Wednesday, June 25, 2014
To: Friends & Supporters
From: Gary L. Bauer
Voters: IRS Emails Deliberately Destroyed
The latest Fox News poll should have White House aides reaching for the Maalox. While the president and his allies dig their heels in on the “phony” IRS scandal, voters are not buying their excuses.
According to the poll, 76% of voters (including nearly two-thirds of Democrats) believe that Lois Lerner’s emails were deliberately destroyed to cover-up potential wrongdoing. Only 12% believe they were destroyed by mistake.
So when President Obama insists that there isn’t even “a smidgen of corruption” at the IRS, only 12% of the country believes that.
Here’s another telling statistic: 82% of voters under 35 years old, a very pro-Obama demographic, reject the claim that Lerner’s emails disappeared by accident.
And while some politicians and their left-wing media allies try to dismiss the IRS scandal as a baseless, partisan witch hunt, 74% of voters believe that Congress should continue investigating the IRS “until someone is held accountable.”
On CNN yesterday, Ron Fournier, a left-leaning but honest journalist, summed up the IRS and VA scandals well, saying:
“The one thing both these scandals have in common is, for a party that wants to establish the fact that good government can do good things, they’re now giving the public two choices. One, either we’re incredibly incompetent, both the IRS and the V.A. scandal, or we’re crooked. Pick your poison. It’s not a good place to be.”
Boehner v. Obama
When President Obama ordered the release of five Taliban leaders from Guantanamo Bay last month, there was broad agreement that he broke the law in the process by failing to notify Congress. It was just the latest in a long string of such extra-constitutional executive actions.
Left-wing law professor Jonathan Turley has been one of the most vocal critics of Obama’s abuses of executive power. During an interview after the release of the Taliban 5, Turley said, “Barack Obama is really the president Richard Nixon always wanted to be. You know, he’s been allowed to act unilaterally in a way that we’ve fought for decades.”
It seems Speaker John Boehner has had enough. He told House Republicans yesterday that he is formulating a legal strategy to challenge the president’s executive actions in court hoping to restore some balance to our system of checks and balances.
Tomorrow the Supreme Court could hand down decisions doing just that regarding Obama’s illegal appointments to the National Labor Relations Board and Obamacare’s abortion mandate in the Hobby Lobby case. Stay tuned.
“Get A Warrant”
In a deeply divided city, something refreshing happened today at the Supreme Court. Four liberals, four conservatives and whatever you consider Justice Anthony Kennedy all agreed that police cannot search your cell phone without a warrant.
Now I’m a big defender of law enforcement. I’m also a big defender of our fundamental liberties, and I think the justices got this one right.
Some had argued that searching cell phones was no different than asking someone under arrest to turn out their pockets. But in this digital age, when so much of our lives are stored on our smartphones, all nine justices rejected that argument.
Speaking for the unanimous court, Chief Justice John Roberts declared:
“The fact that technology now allows an individual to carry such [private] information in his hand does not make the information any less worthy of the protection for which the Founders fought. Our answer to the question of what police must do before searching a cell phone seized incident to an arrest is accordingly simple — get a warrant.”
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