In what model of government checks and balances is this even permissible?
Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has gone, hat in hand, to health industry officials, asking them to make large financial donations to help with the effort to implement President Obama’s landmark health-care law, two people familiar with the outreach said.
Her unusual fundraising push comes after Congress repeatedly rejected the Obama administration’s requests for additional funds to set up the Affordable Care Act, leaving HHS to implement the president’s signature legislative accomplishment on what officials have described as a shoestring budget.
Over the past three months, Sebelius has made multiple phone calls to health industry executives, community organizations and church groups and asked that they contribute whatever they can to nonprofit groups that are working to enroll uninsured Americans and increase awareness of the law, according to an HHS official and an industry person familiar with the secretary’s activities.
And if this is indeed within the bounds of the law, that is arguably worse. The executive branch should not have the ability to request or coerce private funding on its own for government purposes.
Not that this is new as a concept. I have always been very uncomfortable with the tobacco lawsuits that states won to compel tobacco companies to fund state programs. In my mind, states were free to increase taxes on tobacco products to fund whatever the heck they want. But it should have been done through the normal legislative process. This always seemed like a backdoor tax for governments unwilling to formally levy higher taxes.
Now the federal government is dispensing with even the pretense of rule of law by cutting out that lengthy process of going through a law suit to compel a tax under the guise of a lawsuit settlement.
Lovely little industry you got there. It would be a shame if something was to happen to it:
A BEDROCK principle of U.S. democracy is that the coercive powers of government are never used for partisan purpose. The law is blind to political viewpoint, and so are its enforcers, most especially the FBI and the Internal Revenue Service. Any violation of this principle threatens the trust and the voluntary cooperation of citizens upon which this democracy depends.
So it was appalling to learn Friday that the IRS had improperly targeted conservative groups for scrutiny. It was almost as disturbing that President Obama and Treasury Secretary Jack Lew have not personally apologized to the American people and promised a full investigation.
As that initial article notes:
Meredith McGehee, policy director for the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center, which researches government ethics issues, said she was troubled by Sebelius’s activities because the secretary seemed to be “using the power of government to compel giving or insinuate that giving is going to be looked at favorably by the government.”
"Seemed?" Ya think?
This is wrong. And dangerous. And if Vice President Dick Cheney had requested money from oil companies and gun manufacturers to implement some government policy that Congress wouldn't fund, our media and civil rights communities would be rightly outraged.
