Obama and liberals were outraged over enhanced interrogation techniques used at Guantanamo Bay under Bush – calling this a violation of the civil liberties of detainees. Obama and his unlawful cronies at the DOJ do not need to use enhanced interrogation techniques because they do not detain unarmed suspected terrorists – they kill them. Obama is the first President to order the killing of a U.S. born citizen – Anwar Al-Awlaki. Obama has been the most ruthless and unlawful president by infringing on the most precious democratic civil liberties outlined in the Bill of Rights of our Constitution - a person’s right to due process – the right to a fair trial where they are presumed innocent until proven guilty. Obama has also continued to use military tribunals (which Obama claimed was unconstitutional) for detainees. What’s more troubling, the media has all but stopped publishing stories about the U.S. army killing innocent civilians (another civil liberty violation accusation made by the left) – something that has become a daily occurrence by U.S. drone strikes around the globe.

Obama went to war against Libya without the consent of Congress.

Obama and his liberal cohorts in Congress have failed to pass a budget his entire term.

The passing of the 862 billion dollar stimulus which was proved to be a waste of taxpayer dollars because it did nothing to end the recession and it failed to put people back to work. This is because the stimulus was not concerned about economy, but it was more concerned about pushing the Obama agenda. Hidden within the bill were monies appropriated for Obama’s green agenda and his education vision - “The Race to the Top”. The stimulus was used to bypass the current educational law “No Child Left Behind” to enforce Obama’s vision – not the national vision.  

Obama, a Constitutional lawyer, passed healthcare legislation which contained a mandate forcing American citizens to buy insurance. The Supreme Court upheld the law by replacing the mandate with a tax on all Americans. The court would not uphold a mandate based on the commerce clause or the necessary clause.

Obama sued individual states whose immigration policies enforced federal laws. What’s worse, Obama used an executive order (unlawfully bypassing congress) to stop enforcing federal deportation laws on illegal aliens. In the Arizona case, the Supreme Court upheld a majority of the law.  

Obama’s DOJ has enforced election intimidation laws that solely infringed on the rights of minorities. However, the DOJ dropped cases where Black Panthers intimidated white voters. In fact, the DOJ is suing the state of Florida because it is trying to purge its voter rolls of any individuals who may be deceased, illegal, or felons. To complicate matters, the DOJ is filing suit against any state requiring a photo ID to vote even though the President himself checks photo ID’s for people to addend his campaign events.

The DOJ and administration has failed to enforce the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) because they do not like the law.

Obama’s EPA has passed hundreds of laws, regulations, and restrictions without the authority of Congress.

The DOJ and the White House are hiding behind executive privilege on the Fast and Furious program that allowed weapons to flow from the U.S. to Mexico. Unfortunately, the ATF lost track of most weapons and they were used to kill a U.S. Border Patrol agent, Brian Terry. This is the same DOJ and White House that have routinely leaked classified material endangering the lives of American citizens to make the President look strong on national defense. Liberal papers have been printing stories weekly about cyber warfare, the Bin Laden raid, and drone strategy – all proprietary information leaked to the media. 

And finally, let’s not forget about how Obama routinely uses taxpayer money to pay for family vacations, photo ops, fundraiser trips, and extravagant parties.

In fact, every law passed by Obama is loaded with exceptions and special interest earmarks and carve outs to protect one group of people with power and money at the expense of (to discriminate against) the common individual or business. The Obama health care law gave better benefits to union members. Obama’s stimulus gave better fiscal and tax benefits to green companies and ignored other small businesses. The financial reform bill continued to protect banks too large to fail. The credit card reform bill has led to other charges and higher interest rates on users. Obama’s immigration policy provides amnesty to only youths, no other age group.

The bottom line is that everything this president does or attempts to do is a power grab that pushes the legal envelope threatening our freedoms and democracy outlined by the constitution.

In my working years at Texas Instruments I noticed a lot of creep. Essentially, there would be a group of 3 or 4 people on a New Product Team (Design Engineer, Test Engineer, and Product Engineer) working hard to develop and introduce a new product. However, there were literally dozens of people employed in several departments hindering new product development progress and simply making it difficult to finish the job. It was not always that way, but due to new rules, regulations, guidelines, standards, and corporate policy (creep) the time and cost (adjusted for inflation) it took to develop and introduce a new product more than doubled over my 22 year career.

Marketing Engineers continually changed product specifications and therefore, changed the scope of the project (spec creep) throughout its development. The bottom line is it is impossible to hit a moving target. Sustaining Engineers wanted every new product to run at manufacturing facilities as if it were a mature product. In other words, they wanted new products to meet guidelines for yield, repeatability, and reproducibility as if the product had been in production for 10 years – this, off course, was unrealistic. And it was not enough that new product teams had to deal with sustaining engineering, they also had to deal with Manufacturing. Manufacturing had a completely different list of criteria, metrics, and goals, which incidentally conflicted with those goals set forth by new product groups. Project Management’s sole responsibility was to make an unrealistic project schedule (no new products ever met or exceeded scheduling expectations) and consequently held an inordinate amount of meetings about why the project is failing to meet the unrealistic schedule. Corporate Security creep worked to make it more difficult to get on systems, to enter buildings, and even to park a vehicle. I was reprimanded several times for parking violations and leaving my office door open and or unlocked (even though no secure information was exposed or unlocked). Corporate Maintenance and Safety made new and more stringent guidelines for engineers to follow (even though a product, test, or design engineer was never killed at the company due to safety issues). Human Resources were the best at issuing new creep including regulations for hiring new personnel, evaluating personal, and implementing an assortment of diversity policies that were just impractical. Quality Control was referred to as Creep Control. Quality Control issued dozens of checklists to ensure the new product team was meeting all the standards set forth by Marketing, Sustaining, Manufacturing, Project Management, Security, Safety, and Human Resources. And if that was not bad enough, upper level management was the machine behind all this madness of creating departments, groups, and organizations solely responsible for making up specification, rules, regulations, and policy creep.

All of these groups/departments/organizations (Marketing, Sustaining, Manufacturing, Project Management, Security, Safety, Human Resources, Quality Control, and Upper Level Management) had a few things in common. First, very few of the people within these departments understood the big picture. In other words, they were creating new rules, checklists, guidelines, policy, and regulation for new products without completely understanding how new product organizations created new products (remember the company needs new products to create revenue). Secondly, the creep departments grew in size (bureaucracy), while new product group growth was much slower. Third, ego and power was the reason for departments to create creep, not necessity. 

Does any of this sound familiar? It should, this is exactly how the government interferes in the private sector. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) creates hundreds of new rules and regulation annually (creep, but what liberals would call progress). The EPA is continually making unrealistic guidelines for automotive and energy companies. For instance, the EPA set a 31 mile per gallon (mpg) standard for all new cars, but the EPA does not understand the science, engineering, and physics behind meeting such standards. For example, the EPA does not understand or care about the design tradeoffs between car safety (car size and weight) and meeting the 31 mpg standard. In other words, the EPA does not care if the car design is practical to meet marketing demands (big enough for a family of 5 to drive long distances). Hence, the automotive industry struggles at times to be profitable.  

Just about any government department or agency is creating more creep than progress. The Department of Agriculture, Department of Education, Department of Energy, Health and Human Services, and unions are doing more harm (creep) than good (progress). Heck, the liberal interpretation of the Constitution is not progress, but creep.  

Government creep has the same detrimental outcome as corporate creep – it makes it harder for private sector workers and companies to do their jobs; it makes private sector products more expensive (i.e. higher energy costs, higher health insurance costs, emission standards, and so forth); and it takes longer for the private sector companies to create new products. This is not progress, but creep that is strangling the life out of innovation and creativity and therefore, making the U.S. a second rate nation.

The 16^th amendment has enabled the federal government to coerce states for nearly a century. The government created departments not enumerated in the federal powers of the Constitution including: HHS, Department of Education (DOE), Department of Energy (Doe), Department of Agriculture (USDA), and Department of Transportation (DOT) – to name a few. The federal government collects tax money from the individuals of each state, and if the states want to recoup this money they have to adhere to federal government power grabs for universal control over healthcare, education, energy, agriculture, or transportation. For instance, the Department of Education created a new program called “The Race to the Top”. There was 4.3 billion dollars of state funding hidden in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (the 862 billion dollar stimulus) for the Race to the Top. Even though The Race to the Top was not a law, the federal government coerced states to abide by their guidelines to get funding for this program. Some claim that this is not coercion because the states could just refuse the money – it is voluntary. But this is not going to happen, especially during a recession where states were already cash strapped and did not want to double tax its citizens. Besides, the government could have just as easily divided the money up evenly (population adjusted) amongst the states without any strings attached – they did not do this.  

Let’s face facts; the introduction of the 16^th amendment made the 10^th amendment moot. States are now at the mercy of the federal government. And what’s worse, the 16^th amendment made this country more bureaucratic, less efficient, and more susceptible to fraud and waste. For example, the tax payers of Ohio send their tax dollars to the federal treasury which in turn, funnels the money to federal departments which in turn, funnels the money back to the states treasury which in turn, funnels the money into state departments. Things would operate much more smoothly if the states taxed their people and spent the money as they saw fit, and cut out the middle man – the federal government. This simply makes sense and is more logical because states and localities better understand their issues and problems than the federal government. To assume that education or Medicaid has the same variables in Los Angeles California as it does in Alamosa Colorado is just wrong. Some may argue that by having the federal government controlling laws and regulations for HHS, DOE, Doe, USDA, and DOT makes legislation more consistent and equally enforced amongst states. This is not even remotely true and is exactly why legislation is thousands of pages long, because bills are laced with pork, earmarks, and waivers influenced by lobbying which does the contrary, it makes laws inconsistently enforced not only amongst states, but among corporations and individuals. Just this past week Congressional Democrats were talking about cutting tax incentives for only oil companies, but not tax incentives and funding for green companies – is this a fair law equally enforced amongst corporations?

How about federal standards the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) puts on industry – is this coercion? Yes, I believe so. The EPA is placing emission standards on energy manufacturers before the implementation of methods to conform to such rules are commercially available. This forces companies to cut back workers or increase energy consumption costs on individuals and companies. The same thing happens when the EPA places gas mileage standards on cars, automobile manufactures have to increase costs and cut corners on safety to meet such demands. This is coercion, the government is forcing companies to comply or receive fines. And what’s worse, these actions by the EPA make products more expensive and possibly even less safe.  

All this being said, even if the Supreme Court rules in favor of the states completely severing ObamaCare, it is improbable they will say the legislation is coercion.