Obama Moves To Raise Taxes On Cell-Phone Users — Without Congress

seize any opportunity I can find to work with Congress to strengthen the middle class, improve their prospects, improve their security. But where Congress is unwilling to act, I will take whatever administrative steps that I can in order to do right by the American people.

The latest such idea is unilaterally to levy a federal fee (traditionally known in America as a “tax”) on mobile phone users in order to pay for “high-speed Internet access in schools that would allow students to use digital notebooks and teachers to customize lessons like never before.” As the Standard Examiner notes, the program, named “ConnectEd,”

is a case study in how Obama is trying to accomplish a second-term legacy despite Republican opposition in Congress.

“It’s got a lot of the characteristics of big-vision policy that you really don’t get through legislation anymore,” said Rob Nabors, White House deputy chief of staff, who is coordinating executive actions.

Dilate on this phrase for a moment: “Big-vision policy that you really don’t get through legislation anymore.” Rob Nabors probably doesn’t know how right he is. Typically in America, when presidents cannot get the legislation they want through the peculiarly named “legislative” branch, that legislation remains unpassed. But, as George Will observed this morning in masterly fashion, this is apparently of little consequence to a man whose “increasingly grandiose claims for presidential power” rest upon the novel conceit that the structure of the republic retains its integrity only if its institutions agree to do what the incumbent president considers imperative.

Read More at National Review . By Charles C.W. Cooke.