“Rick Scott Stands Alone”: No One Wants To Be The Governor’s Running Mate In 2014
Florida Gov. Rick Scott’s (R) re-election bid will be challenging. Between his poor record, weak poll numbers, and credible challenger, the Republican is going to need some help to get another four years in Tallahassee.
But if he’s hoping on getting that help from his lieutenant governor, Scott should prepare a back-up plan.
In March, an ugly scandal unfolded and Lt. Gov. Jennifer Carroll (R) was forced to abruptly resign from office. Though Carroll has not yet faced criminal charges, her company is accused of helping oversee a fraudulent veterans’ charity and using gambling at Internet cafes to launder money.
The governor wasn’t connected to the scandal, but it nevertheless left Scott looking for a new #2 in his administration, who can also serve as his running mate during the 2014 campaign. How’s the search going? Not well (thanks to my colleague Tricia McKinney for the heads-up).
Seminole County Sheriff Don Eslinger on Monday formally declined Gov. Rick Scott’s offer to be considered as a possible lieutenant governor, becoming the second person on Scott’s four-person short list to turn him down.
Eslinger sent an email to his staff saying he was “flattered and honored” to be considered but that he will keep the job that he was first elected to in 1990. Last week, St. Johns County Superintendent of Schools Joseph Joyner also rejected Scott’s offer.
In case this wasn’t obvious, the Tampa Bay Times report added that the withdrawals from two of Scott’s top contenders “create the perception that no one wants to be the governor’s running mate in 2014.”
Yes, actually it does. Indeed, the Miami New Times added, “It seems almost too obvious to state that a key requirement of being lieutenant governor is actually wanting to be lieutenant governor, but that’s apparently something Gov. Rick Scott didn’t take into account during his long, dragged-out search to replace disgraced ex-Lt. Gov. Jennifer Carroll…. It’s not exactly good news when the two lowest-profile candidates on the list announce they have no interest in the job.”
The governor apparently had a short-list of four, which is now down to two – a state senator and a county commissioner, both of whom are from the Tampa area.
If they also decline, I’d just note that Florida has a 7% unemployment rate, so presumably the Republican governor will find someone who’s available and willing to stand alongside Rick Scott for the next five years.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, November 27, 2013
“Demanding The Right To Oppress”: Is Forced Religious Belief Coming To An Employer Near You?
The Supreme Court just can’t seem to quit the Affordable Care Act.
On Tuesday, it announced it would hear challenges to the law’s “contraception mandate,” which requires employers that provide health insurance to include contraceptives in their plans, including birth control pills and emergency contraception. At stake is whether for-profit companies can be exempted from the mandate because of their owner’s religious beliefs.
This controversy centers on a lawsuit by Hobby Lobby, an arts & crafts chain whose owners—David Green and his family—are devout Christians who believe life begins at conception and that using certain kinds of birth control violates their religious beliefs.
Obamacare contains an exemption for churches and other religious nonprofits, but the Greens want it extended to for-profit companies like their own, who are otherwise required to include FDA-approved contraceptives in their health insurance plans. They claim that the requirement would “substantially burden” their ability to practice their religion.
This gets to the core of the lawsuit. Hobby Lobby isn’t just fighting for an exemption from the contraception mandate, it’s arguing that, as a business, it shares in its owners religious beliefs and has its rights as a corporate person protected under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, a 1993 law mandating that strict scrutiny be used when determining if the free exercise clause of the First Amendment has been violated. By requiring companies to cover women’s contraception, Hobby Lobby argues, the federal government is violating their religious rights. In short, the Greens are asking the court to classify for-profit corporations as having religious consciences.
It should be said that the Greens aren’t Catholics; they’re evangelical Christians who don’t share Catholicism’s doctrinal opposition to birth control. Condoms and diaphragms aren’t an issue. Instead, the Greens—who see fertilized eggs as persons—object to Plan B and other forms of emergency contraception, which they believe prevent embryo implantation in a woman’s womb, and are tantamount to abortion.
But medical science is clear: emergency contraception is not an abortifacient. As explained in an amicus brief by Physicians for Reproductive Health, pregnancy begins when a fertilized egg attaches itself to the uterine lining, a process that occurs within five to nine days of sexual intercourse, if the egg is fertilized. “Emergency contraception,” notes the organization, “refers to a drug or device that is used after intercourse, but before pregnancy, to prevent pregnancy from occurring.” Abortifacients, by contrast, are used to terminate an existing pregnancy.
According to the brief, the two FDA-approved forms of emergency contraception—Plan B and “ella”—work by preventing, disrupting, or prohibiting ovulation, which stops fertilization altogether. In the doses approved for contraceptive use, neither terminates a pregnancy.
This is important. For Catholic groups, who oppose all contraception regardless of circumstance, the science is irrelevant. The mechanism of birth control is less important than the theological commitment to all pregnancies. But evangelicals—like the Greens—are in a different boat. Their objection depends on the science of pregnancy. If what’s true—emergency contraception doesn’t cause abortion—contradicts their beliefs, then what basis do they have for the objection? It’s fine if the Greens oppose abortion out of their sincere religious convictions—they can believe whatever they want—but that doesn’t give them license to redefine abortion (or contraception) to fit those beliefs.
Indeed, allowing them the privilege opens the door to a whole host of actions that would burden the liberty—religious or otherwise—of employees or customers. In a world where corporations have First Amendment protections for their religious beliefs, can they win exemptions for any law they disagree with? If Congress passes the Employee Non-Discrimination Act, can Hobby Lobby decline to follow its dictates—and say, refuse to hire to gays and lesbians—out of its sincere religious beliefs? Could it refuse to hire blacks out of a belief that they are cursed by God?
This is all on top of the implications for employees. If you work at Hobby Lobby, could the company require you to attend Bible study? What if your employer is a Christian Scientist? Could they refuse to provide health insurance at all, citing their religious beliefs? These become real scenarios if the Court decides that belief trumps all other considerations, including actual fact.
Over the last few years, corporations have accumulated more and more power, under the guise of “freedom.” At the moment, employers can fire employees for their political views, require employees to attend political rallies, and even volunteer for candidates they disagree with. Hobby Lobby is asking the Supreme Court to extend this even further, to forcing employees to choose health insurance that matches the religious preferences of their employers.
All of this raises important questions. Is this about securing religious liberty, or expanding it for a particular group? And if it’s the latter, is Hobby Lobby fighting for “liberty,” or is it demanding the right to oppress?
By: Jamelle Bouie, The Daily Beast, November 27, 2013
“A Sobering Reminder”: The Number Of Uninsured Americans Increased By 7.9 Million Under George W. Bush
The week President Obama took office, initial jobless claims, the statistic that immediately gauges layoffs, hit a 26-year high with 637,000 applying for unemployment insurance in one week. It was clear that the president was inheriting a record deficit, a cratering economy and two floundering wars. But buried in all those crises was an unspoken slow-motion disaster that people rarely mentioned: the steady crumbling of our health care system.
“When [former president Bill] Clinton left office, the number of uninsured Americans stood at 38.4 million,” Ron Brownstein wrote in 2009. “By the time [former president George W.] Bush left office that number had grown to just over 46.3 million, an increase of nearly 8 million or 20.6 percent.”
The numbers were just as bad when you looked at the share of the uninsured.
When Clinton left office, 13.7 percent of the population was uninsured. Bush left with 15.4 percent lacking coverage. And the only health reform the last Republican to occupy the White House enacted in his eight years was to add an unfunded prescription drug benefit that guaranteed cuts would need to be made at some point.
So the 15.4 percent of Americans Bush left uninsured in 2008 continued to rise in 2009 to 16.1 percent, then peaked at 16.3 percent in 2010. In 2011, it dipped to 15.7 percent, the biggest drop since 1999. The last census report showed that 48.6 million Americans were uninsured – that’s 15.4 percent. Exactly where it was in 2008.
It would be easy to credit the recovering economy for the rise of insured Americans — initial jobless claims last week were half of what they were when Obama took office. But the percentage of the uninsured is now lower than it was in 2006, before the Great Recession hit.
The New York Times‘ Paul Krugman calls the Affordable Care Act’s role in bringing health-cost growth to its lowest rate on record the law’s “secret success.” But the other secret success is how Obamacare is helping to reverse the growth of the uninsured population. This began in 2011 with children and young adults being able to stay on their parents’ plans until age 26, covering more than three million. And it continues this year with millions of Americans being added to the Medicaid rolls and millions likely to sign up for private plans, if the law’s health care exchanges begin working well enough.
Still Republicans are playing up the estimated 5 million cancellations of plans due to Obamacare the same way they played up the deficit and faltering economy President Obama inherited as if it had been his fault.
We won’t know how many of these people end up in new plans until next year, but we do know that nearly all of them will pay the same or less with a new plan that cannot deny them coverage or charge them more if they get sick.
“To sum up, lots of people losing coverage are losing policies they never liked much, that they would have dropped soon anyway, and that would have left them facing potential financial ruin if they got sick,” The New Republic‘s Jonathan Cohn wrote. “Even those with truly good policies had no guarantees that in one year, let alone two or three, they’d still be able to pay for them.”
Now, millions of Americans are being offered affordable health insurance possibly for the first time in their lives, promising to cut the ranks of the uninsured by millions in just a few years.
While Republicans are mourning cancellations of the exact kinds of plans that left massive holes in our health care system, the question is: Where were those crocodile tears when almost 8 million Americans became uninsured under George W. Bush… and Republicans did nothing to stop it?
By: Jason Sattler, The National Memo, November 29, 2013
“Another Dog Whistle To GOP Base”: The Latest Lie In The Push For Voter ID Restrictions
To the Republican supporters of laws that would treat the poll booth like an exclusive nightclub that asks for photo ID and other qualifications before allowing entry, the answer to why anyone would oppose this is simple: They must not want to vote badly enough.
This was the logic for Wisconsin State Senator Glenn Grothman who last week on MSNBC said, “I really don’t think they care that much about voting in the first place, right?” in response to a question about how African-American voters might be impacted by voter ID and early voting cuts.
This is not anomalous thinking among Republicans. Similar comments have been made by Republican state legislators in Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Florida. In fact, they say these things so often publicly that you have to wonder if it’s some kind of dog-whistle to the more racially polarized portion of their voting base.
The idea that people of color don’t “care” about voting ignores how expensive it can be to meet the qualifications of voter ID laws to begin with. Those expenses are irrelevant only to those who can easily meet them. On Friday November 15th, a federal court trial over Wisconsin’s voter ID law concluded after two weeks of testimony from at least a dozen state residents illustrating how difficult it’s been to obtain the photo ID needed to vote. It also featured the testimony of state government officials who dismissed those residents’ burdens as easily surmountable.
The question of who’s right in that tug of war comes down to careful consideration of the racial and class contexts of the law. If you are a white male with a government job, you obviously are in tune enough with the law, and have the resources to meet it. But if you are not that … well consider the statistics:
- 78 percent of African-American men in Wisconsin between the ages of 18 and 24 do not have a driver’s license
- 66 percent of young African-American women in the same age range lack a driver’s license
- 57 percent of young Latino men aged 18 to 24, and 63 percent of young Latinas lack driver’s licenses
During the Wisconsin trial, statistician Leland Beatty testified that more than 300,000 registered Wisconsin voters did not have a driver’s license or state ID card in 2012—16.2 percent of them African-American registered voters compared to just 9.5 percent of registered white voters. For Latinos, over 24 percent lacked a driver’s license or state ID card. Beatty analyzed the same data for 2013 and found the same racial disparate impact.
The burden suffered by people of color in Wisconsin under a voter ID law is not an academic exercise in statistics, though. Real Wisconsin residents testified about how hard it is to comply with the law—a law unnecessary given the state went hundreds of years without it and yet still managed to earn the top score in election performance by the Pew Research Center last year. Despite that, the expenses that come along with the voter ID law were laid bare during the November trial, which is the first litigation that has happened under the Voting Rights Act’s Section Two since the U.S. Supreme Court gutted the civil rights law this summer.
Lorene Hutchins, a 93-year-old, African-American woman born in Mississippi was able to retrieve her birth certificate from her home state only after her daughter Katherine Clark helped her through the arduous process. It cost them over $2,000 in expenses and legal fees to do so.
Ray Ciszewski, a volunteer for his church’s program that helps the homeless and those recently released from prison obtain birth certificates for jobs, and lately to vote, testified that it costs on average $20 for a Wisconsin birth certificate. Roughly 23 percent of the people he’s tried to help were unable to get their birth certificates for a number of reasons, he said during the trial.
Carmen Cabrera of the Latino non-profit Centro Hispano Milwaukee testified that many of their members encountered language barriers—in particular, a limited availability of Spanish-speaking DMV clerks—when they help them get state IDs. Not to mention, there’s limited access to the DMV offices around the state since most of them are open only on weekdays and close at 4:30 p.m. Anytime voters have to take time off from work or school to haggle with DMV operators, especially those who don’t speak their language, that is a cost voters have to bare.
Attorney General Kawski called these plaintiffs’ experiences “uncommon, bizarre and one-of-a-kind exceptions”—again, only bizarre to those who are privileged enough to not have to deal with the every day struggles of people of color and low income.
I encountered this same dynamic last year while covering the Pennsylvania court trial over its voter ID law, where poor people of color had to prove that they even existed, ID or not. Over two dozen witnesses, mostly black and Latino, provided account after account about how difficult it is for them to transact with the government over ID while state officials responded on the stand by placing those life stories in doubt. That case is still unresolved, pending a judge’s ruling
More stories about the costs and burdens of Wisconsin residents who lack ID are bound to surface. The Wisconsin state supreme court this week decided to hear two other challenges to the voter ID law filed by local NAACP and League of Women Voter chapters. Other Voter ID law challenges are waiting for their day in court in North Carolina and Texas—the latter of which is a protracted court battle that rivals only Wisconsin in terms of time elapsed without resolving the voter ID controversy. Texas’s law was stopped last year in federal court under a Voting Rights Act Section 5 challenge. When the Supreme Court invalidated Section Five’s coverage formula, Texas immediately reinstated the law, which ranks at the top of the nation with Wisconsin in terms of its voter restrictions. It is headed back to federal court, this time under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.
The stakes for all of these voter ID trials are not only who may or may not show up to vote in 2014 and 2016, but also whether government officials will finally recognize the true costs and burdens of being poor, black and brown in America as illustrated in these court testimonies. It’s not that they don’t care about voting; it’s that too many obstructions have been placed in their way.
By: Brentin Mock, The American Prospect, November 25, 2013
“The First Step Of A Long Journey”: Now’s Not The Time For Liberals To Say “I Told You So” About Obamacare
It has been a rough two months for the Affordable Care Act and its defenders. Having spent years fighting ridiculous allegations about socialized medicine and “death panels,” supporters of near-universal coverage now face something different. The performance failures in the rollout of healthcare.gov have triggered cries of “I told you so!” from some liberals. This wouldn’t have happened, they say, if only Obama had supported some form of single-payer plan, such as Medicare for all. The anger over the botched rollout is understandable, but these recriminations are poorly timed—and just plain wrong.
For starters, the ACA is working reasonably well in some places—California, Connecticut, Kentucky, Washington, and the District of Columbia, for example. These under-reported success stories show that insurance exchanges can work, if properly administered. Exchanges are successfully determining applicants’ eligibility for Medicaid or private insurance, enabling consumers to choose among competing plans, and computing the tax credits to which people are entitled. The human benefits are real, from California to Breathitt County in rural Kentucky. These successes make the federal government’s dismal rollout even more embarrassing. Republicans may have done everything within their power to dynamite the ACA, but the administration fell inexcusably short in launching Obama’s domestic-policy centerpiece.
It doesn’t help that health reform is really complicated. The U.S. health-care system is far and away the most complex in the world, one that includes employer-sponsored coverage, Medicare, Medicaid, Tricare, the Indian Health Service, and small-group and individual insurance coverage—and that’s before Obamacare was implemented.
Given that complexity, some on the left say, life would be simpler if only Congress had been willing—which it was not—to scrap all current arrangements and replace them with a single, federally administered health insurance plan. Those on the right regard this complexity and say that life would be simpler if only Congress had been willing—which it was not—to scrap all current arrangements and replace them with income-related vouchers people could use to help pay for private insurance of their choice.
Those positions enjoy loud support in the blogosphere, Twitter, and cable TV, but only niche support at each end of the political spectrum. Although their ideological values could hardly be more different, these polar-opposite camps each disdain the kludgy fixes of incremental politics. And yet, incrementalism is what most Americans want. Most people are reasonably well-insured. They like their coverage, and they want it to remain affordable. They fear legislation that threatens it. Proposals, whether from the left or right, that force most people into radically different arrangements are fated to remain politically marginal in America.
That the right, which predicted Obamacare would mean the death of liberty and ruination of the U.S health care system, feels vindicated by Obamacare’s initial woes is no surprise. But the troubles with healthcare.gov have rekindled attacks from the left, too. Consider a recent essay by American Prospect co-editor Robert Kuttner, in which he writes, “The colossal mess that Obamacare has become reflects both the character of the legislation and that of the president who sponsored it.”
We understand Kuttner’s frustration. We do not share his disdain for the ACA or for Obama. The law ended a century of legislative failures in the search for universal health insurance coverage, and enacted important reforms of our healthcare delivery system. Obama bet his historic legacy on a reform that, however imperfect, brings health insurance to millions, improves its quality, and helps slow spending growth.
The real beef of those who seek a more radical rewiring of our healthcare system is not with the president. It is with the coalition of labor, healthcare, disability, and anti-poverty groups that coalesced during 2007 and 2008 around a health reform model that later became the ACA. Candidates Hillary Clinton, Obama, and John Edwards endorsed similar health plans. They all included Medicaid expansion, regulated markets (health insurance exchanges), premium subsidies, strengthened insurance regulation, and an explicit or de facto individual mandate. Many Democrats would have preferred single-payer, but the candidates and even most single-payer supporters understood that politically this just wasn’t possible.
We wish ACA had gone farther. It could have provided more generous premium assistance and cost-sharing for working families. It could have allowed people near retirement to buy into Medicare. Alas, senators such as Joe Lieberman—not Obama—scuttled these possibilities. The ACA is only the first step in a long journey of needed health reforms.
Kuttner goes on to write: “Medicare for All would be simpler to execute, easier to understand, and harder for Republicans to oppose.” Nancy Folbre, writing in The New York Times, took the same position. Kuttner and Folbre are correct that Medicare for All would be much easier to understand. Perhaps, as Obama among others has said, Medicare for All would be preferable to our current system, were we designing that system from scratch.
But we aren’t. The slogan “Medicare for all” was never incorporated in a well-crafted legislative proposal. Had it been, it would have been even easier than Obamacare for Republicans to oppose. And implementation would have been formidably difficult. Had the transition to single-payer ever been specifically mapped out, it would immediately have become apparent that this process requires wholesale replacement or rewiring of employer-based coverage, major changes in the relations between states and the federal government. Hundreds of billions of dollars in transfers and new taxes would have been necessary. Enterprising constitutional conservatives surely would have identified plausible court challenges. What’s more, a phalanx of providers—hospitals, doctors, insurers, drug companies and device manufacturers—opposed single-payer proposals. Even such incremental moves as the public option evoked profound unease among insurers, community hospitals, and other key parts of the coalition that supported the ACA.
The backlash against the ACA is occurring because it disrupts coverage of several million people in the individual and small-group insurance market. Transition to single-payer would have been far messier, disrupting coverage for hundreds of millions of Americans, with a much larger and more explosive mix of winners and losers.
There was and is no alternative to the messy incremental politics that produced Obamacare. Liberals such as then–House Majority Speaker Nancy Pelosi didn’t make unpalatable compromises because they held pallid aspirations for health reform. They compromised because they knew that they could not impose their will on querulous colleagues, because they needed 60 Senate votes, because millions of Americans needed help, and because it is better to win messily than to lose gloriously.
Much now rides on the government’s ability to fix healthcare.gov. Definite progress has been made. The federal exchange will be better by year’s end, but it will be months, not a few weeks, before the website really works the way it should. The White House’s cautionary messages on enrollment efforts and its one-year delay in online small business enrollment exemplify the many challenges with getting Obamacare off the ground. So these are anxious times. If the ACA fails, hopes for universal coverage will be set back a generation. Now’s not the time for liberals supporters to turn against Obamacare, or against each other.
By: Henry Aaron and Harold Pollack, The New Republic, November 28, 2013
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