The Obama-Holder Justice Department: The Last Refuge for Lawless Leftists

Note: This first appeared in the Daily Caller.

The Justice Department has been perhaps the worst wing of the Barack Obama Administration anti-capitalism, corrupt, Crony Socialist nightmare mess.

Attorney General Eric (With)Holder has been an uber-Leftist-on-parade, and a stonewall on any number of investigations – leading to the very real possibility of Contempt of Congress charges.

And Holder obstructs more than justice.  Any chance he has to impede the free market – he readily takes.

One gi-normous example of this was the AT&T-T-Mobile merger – a free market transaction between two willing private companies. And the Holder Justice Department sued to block it – a key component of an all-out Leftist-Administration blockade.

Which worked. After over a year of being dragged behind the government locomotive, AT&T and T-Mobile withdrew their merger application.

Leftists revel in this Holder-Justice anti-free market hyper-activity – and want to exploit it even further.  On, for instance, Network Neutrality.

Net Neutrality has been for the Left an abysmal policy failure.

They tried to build a grassroots coalition for it. Fail.

They tried to get Congress to pass a bill implementing it – the one legal way to impose it. Fail.

They tried in 2007 to have the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) illegally ram it through. Fail.

They then in 2010 tried to have the FCC exact the same illegal damage…again. Which is a looming Fail – lawsuits are filed to dump it, and almost everyone thinks it will again go down.

The Obama Administration’s Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC) forced companies to have Net Neutrality Board of Director votes.  Big Time Fail.

So where do Internet domination-seeking Leftists – having been again and again stymied by the Constitution, the rule of law and basic common sense – now turn?

Why, the Barack Obama-Eric Holder Justice Department of course.

The U.S. Department of Justice has opened a “wide-ranging” investigation into whether cable, satellite and telecom providers are stifling fast-growing internet video services like Netflix, according to multiple reports. The probe carries echoes of recent battles over so-called “network neutrality,” the idea that broadband providers shouldn’t discriminate against rival services.

A “‘wide-ranging’ investigation” – that surely won’t have a deleterious effect on these “broadband giants” doing business.  In a sector that has grown to be 1/6th of our entire national economy. Right?  Not so much.

Already the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division has jolted another fast-growing Internet industry, e-book publishing, by bringing a lawsuit alleging that publishers and Apple Inc. colluded to fix prices.

The Justice Department and the Left are in fact on an all-encompassing anti-capitalism fishing expedition.

Another issue that investigators have asked about is whether cable companies are acting anti-competitively by making viewers have a cable subscription before being able to access certain online programming…

The Justice Department also is investigating the contracts that programmers sign in order to be distributed on cable systems.

Basically the entire Tech sector is again being forced to dedicate thousands of man-hours and millions of dollars to dealing with this latest titanic government overreach.

Man-hours and dollars that could be much better spent working to make our free speech-free market broadband Xanadu even better.

And there’s no inconsistency whatsoever when the Left forces these companies to waste these millions of dollars and man-hours – and then complains that their prices are too high.

One almost gets the sense that the entire Leftist cadre thinks their jig is soon up – ending, say, somewhere on or about January 20. And that they are trying to get in under the gun as much regulatory ridiculousness as possible.

Their economy-crushing inanity cannot end soon enough.