Why Mitch McConnell Should Avoid Discussing The Debt
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) was asked about an extension of the payroll tax break yesterday, but instead of answering the question, the Republican changed the subject. The subject on McConnell’s mind was the debt.
“We have this problem at the risk of being repetitious, because we spend way too much. We now have a debt the size of our economy. We look a lot like Greece. We’re heading toward western Europe. If you want to see what happens, just look across the Atlantic. That’s the direction we’re headed in.
“Under this administration, we’ve run the national debt up 43 percent in just three years.”
McConnell first started equating the U.S. and Greece last summer, and the argument is not improving with age.
In every meaningful way, the comparison is just silly. The U.S. has extremely low interest rates and foreign investors are happy to loan us money; Greece has extremely high interest rates and no one is eager to loan the country money. The U.S. has its own currency; Greece has the euro. We have a manageable debt; Greece has a debt crisis. We’re a large country with an enormous economy; Greece is a small country with a small economy. We have one of the world’s most stable systems of government (at least for now); Greece’s government structure is suspect.
For a leading senator to tell a national television audience that the United States looks “a lot like Greece” is a clear reminder: McConnell is not to be taken seriously on these issues.
Incidentally, there’s also the matter of McConnell’s credibility on fiscal issues, or in his case, the lack thereof. The Republican leader voted for the Bush tax cuts, and added the costs to the national debt. He voted to finance the war in Afghanistan by adding the costs to the national debt. McConnell voted to put the costs of the war in Iraq onto the national debt. He supported a massive expansion of the government’s role in health care (Medicare Part D) and voted to pile all of its costs right onto the national debt. The GOP leader even backed the Wall Street bailout and added the bill to the national debt.
Perhaps Mitch McConnell should choose something else to complain about.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, January 30, 2012
Plaintiffs Challenging Affordable Care Act In The Supreme Court Admit That The Law Is Constitutional
One of the oddest arguments made by the plaintiffs now challenging the Affordable Care Act before the Supreme Court is a claim that, if just one small part of the law is declared unconstitutional, the whole law must fall with it. The overwhelming majority of judges who have heard ACA cases rejected the ridiculous claim that any part of the law is unconstitutional. And, of the handful of judges to strike part of the law down, only one — the guy who included an explicit shout-out to the Tea Partyin his opinion — accepted the legally indefensible position that the whole law must fall.
In their attempt to see the entire Affordable Care Act fall, however, several of the plaintiffs challenging the law committed what should be a fatal blunder — they effectively admit that their entire constitutional challenge to the law is garbage.
The primary attack on the ACA targets its provision requiring most Americans to either carry health insurance or pay slightly more income taxes — the so-called “individual mandate.” This insurance coverage provision exists because without it, the law’s other provisions ensuring that people with preexisting conditions can obtain insurance cannot be implemented. If patients can wait until they get sick to buy insurance, they will drain all the money out of an insurance plan that they have not previously paid into, massively driving up costs for the rest of the plan’s consumers.
This problem doesn’t just make the insurance coverage requirement good policy, it also makes it constitutional. The Constitution doesn’t just give Congress sweeping authority to regulate the national economy, it also authorizes it “[t]o make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution” regulations of interstate commerce. As conservative Justice Antonin Scalia explains, this means that, “where Congress has the authority to enact a regulation of interstate commerce, it possesses every power needed to make that regulation effective.”
So, with this background in mind, consider the following passage from the private plaintiffs’ brief arguing that the entire law must fall if the insurance coverage rule goes down:
The mandate was intended to be a direct subsidy to insurance companies, as compensation for requiring them (in the guaranteed-issue provision) to insure against “risks” that have already come to pass and forbidding them (in the community-rating provision) from using actuarially sound insurance premiums. The mandate thus works to counteract the powerful inflationary impacts of these other provisions, which would otherwise make premiums in the individual insurance market prohibitively expensive, thereby frustrating Congress’ goal of affordable health insurance. And Congress further viewed the mandate as necessary to prevent “adverse selection” to “game” the new insurance rules, which proponents warned would spark a “death spiral” in insurance.
The guaranteed-issue and community-rating requirements thus cannot operate without the mandate in the manner intended by Congress. Rather, “their associated force—not one or the other but both combined—was deemed by Congress to be necessary to achieve the end sought.” To strike the mandate alone would impermissibly eliminate a central quid pro quo of the Act. If the mandate falls, the guaranteed-issue and community-rating regulations must therefore fall with it, as the Government itself has conceded.
So the plaintiffs admit that, without the insurance coverage requirement, premiums will become “prohibitively expensive” and that the ACA’s provisions protecting people with preexisting conditions or who otherwise are highly likely to need health care (what are known as “guaranteed-issue” and “community-rating” laws in the jargon of health policy) “cannot operate without the mandate in the manner intended by Congress.” This is a flat out admission that the Scalia Rule applies in this case. Guaranteed issue and community rating are regulations of interstate commerce, and thus Congress has “every power needed” to make them effective — including the power to enact the insurance coverage requirement.
I discuss this rather breathtaking admission at greater length in an amicus brief I filed Friday on behalf of several health provider organizations, which also includes some more details about why the plaintiffs’ attempt to take out the entire ACA has no basis in law. Ultimately, however, there is no need whatsoever for the justices to consider how much of the law stands or falls without the coverage requirement. The private plaintiffs already gave away the farm when they admitted that their entire legal challenge rests on a crumbling foundation.
By: Ian Millhiser, Think Progress, January 30, 2012
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