It seems that Dick Morris and I share the same take on Obama’s next moves: moving farther to the Left and ruling by Executive Order. Morris takes it farther than I, though, and speculates on the next moves in specific:

Does President Obama plan to move to the center in response to his overwhelming rejection at the polls on Nov. 2? No way! Instead, he is moving to implement, through executive action, two of the most controversial items in his 2010 agenda — a carbon tax and pollution permit system and a ban on the use of secret ballots in union elections.

Through executive action by the Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) and the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the Obama administration is planning to effectuate both policies without asking Congress.

Source

This is credible. He has already asked the EPA to do this, so I think we will see implementation of this next year. Morris goes into detail about what impact this will have on the US Economy:

The EPA is currently soliciting public comments for its plan to use the Clean Air Act of 1970 to regulate carbon dioxide emissions. The Clean Air Act, as the name indicates, is designed to fight against pollution — unhealthy chemicals that are belched into the air by smokestacks. It was passed to fight sulfur dioxide, particulates, nitrous oxides and other chemicals that cause human diseases. To use it to fight carbon dioxide — which we all breathe without ill effects — because of concerns about global warming is a perversion of the law.

Worse, because the Clean Air Act is designed to protect public health by measuring aggregate pollution in each geographic area, it limits economic development in communities where the pollution levels exceed prescribed standards. But carbon dioxide doesn’t poison anyone. It makes no sense to ban factory expansion in areas where the nature of the industries is that there will be high carbon dioxide levels (like oil area of Texas and Louisiana). But that’s what the EPA plans to do, virtually making economic growth illegal in large parts of the United States.

This is bad. We know the Obama Administration has no problem killing jobs. We saw that with the moratorium on offshore drilling that devistated the economy of the Gulf Coast. It will take far longer to get over the effects of the moritoriu than it will the effects of the BP oil spill. Those rigs that moved for friendlier waters will not be coming back soon.

As bad as this is, Obama has more planned. According to Morris (who usually has pretty good sources for this kind of thing) Obama intends to use executive power to implement the infamopus “Card Check” Union voting system that does away with secret ballots on Unionization issues:

Meanwhile, Craig Becker, the former chief counsel of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) — now the head of the NLRB — has secured a 3-2 party line majority to repeal the Dana decision, which mandates secret ballots in unionization elections. The NLRB will rule that if a majority of workers check off that they want a union on cards, then the union will automatically be approved without a secret ballot vote of the entire workforce.

Currently, if a majority of the workers sign the cards, a secret ballot vote is then triggered. Frequently, the union loses these elections, proving that the card check-off is subject to coercion and bullying. The Democratic majority in the Senate wouldn’t approve the card check change, so the NLRB is planning to accomplish the same objective administratively, trapping workers into unionization they would reject if afforded the opportunity to vote by secret ballot.

What are the results of these two measures? Fewer jobs in America. Obama is trying to get our unemployment rate up, because we know how awful it is to have it this low. At least we aren’t in the Awful Bush Years when unemployment was under 5%. Now that was terrible.

Morris predicts dire consequences for Obama from these actions:

Obama will live to regret these moves. Republicans in the House will de-fund these actions and insert legislative language making it a crime to spend appropriated funds to implement them. By this strategy, all of the controversial Obama legislation will be at issue during the budget fight — taxes, Obamacare, cap and trade and card check. The more these issues are inserted into the budget fight, the greater the chances of Republican victory.

I don’t agree here. The Republicans only control the House. They don’t control the Senate, and they don’t have veto-proof majorities in either house. To actually over-rule an Executive Order, it requires a law to pass both Chambers, which the President will then veto (he wouldn’t have issued the EO if he wasn’t going to defend it), and then both houses have to override that veto. That is not possible in the current congress. As for Morris’ scenario of passing legislation defunding these measures, these again have to pass both Houses (can you really see the Senate doing this? I can’t), and weather the threat of a Presidential veto. I don’t think it is realistic to expect the Republicans to be able to pull that off. They simply do not have sufficient control of the Legislature to do it. Thus, unless Obama alienates enough Democrats to make such a strategy viable, Obama’s Orders will stand as the law of the land for at least two years.

I do agree with Morris on this:

So President Obama has not learned the lessons of 2010 and likely never will.

The question is, have the 23 Democrats up for re-election from Red States in 2012 learned the lesson of 2010? The fate of the nation, for the next two years at least, may resto on the answer to that question.