“Revisionist History”: Chris Christie Shows Why The GOP Is Hopeless On Health Care Reform
With the rollout of the health care exchanges created by Obamacare hitting some bumps, to put it mildly, and President Obama’s approval rating falling to new lows, it seems like now would be the perfect time for Republicans to take control of the health care issue. Yet they haven’t.
Why? To figure that out, look no further than the GOP’s darling of the moment, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie.
Fresh off a re-election rout, plenty of conservatives are pointing to Christie as the hope for a new, modern and revitalized GOP. And at the Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council 2013 yesterday, Christie knew his cue, saying, “Obamacare is a failure, it’s always been a failure and it will not succeed. It just won’t.”
But when asked what he would replace it with, Christie first demurred, saying he didn’t have enough time to flesh out a solution, but then added:
Obamacare is wrong, it’s a failure, it’s the most extraordinary overreach of government power in the history of our country. And it’s being run by people who have never run anything. So why are we surprised it’s failing?
What do we need to replace it? We need a robust debate among both sides. Unlike last time, where the president jammed this down everybody’s throat and got not one Republican vote because he was unwilling to make any compromise, including tort reform, for god’s sake. Well, then this time we need a robust conversation between both sides where everybody brings skin to the table and everybody compromises. And if we do that we can craft a solution.
This is just red meat, not a constructive discussion of the nation’s health care problems. And it’s emblematic of the mainstream GOP’s fact-free approach to health care reform and the problems it’s having landing punches against Obamacare.
For starters, it’s simply incorrect that the Obamacare exchanges are “being run by people who have never run anything.” Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius, after all, ran a state (she was the governor of Kansas, not exactly a socialist utopia), which I imagine Christie counts as executive experience. And President Obama, like it or not, has been at the helm of the world’s largest economy and military since 2009.
But far more importantly, Christie’s only solution to the health care conundrum is more “debate.” He seems to believe that health care reform would have gone just fine if mean old Obama hadn’t “jammed this down everybody’s throat” without making any compromises. That’s revisionist history, to say the least.
Back here in reality, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., spent months fruitlessly trying to get Republicans to sign onto a health care bill, which was also endlessly debated in committee, in each chamber of Congress and on the airwaves. There are a slew of provisions in the law that come from various proposals Republicans have put forth over the years, including some lifted from their Obamacare alternative, but they earned Obama not one Republican vote.
Obama also ditched the public option – a government run plan in the health care exchange – as a concession, for which he got nothing in return except accusations that he was engineering a “government takeover” of health care. Oh, and Christie’s magical tort reform, the GOP silver bullet? Obama has offered it to Republicans multiple times, and in response, they did nothing. (Tort reform, in the end, would result in scant savings anyway.)
This is not to deny that Obamacare has its problems, but simply to highlight that the GOP had the opportunity to be constructive during the health care debate, and instead chose across-the-board opposition and obstruction as an explicit political strategy to bring about Obama’s “Waterloo.”
Now, years later and with Obamacare faltering, the best the GOP’s newest star can muster is to tell the same old tales in the same old way. Complicating the matter is the fact that the few ideas conservatives do have for health care reform would result in many of the same things which Republicans are now criticizing. Reforms favored by the GOP would cause people to lose their insurance plans, even if they like them. And they would cut Medicare. Gasp!
Christie either knows this and can’t say it, because he would then be vilified by the conservative base, or he is just another Republican who doesn’t understand the tradeoffs involved in reforming America’s inefficient, wasteful and oftentimes completely backward health care system. And his refusal to even try to formulate a coherent health care alternative shows why, even after 40-something repeal votes and a disastrous rollout of the exchanges, Obamacare is still very much the law of the land.
By: Pat Garofalo, U. S. News and World Report, November 19, 2013
“Real World Consequences”: Why The Senate’s Nuclear Option On Filibuster Reform Matters
If you care about reproductive rights, the environment or worker rights, the decision by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and the chamber’s Democrats – including courageous votes by this state’s senators, Mark Udall and Michael Bennet – Thursday to reform the filibuster on presidential appointments matters. A lot.
This is not just inside-the-Beltway jabberwocky. Invoking the “nuclear option” so that a simple, 51-vote majority is all that’s needed to confirm judges below the Supreme Court level and other presidential appointments will have a profound effect on the everyday lives of many Americans. Courts are missing judges thanks to an unprecedented refusal by Republicans to confirm the president’s nominees. This is purely political, not about qualifications: as Senate Republicans have bluntly admitted, all Obama nominees are bad.
And this obstruction has real world consequences both in terms of shorthanded courts and the decisions they make.
So, for example, the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals, which is located here in Denver and handles all federal court appeals for not only Colorado but also Kansas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Utah and Wyoming, has two vacancies thanks to GOP filibustering. And as Colorado Ethics Watch has noted, 98 percent of all federal appeals are decided at the Circuit Court level, meaning that, “decisions of the 10th Circuit on important issues such as the environment and federal land policy, reproductive freedom, voting rights and money in politics, and civil rights are often final and binding for the states in the Circuit.”
In addition to refusing to act on qualified judges to the 10th Circuit, Republicans have repeatedly blocked qualified judicial nominees to the District of Columbia Circuit Court. Per Ethics Watch, “The D.C. Circuit is a traditional stepping-stone to the U.S. Supreme Court, with four of the current justices having previously sat on the D.C. Circuit. Currently, three of the D.C. Circuit’s 11 judgeships are vacant, including one that has been open since its previous occupant, John Roberts, was confirmed chief justice of the United States in 2005.”
Judicial vacancies and court rulings matter. Without fair courts that have diverse and impartial judges, we won’t have justice when it comes to women’s health and reproductive rights.
To wit, on November 1, with three judicial vacancies thanks to Republican obstruction and no Obama nominees on the bench, the D.C. Circuit Court ruled that the Affordable Care Act’s requirement that employers provide contraception in their health insurance plans violated religious freedom. Denver’s 10th Circuit, with two Republican-blocked vacancies, decided a similar case the same way, setting up a Supreme Court challenge on whether or not women have the right to birth control regardless of their employers’ religious beliefs. This has profound and dangerous implications even beyond reproductive rights: it threatens to upend the very notion of secular labor law. What if an employer decided their religious beliefs meant they didn’t have to pay Social Security taxes, follow wage and hour guidelines, or hire workers of a different race?
So this isn’t some arcane procedural maneuver by the Senate, it’s the end result of the Republican Party refusing to respect a Democratic president. As for the argument from the right that a future Republican majority will use this move against Democrats: Republicans have broken every deal they’ve made so far to avoid the “nuclear option.” There’s little doubt that they’d change the rules anyway if they magically got the majority.
At least this way a Democratic President, Barack Obama, sees that he, his judicial nominees and appointments, and the American people get a bit more justice.
By: Laura Chapin, U. S. News and World Report, November 22, 2013
“When Ideology Collides With Reality”: Irrational Republican Exuberance Over Obamacare’s Problems
In these days of hyper-polarization, some readers may wonder why I always treat with great respect the findings and analysis of conservative number-cruncher Sean Trende of RealClearPolitics. I don’t always agree with what he says, but he’s willing to say uncomfortable things to people on his side of the barricades when data and history so indicate, as he did in a column today pouring ice water on the popular conservative idea that a collapse of Obamacare would lead to some sort of “existential crisis” for liberalism or “the welfare state.”
I’ve said before that our press corps suffers from histrionic personality disorder, and this is but the latest example. Wasn’t it just weeks ago that we were told the government shutdown could cost Republicans the House? But elections and the ideological orientation of the country don’t turn on such immediate, short-term events. The arc of history is long. Both parties, and both ideologies, have plenty of wins ahead of them, and neither is likely to suffer a knockout blow.
Let’s start by observing that we’re barely 50 days into Obamacare’s launch. While the program is clearly in much graver political danger than was the case a month ago, it’s still unclear that the ship won’t eventually be righted. Maybe the so-called “young invincibles” will sign up in droves, or maybe they won’t and the program will go into a death spiral. We just don’t know yet.
But even if the Affordable Care Act does collapse, I’m not sure that the liberal project will be kneecapped, much less destroyed. Americans have very short memories, and the pendulum will swing back quickly if Republicans mess up their next opportunity to govern.
Trende then goes through a long series of historical examples (dating back to 1890) of big political calamities for one party or the other that was followed in relatively short order, and sometimes almost instantly, by a big recovery, often because the other party over-estimated its advantages and overreached. And he notes that even in specific policy areas a misstep or defeat doesn’t necessarily take issues off the table:
Even the last failed attempt at health care reform, in the early 1990s, didn’t actually spell the end of reform efforts for the next two decades, as many suggest. It just proceeded incrementally, with some fairly significant steps. Congress in 1996 passed the Kennedy-Kassebaum bill, which established health insurance portability. The following year, Republicans helped to establish the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, which today provides health care for almost 8 million children. In 2001, before the 9/11 attacks, Congress was consumed with a debate over the Patient’s Bill of Rights, with the only major disagreement involving whether plaintiffs should be able to collect punitive damages while suing their HMO.
Sean even suggests an Obamacare “disaster” could produce an even more ambitious Democratic health care initiative:
[E]ven if Obamacare does collapse, the most liberal aspects of the American health care system — Medicare and Medicaid — will still be around. Democrats have already been pretty straightforward about what their “Plan B” will be: Medicare/Medicaid for all. Both programs are still very popular, and the Democratic standard-bearer in 2016 would almost certainly campaign on expanding them, perhaps to those over 55 for Medicare and under 25 for Medicaid. I’m not sure that would be a losing issue, even with an Obamacare collapse. In 10 years, I think it’d be a winner.
That is indeed the “silver lining” that a lot of single payer advocates have been seeing in the troubles involving the Obamacare exchanges, which are complex and hard to administer in no small part because of their reliance on a managed competition model many liberals never favored in the first place.
Trende thinks the major lesson here is that the ideological clash of ideas that activists often perceive in political events just isn’t shared by that many voters:
The American electorate is not intensely ideological, and is more motivated by things such as the state of the economy, whether there is peace abroad (or whether we’re winning a war), and whether the president is suffering from a major scandal.
I would agree in part, but would go further to say that today’s radicalized Republican Party has goals that have never commanded a majority of the electorate, and are even less likely to do so in the future. It is capable of making big gains when Democrats screw up, but is determined to risk them immediately to pursue an unpopular agenda. If the worst (or from their point of view, the best) happens and conservatives gain the power to implement that agenda, then the odds are extremely high they will, as Trende puts it, “mess up their next opportunity to govern.” And in that respect, ideology really does matter–when it collides with reality.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, November 20, 2013
“Expanding Social Security”: The Fiscal Scolds Driving The Cut-Social-Security Orthodoxy Have Deservedly Lost Credibility
For many years there has been one overwhelming rule for people who wanted to be considered serious inside the Beltway. It was this: You must declare your willingness to cut Social Security in the name of “entitlement reform.” It wasn’t really about the numbers, which never supported the notion that Social Security faced an acute crisis. It was instead a sort of declaration of identity, a way to show that you were an establishment guy, willing to impose pain (on other people, as usual) in the name of fiscal responsibility.
But a funny thing has happened in the past year or so. Suddenly, we’re hearing open discussion of the idea that Social Security should be expanded, not cut. Talk of Social Security expansion has even reached the Senate, with Tom Harkin introducing legislation that would increase benefits. A few days ago Senator Elizabeth Warren gave a stirring floor speech making the case for expanded benefits.
Where is this coming from? One answer is that the fiscal scolds driving the cut-Social-Security orthodoxy have, deservedly, lost a lot of credibility over the past few years. (Giving the ludicrous Paul Ryan an award for fiscal responsibility? And where’s my debt crisis?) Beyond that, America’s overall retirement system is in big trouble. There’s just one part of that system that’s working well: Social Security. And this suggests that we should make that program stronger, not weaker.
Before I get there, however, let me briefly take on two bad arguments for cutting Social Security that you still hear a lot.
One is that we should raise the retirement age — currently 66, and scheduled to rise to 67 — because people are living longer. This sounds plausible until you look at exactly who is living longer. The rise in life expectancy, it turns out, is overwhelmingly a story about affluent, well-educated Americans. Those with lower incomes and less education have, at best, seen hardly any rise in life expectancy at age 65; in fact, those with less education have seen their life expectancy decline.
So this common argument amounts, in effect, to the notion that we can’t let janitors retire because lawyers are living longer. And lower-income Americans, in case you haven’t noticed, are the people who need Social Security most.
The other argument is that seniors are doing just fine. Hey, their poverty rate is only 9 percent.
There are two big problems here. First, there are well-known flaws with the official poverty measure, and these flaws almost surely lead to serious understatement of elderly poverty. In an attempt to provide a more realistic picture, the Census Bureau now regularly releases a supplemental measure that most experts consider superior — and this measure puts senior poverty at 14.8 percent, close to the rate for younger adults.
Furthermore, the elderly poverty rate is highly likely to rise sharply in the future, as the failure of America’s private pension system takes its toll.
When you look at today’s older Americans, you are in large part looking at the legacy of an economy that is no more. Many workers used to have defined-benefit retirement plans, plans in which their employers guaranteed a steady income after retirement. And a fair number of seniors (like my father, until he passed away a few months ago) are still collecting benefits from such plans.
Today, however, workers who have any retirement plan at all generally have defined-contribution plans — basically, 401(k)’s — in which employers put money into a tax-sheltered account that’s supposed to end up big enough to retire on. The trouble is that at this point it’s clear that the shift to 401(k)’s was a gigantic failure. Employers took advantage of the switch to surreptitiously cut benefits; investment returns have been far lower than workers were told to expect; and, to be fair, many people haven’t managed their money wisely.
As a result, we’re looking at a looming retirement crisis, with tens of millions of Americans facing a sharp decline in living standards at the end of their working lives. For many, the only thing protecting them from abject penury will be Social Security. Aren’t you glad we didn’t privatize the program?
So there’s a strong case for expanding, not contracting, Social Security. Yes, this would cost money, and it would require additional taxes — a suggestion that will horrify the fiscal scolds, who have been insisting that if we raise taxes at all, the proceeds must go to deficit reduction, not to making our lives better. But the fiscal scolds have been wrong about everything, and it’s time to start thinking outside their box.
Realistically, Social Security expansion won’t happen anytime soon. But it’s an idea that deserves to be on the table — and it’s a very good sign that it finally is.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, November 22, 2013
“Calling-Out Bad Analysis”: False Equivalency And Crocodile Tears
I’m delighted to see that amongst the wailing and gnashing of teeth over the “nuclear option’s” invocation, there’s some robust calling-out of bad analysis and crocodile tears.
WaPo was Ground Zero for “centrist” bemoaning of the terrible partisanship this step would unleash. But Jonathan Chait was having none of it:
The bizarre, defining feature of this argument is that, unlike the crocodile tears being shed by Republicans, the centrist Establishmentarians all take the view that the Republican judicial blockade was completely unacceptable. They argue that the solution to the unacceptable blockade is that, as the Post piously insists, “Both parties should have stepped back and hammered out a bipartisan compromise reform.”
That Republicans did not offer to compromise or in any way back down from the stance the Post calls unacceptable is a fact so fatal to this argument that none of the three [WaPo]writers in any way acknowledges it. I would agree that a 50-vote threshold for lifetime judicial appointments represents a sub-optimal arrangement. It would be better if there were some way for the Senate to filter out extreme nominees without having the power to wantonly blockade a vital court for nakedly partisan reasons. Given the refusal of Republicans to back down, I prefer majoritarianism to the existing alternative. The Establishmentarians refuse to grapple with the trade-off. They are against fires and fire hoses alike.
Unfortunately, now that the “nuclear option” has been officially recorded as the efficient cause of whatever happens next in the descent to partisan polarization, it will become the ever-ready justification for future false equivalency arguments of the sort Chait eviscerates.
An even more interesting deconstruction of today’s wailathon comes from Jonathan Bernstein, writing, as it happens, at WaPo’s Plum Line. He suggests it may have been the “reasonable” Senate Republicans pitching the biggest fits about the nuclear option who precipitated it by their languid-at-best attempts at a preemptive deal, and who may actually welcome it privately because it gets them out of a jam:
The problem with the summer compromise is that it was horrible for deal-making Republicans. The deal essentially said: Republicans will continue to filibuster nominations, but will supply enough votes for almost all of them so that the filibusters will be defeated. But that meant that in practice a handful of Republicans were forced to tag-team their votes, making sure that Democrats always had 60. What’s more, the shutdown fight — which began right after the Senate deal was struck — revealed that radical Republicans led by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) were eager to scapegoat those same deal-making Republicans. That raised the cost of the executive branch nominations agreement for tag-teamers such as Sens. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.). In other words, the summer deal might or might not have been stable, but it certainly couldn’t hold in a world in which the majority of Republican senators are looking for ways to separate themselves from mainstream conservatives, and then using that separation to attack them.
Now Obama gets his judges, and “mainstream conservatives”–especially those like Alexander and Graham who are facing 2014 primary threats–can happily vote against them. What’s not to like?
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, November 22, 2013
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