“Particularly Shameless”: Rick Scott Lied On His Mother’s Grave — And Blew A Hole In The GOP’s Anti-ObamaCare Argument
When it comes to ObamaCare’s expansion of Medicaid, it may seem like a matter of simple logic for states to take the money that’s on offer. It would both help their most vulnerable citizens and pump lots of money into local economies.
Alas, logic and the contemporary Republican Party have little relation to each other, so most GOP-controlled statehouses have turned down the offer. But few have done so in a more clownish manner, or exposed the contradictions in the Republican position more clearly, than Florida Gov. Rick Scott.
Scott has flip-flopped on Medicaid, first opposing it, then supporting it, then opposing it again. This is bad, if not entirely unusual, political behavior. But Scott was particularly shameless, citing his recently deceased mother as his justification for suddenly embracing the expansion in 2013.
As he has now revealed, however, Scott was lying on his mother’s grave. He pretended to embrace the Medicaid expansion to secure a federal waiver for privatizing Florida’s Medicaid system, then quietly dropped his support once the waiver was granted. (The Obama administration’s decision to give the quid without first getting the quo, given who they were dealing with, was not its finest hour.)
So Scott used his deceased mother as a shield to lie about his motives in order to funnel federal taxpayer money to Florida businesses, then reneged on his part of the deal, leaving many poor Floridians to needlessly suffer and in some cases die. All par for the course for Scott, who before entering politics oversaw a massive amount of Medicare fraud as CEO of a large for-profit hospital operator.
At this point, one could say that, rank dishonesty and opportunism aside, at least Scott is standing on principle. He is turning down federal dollars to protect state sovereignty. Not a very attractive principle, but at least a principle, right?
Nope. Before the Affordable Care Act, the federal government made money available to states to create Low-Income Pools (LIP) that would reimburse hospitals that treated patients who couldn’t afford to pay for emergency services. Florida is receiving more than $1 billion a year in federal funds from LIP. The ACA, however, makes the LIP obsolete. It addresses problems of uncompensated hospitals by expanding Medicaid, greatly reducing the number of patients who cannot pay their bills.
The federal government has told Florida that it will not make the LIP funds available, pointing to the Medicaid funding which remains available. But Scott wants to have his cake and eat it, too. Not only is he demanding that the federal funding continue, he has actually filed a frivolous lawsuit arguing that the federal government is obligated to give Florida the LIP money. The Obama administration, having been burned by Scott already, is unmoved.
This lawsuit builds on the Supreme Court’s already shaky holding that allowed states to opt out of the expansion, pushing it to an extreme that would be too absurd even for the Roberts Court. It has virtually no chance of succeeding.
But the decision to file it is instructive. On the one hand, Scott is arguing that taking an extraordinarily good offer from the federal government to insure its poor citizens would be an intolerable intrusion on the sacred sovereignty of the state of Florida. On the other hand, Scott is arguing that Florida has a right to another source of federal tax dollars for health care.
There is, in other words, no actual principle involved here — not even a bad “states’ rights” one. It’s just pure partisan politics, with Florida’s poor people being punished as a result.
As Michael Hilzik of the LA Times observes, Scott’s disgraceful behavior reflects broader trends in Republican governance. The decision of Republican officials at the state level to reject the Medicaid expansion, while misleading their constituents about the dread ObamaCare, continues to have disastrous results for their citizens.
The ensuing mess in Florida — where a huge hole has been blown in the state budget because anti-ACA fanatics won’t take the Medicaid expansion — does at least provide a glimmer of hope for the longer term. Red-state legislators may not particularly care about the many poor people being needlessly denied access to medical care. But they will start to increasingly care about the medical professionals and hospitals who are also being screwed. Once Obama leaves office, it’s likely that more and more states will grudgingly take the federal money.
In the meantime, however, the consequences of misrule in these states will continue to be grim.
By: Scott Lemieux, The Week, May 18, 2015
“Rat Bait”: Beware Of Republicans Playing Games!
Because you may have missed this story over the weekend, here’s some important news for lefty critics of Hillary Clinton, via the New York Times‘ Parker and Corasaniti. It focuses on the biggest GOP oppo research operation of them all, and ever, America Rising:
For months now, America Rising has sent out a steady stream of posts on social media attacking Mrs. Clinton, some of them specifically designed to be spotted, and shared, by liberals. The posts highlight critiques of her connections to Wall Street and the Clinton Foundation and feature images of Democrats like Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York, interspersed with cartoon characters and pictures of Kevin Spacey, who plays the villain in “House of Cards.” And as they are read and shared, an anti-Clinton narrative is reinforced.
America Rising is not the only conservative group attacking Mrs. Clinton from the left. Another is American Crossroads, the group started by Karl Rove, which has been sending out its own digital content, including one ad using a speech Ms. Warren gave at the New Populism Conference in Washington last May.
“Powerful interests have tried to capture Washington and rig the system in their favor,” intones Ms. Warren, as images of Mrs. Clinton with foreign leaders flash by.
The new-style digital campaign captures some basic facts about 21st-century communication: Information travels at warp speed on social media, it is sometimes difficult to know where that information comes from, and most people like to read things with which they agree. The result, said Ken Goldstein, a professor of politics at the University of San Francisco who specializes in political advertising, is something more sophisticated.
“Politics is usually basic math,” he said, “and this is a little bit of calculus, thinking a couple steps ahead.”
You know, when it came out during Watergate that Richard Nixon’s campaign staffers were pulling this kind of crap in the 1972 Democratic primaries (mostly aimed at poor doomed Ed Muskie), it was a really big scandalous deal. Now it’s smart politics, or “calculus.” Progressives should beware playing their game.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, May 18, 2014
“Errors And Lies”: The Iraq War Wasn’t An Innocent Mistake; The Bush Administration Wanted A War
Surprise! It turns out that there’s something to be said for having the brother of a failed president make his own run for the White House. Thanks to Jeb Bush, we may finally have the frank discussion of the Iraq invasion we should have had a decade ago.
But many influential people — not just Mr. Bush — would prefer that we not have that discussion. There’s a palpable sense right now of the political and media elite trying to draw a line under the subject. Yes, the narrative goes, we now know that invading Iraq was a terrible mistake, and it’s about time that everyone admits it. Now let’s move on.
Well, let’s not — because that’s a false narrative, and everyone who was involved in the debate over the war knows that it’s false. The Iraq war wasn’t an innocent mistake, a venture undertaken on the basis of intelligence that turned out to be wrong. America invaded Iraq because the Bush administration wanted a war. The public justifications for the invasion were nothing but pretexts, and falsified pretexts at that. We were, in a fundamental sense, lied into war.
The fraudulence of the case for war was actually obvious even at the time: the ever-shifting arguments for an unchanging goal were a dead giveaway. So were the word games — the talk about W.M.D that conflated chemical weapons (which many people did think Saddam had) with nukes, the constant insinuations that Iraq was somehow behind 9/11.
And at this point we have plenty of evidence to confirm everything the war’s opponents were saying. We now know, for example, that on 9/11 itself — literally before the dust had settled — Donald Rumsfeld, the secretary of defense, was already plotting war against a regime that had nothing to do with the terrorist attack. “Judge whether good enough [to] hit S.H. [Saddam Hussein] …sweep it all up things related and not”; so read notes taken by Mr. Rumsfeld’s aide.
This was, in short, a war the White House wanted, and all of the supposed mistakes that, as Jeb puts it, “were made” by someone unnamed actually flowed from this underlying desire. Did the intelligence agencies wrongly conclude that Iraq had chemical weapons and a nuclear program? That’s because they were under intense pressure to justify the war. Did prewar assessments vastly understate the difficulty and cost of occupation? That’s because the war party didn’t want to hear anything that might raise doubts about the rush to invade. Indeed, the Army’s chief of staff was effectively fired for questioning claims that the occupation phase would be cheap and easy.
Why did they want a war? That’s a harder question to answer. Some of the warmongers believed that deploying shock and awe in Iraq would enhance American power and influence around the world. Some saw Iraq as a sort of pilot project, preparation for a series of regime changes. And it’s hard to avoid the suspicion that there was a strong element of wagging the dog, of using military triumph to strengthen the Republican brand at home.
Whatever the precise motives, the result was a very dark chapter in American history. Once again: We were lied into war.
Now, you can understand why many political and media figures would prefer not to talk about any of this. Some of them, I suppose, may have been duped: may have fallen for the obvious lies, which doesn’t say much about their judgment. More, I suspect, were complicit: they realized that the official case for war was a pretext, but had their own reasons for wanting a war, or, alternatively, allowed themselves to be intimidated into going along. For there was a definite climate of fear among politicians and pundits in 2002 and 2003, one in which criticizing the push for war looked very much like a career killer.
On top of these personal motives, our news media in general have a hard time coping with policy dishonesty. Reporters are reluctant to call politicians on their lies, even when these involve mundane issues like budget numbers, for fear of seeming partisan. In fact, the bigger the lie, the clearer it is that major political figures are engaged in outright fraud, the more hesitant the reporting. And it doesn’t get much bigger — indeed, more or less criminal — than lying America into war.
But truth matters, and not just because those who refuse to learn from history are doomed in some general sense to repeat it. The campaign of lies that took us into Iraq was recent enough that it’s still important to hold the guilty individuals accountable. Never mind Jeb Bush’s verbal stumbles. Think, instead, about his foreign-policy team, led by people who were directly involved in concocting a false case for war.
So let’s get the Iraq story right. Yes, from a national point of view the invasion was a mistake. But (with apologies to Talleyrand) it was worse than a mistake, it was a crime.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, May 18, 2015
“Fully Fledged Substitutes For Campaigns”: When Is A Campaign Not A Campaign? When It’s A Super Pac
These days, presidential candidates are not just raising money for their own campaigns. They are also raising money for outside groups with generic sounding names like Priorities USA, Right to Rise and Our American Renewal.
These are Super Pacs (political action committees), affiliated with each outside campaign but nominally independent. In 2012, they were helpful appendages. This year, heading into 2016, they are becoming fully fledged substitutes for campaigns, taking over functions including opposition research, polling and even knocking on doors.
Super Pacs are just five years old. Like most developments in modern campaign finance law, they were created by accident through judicial decisions, not by legislation.
First, in 2010 the Citizens United supreme court decision struck down restrictions on independent expenditures in campaigns by nonprofits. Citizens United was followed the same year by a decision by the DC circuit court of appeals in a case called SpeechNOW, which said political groups that sought to make only independent expenditures could not be subject to federal campaign contribution limits.
These two decisions combined to create “super” versions of previously existing political action committees, that would make expenditures independently of the candidates they supported and thus could raise as much money as they wanted. In other words, one donor can fund an entire Super Pac.
In the 2012 Republican primary, Super Pacs were credited with keeping the campaigns of Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum alive for months, extending the race into the spring.
In that race and the general election that followed, Super Pacs were primarily used to run television ads. American campaigns have long focused on saturating the airwaves with advertisements; Super Pacs provided a new vehicle to air even more commercials. Campaigns, however, still have major advantages over Super Pacs when it comes to buying television time.
Within 60 days of a general election or 45 days of a primary, political campaigns are entitled to something called “lowest unit rate”. It means that a political campaign gets the lowest rate a television station offers to any advertiser, and it is coupled with the requirement that stations give political campaigns “reasonable access” to run ads. Lowest unit rate also means TV stations cannot censor or restrict ads that federal campaigns seek to run.
None of these rules apply to Super Pacs. This means that they have to pay a much higher rate per ad and may find it more difficult to get their advertisements on television.
However, all such advantages for campaigns pale next to the fact that Super Pacs can raised unlimited money from an individual donor. Federal campaigns can only take $5,400 from any individual ($2,700 for a primary election and another $2,700 for a general election). So while campaigns can get more value for their money when spending on advertising, Super Pacs don’t have to worry too much about value.
And this year, they are not worrying too much about just running television ads.
The nascent campaign of Jeb Bush has been entirely headquartered out of an organization called Right to Rise. The group is on pace to raise more than $100m in May alone and is expected to be significantly better-funded than Bush’s inevitable presidential campaign.
Bush has also set up a connected nonprofit, Right to Rise Policy Solutions, which is serving as a parking place for campaign policy advisers until the former Florida governor announces his candidacy.
Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Right to Rise is that it is expected to be led by Bush’s top political adviser, Mike Murphy. Because Super Pacs cannot coordinate with campaigns, this means that Bush will probably be unable to communicate with Murphy for the duration of the campaign.
While Bush has yet to declare his candidacy, Ted Cruz, who has announced his bid for the White House, has also bragged about the success of the four interrelated Super Pacs that are backing his campaign.
In a speech at the April meeting of the Republican Jewish Coalition in Las Vegas, the Texas senator boasted that a Super Pac supporting him had “raised $31m” in the first week of his campaign. “That’s more money than any other Super Pac has raised … in the history of politics” in a comparable period, he said.
Each of the four Super Pacs supporting Cruz is funded entirely by one major donor and devoted to one specific campaign task.
Nor are Republicans alone in such activity. Hillary Clinton, the clear Democratic frontrunner for 2016, is holding a number of fundraisers for one of her affiliated Super Pacs, Priorities USA. A separate group, Correct the Record, has spun off from the Democratic research Super Pac American Bridge, solely to do rapid response for Clinton.
Correct the Record insists it will be able to coordinate with the Clinton campaign, despite taking unlimited contributions, because it will not run any ads on her behalf.
Not all of this may end up being legal. But as Rick Hasen, an election law expert who teaches at University of California, Irvine, points out, even “if some of these things don’t pass muster with the courts”, such matters probably won’t be resolved until after the 2016 election.
Furthermore, campaign finance may have changed dramatically by the time such legal issues are resolved.
“Nothing is permanent when it comes to campaign finance,” said Hasen.
For now, though, the landscape is dominated by Super Pacs.
By: Ben Jacobs, The Guardian, May 17, 2015
“The Conservative Imagination”: Why Republicans Cannot Have A National Security “Doctrine”
In case you missed it, Marco Rubio delivered a Great Big Foreign Policy Speech yesterday, at the hallowed venue of the Council on Foreign Relations. It was such a big deal that Charlie Rose introduced him. And it even unveiled a proposed “doctrine” for national security, which I am sure the Floridian hopes will soon be known as the Rubio Doctrine.
But as Peter Beinart notes at The Atlantic, the Rubio Doctrine is basically just a collection of banal principles almost anyone could agree with:
The Rubio doctrine, which the Florida senator announced on Wednesday, “consists of three pillars.” Pillar number one is “American strength”: America must “adequately fund our military.” Pillar number two is “the protection of the American economy”: America must pursue “free trade.” Pillar number three is “clarity regarding America’s core values”: America must “support the spread of economic and political freedom by reinforcing our alliances, resisting efforts by large powers to subjugate their smaller neighbors” and “advanc[ing] the rights of the vulnerable.”
These, Rubio told moderator Charlie Rose, “are timeless truths.” But that’s precisely the problem. Historically, foreign-policy doctrines have been the opposite of “timeless.” They represent efforts to further American interests and ideals by offering a specific response to a specific geopolitical reality. Every president wants the United States to be strong, prosperous, and moral. Doctrines are supposed to outline a strategy for achieving those goals. They are not the goals themselves.
The most significant part of Beinart’s critique is this acerbic explanation of why Rubio has to keep his “doctrine” at 40,000 feet above the specific challenges of our era:
Rubio and most of the other GOP candidates want the United States to go on offense overseas after the perceived retrenchment of the Obama years. But Americans have little appetite for additional wars, and the threat that Republicans focus on most—“radical Islam”—lumps together states and organizations that are not only disparate, but bitterly hostile to each other. Truman’s “containment” doctrine and Reagan’s doctrine of “rollback” each had problems. But at least they were aimed at a specific enemy. Rubio can’t lay out a doctrine like that today because the two enemies he and other Republicans talk about most—Iran and ISIS—are only linked in the conservative imagination. On the ground, they’re at war.
That’s a bit of a problem, eh? I’m guessing if Rubio were challenged on this point, he might answer the way Will Rogers once did shortly before World War I when he was asked exactly how he proposed to drain the Atlantic Ocean, which was his “solution” to the problem of German U-Boat attacks: “That is a detail, and I am not a detail man.”
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly 15, 2015
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