President Obama has a great new idea: he wants to put high-speed Internet into schools, and pay for it with a $5-a-year fee on every cell phone user in America. But there’s a problem: No way is Congress going to approve that. So Obama is reportedly leaning on the FCC to impose it as a telecommunications fee. The plan has a lot of Republicans and constitutional scholars crying foul. It might be just $5 a year, but it sets a dangerous precedent. According to the Constitution, all decisions relating to taxes and spending must originate in the House. Obama has been treating his executive order pen as if it’s Harry Potter’s magic wand for quite a while, but this time, he may have gone too far. As Charles Cooke notes in National Review, it doesn’t matter how gridlocked Congress is, or how frustrated Obama is, or how good he thinks the cause is: Presidents absolutely cannot create new taxes. Taxes have to be voted on by the representatives of the people. There’s a word for what taxation without representation is. I’ll let you look it up on the high speed Internet.
Posted on: Wed, 21 Aug 2013 11:30:52 +0000
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