The Incomplete Cynic

The Trunk: Kids Shouldn't Smoke

I don’t know why I feel compelled to wade into this, but I do…

squashedcomments:

I think we’ve gone over most of these before—so I won’t rehash all of the issues in detail. I don’t give Obama full credit in any of those situations—though I think most of them he did most of what he claimed he would do.

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Regarding the other issues you raised:

Lobbyists - There is a policy. There have been waivers for people like Sebelius who have lobbied in the past. There are also some state lobbyists or people like Holder who lobbied a long time ago. I’ll give Obama a 75% compliance on that one.

Of course they lobbied “in the past”, that doesn’t excuse the nominations. He said he wouldn’t appoint lobbyists, then he did so on the first day, and on many days after that. It’s not as if several months had passed and his perfect nominee happened to have been recently lobbying, and he asked for a waiver. He appointed more than a dozen lobbyists to positions where they’d have influence over the industries they lobbied for…and he did it in less than two weeks. Politifact called this promise broken less than two months after the inauguration.

On posting bills in advance - I’ll give you this one. Obama didn’t keep that promise. On the other hand, it wasn’t really a practical promise. There have been huge increases in transparency—but when the government is going to shut down in a few hours, you can’t hold a bill for five days.

You get a point for a good example. But it doesn’t matter much, because he broke this promise only a week after inauguration, by signing his very first bill, the Ledbetter Act, after only two days. He didn’t even post it until after the signing. There are more examples. In fact, he broke this promise on the first ten bills he signed, and dozens of times after that, just in 2009.

On signing statements - Since this is the area that requires some actual legal analysis, I’m going to pass on this one. I didn’t follow Bush’s signing statements closely enough to compare them with Obama’s.

This seems pretty simple: he said he wouldn’t use them, then did. Not a lot else to it.