Barack Obama Part 19

According to a WorldNetDaily report:

"A senior FBI official has admitted the United States is finding it virtually impossible to screen out terrorists that could be hiding among the thousands of Syrian 'refugees' heading soon to American cities. The U.S. simply does not have the resources to stop Islamic radicals in Syria from slipping into the country through the State Department’s refugee-resettlement program, said Michael Steinbach, deputy assistant director of the FBI’s counter terrorism unit. Separating legitimate refugees from terrorists was difficult enough in Iraq, where the U.S. had a large occupation force. Even then, the U.S. government’s vetting process missed “dozens” of Iraqi jihadists who slipped into the country posing as refugees and took up residence in Kentucky, according to a November 2013 ABC News report."

Obama Administration Unilaterally Announces That Spouses of Certain Visa Holders Could Now Get Work Permits

On March 24, 2015, the Obama administration announced that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) would begin granting work permits to the spouses of H-1B visa holders -- skilled foreign workers seeking permanent resident status in the United States -- on May 26th. According to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIC), a division of DHS, as many as 179,000 foreigners would be eligible to apply for work permits under the new rule in the first year -- and 55,000 annually thereafter. DHS said the move "should also support the U.S. economy" and would "bring U.S. immigration policies more in line with those laws of other countries that compete to attract similar highly skilled workers."

OBAMA AND WELFARE POLICY

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Obama's Mushrooming Welfare State

From 2008 to 2011, federal welfare assistance (in America's 79 means-tested federal welfare programs) grew by 32%, from $563.413 billion to $745.84 billion annually. According to Heritage Foundation Senior Research Fellow Robert Rector, the spike in federal welfare spending during Obama’s first two years in office was two-and-a-half times greater than any previous increase in American history, after adjusting for inflation.

According to a CNS News report, “Obama’s spending proposals call for the largest increases in welfare benefits in U.S. history ... a spending total of $10.3 trillion over the next decade on various welfare programs. These include cash payments, food, housing, Medicaid and various social services for low-income Americans ...”

Obama Has Long Opposed Welfare Reform

When he was an Illinois state senator in 1996, Obama spoke from the floor against implementing the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), which was ultimately passed by Congress and signed into law by President Bill Clinton. That welfare-reform bill placed certain limitations on how long a household could continue to receive benefits, and instituted a work requirement designed to move people off the welfare rolls and into paying jobs. Ultimately, PRWORS reduced the number of households participating in the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFCDC) program by 60%, from 5.1 million to 2 million.

Upon joining the U.S. Senate in January 2005, Obama quickly set out to undermine the welfare-reform law. Consider that in 2005, Congress closed a loophole that had permitted some states to circumvent the legislation by defining as “work” such activities as bed rest, personal care activities, massage, exercise, journaling, motivational reading, smoking cessation, weight loss promotion, participation in parent-teacher meetings, or helping friends or family with household tasks and errands. Obama strongly objected to the closure of that loophole.

Ending the Work Requirements for Welfare

On July 12, 2012, President Obama's Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) issued a policy directive eliminating the federal work requirements that were the essential ingredient of the 1996 welfare-reform bill (PRWORA). Thus did Obama promote the further expansion of the American welfare state.

Illegal Aliens Who Have Never Paid Taxes Are Now Eligible for Federal Tax "Refunds"

On February 11, 2015, IRS Commissioner John Koskinen told Congress that even illegal immigrants who had never previously paid taxes would be able to claim back-refunds of the Earned Income Tax Credit – which allows even people with no tax liability to get money from the government – once they received Social Security numbers under President Obama's executive action on deportation. "Under the new program, if you get a Social Security number and you work, you'll be eligible to apply for the Earned Income Tax Credit," said Koskinen. This would be the case even "if you did not file" taxes, he elaborated, as long as the illegal immigrant could demonstrate that he or she had worked off-the-books during those years.

According to a Washington Times report: “That expands the universe of people eligible for the tax credit by millions. [Koskinen] said only about 700,000 illegal immigrants currently work and pay taxes using an Individual Taxpayer Identification Number, but as many as 4 million illegal immigrants could get a stay of deportation and work permits under the temporary amnesty, which would mean they would be eligible to claim back-refunds if they worked those years.”

OBAMA AND THE CONSTITUTION / SUPREME COURT

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The Constitution As a “Living Document”

In his 2006 book The Audacity of Hope, Obama expresses his belief that the U.S. Constitution is a living document (subject to constant reinterpretation and change), and states that, as President, he would not appoint a strict constructionist (a Justice who seeks to apply the text as it is written and without further inference) to the Supreme Court: “When we get in a tussle, we appeal to the Founding Fathers and the Constitution’s ratifiers to give direction. Some, like Justice Scalia, conclude that the original understanding must be followed and if we obey this rule, democracy is respected. Others, like Justice Breyer, insist that sometimes the original understanding can take you only so far—that on the truly big arguments, we have to take context, history, and the practical outcomes of a decision into account. I have to side with Justice Breyer’s view of the Constitution—that it is not a static but rather a living document and must be read in the context of an ever-changing world.”

Emphasis on a Justice's “Heart” and on Helping “the Weak,” Rather Than on Abiding by the Law

When President Bush in 2005 nominated John Roberts to be Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, then-Senator Obama stated that few Supreme Court cases involve any controversy at all, “so that both a [conservative like] Scalia and a [leftist like] Ginsburg will arrive at the same place most of the time on those 95 percent of cases.” In the other 5 percent, he said, “the critical ingredient” was neither the law nor the Constitution says, but rather “what is in the judge’s heart.” Obama said in a floor speech on September 22, 2005: “[W]hen I examined Judge Roberts’ record and history of public service, it is my personal estimation that he has far more often used his formidable skills on behalf of the strong in opposition to the weak ... he seemed to have consistently sided with those who were dismissive of efforts to eradicate the remnants of racial discrimination in our political process … he seemed dismissive of concerns that it is harder to make it in this world and in this economy when you are a woman rather than a man.”

Obama was also “deeply troubled” by “the philosophy, ideology and record” of yet another Bush nominee to the Supreme Court, Samuel Alito. “[W]hen you look at his record,” Obama said in a floor speech on January 26, 2006, “when it comes to his understanding of the Constitution, I found that in almost every case he consistently sides on behalf of the powerful against the powerless.”

Explaining the criteria by which he would appoint judges to the federal bench, presidential candidate Obama declared: “We need somebody who's got the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it's like to be a young teenage mom, the empathy to understand what it's like to be poor or African-American or gay or disabled or old—and that's the criterion by which I'll be selecting my judges.”

Obama Appoints Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court (May 2009)

In her college yearbook, Sotomayor selected, as her special quotation, the following statement of Norman Thomas, who ran for U.S. president six times on the Socialist Party ticket: “I am not a champion of lost causes, but of causes not yet won.”

In the early 1990s, Sotomayor spoke publicly and proudly about the role that affirmative action (racial and ethnic preferences) had played in her educational background: “I am a product of affirmative action. I am the perfect affirmative action baby. I am Puerto Rican ... I was accepted rather readily at Princeton, and equally as fast at Yale. But my test scores were not comparable to that of my classmates, and that's been shown by statistics, there are reasons for that. There are cultural biases built into testing, and that was one of the motivations for the concept of affirmative action, to try to balance out those effects.”

In 1998 the Family Research Council named Sotomayor as the recipient of its Court Jester Award, mocking her decision to extend the application of the Americans With Disabilities Act to a woman who had cited her own inability to read as the “handicap” that caused her to fail the New York State bar exam several times.

In 2001 Sotomayor gave a speech at UC Berkeley, during which she suggested, approvingly, that making the federal bench more “diverse”—in terms of ethnicity, race, gender, or sexual orientation—“will have an effect on the development of the law and on judging.”

Refuting the notion that judges should not permit personal traits (race, gender, ethnicity) to influence their legal decisions, Sotomayor said: “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.” This assertion by Sotomayor was not an isolated incident. Indeed, she delivered multiple speeches between 1994 and 2003 in which she suggested “a wise Latina woman” or “wise woman” judge might “reach a better conclusion” than a male judge.

Sotomayor is a member of the National Council of La Raza, which favors mass immigration and ever-increasing rights for illegal immigrants. Awash in a victim mentality, she describes Latinos as one of America’s “economically deprived populations” which, like “all minority and women’s groups,” are filled with people “who don’t make it in our society at all.” Attributing those failures to inequities inherent in American life, Sotomayor affirms her commitment to “serving the underprivileged of our society” by promoting affirmative action and other policies designed to help those who “face enormous challenges.”

In a 2005 panel discussion for law students, Sotomayor said that a “court of appeals is where policy is made”—a candid rejection of the long-accepted principle that a judge's proper role is to interpret the law rather than to create it. Then, remembering that the event was being recorded, Sotomayor added immediately: “And I know—I know this is on tape, and I should never say that because we don’t make law. I know. O.K. I know. I’m not promoting it. I’m not advocating it. I’m—you know.”

Sotomayor is an advocate of legal realism, which the Traditional Values Coalition (TVC) describes as a judicial philosophy that is “diametrically opposed to the concept of strict construction/originalism as advocated by conservative legal thinkers and judges.” TVC adds that according to legal realism: “[J]udges should do more than interpret the law or look to the original intent of the writers of the law or the Constitution. Judges should bring in outside influences from social sciences, psychology and politics, plus their own views, to craft the law….” Suggesting that the public wrongly expects “the law to be static and predictable,” Sotomayor contends that courts and lawyers are “constantly overhauling the laws and adapting it [sic] to the realities of ever-changing social, industrial and political conditions.”

Obama Appoints Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court (May 2010)

A week after Ronald Reagan’s presidential victory in November 1980, Kagan, who was then a student at Princeton University, wrote in the campus newspaper that her immediate “gut response” to Reagan's election had been to conclude “that the world had gone mad, that liberalism was dead, and that there was no longer any place for the ideals we held or the beliefs we espoused.” Soon thereafter Kagan predicted, with a hopeful spirit, that “the next few years will be marked by American disillusionment with conservative programs and solutions, and that a new, revitalized, perhaps more leftist left will once again come to the fore.”

The following year, Kagan penned her senior thesis—titled “To the Final Conflict: Socialism in New York City, 1900-1933”—wherein she lamented that “a coherent socialist movement is nowhere to be found in the United States”; that “Americans are more likely to speak of … capitalism’s glories than of socialism’s greatness”; and that “the desire to conserve has overwhelmed the urge to alter.” Kagan called these developments “sad” and “chastening” for “those who, more than half a century after socialism’s decline, still wish to change America.”

As a young lawyer, Kagan clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, whom she now identifies as her hero. Regarding affirmative action, Marshall infamously told fellow Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, “You [white] guys have been practicing discrimination for years. Now it's our [blacks'] turn.”

In one of her legal writings, Kagan cited Thurgood Marshall's assertion that the Constitution, “as originally drafted and conceived,” was “defective.” This view is consistent with President Obama's contention that the Constitution “is not a static but rather a living document and must be read in the context of an ever-changing world.” Kagan has also quoted Justice Marshall saying that the Supreme Court's mission is to “show a special solicitude for the despised and the disadvantaged,” rather than simply to interpret the law.

In an article she wrote for the University of Chicago Law Review, Kagan indicated that there could be instances where the government might justifiably interfere with the right to free speech: “If there is an ‘overabundance’ of an idea in the absence of direct governmental action—which there well might be when compared with some ideal state of public debate—then action disfavoring that idea might ‘un-skew,’ rather than skew, public discourse.” This position has profound implications as regards the future of conservative talk radio.

Kagan served under President Clinton in various capacities. During her years in the Clinton White House, she supported race preferences in the form of affirmative action.

During her tenure as dean at Harvard Law School, Kagan co-signed a letter urging the Senate not to adopt an amendment that would have protected the White House from lawsuits filed by foreign terrorists charging that their “constitutional rights” had been violated by American law-enforcement and intelligence authorities.

In 2006, Kagan instituted three new courses to the required curriculum at Harvard Law. One of these courses focuses on public international law; another deals with international economic law and multinational financial transactions; the third is a comparative law class whose purpose is to “introduce students to one or more legal systems outside our own, to the borrowing and transmission of legal ideas across borders, and to a variety of approaches to substantive and procedural law that are rooted in distinct cultures and traditions.” While adding these three required courses, Kagan eliminated a requirement for students to take at least one constitutional law class at any time during their legal education.

OBAMA AND ABORTION

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Obama's Stance on Abortion

During his years as a state and federal legislator, Obama consistently voted in favor of expanding abortion rights and the funding of abortion services with taxpayer dollars. Says author David Freddoso, “I could find no instance in his entire career in which he voted for any regulation or restriction on the practice of abortion.”

In July 2006 Obama voted against a bill stipulating that the parents of minor girls who get out-of-state abortions must be notified of their daughters' actions. In March 2008 he voted against a bill prohibiting minors from crossing state lines to gain access to abortion services. That same month, he voted “No” on defining an unborn child as a human being eligible for the State Children's Health Insurance Program.

On July 17, 2007, Obama declared: “The first thing I'd do as President is sign the Freedom of Choice Act.” This bill would have effectively terminated all state restrictions on government funding for abortions. It would also have invalidated state laws that protected medical personnel from losing their jobs if they refused to participate in abortion procedures.

Obama's Support for Planned Parenthood

The largest abortion provider in the United States, Planned Parenthood in 2008 alone was responsible for 324,008 abortions, as compared to just 2,405 adoption referrals. This ratio was representative of the organization's activities in most years.

On July 17, 2007, Obama thanked Planned Parenthood for “the outstanding work” it was doing “for women all across the country and for families all across the country.... I put Roe at the center of my lesson plan on reproductive freedom when I taught Constitutional Law. Not simply as a case about privacy but as part of the broader struggle for women’s equality.”

During an April 26, 2013 speech to Planned Parenthood, Obama said: “As long as we’ve got to fight to make sure women have access to quality, affordable health care, and as long as we’ve got to fight to protect a woman’s right to make her own choices about her own health, I want you to know that you’ve also got a president who’s going to be right there with you, fighting every step of the way. Thank you, Planned Parenthood. God bless you.”

Obama and Partial-Birth Abortion

When Obama was a state senator in 1997, two separate “partial-birth abortion” bans came up for consideration. On both occasions Obama voted “present,” the functional equivalent of a vote against the ban. The term “partial-birth abortion” refers to a procedure where the abortionist maneuvers the baby into a breech (feet-first) delivery position, permits the baby's entire body to exit the birth canal except for its head, and then uses scissors to puncture the baby's brain and kill it (while the head is still inside the mother).

In 2000, Obama voted against a bill that would have ended state funding for partial-birth abortions.

A Legalized Form of Infanticide

In 2002 Obama voted against the Induced Infant Liability Act, which would have protected babies that somehow survived late-term abortion procedures. The Act twice came up in the Judiciary Committee on which Obama served. At its first reading he voted “present,” the functional equivalent of voting against it. At the second reading, he voted “No.” The bill was then referred to the senate’s Health and Human Services Committee, which Obama chaired after 2003. As chairman, he chose never to call the bill up for a vote.

Obama Strikes Down Rule that Prohibited U.S. Funding of Abortion Clinics Overseas

On January 23, 2009—the day after the 36th anniversary of the famous Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision—President Obama struck down a rule that had prohibited U.S. money from being used to fund international family-planning clinics that either promote abortion or provide referrals to abortion services. Stating that such restrictions on funding had been used as a “political wedge issue,” the President said that he had “no desire to continue this stale and fruitless debate.”

Obama Issues Edict Forcing Religious Healthcare Providers to Violate Their Own Views on Abortion and Contraception

In January 2012 the Obama administration issued an edict mandating that religious hospitals, schools, charities, and other health and social service providers give their employees health-insurance plans covering contraception, abortifacient pills, and sterilizations—even if those things were in violation of the employers' moral or religious codes. Critics pointed out that Obama's edict violated the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment.

On February 10, 2012, the Obama administration, reacting to harsh public criticism, announced that: “If a woman works for religious employers with objections to providing contraceptive services as part of its health plan, the religious employer will not be required to provide contraception coverage but her insurance company will be required to offer contraceptive care free of charge.”

According to pro-life Rep. Chris Smith: “The so-called new policy is the discredited old policy, dressed up to look like something else It remains a serious violation of religious freedom. Only the most naive or gullible would accept this as a change in policy.... The White House Fact Sheet is riddled with doublespeak and contradiction. It states, for example, that religious employers ‘will not’ have to pay for abortion pills, sterilization and contraception, but their ‘insurance companies’ will. Who pays for the insurance policy? The religious employer.”

Eric Scheidler of the Pro-Life Action League stated that the new rule amounted to a “shell game.” “At the end of the day, religious employers are still required to provide insurance plans that offer free contraceptives, sterilizations and abortifacients in violation of their moral tenets,” he said.

43 Catholic Organizations Sue the Obama Administration

In May 2012, a total of 43 plaintiffs filed 12 separate federal lawsuits against the Obama administration, challenging the constitutionality of its mandate that religious entities must purchase insurance policies covering contraception and abortion-related procedures.

OBAMA AND EDUCATION

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More Taxpayer Expenditures As the “Solution” to All Schooling-Related Problems

In his 2008 presidential campaign, Obama stressed the importance of increasing government expenditures on public education. “We're going to put more money into education than we have,” he said. “We have to invest in human capital.”

Obama’s education plan called for “investing” $10 billion annually in a comprehensive “Zero to Five” plan that would “provide critical supports to young children and their parents.” These funds would be used to “create or expand high-quality early care and education programs for pregnant women and children from birth to age five”; to “quadruple the number of eligible children for Early Head Start”; to “ensure [that] all children have access to pre-school”; to “provide affordable and high-quality child care that will … ease the burden on working families”; to allow “more money” to be funneled “into after-school programs”; and to fund “home visiting programs [by health-care personnel] to all low-income, first-time mothers.”

Consider Obama's perspective on the low graduation rates of nonwhite minorities: “Latinos have such a high dropout rate. What you see consistently are children at a very early age are starting school already behind. That’s why I’ve said that I’m going to put billions of dollars into early childhood education that makes sure that our African-American youth, Latino youth, poor youth of every race, are getting the kind of help that they need so that they know their numbers, their colors, their letters.”

Obama's stimulus package included approximately $100 billion for education.

In Reality, More Money Does Not Buy Better Education

American taxpayers have already been spending $600 billion per year on public elementary and secondary schools, with average per-pupil expenditures nationwide approaching $11,000 annually. In the District of Columbia, the per-pupil spending figure is over $16,000 per year—among the highest for any city in the United States. Yet DC’s public schools are the worst in the country, as measured by student scores. Detroit likewise spends about $16,000 yearly on the education of each public school pupil. Yet, when tested, fourth- and eighth-graders in that city’s public schools read at a level that is 73% below the national average. In Trenton, New Jersey, whose population is more than 80% black and Hispanic, the government spends some $20,663 per public school pupil, while the citywide high-school graduation rate is a mere 41%. And in Camden, New Jersey, where nearly 90% of all residents are black or Hispanic, the city spends roughly $16,000 per pupil, yet only 38.6% of the city's public school children ever obtain a high-school diploma.

Obama Opposes School Voucher Programs

President Obama opposes voucher programs designed to permit parents to divert a portion of their tax liabilities away from the public-school system, and to use those funds instead to help cover the tuition costs for private schools to which they might prefer to send their children.

Obama's opposition to vouchers is consistent with the stance of the 3.2 million-member National Education Association (NEA) and the 1.5 million-member American Federation of Teachers (AFT). These unions rank among the most powerful political forces in the United States. The NEA, for instance, employs a larger number of political organizers than the Republican and Democratic National Committees combined. Of the $59 million in combined campaign donations which the NEA and AFT have made during the past two decades, more than $56 million (i.e., 95%) has gone to Democrats. That figure represents merely the tip of the proverbial iceberg, for it does not include expenditures on such politically oriented initiatives as television ads or get-out-the-vote efforts.

OBAMA AND GUN RIGHTS

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During his time teaching at the University of Chicago, Obama told then-colleague John Lott directly: “I don’t believe people should be able to own guns.”

As a candidate for the Illinois State Senate in 1996, Obama promised to support a ban on “the manufacture, sale & possession of handguns.”

In 1998 Obama supported a ban on the sale of all semi-automatic guns.

While running for the U.S. Senate in 2004, Obama spoke in favor of federal legislation to block citizens nationwide from receiving concealed-carry permits. “National legislation will prevent other states’ flawed concealed-weapons laws from threatening the safety of Illinois residents,” he said.

That same year (2004), Obama spoke in favor of banning gun sales within five miles of a school or park, which would have effectively shut down almost all gun stores.

Senator Obama supported Washington, DC's comprehensive gun ban, which prevented district residents from possessing handguns even in their own homes; required that long guns be kept locked and disassembled; and lacked a provision allowing the guns to be reassembled in the event of an emergency.

OBAMA AND ACORN: A CORRUPT, UNHOLY ALLIANCE

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Obama Worked for ACORN

In the early 1990s, Barack Obama worked for Project Vote, the voter-mobilization arm of the pro-socialist community organization ACORN. Moreover, Obama was the attorney for ACORN's lead election-law cases, and he worked as a trainer at ACORN's annual conferences, where he taught members of the organization the art of radical community organizing.

“All of You [Will] Help Us Shape the Agenda”

During his 2008 presidential campaign, Obama was a featured speaker at one particularly notable political event in which ACORN played a prominent role—a December 1, 2007 forum exclusively for thousands of community organizers from across the United States. He was introduced to the crowd by Deepak Bhargava, ACORN's leader of community reinvestment and fair housing. In his introductory remarks, Bhargava characterized America as “a society that is still deeply structured by racism and sexism.” In his subsequent remarks, Obama said: “[B]efore I even get inaugurated, during the transition we're gonna be calling all of you in to help us shape the agenda. We're gonna be having meetings all across the country with community organizations so that you have input into the agenda for the next presidency of the United States of America.”

“I've Always Been a Partner with ACORN”

In a 2007 interview with ACORN representatives, candidate Obama said the following: “You know you've got a friend in me. And I definitely welcome ACORN's input. You don't have to ask me about that. I'm going to call you even if you didn't ask me.... When I ran Project Vote, the voter registration drive in Illinois, ACORN was smack dab in the middle of it.... Once I was elected, there wasn't a campaign that ACORN worked on down in Springfield that I wasn't right there with you.... Since I have been in the United States Senate I've been always a partner with ACORN as well.... I've been fighting with ACORN, along side ACORN, on issues you care about my entire career.”

ACORN and Corruption in Obama's 2008 Campaign

Obama's 2008 presidential campaign furnished the ACORN affiliate Project Vote with a list of donors who had already contributed (to the campaign) the maximum amount of money permitted by law. Anita Moncrief, a former Washington, DC staffer for Project Vote, later revealed that her organization had contacted these big donors and urged them to give money to Project Vote—money which could then be funneled directly into the Obama campaign coffers, thereby evading election-law limits on campaign contributions.

Obama's 2008 presidential campaign paid more than $800,000 to an ACORN front group known as Citizens' Services Inc, whose headquarters were located at precisely the same address as ACORN's national headquarters in New Orleans, Louisiana, for voter-registration services.

As the 2008 presidential campaigns progressed, ACORN began to make headlines for two major reasons. First, the organization was under investigation in 14 separate states for massive voter-registration fraud. Strongly pro-Democrat, ACORN claimed to have registered 4 million new voters during the preceding four years. Many tens of thousands of these registrations already had been found to be fraudulent—they bore phony names, fake or nonexistent addresses, inaccurate personal information, duplicate signatures, etc. The full extent of the fraud, however, was impossible to determine.

Obama Deceptively Minimizes His Ties to ACORN

In an October 15, 2008 presidential debate, Republican John McCain raised the issue of Obama’s ties to ACORN. Obama replied to McCain as follows: “The only involvement I’ve had with ACORN was I represented them alongside the U.S. Justice Department in making Illinois implement a motor voter law that helped people get registered at DMVs.”

Obama also stated that his presidential campaign had not used ACORN's voter-registration services—deceptively omitting the fact that it had paid $800,000+ to the ACORN subsidiary Citizens' Services Inc. for voter-registration services.

OBAMA & THE POLICIES THAT LED TO THE HOUSING & ECONOMIC CRISIS

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Obama Litigates in Favor of Pressuring Banks to Make Risky Loans to Minorities

In 1993, attorney Barack Obama took a job as a litigator of employment and voting-rights cases with the law firm Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Galland. In a 1994 class action lawsuit known as Buycks-Roberson v. Citibank, Obama and his fellow Davis Miner lawyers represented ACORN in pressuring Citibank to make more mortgage loans to marginally qualified black applicants.

As author Jerome Corsi points out: “ACORN Housing, then a nationwide organization with offices in more than 30 cities, used the Citibank litigation to push the group’s radical agenda to get subprime homebuyers mortgages under the most favorable terms available.”

Four years later, a beleaguered Citibank—anxious to put an end to the incessant smears (charging racism) that Obama and his fellow litigators were hurling in its direction (to say nothing of its mounting legal bills)—settled the case by agreeing to increase its lending to minority applicants who failed to meet traditional loan criteria. Thus was a veneer of legal legitimacy given to the disastrous lending practices that eventually mushroomed into the subprime-mortgage debacle and, ultimately, the housing-market crisis of 2008—a crisis Obama blamed largely on the “greed” of Wall Street bankers and the excesses of free market capitalism.

Obama's stance in favor of lending practices like those promoted in Buycks-Roberson were consistent with the dictates of the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA). Put in place by the Carter administration in 1977 and reinforced aggressively by the Clinton administration in the early 1990s, the CRA mandated that banks, in the spirit of “social justice,” make special efforts to seek out and lend to mortgage applicants—particularly nonwhite minorities—who failed to meet traditional loan criteria. As Forbes magazine points out, “Obama has been a staunch supporter of the CRA throughout his public life.”

Obama commonly takes issue with opponents who would prefer to permit the banking industry to function without a meddlesome federal government forcing it to engage in lending practices that defy common sense. He routinely accuses those adversaries of seeking to repeat “the same policies that got us into this mess in the first place.” But in fact, the policies that created the “mess” were precisely those government-imposed measures that Obama himself supported.