National Review Online posted an article today about the treatment of Governor Jindal and the people of Louisiana by the Obama Administration. There have been a number of incidents in recent years that form a pattern of political vindictiveness against the state and its governor.
The article reminds us of the beginning of the problem:
First, though, consider the litany of Obama’s abusive treatment of Louisiana; the Bayou State is surely the jurisdiction most victimized by the Obamite combination of wrath and pettiness. It began early, after Jindal’s (poorly received) 2009 State of the Union response, which represented the first major high-profile critique of Obama’s gauzy new administration. Clearly, Jindal got under Obama’s skin.
President Obama and his administration are known for taking measures to get even with the real or imagined enemies.
The article further reports:
Just two months later, the Obama team was notoriously slow to respond to the massive Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Among a host of mistakes documented by a national commission on the disaster were clearly politicized decisions on numerous fronts, including on the allocation of oil-containing booms. Worse (and despite some media fact-check reports to the contrary), the Obama bureaucracy kept obstacles in place that blocked specialized foreign skimmers from helping to contain the spill — in part, it seems, to placate American unions.
The article continues, citing examples of the Obama Administration’s blocking the school voucher program Governor Jindal had proposed to help Louisiana’s failing schools, blocking the Keystone Pipeline, which would help Louisiana’s economy, and refusing to provide fairly routine Stafford Act relief to Louisiana’s storm victims after Hurricane Isaac in 2012. However, the latest example of this harassment is simply unconscionable.
Governor Jindal has been working to reform Louisiana’s system of ‘charity hospitals’ for years. In 2012 the federal government cut the percentage of some federal matching funds. Governor Jindal responded to that by setting up a system that leased the hospitals to private managers.
The article reports the results of that decision:
In less than a year, the hospitals opened more beds for the mentally ill and in emergency rooms, provided more advanced technology for cancer screening and other care, and began improving services across the board. Already the Jindal reforms were providing proof of his (and other conservatives’) longstanding contention that state innovation could do far more to deliver better care, more efficiently, than a centrally regulated federal behemoth can.
The Obama Administration’s response? Try to shut that system down. Please read the article for further details.
The article concludes:
The message from Obamaville goes out: Cross us, and anybody in your orbit, even low-income medical patients, will suffer.
The good news for Louisiana is that the state has a good chance, on appeal, eventually to win approval of its hospital leases. For the rest of the country, this year and in 2016, the appeal for relief must come through the ballot box.
This should be a wake-up call to American voters. It’s not a presidential election–it’s a mid-term election, but we need to elect people who will check the power of the Executive Branch of government. If we don’t, we will have tyranny.