“Plan Versus No Plan”: Virginia’s Gubernatorial Race Is A Referendum On ObamaCare, And The GOP Is Going To Lose
Republican Ken Cuccinelli became a national conservative star as Virginia’s attorney general by leading the legal fight to declare the Affordable Care Act unconstitutional all the way to the Supreme Court. Now he’s running for governor, and he’s making health care the defining issue of his campaign.
As the federal rollout continues to be plagued by website problems and renewed criticism over discontinued low-coverage individual plans, Cuccinelli told his supporters Monday, “We need people to know Nov 5th in Virginia is a referendum on ObamaCare.” His latest ad slams Democratic opponent Terry McAuliffe for wanting to “EXPAND OBAMACARE,” and closes by saying “to stop ObamaCare and higher taxes, there’s only one choice.” Outside conservative groups are also running ads excoriating McAuliffe as a supporter of ObamaCare.
Virginia voters appear to agree with Cuccinelli that health care is one of the most important issues of the campaign. The Washington Post poll conducted October 24-27 asked likely voters how important eight different issues were to determining their vote. Along with job creation and education, health care tied for first, with 72 percent saying those issues were “very important.”
And yet, in that same poll, Cuccinelli is losing by 12 points.
In fact, Cuccinelli is losing in every single poll that’s been taken in this race save for one in early July, suggesting that his defeat is a near-certainty.
Republicans are clinging to a bit of hope after a Quinnipiac poll released this week showed him only down by 4 points. But that poll only shows a minor tightening — within the margin-of-error — relative to the previous Quinnipiac poll from earlier in the month. Further, both Quinnipiac and the Washington Post polls peg Cuccinelli’s level of support around a meager 40 percent. And both polls show a third-party candidate in the race drawing support away from both major party candidates, which suggests if the also-ran fades in the stretch it won’t upend the stable trajectory of the race to date. (The Huffington Post synthesis of all the polls to date estimates McAuliffe’s lead to be a healthy eight points.)
Why isn’t health care helping Cuccinelli in the swing state of Virginia, despite all the very real problems ObamaCare has been facing this month? After all, the candidates’ positions on health care couldn’t make the choice any clearer. Cuccinelli wants the law repealed. McAuliffe says “it’s time to implement the law” by accepting federal money so the state can expand Medicaid coverage for the working poor, and having Virginia establish its own health insurance exchange.
The simplest answer is: McAuliffe’s position is shared by a whole lot of Virginians.
A plurality of 49 percent supported ObamaCare in a different Quinnipiac poll taken October 2-8. Voters said McAuliffe would do a “better job” on health care by a nine-point margin over Cuccinelli.
Of course, now that the shutdown is over and the program’s rollout is suffering significant flak, you might expect those numbers to worsen for McAuliffe. But this week’s Washington Post poll finds voters now trust McAuliffe to do a “better job” on health care by a whopping 21-point margin.
There is another plausible reason: Republicans still refuse to bolster their criticism of ObamaCare with serious policy alternatives.
Despite Cuccinelli’s insistence that the election is a referendum on ObamaCare, his website fails to include a page dedicated to what he would do about health care. Instead, he buries a few paragraphs on health care on his overall “Issues” page, which offers several conservative buzzwords but no actual policy specifics. Meanwhile, McAuliffe spells out his health care agenda in a seven-page white paper.
Plan beats no plan.
Despite all the troubles the Obama administration has had in getting ObamaCare off the ground, what’s been clear all month is this: Whatever misgivings and uncertainties persist, millions of people are going to Healthcare.gov and want the new system to work. But only Democrats, and a very small number of Republican governors, are showing a commitment to making the system work.
This should be a wake-up call to Republicans who thought the shaky Affordable Care Act rollout would shred belief in governmental competence, undermine liberalism, justify conservative obsession with repeal, and infuse Republicans with fresh momentum.
Because as this Virginia race shows, without plausible Republican policy alternatives, Democrats will able to ride out the inevitable hiccups that come with implementing new government programs and avoid any mass anti-government backlash. Simply hating on ObamaCare has not, is not, and will not be a potent political weapon.
By: Bill Scher, The Week, October 31, 2013
“Poverty In America Is Mainstream”: It’s An Issue Of Us, Rather Than An Issue Of Them
Few topics in American society have more myths and stereotypes surrounding them than poverty, misconceptions that distort both our politics and our domestic policy making.
They include the notion that poverty affects a relatively small number of Americans, that the poor are impoverished for years at a time, that most of those in poverty live in inner cities, that too much welfare assistance is provided and that poverty is ultimately a result of not working hard enough. Although pervasive, each assumption is flat-out wrong.
Contrary to popular belief, the percentage of the population that directly encounters poverty is exceedingly high. My research indicates that nearly 40 percent of Americans between the ages of 25 and 60 will experience at least one year below the official poverty line during that period ($23,492 for a family of four), and 54 percent will spend a year in poverty or near poverty (below 150 percent of the poverty line).
Even more astounding, if we add in related conditions like welfare use, near-poverty and unemployment, four out of five Americans will encounter one or more of these events.
In addition, half of all American children will at some point during their childhood reside in a household that uses food stamps for a period of time.
Put simply, poverty is a mainstream event experienced by a majority of Americans. For most of us, the question is not whether we will experience poverty, but when.
But while poverty strikes a majority of the population, the average time most people spend in poverty is relatively short. The standard image of the poor has been that of an entrenched underclass, impoverished for years at a time. While this captures a small and important slice of poverty, it is also a highly misleading picture of its more widespread and dynamic nature.
The typical pattern is for an individual to experience poverty for a year or two, get above the poverty line for an extended period of time, and then perhaps encounter another spell at some later point. Events like losing a job, having work hours cut back, experiencing a family split or developing a serious medical problem all have the potential to throw households into poverty.
Just as poverty is widely dispersed with respect to time, it is also widely dispersed with respect to place. Only approximately 10 percent of those in poverty live in extremely poor urban neighborhoods. Households in poverty can be found throughout a variety of urban and suburban landscapes, as well as in small towns and communities across rural America. This dispersion of poverty has been increasing over the past 20 years, particularly within suburban areas.
Along with the image of inner-city poverty, there is also a widespread perception that most individuals in poverty are nonwhite. This is another myth: According to the latest Census Bureau numbers, two-thirds of those below the poverty line identified themselves as white — a number that has held rather steady over the past several decades.
What about the generous assistance we provide to the poor? Contrary to political rhetoric, the American social safety net is extremely weak and filled with gaping holes. Furthermore, it has become even weaker over the past 40 years because of various welfare reform and budget cutting measures.
We currently expend among the fewest resources within the industrialized countries in terms of pulling families out of poverty and protecting them from falling into it. And the United States is one of the few developed nations that does not provide universal health care, affordable child care, or reasonably priced low-income housing. As a result, our poverty rate is approximately twice the European average.
Whether we examine childhood poverty, poverty among working-age adults, poverty within single-parent families or overall rates of poverty, the story is much the same — the United States has exceedingly high levels of impoverishment. The many who find themselves in poverty are often shocked at how little assistance the government actually provides to help them through tough times.
Finally, the common explanation for poverty has emphasized a lack of motivation, the failure to work hard enough and poor decision making in life.
Yet my research and that of others has consistently found that the behaviors and attitudes of those in poverty basically mirror those of mainstream America. Likewise, a vast majority of the poor have worked extensively and will do so again. Poverty is ultimately a result of failings at economic and political levels rather than individual shortcomings.
The solutions to poverty are to be found in what is important for the health of any family — having a job that pays a decent wage, having the support of good health and child care and having access to a first-rate education. Yet these policies will become a reality only when we begin to truly understand that poverty is an issue of us, rather than an issue of them.
By: Mark R. Rank, The New York Times, November 2, 2013
“Show Your Invisible Hand”: The SEC Should Make Corporations Disclose Political Contributions
A core assumption of the Supreme Court’s opinion in 2010’s troubling Citizens United case, which broadened corporations’ abilities to use their money for political purposes, was that shareholders could decide for themselves whether they agreed with the ways that money was being spent.
According to Justice Anthony Kennedy, who delivered the opinion for the Court, “With the advent of the Internet, prompt disclosure of expenditures can provide shareholders and citizens with the information needed to hold corporations and elected officials accountable for their positions and supporters. Shareholders can determine whether their corporation’s political speech advances the corporation’s interest in making profits, and citizens can see whether elected officials are ‘in the pocket’ of so-called moneyed interests.”
The problem with this particular assumption, which economists call perfect information, is that corporations are — surprise surprise — not legally obligated to share information on political spending with their shareholders or the public. In August 2011, a group of high-profile law professors filed a petition with the Securities and Exchange Commission, calling on the agency to require public companies to disclose what corporate resources they spend on political activities because “most political spending remains opaque to investors in most publicly traded companies.”
Why do companies spend money on politics? The answer seems obvious: they want to generate profits. They are seeking advantages like reduced trade barriers, government contracts, easier regulatory inspections, and lower tax rates. For more on this point, see my colleague Tom Ferguson’s recent paper with Paul Jorgensen and Jie Chen, which reveals how “Too Big to Fail” Wall Street firms and telecom companies have captured the GOP and the Democrats, respectively. (As an aside, isn’t it odd that the same companies orchestrating the expansion of the surveillance state are so concerned about their own privacy?)
But there is sufficient research to suggest there is another, more covert reason that has serious consequences for shareholders. In my recently published Roosevelt Institute paper on the costs and benefits of this disclosure rule, I cite several studies that show corporate executives frequently spend on politics for their own personal advantage rather than the company’s bottom line. These personal benefits include things like prestige, a future political career, star power, or assistance for political allies.
With these kinds of distorted incentives, the lack of information available to the public about corporate political spending puts shareholders and potential investors at enormous risk. Why would they want to invest in a company that is undertaking activities that are more likely to benefit its executives than its investors? Requiring corporations to disclose their political spending, on the other hand, would do the following:
—Enable investors to make informed investment decisions. Good information is always key to helping potential shareholders calculate the risk they are taking by investing in a company or helping current shareholders decide if they want to hold on to a company’s stock.
—Create the motivation for corporate executives to focus less on their own personal benefit and more on the political spending that would increase shareholder wealth. By disclosing their political activities, corporate executives would have less of an opportunity to waste company resources for their own advantage.
—Benefit corporations that already share their political spending information. Research suggests companies that already disclose SEC-required information enjoy a bump in stock returns when the particular rule is put in place.
Two years after the lawyers submitted their petition, File No. 4-637 is finally on the SEC’s official agenda and support for the disclosure rule is overwhelming. Recent polling finds that 79 percent of surveyed Republicans and nearly 100 percent of Democrats support the rule, and more than 600,000 public comments supporting the rule have been submitted to the SEC. Major institutional investors are also in agreement. Former Vanguard mutual fund CEO John C. Bogle, six state treasurers, CalPERS and other pension funds, and many more are also in support. The rule also has the endorsement of small-business owners across the country, as large companies have a competitive advantage over smaller businesses because of their ability to influence lawmakers and agencies through campaign contributions and lobbying.
The pushback against disclosure is typically about the costs of disclosure. But companies already have to document their political spending for the IRS, so the additional cost would be, at most, the few hours it would require an employee to copy and paste data from an internal file into a public one. Furthermore, companies already submit annual forms to the SEC. The political spending information would simply be a few additional lines of text added to these forms.
A more valid concern about this rule is that, if companies are required to disclose this information to the SEC, the information could be exploited by their competitors and harm the companies’ bottom line. But corporate political activities are already well known among industry competitors. In fact, sometimes political spending is even coordinated among industry groups. The people who are actually excluded from this information are the ones who need it most: investors.
At a briefing held this past Wednesday organized by the Corporate Reform Coalition, Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Robert Menendez (D-NJ) called for the SEC to finally adopt this important rule. “There is no excuse,” said Warren, “There is no reason […] for saying a corporation wants to be able to spend shareholders’ money and not tell shareholders how that money is being spent.”
By: Susan Holmberg, The National Memo, November 1, 2013
“Contempt For Progressive Legislation”: The Severely Conservative Judge Who Just Ruled Against Birth Control
Nine years ago, the California Supreme Court upheld a state law similar to the Affordable Care Act’s rules requiring most employers to include birth control coverage in their employee health plans. The sole dissent in that case was Justice Janice Rogers Brown. Nearly a decade later, Brown got her revenge. Though no longer a member of California’s highest court — President George W. Bush appointed her to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit over the strenuous objections of Democrats — Judge Brown is now the author of a 2-1 opinion holding that religious employers can ignore the federal birth control rules. What was once a fringe view held by a lone holdout is now the law in the second most powerful court in the country.
Judge Brown’s opinion barely conceals her contempt for progressive legislation. Prior to her nomination to the D.C. Circuit, Brown labeled the New Deal a “socialist revolution,” and she likened Social Security to a kind of intergenerational cannibalism — “[t]oday’s senior citizens blithely cannibalize their grandchildren because they have a right to get as much ‘free’ stuff as the political system will permit them to extract.” Since joining the federal bench, she authored a concurring opinion suggesting that all labor, business or Wall Street regulation is constitutionally suspect. The very first sentence of her birth control opinion labels the Affordable Care Act a “behemoth.”
So there was never any doubt how Brown would vote on this particular challenge to women’s access to birth control. Her opinion was joined by Judge A. Raymond Randolph, a conservative George H.W. Bush appointee. Carter-appointed Judge Harry Edwards dissented.
Coincidentally, Brown’s opinion comes just one day after Senate Republicans reignited the filibuster wars by filibustering the first of three Obama nominees to her court. Currently, the D.C. Circuit is evenly divided between Democratic and Republican active judges, but a large number of Republican judges in partial retirement allow the GOP to dominate the court. Senate Minority Whip John Cornyn wrote in a Fox News op-ed that Republicans should prevent any of Obama’s nominees from being confirmed to this court to prevent Democrats from gaining a majority. Although federal appeals courts typically hear cases via randomly drawn three-judge panels, the court’s rules permit a majority of the court’s active judges to displace any decision reached by a three-judge panel.
Senate Democrats waged an unsuccessful effort to filibuster Judge Brown’s nomination during the Bush Administration — largely because of her strident opposition to programs such as Social Security — but that filibuster was eventually defeated after Republicans threatened to invoke the so-called “nuclear option” to eliminate filibusters of judicial nominees. The deal that allowed Judge Brown to be confirmed also paved the way for Judge Priscilla Owen’s nomination. Yesterday evening, Judge Owen authored an opinion reinstating a Texas anti-abortion law blocked by a lower court judge.
There is a lesson here for Democrats trying to decide whether to invoke the nuclear opinion in the D.C. Circuit fight that Senate Republicans started this week. When Republicans had the courage to demand what they wanted and put a serious threat behind it, they got two of the most conservative judges in the country. If Senate Democrats follow suit — either by forcing Republicans to cave or by carrying through on a threat to nuke the filibuster — they will also win their fight to get President Obama’s nominees confirmed.
By: Ian Millhiser, Think Progress, November 1, 2013
“A Very Low Bar”: How A Crazy Senator Became A Sudden Darling Of The So-Called Respectable Right
Fanfare! Trumpets! There has been a Big Important Speech on the Future of Conservatism. Let’s take it Really Seriously. Sen. Mike Lee, Republican of Utah, went to the Heritage Foundation Tuesday and spoke. Milton Friedman and Irving Kristol were namechecked! Russell Kirk was quoted! The gas tax was proposed to be slashed 80 percent! Oh wait, I am supposed to still be mentioning the Serious parts.
I shouldn’t make fun, maybe. There are serious parts. Lee’s concern for “immobility among the poor,” the middle-class squeeze, and “cronyist privilege at the top,” and his desire to fashion a conservative response to them, is the right note for a Republican senator to strike. Amen to calls for “a new conservatism of the working and middle class,” because either we will get one or the failed attempt to give us one will prove it to be a contradiction in terms. Conservative intellectuals of a reformist bent welcomed the speech—Ross Douthat, Reihan Salam (they co-wrote a book on these themes), Rich Lowry, Jennifer Rubin. BuzzFeed political editor McKay Coppins called it a “lofty, agenda-setting speech” for its ringing declaration, “frustration is not a platform. Anger is not an agenda. And outrage, as a habit, is not even conservative” and for its forceful denunciation of the House Republicans’ sociopathic shutdown tactic, which futilely damaged the U.S. economy and very nearly caused the federal government to default—a narrowly evaded catastrophe.
Except, of course, Lee didn’t do that last thing. Lee was pro-shutdown! Other than Ted Cruz, he was probably the House Republicans’ most important ally in the Senate. And he did not denounce—or, in his case, repudiate—the shutdown tactics. So now you see why I couldn’t help but make fun.
I suppose if we set the bar low enough that insects can do the limbo with it, you could read his speech as endorsing a less insane way forward. But here is what happened Tuesday: One of Washington’s most staunchly pro-shutdown politicians, appearing at maybe Washington’s most important pro-shutdown organization, pointedly refused to condemn the shutdown or suggest he would not support a future shutdown if it meant trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare.
On the contrary, Lee said, “I am proud of my friend Ted Cruz and the dozens of others—including Speaker John Boehner and the House Republicans—who fought Obamacare, continue to fight it, and will not stop fighting it.” At the outset, he narrated, “It began with our effort to stop Obamacare—a goal that all Republicans share even if we have not always agreed about just how to pursue it.” Absent a declaration that he no longer agrees with how he pursued it, one is forced to conclude that he feels the same way now. Douthat, Salam, and Lowry do not mention this.
There is a broader point here. If I ever found the bulk of my political views articulated by somebody whose most prominent action ever—undertaken in the past month and unrepudiated—was as grotesquely irresponsible as what Cruz, Lee, and the House Republicans put us through, it would cause me to question my views. I would reflect upon the fact that Lee and I share these beliefs, and that he logically extends them toward something totally self-destructive and crazy. I would have to conclude either that he is correct to do this, and therefore that my views must be wrong and that I must change them, or that he is not worth listening to, because he takes perfectly good ideas and warps them into something powerfully hazardous. There is apparently no such reckoning among the right’s respectable intellectuals—most of whom did oppose the shutdown itself, and not only for pragmatic reasons.
But in the meantime, let’s stick to the matter at hand. Can’t all reasonable people agree to ignore Mike Lee completely until he says he was wrong about the shutdown? Should this be a controversial suggestion? Given the gravity of the threat of a future shutdown, isn’t that the only responsible response?
Salam highlights several promising policy sketches that Lee offered; and truly, it is hard not to appreciate a Republican concerned with work-life balance issues. But Salam and the others misrepresent Lee—who, Salam notes, holds a relatively safe seat, and so presumably may speak his mind. Giving parents greater flexibility isn’t Lee’s foremost priority. According to Lee, “The first and most important policy goal Republicans must adopt to improve the lives of middle-class families is, and will remain, the full repeal of Obamacare.” How? Again, we have no choice but to presume that Lee believes that a legitimate tactic for repealing Obamacare is, and will remain, shutting down the government and threatening its default. How about we hear Lee out, and maybe even talk to him, sometime after he puts his gun away.
By: Marc Tracy, The New Republic, October 30, 2013
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