The 225-201 vote fell along party lines, with five Republicans voting against the measure. No Democrats supported it.
The lawsuit is a direct response to GOP frustration with Obama’s wide-ranging use of executive power.
Republicans have been particularly angry over Obama’s decision to ignore several deadlines in the Affordable Care Act and his decision to defer the deportation of certain young people who illegally immigrated to the United States as children.
In the last week, lawmakers have been riled up by reports that immigration advocates and Democrats are pushing the administration to take additional executive actions to give more immigrants legal status.
Lawmakers Throw Light on Secretive ‘Operation Choke Point’
Kelsey Harkness / @kelseyjharkness / July 15, 2014 /
‘No place to stop’: Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., on Operation Choke Point. (Photo: Flickr)
Is “Operation Choke Point” about to get choked by Congress? Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., sure hopes so.
Issa, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, is calling for the dismantling of what he calls a secretive initiative launched by the Obama administration in early 2013.
Critics say that Operation Choke Point, so dubbed by Department of Justice officials under Attorney General Eric Holder, seeks to weed out businesses from the marketplace that the Obama administration considers objectionable. According to The Wall Street Journal, it was an outgrowth of the Financial Fraud Task Force, established by President Obama’s executive order early in his first term.
The initiative, Issa said last week, is a slippery slope:
“If you empower the government to pick winners and losers within a lawful enterprise, then there is no place to stop.”
Initially, in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, officials targeted small-dollar, nonbank lenders. But it grew to include other legal, legitimate businesses such as gun dealers and tobacco vendors at Walmart and Bass Pro Shop.
Issa, speaking on Operation Choke Point at Cato Institute, called it “proactive, progressive activity” by government against banks and other legitimate businesses.
“Fraud should be prosecuted,” Norbert Michel, research fellow in financial regulations at The Heritage Foundation, told The Daily Signal. “They don’t have to use the banking system to shut out every single player in an industry to do that.”
House Republicans already have passed legislation prohibiting funding for Operation Choke Point. This week, the Justice Department initiative comes under further scrutiny in three House settings:
This morning at 10, the oversight and investigations subcommittee of the Financial Services Committee wasscheduled to hold a hearing on the Justice Department initiative. Today at 2 p.m., the Financial Services Committee’s subcommittee on financial institutions subcommittee was set to hold a hearing on a new bill by Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer (R-Mo.), the “End Operation Choke Point Act of 2014.” Thursday at 9:30 a.m., the Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on regulatory reform will hold a hearing entitled “Guilty Until Proven Innocent?” on whether Justice has the legal authority to execute the operation and possible collateral damage to legitimate businesses.
One official at Justice, quoted anonymously in a Wall Street Journal report last summer, said the initiative was intended to change “the structures within the financial system that allow all kinds of fraudulent merchants to operate,” with the intent of “choking them off from the very air they need to survive.”
By “air,”the DOJ means money. The Obama administration uses Operation Choke Point to intimidates banks from doing business with merchants it deems “high risk,” Issa and other critics say.
For example, Issa said in his remarks last week, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation officials make “inappropriate” phone calls to banks and payday lenders, pressuring them to sever ties with businesses the government considers “reputational risks.”
Mark Calabria, Cato’s director of financial regulation studies, said FDIC pressure is an enormous weight over the financial industry.
“When the federal government maintains the discretion to decide which bank gets rescued and which does not, it should be clear that banks in practice have little choice but to cooperate,” Calabria said.
Despite his opposition to the initiative, Issa has yet to endorse legislation to end Operation Choke Point. Instead, he said:
We’ve got to do what baseball pitchers do anytime somebody’s crowding the plate. And that is, we’re going to put the ball close enough that either they’re going to jump back, or we’re going to hit them with the ball. … What they’re doing is wrong, and we’ve got to show that.
Following the revelation that the Environmental Protection Agency plans to garnish wages without a court order to collect non-tax debts (i.e. misused grant funds, unrepaid loans or “fines, penalties or fees assessed by federal agencies”), the EPA has sought to defend its proposed rules.
The agency cites The Debt Collection Improvement Act of 1996 (DCIA) as its authority for these rules and called it proposed rule “noncontroversial.” It is curious that the agency tucked these rules into the Federal Register as everyone was headed out for the July 4thvacation.
In a Politico story, part of defense offered by EPA was that it had to put these rules forward as “the same Treasury guidelines apply to all federal agencies that refer delinquent non-tax debts to Treasury for Collection.” This is not reassuring. If correct, this means we can soon expect similar rules to garnish wages without a court order from other agencies that have the power to fine citizens. Are such rules in the pipeline for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Occupational Health and Safety Administration, and the Bureau of Land Management?
No matter what the EPA says, it is just wrong for an agency to allege violations, impose fines and then garnish wages without a court order. The whole process is stacked against citizens and ripe for abuse. There are, however, a variety of simple fixes:
First, Congress could use its power of the purse and simply prohibit the use of any funds for garnishing wages without a court order as regards fines or penalties imposed by an agency. Given EPA’s warning that other agencies are likely to follow, it could be widely applied.
Second, Congress could overturn the EPA regulation or the underlying 1998 Treasury regulation.
o It could do so by adding due process requirements to the DCIA, crafting procedures that would not be so stilted in favor of the agency.
o More directly, it could simply require that, in the case of fines or penalties, an agency obtain a court order for wage garnishment.
o It could even amend the DCIA to limit garnishment to non-regulatory debts.
There are other possible fixes, but the point is this: This is a problem that Congress should be easily able to analyze and fix in a bipartisan manner.
An EPA spokesperson tried to assuage fears stating that, before wages could be garnished for fines, alleged violators are given prior notice and the opportunity to “review, contest or enter into a payment agreement.”
When one reads regulations’ fine print that opportunity is not so encouraging. Under EPA’s proposed system, the agency gets to unilaterally decide whether there is an oral hearing or whether it will decide the case based on the paper record. If there is an oral hearing, EPA has unbridled discretion to choose where. So, if you are from Alaska for example, the EPA could decide the oral hearing for your alleged violations will be in Washington DC. Tough luck.
Also, according to EPA’s proposed system, when you arrive your hearing official will be someone picked by the very agency that has sought to impose the fine. EPA gets to designate any individual the agency considers “qualified” for that job. Could EPA’s view of “qualified” include the official who imposed the fines in the first place? Who knows? Finally the standards basically put the burden of proving one’s self innocent on the citizen. While most see this as ridiculously stacked, this is the EPA’s notion of“adopting hearing procedures that … provide due process.”
There is no reason to tolerate this behavior. It is regulators gone wild and should be nipped in the bud.
Student Accuses High School Of Blocking Conservative Websites June 18, 2014 9:52 AM
WOODBURY, Conn. (CBS Hartford) – A high school student claims that a firewall is blocking conservative websites at his school.
Andrew Lampart, a senior at Nonnewaug High School, discovered that he couldn’t get on the National Rifle Association’s website while on campus as he was doing research for a classroom debate on gun control in May.
“So, I went over to the other side,” Lampart told WTIC. “And I went over on sites such as Moms Demand Action or Newtown Action Alliance and I could get on these websites but not the others.”
The 18-year-old decided to investigate further by broadening his search terms to political parties in Connecticut.
“I immediately found out that the State Democrat website was unblocked but the State GOP website was blocked,” Lampart said.
The student took it a step further and looked at websits focusing on abortion issues and religion. He discovered that “right-to-life” groups were blocked by the firewall but that Planned Parenthood and Pro-Choice America weren’t.
FEC chair warns that conservative media like Drudge Report and Sean Hannity face regulation — like PACs
BY PAUL BEDARD | MAY 7, 2014 AT 8:49 AM
Government officials, reacting to the growing voice of conservative news outlets, especially on the internet, are angling to curtail the media’s exemption from federal election laws governing political organizations, a potentially chilling intervention that the chairman of the Federal Election Commission is vowing to fight.
“I think that there are impulses in the government every day to second guess and look into the editorial decisions of conservative publishers,” warned Federal Election Commission Chairman Lee E. Goodman in an interview.
“The right has begun to break the left’s media monopoly, particularly through new media outlets like the internet, and I sense that some on the left are starting to rethink the breadth of the media exemption and internet communications,” he added.
Noting the success of sites like the Drudge Report, Goodman said that protecting conservative media, especially those on the internet, “matters to me because I see the future going to the democratization of media largely through the internet. They can compete with the big boys now, and I have seen storm clouds that the second you start to regulate them, there is at least the possibility or indeed proclivity for selective enforcement, so we need to keep the media free and the internet free.”
All media has long benefited from an exemption from FEC rules, thereby allowing outlets to pick favorites in elections and promote them without any limits or disclosure requirements like political action committees.
But Goodman cited several examples where the FEC has considered regulating conservative media, including Sean Hannity’s radio show and Citizens United’s movie division. Those efforts to lift the media exemption died in split votes at the politically evenly divided board, often with Democrats seeking regulation.
Liberals over the years have also pushed for a change in the Federal Communications Commission’s “fairness doctrine” to cut of conservative voices, and retired Supreme CourtJustice John Paul Stevens has delighted Democrats recently with a proposed Constitutional amendment that some say could force the media to stop endorsing candidates or promoting issues.
Welcome to Fascism 101: The FCC Wades Into the Newsroom
Why is the agency studying ‘perceived station bias’ and asking about coverage choices?
Feb. 10, 2014 7:26 p.m. ET
News organizations often disagree about what Americans need to know. MSNBC, for example, apparently believes that traffic in Fort Lee, N.J., is the crisis of our time. Fox News, on the other hand, chooses to cover the September 2012 attacks on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi more heavily than other networks. The American people, for their part, disagree about what they want to watch.
But everyone should agree on this: The government has no place pressuring media organizations into covering certain stories.
Unfortunately, the Federal Communications Commission, where I am a commissioner, does not agree. Last May the FCC proposed an initiative to thrust the federal government into newsrooms across the country. With its “Multi-Market Study of Critical Information Needs,” or CIN, the agency plans to send researchers to grill reporters, editors and station owners about how they decide which stories to run. A field test in Columbia, S.C., is scheduled to begin this spring.
The purpose of the CIN, according to the FCC, is to ferret out information from television and radio broadcasters about “the process by which stories are selected” and how often stations cover “critical information needs,” along with “perceived station bias” and “perceived responsiveness to underserved populations.”
