To Save America: Stopping Obama's Secular-Socialist Machine by Newt Gingrich

particularly troubling considering the administration’s attempts shortly thereafter to convert TARP recipients’ preferred stock into common stock, which would give the government voting rights on the banks’ management or policy.
    Finally, who can forget the administration’s war against FOX News? As opposition grew to their efforts to nationalize healthcare, administration officials began calling on other news organizations to shun FOX for producing, as then-White House communications director Anita Dunn put it, “opinion journalism masquerading as news.” The White House even refused to provide guests to FOX News Sunday for having the temerity to fact-check assertions made by administration officials. Other news organizations, rightly concluding they could be the next target, refused to ostracize FOX, and the administration eventually backed down.
    This wasn’t the first time Team Obama tried to intimidate a news program. In August 2008, the Obama campaign encouraged supporters to call and email a Chicago radio station—WGN AM—to protest the appearance on the station of conservative journalist Stanley Kurtz, who had been investigating Obama’s ties to former Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers.

HOLDING THE CONSTITUTION HOSTAGE
    Perhaps the worst example of the machine’s intimidation tactics is President Obama’s unconstitutional use of the Environmental Protection Agency to blackmail Congress into passing his cap-and-tax energy bill.
    In summer 2009, the House of Representatives narrowly passed the job-killing cap-and-trade energy tax bill. But because the bill needed sixty votes, including those of senators from coal producing states, it was obviously going nowhere in the Senate.

    So at the end of 2009, the administration tried to bully the Senate into passing the bill. They cited a 2007 Supreme Court ruling that the EPA could regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant under the Clean Air Act. The Bush Administration had refused to do so, realizing it would create a morass of new regulations and bureaucracy. But as the UN’s annual climate change conference began in Copenhagen on December 7, Obama’s EPA chief, Lisa Jackson, announced the EPA now considers six greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide and methane, dangerous to the environment and public health, and that the EPA would begin drawing up new regulations to arbitrarily reduce them.
    The announcement deliberately coincided with the climate change conference, which aims to establish an international treaty to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Of course, the president cannot implement a treaty by himself; he needs the approval of two-thirds of the U.S. Senate. So the EPA’s announcement was actually a threat to circumvent the Senate’s constitutional prerogatives. Obama was indicating he would commit the United States to carbon-cutting goals reached at Copenhagen, and if the Senate refused to approve a carbon-cutting treaty or to pass cap and trade, Obama would simply use the EPA to regulate carbon whether the Senate likes it or not.
    Senator John Kerry, a co-sponsor of the Senate cap-and-trade bill, aptly summed it up: “The message to Congress is crystal clear: get moving.”
    This is a breathtakingly anti-democratic and unconstitutional arrogation of power by the president. Even Democratic senator Jim Webb warned Obama in a public letter that “only specific legislation agreed upon in the Congress, or a treaty ratified by the Senate, could actually create such a commitment on behalf of our country.”
    But for a president trained to value the acquisition of power above all else, why let the Constitution obstruct that goal?

THE MACHINE’S MILLIONAIRE BACKERS
    Finally, no overview of the secular-socialist machine would be complete without acknowledging its key source of funding: a clique of left-wing millionaires operating outside the Democratic Party.
    A “shadow party,” as David Horowitz and Richard Poe coined it, was enabled by a