Dan Calabrese

I was going to write a column about how stunningly ineffective President Obama has been at governing, pretty much since the day he took office. But as I went to construct my argument, I realized that what it actually demonstrates is how well the Constitution works, and how smart the Founders were.

Nice work, Tom.

Consider: The only significant bill Obama has signed has been the $787 billion stimulus package. In other words, he persuaded a Congress controlled by massive Democratic majorities to spend a pile of money. How much skill does that take?

And that one piece of legislation has – to say the least – not accomplished its purported purpose, since the economy remains weak and unemployment is still rising.

Obama’s other main priority, health care reform, still looks a long way from passing, which is pretty amazing considering he has huge majorities in both houses of Congress – including a filibuster-proof one in the Senate.

And the big executive order he signed on Day One? To close Guantanamo Bay? That’s now not going to happen because Obama has realized that when he made that promise, he didn’t know what the hell he was talking about.

Any way you look at it, Obama has been an ineffective president who has accomplished nothing of substance – in spite of the huge congressional majorities his party controls.

This is a hell of a good system we have. When the 2008 election results became clear, conservatives began preparing for Armageddon. With Democratic majorities that big, and a president as liberal as Obama, surely we would see socialized  medicine. Surely we would see a massive expansion of the welfare state. Surely we would see the introduction of nefarious new regulations and controls on business. Surely taxes would be raised through the roof.

And on the international front, we would surely face the quick withdrawal of our troops from Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the surrender of our sovereignty to the United Nations on foreign policy and on the nonsense of global warming.

Not much of this has gone anywhere. The Democrats have certainly blown a hole through the federal budget, and this year’s budget was indeed full of tax increases.

But health care? Cap and trade? New entitlements? Surrender abroad? The closing of Gitmo?

Obama isn’t close to getting a single one done.

That is, to be sure, largely attributable to the fact that he has no experience governing or making executive decisions, and as such doesn’t have the slightest idea what he is doing. There’s no substitute for incompetence!

But it also has to do with the beauty of the American system of governance, and how effective it is in beating back tyranny, even on the part of a huge and determined majority.

The Democrats barely passed Nancy Pelosi’s health care bill in the House, and they only did so by making promises to anti-abortion Democrats that they probably won’t be able to keep if a bill ever passes the Senate and comes back to them from conference committee.

In the Senate, even with 60 seats, the Democrats don’t appear capable of holding together their caucus to stop a filibuster.

This is because certain congressional districts are willing to elect Democrats, as are certain states in the case of the Senate, but they’re not willing to put up with it if these Democrats go too far in supporting ultraliberal legislation.

As much pressure as the Blue Dogs may get from Pelosi and Harry Reid, they listen in the end to their own constituents, because they have to if they want to survive politically. Whatever Pelosi and Reid may promise them doesn’t matter if they’re voted out of office.

And it’s not for no reason that Pelosi and Reid keep scheduling these health care votes on Saturdays. If they really thought the public wanted this bill, they would take the vote during a prime part of the news cycle to get maximum coverage. They would wait until their members go spend some time in their districts and hear from their constituents about how  much they want it.

And they would, above all else, pass the bill during an election year, so all their members could go back home and run on having voted for health care reform. They could watch the Democratic majorities grow.

But that’s obviously not what’s happening. Democrats know that, the closer they get to November 2010, the more suicidal it is to vote for this turkey. That’s why, if they don’t get it passed this year, it’s dead – just as Cap and Trade is probably dead already.

Good thing the Founders decided to put the entire House and a third of the Senate up for re-election every two years, eh? They understood that we might get a Congress bent on some pretty horrible ideas, and that it could really come in handy to have an election right around the corner at all times.

This is not to say that Obama and the Democrats have done no damage. They’ve done a ton of it, mainly in the realm of spending and out-of-control debt.

But considering the size of the majorities they have, their failure to do much, much more is rather stunning. We can be grateful for their ineptitude, from Obama on down through the ranks. But we can also be grateful for the framers of the Constitution, who knew we might end up with a crew like this at some point, and devised some pretty brilliant safeguards against them.

Thanks to them, if we ever do elect serious leaders again, the mess they have to clean up won’t be nearly as bad as it otherwise might have been.

Become Dan’s friend on Facebook.

Become a fan of The North Star National on Facebook.

To book Dan as a speaker, contact Lourdes Swarts at Speakers Access.

26 Responses to “Obama’s total failure on almost every front owes a big thanks to the Founders”