“Shocking Sloppiness Won’t Doom The Health Reforms”: Republican Politicians Will Have A Lot Of Angry People On Their Hands
How many politicians, aides, lobbyists, lawyers, insurance moguls, professional groups, and interns — both the political and medical kind — agonized over the details in the Affordable Care Act? The number is big.
But despite thousands of hands in the kitchen, the final product included four words that cast doubt on a cornerstone of the reforms — subsidies for those buying coverage on federal health insurance exchanges. Unbelievable.
Diehard foes of the reforms have weaponized those words as a means to kill the law. They argue in the Supreme Court case King v. Burwell that specifically offering subsidies for plans bought on exchanges “established by the state” means no help for those going to federal exchanges.
Since the program started, low- and middle-income Americans have been receiving tax credits for coverage on both types of exchanges. Almost everyone assumes that’s how it’s supposed to be.Take away subsidies for federal exchanges and only the sickly will join it. The economic structure underpinning guaranteed coverage will collapse as premiums charged for plans on federal exchanges soar and the healthy stay away in droves.
The plaintiffs, though they come from the right, are doing their Republican colleagues no favors. You see, when the Affordable Care Act created federal exchanges in states that had not set up their own, leaders in Republican-controlled states could noisily defy President Obama while taking few political risks. They could refuse to set up state exchanges knowing that their constituents would enjoy subsidized coverage on the federal exchanges.
Lose those subsidies and Republican politicians are going to have a lot of angry people on their hands. Some 7.5 million Americans receive subsidies on federal exchanges.
Hypocrisy now crashes over the Republicans’ wall of opposition to the Affordable Care Act. Politicians are currently rewriting the story of their obstruction of a law that they dread could come apart.
An exasperating example is Olympia Snowe, a former senator from Maine who fancies herself a moderate Republican. During the battle for the bill’s passage, she strung Obama along for months, pretending that she might provide him at least one Republican vote. (Why Obama indulged these stalling tactics… perhaps his memoirs will tell.)
Anyway, Snowe recently commented that the little words at the heart of the Supreme Court case were unintended. “Why would we have wanted to deny people subsidies?” she said. “It was not their fault if their state did not set up an exchange.”
So why did she vote against the bill? She also railed against “Obamacare” as a “government-run health care system,” not that this was the case. Until Snowe left the Senate in 2013, she worked with her party to undercut the reforms.
But get this: At the time of the bill’s writing, Snowe proposed letting Americans buy cheaper drugs from Canada. It was OK, apparently, for a foreign government to help struggling Mainers obtain health care, but not OK for their own to do so.
One expects the health reforms to survive this latest assault. The best outcome would be the Supreme Court’s confirming that the words were a mistake and that yes, subsidies for the federal health exchange are legal.
If the court says no, politicians in states relying on federal exchanges could swing into action and set up some form of state exchange. And the Obama administration would probably make it easy for them.
The bipartisan takeaway here is the appalling state of American governance. We now hear from all sides that omission of subsidies for the federal exchanges was “sloppy,” “careless,” “inadvertent,” “a drafting error.” Actually, it was inexcusable.
But let’s move on.
By: Froma Harrop, Featured Post, The National Memo, May 28, 2015
“The Tax Rates That Don’t Cause Bernie Sanders To ‘Flinch'”: About As Radical As Republican Plans To Slash Taxes On The Wealthy
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is many things, but subtle isn’t one of them. Take a look at these comments the Democratic presidential candidate made to CNBC about higher taxes on the wealthiest Americans.
“These people are so greedy, they’re so out of touch with reality,” he said. “They think they own the world…. I’m sorry to have to tell them, they live in the United States, they benefit from the United States, we have kids who are hungry in this country. We have people who are working two, three, four jobs, who can’t send their kids to college.
“Sorry, you’re all going to have to pay your fair share of taxes,” he asserted. “If my memory is correct, when radical socialist Dwight D. Eisenhower was president, the highest marginal tax rate was something like 90 percent.”
That last part is true, by the way. In the 1950s, when Republicans were far more interested in deficit reduction than tax breaks, Eisenhower was committed to helping pay off World War II-era debts. He kept Roosevelt’s 90% top marginal rate in place, and the post-war economy boomed anyway. (It wasn’t until JFK in 1961 that Washington approved a “peace dividend,” and even then, some Republicans of the era balked, still preferring to focus on the debt, not tax breaks.)
But Sanders’ support for similar rates is so far from mainstream norms that his comments strike much of the political world as somehow bizarre. The New York Times noted with incredulity that the Vermont senator “doesn’t flinch over returning to the 90 percent personal income tax rates of the 1950s for top earners.”
Over at Salon, it led Simon Maloy to raise a good point: “We’ve become so accustomed to historically low rates of taxation for the wealthy that when someone like Sanders comes along and says the rich can and should pay a far higher rate, people assume he’s out to lunch.”
The flip side to the dynamic is that while reporters and pundits raise their eyebrows at the notion of dramatically increasing the tax burden on the wealthy, absurd and irresponsible tax cuts for top earners are now just assumed to be a given when it comes to Republican policymaking. Several current Republican candidates for the presidency have laid out plans that would eliminate capital gains taxes and the estate tax while cutting the top income tax rate. […]
The thrust of GOP policymaking is to redirect an even greater share of the nation’s wealth to the already engorged few sitting at the top of the income ladder. Sanders is proposing instead that we funnel some of that wealth away from the rich and toward the middle class. And while we’re supposed to “flinch” at a high rate of taxation for income, a zero percent rate on investments is taken in stride.
I think that’s right. Sanders’ position is clearly far from the traditional menu of tax-policy options, so far that he practically sounds like a visitor from another country (if not another planet). We’re accustomed to hearing national figures talk about raising taxes on the rich a little; we’re not accustomed to hearing them talk about raising taxes on the rich a lot.
But what Sanders is proposing is about as radical as Republican plans to slash taxes on the wealthy by hundreds of billions of dollars. It just seems more extreme because our expectations have begun to adapt to a ridiculous GOP wish list that we’re confronted with all the time.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, May 28, 2015
“15 Clowns And Counting, Revisionists Reality Show”: The GOP Should Run Its Debates Just Like American Idol
We’re almost certainly going to have more than a dozen Republican presidential candidates in the 2016 race. As The New York Times helpfully points out, six are already in (Carson, Cruz, Fiorina, Huckabee, Paul, Rubio) and seven more are all but certainly running (Bush, Christie, Graham, Jindal, Perry, Santorum, Walker). There are plenty more maybes, too — both serious (Kasich) and clowns (Trump).
This leaves GOP planners with a big and pressing question: How do you stage a debate when you can’t even fit the participants on a single stage?
It’s an unprecedented problem. There’s never been a primary debate — in either party — with more than 10 candidates. And it’s even more disconcerting to Republicans because they made a strong effort to limit the number of debates so it didn’t turn into a circus like it did four years ago… when there were a mere nine candidates.
Fox News, which hosts the first debate on August 6, announced that it will limit participation to the top 10 contenders based on an average of the last five national polls. Maybe that sounds good on the surface… except that formula threatens to leave out a couple of sitting governors, a U.S. senator, and the only woman running.
CNN, which hosts the second debate on September 16, will literally divide the candidates into two tiers. That could lead to some interesting exchanges, as the lower-tier candidates try to get attention with less airtime.
Other proposed formulas, which exclude candidates by the amount of money raised or the number of staffers hired, also have their problems. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, one of the potential candidates who could be left off the stage, has even proposed two back-to-back debates with randomly selected participants.
All of this worrying and rule-making is intended to prevent the GOP presidential debates from becoming a political version of a reality show. But when you think about it, what’s wrong with that?
Imagine if the debates were like American Idol, with candidates “performing” their answers to questions before a panel of “judges” — and ultimately the votes of television viewers across the country. At the end of each round, the poorest performing candidates would be “voted off” and wouldn’t move to the next round.
Viewership of the debates would surge as Americans discussed with their friends and colleagues what happened on the “show” the previous night. And as more viewers voted to keep their favorite candidates around, more people would have a vested interest in the ultimate winner.
Just as the winners of American Idol often go on to became famous singers who sell out their concerts and sell many albums, the winner of the GOP presidential debate would have a ready-made constituency for the general election.
Some might think it’s unseemly to treat a presidential campaign like a game show. But our politics have been evolving this way for more than 200 years. Our earliest presidents thought it unseemly to even campaign at all. They never left their homes.
The Republican Party has its strongest field of candidates in years. There is no fair way to pick those who would be allowed on the debate stage. Even with as few as 10 candidates, the debates will seem like a game show.
Why not just embrace that? A game show format might lead to the strongest general election candidate Republicans have had in years, too.
By: Taegan Goddard, The Week, May 26, 2015
“How Dems Can Peel Off GOP Voters”: The Birth Of The Left-Wing Wedge Issue
Here’s a little datum that may have slid by you: Gallup has just found that on social issues, the country is now equally split between liberals and conservatives. The question was: “Thinking about social issues, would you say your views are” very conservative, conservative, liberal, or very liberal?
And the answer came back: Grouping the first two into one category and the last two into another, it was a dead heat at 31 percent each. This is pretty close to seismic. Just five years ago, the conservative edge on social issues was 39 to 22 percent. Now it’s totally wiped out. The implications for our electoral politics are obvious and enormous, and I mean good-enormous.
I’m not sure when people started using the phrase “wedge issue.” But we’re all sure what wedge issues are: They’re cultural politics issues used in elections by the right—and always only the right—to drive a wedge into the liberal coalition. Nixon did it expertly, even though the phrase wasn’t in use back then. Reagan did it well, cleaving so many working-class white ethnics away from the Democratic Party. George H.W. Bush and Jim Baker did it—remember Willie Horton (race was the original wedge issue). And Bush the younger and Karl Rove expanded it out to include guns and gays.
And now, Gallup is suggesting to us, the era of the wedge issue may be over.
But wait! Why should it be over? Maybe it’s time for some liberal wedge issues! I like the sound of that a lot.
Gay marriage was a great wedge issue for Dubya and Rove in 2004, as you’ll recall. They got anti-gay marriage initiatives on the ballot in 11 states, many of them key swing states; studies have tended to find that in Ohio, which Bush carried and which was the difference between victory and defeat in the Electoral College, the initiative did goose evangelical turnout a bit (and remember, Bush won the state by just 118,000 votes out of around 5.6 million cast). It may have also helped him win more African Americans than he would have otherwise, hence the wedge.
Well, in 2016, same-sex marriage can be a wedge issue again, but this time, for our team. The numbers are now so decisive that surely in the key swing states with the bushels of electoral votes, the likely Democratic candidate can cast shame upon the head of her opponent. In Florida, support for gay marriage was 57 percent a year ago, and it’s probably a little higher now. In Ohio, support-to-opposition was 52-37 in 2012, and that’s surely higher now. In Virginia in 2013, support registered at 56 percent. The issue isn’t a loser in any important swing state, with the possible exception of North Carolina, which of course is just icing for the Democrats anyway.
How could Hillary Clinton and her party use this, exactly? That gets a little harder to say. The thing that makes a wedge issue a wedge issue is that, historically anyway, it’s been about fear. The blacks are coming. The gays are coming. The anti-gun nuts are going to be pounding on your door, warrant in hand. As has often been said, it’s the best motivator in politics.
The crucial psychic element of fear-mongering is that you have to persuade the majority that some minority is “taking over” and they, your majority, will soon be the trampled minority unless they act. That’s what gets the blood cooking in the old amygdala. (What?! Microsoft Word doesn’t recognize amygdala?!) Conservatives are much better at this than liberals are, and in any case, if liberals tried this it just wouldn’t make sense or work. Everybody knows that the anti-same-sex-marriage side is losing fast, so fear is a non-starter here.
No, the psychic ingredient of the liberal wedge campaign has to be something else. And of course it has to resonate with people on some level, be in tune with what they’re actually thinking. So, what are people (not just liberals, but average, quasi-informed people) thinking about conservatives right now? I’d suggest it’s that they’re just out of it. Out of touch with the times. Holding us back.
Certainly this is so with respect to same-sex marriage, although the problem is hardly limited to that by a long shot. One issue I’d really love to see Clinton and the Democrats plop down smack in the middle of the table this election is the way conservatism today just strangles opportunity for middle-class people, and for young people in particular, in the name of their messianic tax-cutting.
TPM ran a great piece Friday on how the Republican governors who are running for president are destroying their higher-education systems in the name of cutting state income taxes and never, ever raising another tax of any kind. Bobby Jindal has cut taxes six times in Louisiana, which has produced a $1.6 billion shortfall. To plug the gap, he’s cutting higher-ed funding by as much as $600 million, which is 82 percent of state higher-ed aid. Scott Walker’s half-a-billion dollars in tax cuts in Wisconsin have led to a $2 billion shortfall, so he’s slashing higher ed by $300 million.
These, too, are wedge issues, if you ask me. Republicans send their kids to college too. Yes, they like their tax cuts. But I would assume that they don’t like whopping tuition hikes, or their kids having to drop out of college altogether, any more than Democrats or independents do. If the Democrats can connect these dots in the right way—on this and a whole range of Warrenesque “household economics” issues—they can peel off a decent chunk of voters who have been traditionally Republican.
Republicans will still roll out their wedge issues, but it seems that the pickings are pretty slim. Fear just isn’t selling. To borrow from A.J. Liebling’s nice line about sweet Louisiana corn, fear just doesn’t travel well anymore outside the right-wing base. Muslim-bashing may be the exception to that, but even that won’t work without a triggering event of some kind. Republicans might actually have to talk about issues. Which of course is even worse for them.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, May 26, 2015
“Big Trouble In Sheldon Adelson’s Little China”: Sometimes It’s Best To Just Shut Up, Unless You’re Arrogant And Rich
Sheldon Adelson has rarely been shy about sharing his opinion. Whether the topic is Israeli politics, online gambling, or the next GOP presidential nominee, the multibillionaire casino man and Republican Party mega-donor has put his mouth wherever his money is.
But after four days of at times bruising testimony in a volatile wrongful-termination lawsuit that threatens his gambling empire and reputation, the 81-year-old Adelson has talked his way into trouble.
At a time he might have preferred to be jetting off to monitor his Macau casino interests or relaxing at his Las Vegas home with a lapful of panting GOP presidential hopefuls, Adelson found himself giving sworn testimony in a district court hearing designed to establish jurisdiction in the wrongful-termination suit brought against him by former Sands China Ltd. CEO Steve Jacobs. And on Friday, the court ruled that the suit would be heard in the U.S., not Macau, where Adelson wanted the trial to take place.
Adelson is the chairman and CEO of Las Vegas Sands, which owns 70 percent of Sands China Ltd. He is the chairman of the board of Sands China, a company registered in the Cayman Islands and traded on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. Sands China operates the Macau casinos that have helped make Las Vegas resident Adelson one of the world’s richest men.
Among other things, Jacobs accuses Adelson and the company of unethical business practices, bribing public officials, maintaining a relationship with a company tied to a Chinese triad crime boss, and facilitating prostitution. Jacobs says Adelson was involved in all these shady dealings, and that he was fired in part for blowing the whistle on Adelson.
For his part, Adelson calls Jacobs’s accusations the “delusional” fantasies of an incompetent employee bent on revenge and a big payday he didn’t earn. He also accused Jacobs of “squealing like a pig to the government” after his former executive expressed his concerns about the company to the Department of Justice and Securities and Exchange Commission.
Any decent litigator will tell his client that on the witness stand brief answers are best. Before Friday’s ruling, it became obvious that Adelson didn’t get that memo. On several occasions last week, Adelson attorney Randall Jones appeared to try to cut his client short, and a few times reminded the loquacious Adelson that no question was pending. But the casino boss insisted on elaborating at most every turn.
In the process, Adelson contradicted the recollections of current and former company executives on pertinent issues, including whether damaging news accounts led to a decision to stop doing business with a casino junket company influenced by triad boss Cheung Chi Tai.
District Judge Elizabeth Gonzalez moved the hearing along almost without incident—save for one brief exchange with the defendant to remind him that he was the witness and not the judge.
In a previous deposition, Adelson made it fairly clear that not much of consequence happens in his kingdom without his input. Jacobs’s attorney, James Pisanelli, drew from a September 6, 2012, deposition to remind him of that fact.
“‘Did you perform any duties that would be more typical of a CEO on behalf of SCL?’” Pisanelli asked. In 2012, Adelson had answered, “Look, the responsibilities of different positions, different titles, sometimes get mixed up. It could very well be that I have made recommendations or I’ve given orders for something that—that may have belonged to another title, that for one reason or another the suggestions are not forthcoming or that I see that people make mistakes and they have to be corrected.”
And Adelson was prepared to make those corrections from his Las Vegas headquarters whether it was changing executives or moving the location of a gourmet restaurant inside one of his Macau casinos.
Jacobs says he was let go after he refused to pay a $700,000 fee submitted by well-connected Macau legislator and Sands China outside counsel Leonel Alves, which he worried might break U.S. anti-bribery laws. Adelson overruled his Macau CEO and reinstated the payment, which he said was a bargain considering the exorbitant fees other lawyers were charging to settle casino-licensing issues.
Throughout his testimony, Adelson took swipes at Jacobs, who sat silently in the courtroom, at one point observing, “He was one of the least competent and potentially destructive executives I had in over 50 companies in my 69-year business career. He only worked for the company for one year.”
In that time, however, Jacobs appears to have mightily impressed Adelson’s former No. 2 man, Michael Leven, who cheered in an email, “The Titanic hit the iceberg. [Jacobs] arrived and not only saved the passengers, he saved the ship.”
Clearly nonplussed, Adelson said Leven had been “hypnotized” by Jacobs and then promised, “Mike Leven will come in and say he made a mistake.”
But Jacobs’s attorneys, Pisanelli and Todd Bice, continued to grind away at their argument that, according to a court filing, “Jacobs was not terminated for cause. He was terminated for blowing the whistle on improprieties and placing the interests of shareholders above those of Adelson.”
Adelson, ever pugnacious, countered that he looked forward to the time the merits of the case would be filed, which is intriguing considering how hard his own attorneys have worked to drag out the jurisdiction issue.
Jacobs’s lawsuit contends, “While Sands China publicly holds itself out as being headquartered in Macau, its true headquarters are in Las Vegas, where all principle decisions are made and direction is given by executives acting for Sands China.”
Adelson downplayed that argument and even appeared to shrug off the assertion that his company had been doing business with a major Chinese organized crime figure.
“I keep reading the newspapers that say that Cheung Chi Tai was only a witness in a trial in Hong Kong concerning some wrongdoing,” Adelson said. “He was never accused of any wrongdoing. It’s not—I don’t get involved in those things…We hired the former head of the FBI regulatory division. We hired the former chief operating officer of the U.S. Secret Service. We do everything we can to stay away from the bad guys, and we’re constantly on the lookout for any direct or indirect connection. You’re asking me about documents in languages that I don’t speak or read.”
Pisanelli countered, “So you’re telling us, sir, then that as the chairman of the board you were to learn that a person with whom your company had a business association with was involved in a plot to behead some of your employees, that is not something you would have gotten involved with as the chairman?”
Adelson’s attorney Jones rushed to object.
It’s just such testimony that has helped generate damaging headlines linking Adelson’s company to Chinese organized crime, which could cause a lot of trouble for the casino king now that the case will proceed in a Las Vegas courtroom.
Then again, maybe it’s just the kind of trouble a guy worth nearly $30 billion or so can afford.
By: John L. Smith, The Daily Beast, May 27, 2015
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