It would appear that our choice in five months is between two folks who are prone to foot-in-mouth disease. President Obama earned election in 2008 on the strength of his words and a concept (Hopinchange) . The same strategy will not work in 2012. Re-election is about the ability to run on your record, or to at least discredit your opponent’s record. While our die-hard friends on the left may disagree, even the inner-circle at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W. realizes that the latter strategy has a better chance come November.

Much like his running mate, President Obama is boxed in by his words. Even a story with a positive spin rings hollow if one wants to do their homework. For example, Rex Nutting of Marketwatch <ahref=”http://www.marketwatch.com/story/obama-spending-binge-never-happened-2012-05-22″>(WSJ)andhis recent spinning of the President as a deficit hawk comes as great news to the administration. Federal spending has increased at the lowest rate since the Eisenhower administration.

While that spin plays well with the “read the headlines” voters, the undecideds who want to apply some critical thinking would have a few things to say about it. For instance, one would really have to do something unprecedented to grow spending at a noticeable rate after the 2009 bailout bonanza. Since the bailouts were supposed to be a one-time rescue program with payback provisions, any increase means that the spending has been duplicated elsewhere. It also helped that the Iraq withdrawal was already scheduled for 2011.

Regardless of the inherited situation, Greece, the weather, etc, there are several troubling trends occurring and the administration doesn’t seem willing to tackle them. Debt versus GDP is at 100 percent. Government spending versus GDP is stalled at 24 percent (by contrast Clinton left office at an ideal 19 percent). To use the lingo of climate scientists, the administration wants credit for changing the graph from a hockey stick to a sand wedge.

It would be akin to Norv Turner’s first year as coach of the Washington Redskins. Norv took over a team that lost twelve games and proceeded to lose thirteen. Could you imagine if Turner claimed success by slowing the rate of the increase in losing? The writers of the Washington Post’s C section would never allow that to happen. But A sections across the country have run with the Nutting spin.

Of course, all of Nutting’s analysis fails to account for the election of 2010. Spending is scheduled to fall in 2013 by 1.3 percent, that is correct, but weren’t the drivers of that summer 2011 budget deal the ones who had to listen to the President tell them how irresponsible they were for not simply raising the debt ceiling as had been done many times over (duh, the blank check was sort of the problem)? Now the President wants sole credit for a deal he would have never made with the Pelosi congress.

Even the President’s own words box him in on the spending issue. The President wants to claim the mantle of fiscal hawk when it is in vogue; however, his feelings on the government’s role as economic engine were made quite clear. To laughter and applause at a February 5,2009 gathering of the House Democratic conference, President Obama doubted spending-weary skeptics of his stimulus plan by saying, “So then you get the argument, well, this is not a stimulus bill, this is a spending bill. What do you think a stimulus is? That’s the whole point. No, seriously. That’s the point.”

If the President had four years of doing things his way, do you think Nutting would have come to the same conclusion? The President seems to favor what I call “liquid soap economics.” (Crazy Troup’s Corner analogy warning) Did you know that one pump of liquid soap and sanitizer will accomplish the task you want it to accomplish? Most people pump three times, because if two milliliters are good, then six must be better. Soap companies like this because restaurants and other facilities have to reorder the product three times faster than they need to.

The point is, money printers have to keep going back to the presses to constantly keep up with the side effects of printing it. As long as certain groups are under the impression that they are better off with the printing presses turned on, they’ll endorse the spending spree. This is why there are folks out there who say the stimulus wasn’t big enough (translation: I didn’t get mine).

Accounting for recent events, the big picture is this -government a la Washington, or government a la Wisconsin? The administration was eerily silent on the Wisconsin front. Why? If he chooses government a la Wisconsin, he abandons his base. If he chooses government a la Washington, he has to give back Mr. Nutting’s golden fiscal championship trophy.

So what’s left? If you said, “Denounce the Romney record,” you win. Even so, that comes with its own risks…
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The Supreme Court recently heard arguments over the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act (f/k/a the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act), principally the mandate that compels most Americans to carry health insurance by 2014. Before the proceedings, it was even money that the keystone provision of this legislation would stand. When Anthony Kennedy noted that “the mandate fundamentally changes the relationship between citizens and the federal government,” the money at Troup Hotel and Casino started flowing towards striking down the mandate.

As the arguments wound down, the conversation turned towards life without a mandate. Could the remaining 2,699 pages be valid if the law’s keystone clause were deemed to be unconstitutional? Antonin Scalia seems to think so. He offered, “If we struck down nothing in this legislation but the — what’s it called, the Cornhusker kickback, okay, we find that to violate the constitutional proscription of venality, okay? When we strike that down, it’s clear that Congress would not have passed it without that. It was the means of getting the last necessary vote in the Senate. And you are telling us that the whole statue would fall because the Cornhusker kickback is bad. That can’t be right.” Many on the left flocked to this quote to mock Scalia, noting that the controversial measure was changed so that Nebraska did not receive preferential treatment. A re-read of this hypothetical argument would lead a reasonable person to believe that Scalia thinks the statute could otherwise stand.

This action would take us to a very scary place. This action, for all intents and purposes,would hand the Supreme Court (an unelected body) a line-item veto. In 1996, the “Contract with America” Congress and President Bill Clinton passed “An Act To give the President line item veto authority with respect to appropriations, new direct spending, and limited tax benefits.” This allowed the President to curb pork-barrel spending. Checks and balances dictate that a veto can be overridden by a Congressional two-thirds majority. This means that if the President were to make egregious use of the veto, that Congress could still override it. If the Supreme Court were to claim line-item veto power, no other branch of government could stop it. On June 25, 1998 the Supreme Court deemed the line-item veto act to be unconstitutional. Now they may claim to that power for themselves.

Since the arguments for and against the ACA are emotionally charged, let’s draw a hypothetical parallel using a controversial piece of legislation passed under a GOP President. What if the Supreme Court declared in 2009 that the government could roll out the TARP program under Congress’ authority to order the printing of money, but Congress did not have the authority to demand repayment of the funds since it falls outside the scope of collecting taxes? Wouldn’t that ruling materially alter the legislation? And wouldn’t it also put words into the mouths of the Congressmen who voted for it base upon certain pretenses? Since striking down the mandate materially alters the ACA, the whole law should go back to the drawing board.

President Obama disagrees with this stance (Quelle surprise!). The President said that striking down the law would be “unprecedented” and a classic case of “judicial activism.” What is unprecedented is the President’s use of the word unprecedented. Plenty of laws have been struck down by the Supreme Court, for instance, the line-item veto. One can assume with little risk that President Obama would have great admiration for someone like Franklin Roosevelt. Even so, our 32nd President saw six of his New Deal programs scuttled by the Supreme Court (hence his later attempt to pack the court with sympathetic Justices). With regard to judicial activism, overturning the law would actually be an example of restraint. Activism would require the court to inject more meaning into the law.

Judicial activism would best describe the behavior of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg during the proceedings. As Solicitor General Donald Verrilli stumbled and bumbled through his arguments, Ginsburg threw a lifeline: “Mr.Verrilli, I thought that your main point is that, unlike food or any other market, when you made the choice not to buy insurance, even though you have every intent in the world to self-insure, to save for it, when disaster strikes, you may not have the money.” I would have expected Justice Kagan, fresh off the Solicitor’s chair, to be the one who put words into counsel’s mouths.

That the President has picked another fight with the Supreme Court is bewildering. You may recall the State of the Union speech in 2010 when the President excoriated the Court for its decision in the Citizens United case. Now he is wagging his finger once again. It is also a tad strange because Obama seems to revere the courts, and believes they should be used as vehicles for change. For example, in a 2001 radio interview, the current President offered the following: “As radical as I think people tried to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn’t that radical. It didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution, at least as it’s been interpreted. And more important, interpreted in the same way that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties. It says what the states can’t do to you, it says what the federal government can’t do to you, but it doesn’t say what the federal government or the state government must do on your behalf.” It seems here that Obama’s lament is that the courts have not been activist enough for his liking, and that he would want to change that. Perhaps President Obama sees his calling as a potential Justice, taking the William Howard Taft route to the bench.

The Affordable Care Act is highly flawed. In the instance of the mandate, it will likely be deemed unconstitutional. If the mandate falls, so too should the law. That said, the noble cause of extending access to health care and bending back cost curves should still be addressed. There are plenty of options that are means to those ends, and those options don’t have to involve the creation of budget deficits or Trojan horses for government run health care.