With at least three Obama administration scandals swirling in Washington, and perhaps more on the way, a number of opportunities “to do the things … you didn’t think were possible” have emerged—like moving a conservative agenda.

President Barack Obama’s agenda for the immediate future, and probably for the next three years, is dead. D-E-A-D. One reason he has survived this long is that the media have been so supportive—one might say “coddling.” No surprise, since major news executives have siblings working for the White House.

But that’s changing, probably because the media think they’ve been lied to, repeatedly. Plus now they know the Justice Department was scrutinizing the AP’s phone records.

Politico’s Jim Vandehei and Mike Allen just published a piece entitled “D.C. Turns on Obama.” That apparently includes the authors. They write, “Obama’s aloof mien and holier-than-thou rhetoric have left him with little reservoir of good will, even among Democrats.” And in the next paragraph they say, “This White House’s instinctive petulance, arrogance and defensiveness have all worked to isolate Obama at a time when he most needs a support system.”

Ouch! That’s not House Speaker John Boehner talking; that’s from journalists. “D.C. Turns” indeed.

That turning will suck almost all of the air out Washington for proceeding with Obama’s agenda—though in fairness, a number of pundits have emerged recently wondering if he even has a second term agenda.

And people who would normally back the president could begin looking for ways to oppose him. Even ethics-challenged Rep. Charlie Rangel is stepping it back.

All that scrum likely means a country without any policy direction, as the administration shifts to permanent damage control, which means conservatives have a chance to fill the policy agenda void. Here are some suggestions.

ObamaCare Repeal — The House is set to vote on repealing ObamaCare again. But this time, repeal proponents should stress that a vote for ObamaCare is a vote for the IRS tracking your health care. The IRS wants funding for nearly 2,000 full-time employees to ensure Americans are obeying ObamaCare. Just how extensive the agency’s new power and control will be was intentionally left vague in the legislation. (Update: Now we learn that the IRS person in charge of ObamaCare is the one who ran the office targeting conservative nonprofits.)

Very few politicians are going to want to expand the IRS’s size and power in the midst of news headlines about the agency’s abuse of power, which is exactly what ObamaCare does. This scandal creates an opportunity for some Democrats to agree that we need to end, or at the very least postpone, the legislation until Congress gets a handle on the scope of the IRS’s crimes and does something about it.

Tax Reform — There is bipartisan support for fundamental tax reform, and now is the perfect time to simplify the tax code by lowering rates and limiting tax breaks. A less-complicated tax system means fewer opportunities for tax agents to harass Americans.

And again, reformers need to stress that a vote for the status quo tax system is a vote of confidence in the IRS agents and management who perpetrated the unethical and possibly illegal targeting.

Entitlement Reform — There is some bipartisan support for entitlement reform, but it has been mostly nipping at the edges. Conservatives need to push forward with Rep. Paul Ryan’s bipartisan Medicare reform plan that expands on the current Medicare Advantage program already popular with more than a quarter of seniors.

And conservatives need to return to their roots on Social Security reform, by implementing a system of personal retirement accounts. Accounts could be small to begin with, perhaps allowing workers to set aside that 2 percentage points that were part of the “payroll tax holiday” in 2011 and 2012, but is now going to Social Security again.

The stock market is roaring and yet millions of Americans are excluded from the climb because they don’t have enough income left over to significantly fund a personal IRA. Personal retirement accounts have long been a key component of Republican entitlement reform. There’s no better time to reenergize that effort than when the market is up and Obama is down.

While Obama officials devote all of their time and effort trying to rescue their now-demolished promise that big government can be efficient, fair and truthful, conservatives should fill the policy void with proposals that will shrink the government and grow the economy. If successful, it could turn out that the worst thing for the Obama presidency is the best thing for the country.

It is well understood (though much less appreciated) that the American Founders wrote a Constitution and designed a system to limit the power of the federal government.

Less well understood is WHY they did so. Our Founders believed that the greatest threat to personal freedom was not from foreign governments, but rather from an oppressive domestic government. They did not design federalism and limited government because it was more efficient, or more productive, or more elegant. They did so because they simply didn’t trust government.

Our founders realized that, with a large, powerful, intrusive government, your freedom is only as secure as the virtue of whatever mid-level functionary whose path you are so unfortunate as to cross.

The latest example, of course, is the admission that the IRS actively discriminated against groups with a particular political viewpoint, in this case Tea Party and conservative groups. Every few hours, the scandal widens and the discrimination broadens. But if this is what they’ve admitted to up front, one can’t help but wonder what they are hiding.

Whether the abuses were committed by mid-level bureaucrats with an ax to grind or acting on orders from higher-ups is politically tantalizing, but not necessarily relevant to the observation that when we continually empower government agencies with more and more control over our lives, our freedom is in peril.

There are some immediate and obvious implications from having been reminded that we can’t trust the IRS:

• Compliance with our current complicated and intrusive tax code requires the submission of more and more personal financial information to the IRS. We cannot trust them to safeguard this information.  So the tax code must be simplified and migrated toward a consumption tax, which involves far less intrusive information demands upon taxpayers.
• Enlisting the IRS as the enforcement mechanism for Obamacare makes a bad thing much worse. The IRS will have access to at least some of your personal health information. This is unacceptable, and it’s further justification for outright repeal of the legislation.
• The IRS plan for a “real time tax system” and “return free” tax compliance, where the IRS has access to your personal financial information, computes your tax liability for you, and simply sends you a bill, is an affront to our system of voluntary tax compliance and should be rejected outright. The IRS has earned opprobrium, not trust.

Finally, it’s clear that the movement to limit the spending and power of the federal government is riling some powerful enemies within the Government Class, and they’ll use whatever power they have to fight back, whether it’s IRS harassment, purposely delaying flights, or releasing felons. Restoring some semblance of limited government is going to require stiff spines on the part of our elected leaders, and faithful engagement on the part of the citizenry.

In addition to sending $150 million to the states’ community health centers, including Michigan’s $3.75 million, to help them enroll people, Obama will be talking today about all the good things encapsulated in the more than 2,000 page act. He will particularly appeal to women and young Americans, his main base of support in the past two elections

For good reason. A recent poll conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation shows that overall, 57 percent of Americans do not believe they have enough information to make informed decisions in the new marketplace. A whopping 67 percent of the presently uninsured don’t believe they have enough information to sign up for the new program.

The ACA was ramrodded through a Democratic Congress in 2010 and signed by the president without so much as one vote from Republicans. And now that strategy is coming back to haunt the president. Without any Republican support, some GOP governors are refusing to play along with strategies they didn’t approve of in the first place. This is most significant in the setting up of insurance exchanges, a centerpiece of Obama’s legislation. Many states with GOP governors are letting the feds set up the state exchanges.

Other states have refused to go along with the expansion of Medicaid.

But some of the problems are self-inflicted. A program to cover people with pre-existing conditions has cost more than expected, causing it to be shut down to new enrollees, even though only a quarter of the people expected to sign up actually did.

This has caused Merrill Matthews, a resident scholar at the Institute for Policy Innovation in Dallas, Texas, to write for Forbes: “One of Obama’s primary justifications for demanding health care reform was to help the uninsurables get coverage, and he has closed that provision to new entrants.”

Insurers, too, once supporters, are backing away. According to Matthews, quoting Reuters, “In recent days, executives at the four largest U.S. health insurers say they are likely to sell insurance plans on less than a third of the exchanges, reluctant to venture out beyond the states where they already offer coverage.”

In addition to the uncertainties and problems cited above, there has been speculation by actuaries that health care premiums will increase, some as much as 100 percent.

Despite Americans’ trepidation, supporters are encouraged.

“We’re in the phase for the actual meat of the law to come online,” said Neera Tanden of the Center for American Progress, a liberal group aligned with the White House. “It’s important for the public to recognize that the law has tangible benefits to people so they feel comfortable enrolling.”

Still, Obama has a hard sell.

Baucus was referring to the implementation of ObamaCare: the missed deadlines, the confusion, and perhaps most importantly, the political fallout. But there are several other train wrecks, abject failures that have received little attention. And Republicans have had little or nothing to do with them.

Train Wreck No. 1 — Electronic health records, or EHRs, were supposed to create an electronic version of patients’ medical records that could be transferred from doctor to doctor or hospital to hospital, known as “interoperability.”

The Obama administration included $20 billion in the 2009 “stimulus bill” to promote the adoption of EHRs. Doctors and hospitals would be paid if they implemented EHRs in a “meaningful” way. The oft-repeated justification was that EHRs would save money—Obama cited an $81 billion savings that no one now believes—and improve the quality of care.

Well, the title of a January New York Times report reveals what many health policy experts predicted: “In Second Look, Few Savings from Digital Health Records.” As it turns out the only ones benefiting from EHRs are the companies that lobbied for the legislation, doubling some of those companies’ profits. As the Times points out, “the legislation has been a windfall to top executives at the leading health records companies.”

Had anyone taken the time to look at the VA and its hospital system, which has had versions of electronic health records for decades, they might have been a little less optimistic. A recent National Center for Policy Analysis report explains, “efforts to integrate Department of Defense medical records for service members with VA electronic health records for new veterans have failed, hamstringing attempts to provide a continuum of care for veterans with service-connected conditions, as well as costing taxpayers more than $1 billion dollars.”

Electronic health records may eventually become the gold standard in health care, but we’re not there yet and Obama’s billions of taxpayer dollars may have even slowed the progress.

Train Wreck No. 2 — President Obama rammed through the first major new entitlement in 45 years, but instead of people embracing it, most don’t want it; not businesses, not insurers, not doctors, not individuals. Apparently, not even Democrats who voted for it.

Reuters reports that the largest insurers, most of which initially supported the legislation, are very reluctant to enter the health insurance exchanges, where millions are supposed to have access to numerous health insurance options. “In recent days, executives at the four largest U.S. health insurers say they are likely to sell insurance plans on less than a third of the exchanges, reluctant to venture out beyond the states where they already offer coverage.”

And insurers aren’t alone. A majority of the public has supported repeal since the legislation passed, and the “repealers” have recently grown. Of course, business trade associations like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Federation of Independent Business have been fighting ObamaCare from the beginning.

The reception has been so bad that the Obama administration signed a $20 million public relations contract a year ago in an attempt to convince the public they want ObamaCare, and it just signed two more for another $10 million. That’s $30 million of your tax dollars to sell something most of you don’t want.

Train Wreck No. 3 — Health insurance premiums will explode. In January retired actuary Mark Litow and I published an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal explaining why ObamaCare will push up premiums for some people by 100 percent.

In the last two months, as insurers have begun to announce their ObamaCare premiums, it’s clear we were right. States that largely destroyed their health insurance markets, like Massachusetts and New York, may not see much change—at least for a few years. But states that did a good job of ensuring access to affordable coverage will see their premiums skyrocket, especially in the individual market for younger adults.

Note that the rise in premiums is not a result of Obama’s sloppy implementation efforts; it’s due to the fact that the people writing the legislation didn’t have a clue how health insurance works or how it affects consumer choices. They thought—and Obama repeated it several times—that getting everyone covered would lower health care spending. They also thought that adding free services would reduce health care costs, when virtually any actuary would have told them the opposite.

Train Wreck No. 4 — And let’s not forget those with major pre-existing medical conditions, the uninsurables. ObamaCare put $5 billion aside to fund a new system of high risk pools to cover them—even though 35 state-based high risk pools already existed with about 220,000 people enrolled.

While Democratic planners expected some 375,000 people would be eligible to enroll in the program, only about 100,000 have. And yet the program is running out of money, and so the administration has closed it to new enrollees.

Let me repeat that: One of Obama’s primary justifications for demanding health care reform was to help the uninsurables get coverage, and he has closed that provision to new entrants.

Yes, ObamaCare will be a train wreck, many times over—just wait until the IRS cranks up its enforcement efforts or it becomes clear that people cannot get health insurance subsidies in the federally created exchanges.

Democrats went to great lengths to completely restructure the U.S. health care system and get all the “credit” for it. And now they are increasingly afraid they will.

Last week, during the 25th anniversary celebration of the Institute for Policy Innovation at the Frontiers of Flight Museum, Sen. Ted Cruz told the crowd that 2012 GOP nominee Mitt Romney was wrong to declare that 47 percent of the population was receiving government aid and lost as potential Republican voters.

"We need to champion those climbing the economic ladder," Cruz said. "We should be defenders and champions of the 47 percent."

Lots of factors affect the Dow Jones Industrial Average. But at this point, the sequester budget cuts aren’t one of them—at least not negatively.
 
Remember all the hand wringing from the White House, and especially President Obama, last February, as we approached the March 1 sequester deadline?
 
According to the president, the self-imposed budget cuts amounting to about $85 billion for the rest of this fiscal year, and about $1.2 trillion over 10 years, would be devastating to the economy—perhaps pushing us back into a recession.
 
We’re now two months into it. The air traffic control hassle prompted Congress to act—some might say “cave”—passing legislation to ensure the Federal Aviation Administration had the freedom to shuffle money around. And we’re learning that there will be cutbacks in various programs and services across the country, which will certainly cause some individual pain.
 
But as for the stock market? It’s up nearly 900 points since March 1 ($14,089 to $14,974 on May 3). Apparently, investors don’t see the cuts hurting the economy—and perhaps actually helping it.

 
Of course, so many factors affect the stock market that it would be difficult to claim that the 900-point rise was because of the sequester cuts. In fact, the market started its latest climb in mid-November, with significant drops in late December as Congress and the president struggled over the Fiscal Cliff, and again on February 25, probably out of concern that the cuts wouldn’t take effect.
 
And the market may turn south come summer—as it often does—as fears of a European Union downturn and other factors begin to weigh on investors.
 
But the market’s current rise is just one more rebuke to the administration’s guiding economic policies: that government spending is what spurs economic growth.
 
That’s why, as we creep up on the debt-limit ceiling later in May, fiscal conservatives may want to consider another round of sequester cuts, as Institute for Policy Innovation President Tom Giovanetti has proposed.
 
The sequester may be a blunt instrument for cutting government spending. But as long as the Big Spender is in the White House, it may be the best tool we have.