Mitt Romney Supported Everything The GOP Hates About Energy, And Then Some
Stop me if you’ve heard this attack: There’s a presidential candidate out there who wants high gas prices to force the government to finally increase regulations on cars, persuade Americans to stop driving those beastly SUVs, nudge people toward clean electric cars — all with the goal of combating climate change. And don’t even think about lowering gas taxes to help car owners out at the pump: That’s just a gimmick. Take a moment and guess which politician is behind these positions.
If you guessed Mitt Romney, you are correct. And his long history of enviro-friendly rhetoric during past surges in gas prices is proving awkward as he slams the White House for taking similar positions today.
The best example yet is probably an audio clip dug up by Buzzfeed’s Andrew Kaczynski, purportedly from a 2007 town hall, that contains in just two minutes just about everything Republicans hate about Democrats on energy.
In it, Romney is asked how he feels about requiring higher fuel-efficiency standards from car companies. He says he would consider them, explaining that the government has not required high enough efficiency standards in recent years and that loopholes encourage people to drive SUVs. Not only that, he’s rooting for high gas prices to help get the job done.
“The CAFE requirements have not worked terribly well over the last 20 years in part because they haven’t applied to trucks, so America has moved more and more to trucks and SUVs,” Romney said. “So the average fuel economy over the last, I think it’s 20 years, has been almost flat. I’m hopeful that with $3 gasoline being charged by Hugo Chavez and Ahmadinejad and Putin and others that you’re going to see Americans slowly but surely move to vehicles that are far more fuel efficient and you’ll see our manufacturers start competing on the basis of fuel efficiency.”
Today Romney proudly touts his opposition to fuel efficiency standards on his website, telling one conservative radio host that car companies’ woes came after “the government put in place CAFE requirements that were disadvantageous for domestic manufacturers.”
There’s more from that town hall. Romney specifically praised hybrid cars and electric car technology — now widely mocked on the right — as a potential solution. Romney himself has called the plug-in Chevy Volt “an idea whose time has not come” on the campaign trail and joked this month that “you can’t drive a car with a windmill on it.”
But back in 2007: “I sure hope that you’re going to see more and more hybrids and much better fuel economy,” Romney said. “Plug-in cars, electric cars with better battery technology, might be a way of reducing our emissions.”
This was in line with other past Romney statements that surfaced this week in which he urged Americans to channel the reality of high gas prices into support for alternative energy and conservation. The New Republic noted that Romney specifically opposed cutting the gas tax in his state in 2006 during a spike in oil prices for that very reason.
“I don’t think that now is the time, and I’m not sure there will be the right time, for us to encourage the use of more gasoline,” Romney said then. “I’m very much in favor of people recognizing that these high gasoline prices are probably here to stay.”
Today Romney insists that gas prices are the White House’s fault, even as the overwhelming consensus among experts is that it’s out of the government’s hands, and says that more drilling will help fix the problem. And he wants Obama to fire anyone in his administration who thinks that there are benefits to higher gas prices.
“This ‘gas-hike trio’ has been doing the job over the last three and a half years and gas prices are up,” Romney said last week, referring to Cabinet members Energy Secretary Steven Chu, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson. “The right course is they ought to be fired.”
Even Romney’s own energy advisers are reluctant to back him up on his claims this week. Two of them, Glenn Hubbard and Greg Mankiw, have supported taxing energy in order to decrease emissions that contribute to climate change. In other words: increasing gas prices for the sake of the environment. That’s to the left of the Obama administration.
Romney surrogate John Sununu defended Romney’s 2006 and 2007 positions to TPM on Monday, suggesting that the governor was merely putting an optimistic spin on a lousy time for gas prices.
“I think if you look at those interviews what he was saying is we ought to take advantage of the terrible situation,” he said. He added that Romney, then and now, supports both “the production side of energy, where the governor is absolutely committed, and the conservation side” as part of the solution to America’s energy problems.
But add it all up, and Romney and his advisers are on record minimizing the government’s ability to influence gas prices and supporting many of the same goals and policies espoused by Democrats to help promote energy efficiency and combat climate change. Just as his health care bill’s similarities to the Affordable Care Act have made him vulnerable to attacks, Romney’s latest energy offensive might open him up to more of the same charges he’s faced throughout his campaign — that he’ll say and do anything to get elected.
By: Benjy Sarlin, Talking Points Memo, March 26, 2012
Justice Kennedy’s “Nuanced View”: A Bad Beginning And A Better Ending
The Constitution’s words enabling Congress to “regulate commerce…among the several states” gives the United States broad authority over economic matters — although non-economic regulation is far more suspect. Early in today’s argument, however, several of the justices appeared poised to impose an entirely novel limit on Congress’ authority — suggesting that laws which require, in Justice Kennedy’s words, an “affirmative duty to act to go into commerce” is somehow constitutionally suspect. So there were no shortages of pointed questions about the Affordable Care Act’s requirement that everyone either carry health insurance or pay slightly more income taxes.
There are two reasons why this requirement is necessary. The first is that, because the law prohibits insurers from denying coverage to patients with preexisting conditions, it must also ensure that healthy people enter the insurance market before they become sick. 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, leaving nothing left for the rest of the plan’s consumers. The second reason relates to a problem with our health system that long predates the Affordable Care Act. Because emergency rooms must provide at least some degree of care free of charge to people who cannot afford it, these costs wind up being transferred to persons with insurance — driving up annual premiums as much as $1,100 on the average patient.
Initially, the Court’s conservatives appeared highly credulous of the plaintiffs’ false claim that upholding the health reform would necessarily enable the federal government to do absolutely anything. Solicitor General Don Verrilli addressed this question by explaining that the health care market is unique in that it is the only market that everyone inevitably participates in — we all get sick at some point — and that, because of health care’s sudden and unexpected costs, people typically pay their health bills through insurance. Thus, he explained, because everyone is already caught up in the health care market, the Affordable Care Act does not impose any kind of “duty…to go into commerce” — it merely tells people who are already in the health care market to make sure they pay for their health costs through insurance.
While Verrilli was still at the podium, the Court’s conservatives did not seem to buy this claim. A ray of hope emerged at the end of the oral argument, however, when Justice Kennedy expressed a somewhat nuanced view:
[T]he government tells us that’s because the insurance market is unique. And in the next case, it’ll say the next market is unique. But I think it is true that if most questions in life are matters of degree, in the insurance and health care world, both markets — stipulate two markets — the young person who is uninsured is uniquely proximately very close to affecting the rates of insurance and the costs of providing medical care in a way that is not true in other industries. That’s my concern in the case.
There’s a lot going on in this statement. On the one hand, Kennedy is clearly skeptical that, if the Court says this market is unique, the government won’t simply argue that the next market is also unique in the next case. On the other hand, Kennedy also appears sympathetic to the second reason why the mandate is essential — that the problem of uninsurance leads to billions in health care costs being transferred to other health care consumers. A young person who forgoes health insurance is “uniquely proximately very close” to affecting the health care costs of others, and that may be enough to get Kennedy’s vote to uphold the law.
The big loser in all of this debate, however, is the Constitution itself. The Constitution says nothing about unique markets. Or about the need to impose artificial Congress authority to regulate the nation’s economy. It simply says that Congress can “regulate commerce.” The idea that a law which regulates 1/6 of the nation’s economy is not regulating commerce is, frankly, absurd. Nor was there ever any risk that a decision upholding health reform would lead to all things being permissible. There are many things that are not commercial — federal murder laws, assault laws, child neglect laws or sexual morality laws, for example. A law regulating our entire national health care market, however, is clearly and obviously constitutional.
Justice Kennedy may inevitably vote to uphold the law — he may even bring Chief Justice Roberts along with him — but, whatever the Court does this term, it appears increasingly likely that we live under the constitution of Anthony Kennedy, and that we no longer live under the Constitution of the United States.
By: Ian Millhiser, Think Progress, March 27, 2012
“Ethically Ironic”: How Was Dick Cheney Able To Get A Heart While Many Others Wait?
Dick Cheney has just joined a list of high-profile people, including Steve Jobs, Mickey Mantle, Evil Knievel and David Crosby who, received a transplant and thereby created a controversy. Cheney received a heart on Saturay from an anonymous donor at Inova Fairfax Hospital in Virginia after a 20-month wait. What is controversial about that? Cheney is 71 years old.
He has been through numerous previous operations that indicate he has other serious medical problems. He has only been able to survive due to the implantation of a left-ventricular assist device (LVAD) — a partial artificial heart — that has kept him going long past the point where his own heart could have kept him alive.
Nearly everyone on an LVAD winds up getting sicker and sicker and, eventually, so sick that they come off the transplant waiting list because the risk is too great.
What starts as a “bridge” to a transplant when you get an LVAD can become, the more time that passes, a final destination — you almost always die with the device. So despite his age and health problems, how was Cheney able to get a heart while many others wait?
It is concerning that a 71-year-old got a transplant. Many of those who manage to even make the waiting list for hearts die without getting one. More than 3,100 Americans are currently on the national waiting list for a heart transplant. Just over 2,300 heart transplants were performed last year, according to the United Network for Organ Sharing. And 330 people died while waiting.
According to UNOS, 332 people over age 65 received a heart transplant last year. The majority of transplants occur in 50- to 64-year-olds.
Most transplant teams, knowing that hearts are in huge demand, set an informal eligibility limit of 70.
Cheney is not the first person over 70 to get a heart transplant. He is, however, in a small group of people who have gotten one. Why did he?
Cheney has an advantage over others. It is not fame or his political prominence. It is money and top health insurance.
Heart transplants produce bills in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. The drugs needed to keep these transplants working cost tens of thousands of dollars every year. Organ donations are sought from the rich and poor alike. But, if you do not have health insurance you are far less likely to be able to get evaluated for a heart transplant much less actually get a transplant.
The timing of Cheney’s transplant is ethically ironic given that the battle over extending health insurance to all Americans reaches the Supreme Court this week.
If the President’s health reform bill is deemed unconstitutional, those who are wealthy or who can easily raise money will continue to have greater access to heart, liver and other forms of transplantation than the uninsured and underinsured.
It is possible that Cheney was the only person waiting for a heart who was a good match in terms of the donor’s size, blood type and other biological and geographical factors. If not, then some tough ethical questions need to be asked.
When all are asked to be organ donors, both rich and poor, shouldn’t each one of us have a fair shot at getting a heart? And in a system in which donor hearts are very scarce, shouldn’t the young, who are more likely to benefit both in terms of survival and years of life added, take precedence over the old?
Let’s hope we get some answers to these tough questions as we watch both Cheney’s recovery and the fate of health care legislation that is intended to minimize the advantages that the rich now have over the poor when it comes to proven life-saving treatments.
By: Art Kaplan, PhD, MSNBC Vitals; Contribution by MSNBC News Service, March 25, 2012
“Exotically Countercultural”: The Unhappy Triumph Of The Marketplace
This objection to Obamacare’s individual mandate, by Jonathan Adler at the libertarian Volokh Conspiracy website, grabbed my attention:
“Virtually everyone” may acquire health care—but “virtually everyone” is not “everyone.” Most people may purchase health care at some point in their lives, but some will not. Some people will refuse to purchase health care for religious reasons. Some will not purchase health care because they are lucky enough not to need such care before a sudden death. Still others may decide not to purchase health care because they have chosen to remove themselves from commerce—consider a survivalist or other person who decides to live in a shack, growing their own food, and not engaging in commerce with others.
Consider Adler’s latter example: It strikes me that the vast majority of Americans would find the idea of “not engaging in commerce with others” to be exotically countercultural at best, possibly antisocial or even deviant. Such a reaction is symptomatic of the fact that the marketplace has long enjoyed pride of place in Americans’ moral psychology. “The chief business of the American people is business,” as President Calvin Coolidge famously said.
This ethos has made proper small-l liberals of us, hasn’t it? Americans have been taught by the libertarian right and the Clintonian middle to believe that a commercial relationship between nations—trade—is the only way to achieve lasting international harmony. At least before the great stock market crash of 2008, CEOs were like cult heroes in the popular imagination. From the pluckiness of Horatio Alger’s heroes to the theology of Joel Osteen, success in the marketplace has been seen as an outward confirmation of inward virtue and divine blessedness.
So it’s with some sense of schadenfreude that I see conservatives of the classical liberal variety chafing at the requirement to buy health insurance, calling it an attempt by Congress to “create commerce.” I’m fully aware of the contractarian basis for this objection: that a forced purchase is not a legitimate commercial exchange.
But the paleocon in me responds this way: This is the antitraditional bed you’ve made for us. Now lie in it.
By: Scott Galupo, U. S. News and World Report, March 27, 2012
“No Nutritional Value”: A Farewell To Newt
It’s not easy letting him go. Not easy at all. Sort of like swearing off bedtime Ben & Jerry’s: there’s valor and the promise of self-improvement in the sacrifice, but also the sad awareness that the world just got a little less naughty. A little less fun.
No matter. It’s time to cut Newt out of our diets.
He has no nutritional value, certainly not at this point, as he peddles his ludicrous guarantee of $2.50-a-gallon gasoline, a promise that would be made only by someone with his own bottomless strategic reserve of crude. Doubly oily entendre intended.
There were calls for him to desist two weeks ago, after he lost Alabama, which abuts his home state of Georgia. But they fell on a deaf Newt.
There were fresh appeals last week, when he failed to wring even one measly delegate from Illinois on Tuesday and then Louisiana on Saturday. But Newt doesn’t need anything as prosaic as delegates, so long as there’s still pocket lint from Sheldon Adelson and the warmth of Callista’s frozen smile.
If he refuses to quit, we in the news media must quit him. Starve him of his very sustenance: attention. Exert a kind of willpower that we’ve lacked in this primary, which we turned into too much of a circus by encouraging too many clowns.
We’ve begun. As the weekend came to a close, The Times’s Trip Gabriel reported that Gingrich’s “full-time traveling press corps is down to a handful of embedded television reporters.” The Associated Press, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and even Politico had packed up their bags. I envision Newt as a larger, grayer, windier version of the little boy at the end of “Shane,” watching the last of these stubborn scribes recede into the horizon, begging them for one last sweet tweet, promising a tasty sound bite about Trayvon Martin or Robert De Niro or … “The Hunger Games!” There must be some harbinger of cultural decline to rail about there! Do “Hunger Games” contestants use food stamps? Those are always good for a diatribe or three.
I implore Fox News to pull up its drawbridge, CNN to bolt its doors. If a Newt falls in the forest and not a single news anchor listens, can he really hang around?
He says he’s propelled by a desire to promote “big ideas,” but his candidacy has devolved into ever smaller talk and ever more desperate sideshows that drag an already undistinguished debate ever lower. Late last week he actually resurrected the Obama-as-Muslim bile, saying the president’s policies raise legitimate suspicion in voters’ minds.
In truth Newt 2012 has never been a lofty enterprise. Although he loves to tout his intellectualism, he got what brief traction he did for visceral and theatrical reasons, with fits of rage and flights of fancy.
He took off when he lashed out at “the elites,” pretending not to be one of them. He soared when he savaged the news media. He rocketed to a colony on the moon.
And he illustrated a dynamic that will survive this campaign season and that we should all think about: how much the profusion of cable channels, Web outlets, other news platforms and commentary of all kinds (including this column) rewards flamboyance, histrionics and a crowded field. A brash candidate is never more than a bellow away from three minutes of air time or two paragraphs somewhere. The beast is ravenous, and I don’t mean Newt.
Yes, the serial surges of the Republican contest since August had grounding in a fickle electorate and changeable polls. But we eagerly abetted them. En route to our beige destiny of Mitt, we craved color. And showcased it.
Newt is one of the few surviving peacocks, especially if you discount Ron Paul, who’s less peacock than emaciated ostrich — never airborne, head in the sand — and so consistently discounted that no one even bothers to implore him to fold his tent. No one can remember that he pitched one.
It’s time to forget Newt as well. His delegate count is closer to Paul’s than to Rick Santorum’s. His strategy — a generous noun — hinges on a replay of the 1920 Republican convention, which picked Warren G. Harding on the 10th ballot.
The 10th ballot? That’d really send the Republican nominee into the general election with a head of steam. I can see the bumper stickers now. Newt: Battle ready. Ballot hardened.
Great politicians are memorialized with holidays, monuments, libraries. For Newt I think an ice cream flavor is in order, something in the clogged vein of Chubby Hubby or Chunky Monkey, although not so physique-focused. Nutty Professor is too obvious a suggestion, though it opens the door to pralines, aptly Southern.
Maybe Peaches ’n’ Scream? That would honor the state he comes from while acknowledging the state he’s been in — unsubtle, overwrought. Not qualifying for the Virginia primary was a blow akin to Pearl Harbor. The Palestinians are “an invented” people.
Newt is empty calories. A pointless pint of them.
By: Frank Bruni, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, March 26, 2012
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