Tom Daschle had managed to reach the golden amount of tax fraud to disqualify himself from the position.  We will never know how close Geithner came to that magic number.

The idea of tax cheat Tim Geithner running the bailouts and pork stimulus has already become a frightening reality.  The idea of pro-abortion, liberal Kathleen Sebelius running your health insurance and doctor’s office is on the doorstep.

Next on the horizon?  Cap and Trade: the legislation that will turn our nation’s energy sector over to Energy Secretary and Global Warming devotee, Dr. Steven Chu.  He already is already a member of the Nobel Prize club for his work on recently debunked Global Warming “science”.  On the bright side, at least we haven’t seen Press Secretary Robert Gibbs making appearances on the Letterman show or catching footballs in United Way commercials.  Nice to know Obama is doing something to earn his paycheck.