Payback

Good Chess players think 5 moves ahead; the best Chess players think a dozen moves ahead.  A lesser Chess player will find himself quickly over-matched by a better one, as he falls into his opponent's trap.  He will take poisoned bait, thinking himself ever so clever, when he doesn't see the set-up to Check Mate.

The Left is in full frontal Tribal Mode, trying to prop up Their Guy and saying that it's no big deal that the President acts without (or against) Congress by choosing which laws to enforce and which not to.  In this, they are only demonstrating for the eleven hundredth time that they are playing Checkers, not Chess.

Obama won the 2008 election.  King him.

Color me unimpressed with the intellectual horsepower on display.  Perhaps it's because I work in Internet Security and so I have to think about what the Bad Guys will try to do, but the Progressives need to spend more time thinking about the rules of the game that they are proposing, and how those rules will play out.

Consider the proposition that they are laying out, that the President can decide, for political gain, to ignore presumptively Constitutional statutes duly enacted by both houses of Congress and signed into law.  But for whatever reason, he doesn't like it, and so he can direct one of the Executive Branch Agencies not to enforce it.  If that's the new rule, how will that play out?

Because Mitt Romney will be President on January 20, 2013.  I think that this is a Very Bad Thing Indeed, but that is irrelevant as Mussolini could beat Obama this year.  But back to our game: using this new game of "I don't like it and so I will prevent the Executive Branch from enforcing it", which laws are beloved of Liberals and would give them the vapors if President Mittens didn't enforce them?

Offered for your approval, is the Borepatch list of payback is a bitch, biatches statutes:

The Endangered Species Act, which has gutted the American timber industry and killed towns across the Pacific Northwest.  If a company had eight years in which to clear cut every acre of old growth forest in the land (subsequently sending the profits overseas where a different Administration couldn't get them), how would the Lefties like that?

The statutes creating OSHA and the EPA.  These agencies have done more to kill American industry and send industrial jobs overseas than anything in this Republic's history.  What if a Republican president simply locked the buildings and fired the employees?  Drill here, drill now, drill where you want.  Why not add in the Departments of Education and Energy while we're at it?  Remember, this is eliminating all the headcount and stopping the paychecks.  Because he doesn't agree with the statutes.

CAFE standards.  Suppose President Romney lowered the fleet mileage-per-gallon targets to 3 MPG?

The National Endowment For The Arts, and the Corporation For Public Broadcasting.  What if President Romney told whichever agency not to cut the check?  Forget defunding them, just don't pay.

Civil Rights.  What if the President forbade the Justice Department from enforcing the Civil Rights Act, busing, consent decrees, etc.  I actually think that this is an entirely different country than it was 45 years ago, and probably nothing would change.  Probably.  This is actually very similar to the attitude of the current President regarding the Arizona immigration law.

Don't pay localities that have public employee unions.  This might actually be the best argument to keep the Department of Education intact.   Want education grants?  Got a union?  Sorry, Charlie.

This is all a thought experiment, of course, but we can predict two things with certainty:

1. Progressives across the land will die in large numbers as they have aneurisms.

2. Other than reliably Democratic constituencies (environmentalists, African Americans, unions, SWPL urban yuppies) nobody in the country will notice, or care.  It will make precisely zero impact to Joe Everyman - he may in fact notice that his life improves as hiring picks up smartly.

And here's the kicker: the hypothetical Republican President won't lose a single vote, because the people who hate these actions wouldn't vote for him anyway.  People who like these actions will vote for him no matter what, but the middle could very well make this a winning strategy, as they see their lives improve after the dead weight of Progressive policies are suddenly removed from the economy.

And dig this: if the economy really takes off - say, growing at 5%, or 6%, or 8% a year, this may turn into a permanent majority.

Really, why on earth do I have to be the one to tell the Lefties that they're playing checkers?  If their opponents were truly as ruthless as they make out, they should have figured this out for themselves.  But they haven't, and so I consider them not to be smarter and better educated than me.  I consider them idiots.

Q. E. D.

This list only scratches the surface.  Remember, Obama sent the American Military into combat in Libya without Congressional authorization.  Leave a comment about what a truly ruthless Republican President could do using the new Progressive® Approved Rules™.