“More Of The Same”: Keeping Alive A Flawed And Self-Destructive Strategy, The GOP Fights On Against Obamacare At Its Own Peril
In the wake of the public uproar over the government shutdown, Democratic hopes for recapturing control of the House of Representatives next year have risen sharply. The party needs to pick up 17 seats, and the main question is whether the current furor against the Republicans will remain until the midterm elections of November 2014.
The House Republicans and their tea party allies, unbowed by their failure to defund President Obama’s Affordable Care Act, have signaled that they have just begun to fight. They have seized on his administration’s inexplicable botching of the law’s rollout to breathe new life into their efforts to kill “Obamacare.”
In so doing, however, they may be keeping alive the flawed and self-destructive strategy that took the country to the brink of financial default. Public opinion polls cited a record plunge in Republican popularity during the government shutdown, attesting to how poorly the tea party scheme to strangle Obamacare in its crib played on Main Street.
House Speaker John Boehner, still nursing the political wounds suffered for trying to appease the get-Obama caucus in the House, told the still-faithful on Wednesday, “We’ve got the whole threat of Obamacare continuing to hang over our economy like a wet blanket.”
Boehner may or may not be proved correct in that view. However, his observation suggests he and his caucus have no intention of getting off the track that led them over a cliff in the executive-branch shutdown, a fiasco for which the GOP gets primary blame.
Much will depend on whether the Obama administration can recover from the amateur hour of the law’s initial implementation and begin to deliver health insurance to the millions of Americans without it. The president seems to have taken his head out of the clouds over the technological screw-up by calling in more experts to straighten out the mess.
Contrary to its foes’ insistence that the law is Public Enemy No. 1, the uninsured public showed unexpectedly heavy interest in enrolling, or at least to exploring whether insurance offered under Obamacare would be good for them and their families. The jury is still out, much as it was on Social Security and Medicare when these programs were first enacted amid even louder laments of “socialism” and “socialized medicine.”
In any event, if the administration manages to overcome the law’s growing pains, the Democrats will have at least a chance to gain new political support among beneficiaries. Many of them are of income levels and ethnicities customarily inclined to vote for the party of Franklin D. Roosevelt and his breakthrough New Deal.
Meanwhile, exertions to keep the flame burning against Obamacare among the House Republicans and their self-appointed leader from the other side of the Capitol, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, could be a blessing in disguise to Democrats pointing to next year’s congressional elections.
Their fund-raising arms are experiencing an usual upswing compared to the Republican cash solicitors. The Democrats will be targeting key House GOP incumbents up for re-election in admittedly strong conservative districts who have benefited from gerrymandering. At the same time, moderate Republicans in Congress are starting to band together to purge the tea party influence in their ranks.
The heavy hit on the Republican brand has been emphatically underscored by the post-shutdown polls. The question is whether voters fed up with the party’s increasingly sharp turn to ultraconservatism, one not seen since the days of Barry Goldwater, will remain turned off at voting time a year from now.
By then, Obamacare may or may not be a principal catalyst for decision-making at the ballot box, pro or con, on midterm election day. The same polls also indicate that Americans still worry much more about the state of the economy and, particularly, high unemployment than about the state of federally subsidized health insurance.
But for now, the House Republicans’ reply to all the criticism of their stand against Obamacare is a promise of more of the same, along with hope that the law will indeed collapse, helping them recover from the severe political damage they have inflicted upon themselves.
By: Jules Witcover, The Chicago Tribune, October 25, 2013
“A New Group Whipping Up Right-Wing Fear”: Predatory Lenders Fight Regulators With Offer Of $500 Visa Gift Cards
Visitors this weekend to Townhall.com were welcomed with a pop-up advertisement soliciting a petition against the Obama administration. “Help us send 1 million letters to stop reckless regulators,” the ad beckons, atop images of President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder.
The advertisement is sponsored by Consumers for Choices, a new group whipping up right-wing anger at the Obama administration for supposedly using his “Reckless, Elitist, Overzealous Regulators” to destroy “small-dollar” and tribal lenders. Visitors to the Consumers for Choices website, which is being advertised on conservative news portals like Townhall, are encouraged to contact their local representatives to send an angry pre-written letter. Consumers for Choices says their supporters will be automatically entered into a weekly raffle, with a grand prize $500 Visa gift card.
The advocacy website repeatedly references Western Sky Financial, an online installment loan company that recently suspended lending after being sent cease-and-desist letters from government agencies. Left unsaid on the Consumers for Choices site are the types of loans offered by the company, which feature interest rates of 355 percent.
A single $5,075 loan from Western Sky cost $40,872.72 to pay back—more than eight times the original amount.
A commercial from the company featured a Native American woman exclaiming, “Making the six monthly payments is good for your credit profile!”
New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman recently sued Western Sky Financial, CashCall Inc. and other online lenders for violating New York state usury laws, which cap interest at 16 percent for such loans. In August, the Department of Justice began investigating a broad range of banks that handle payments for payday and installment lending companies accused of deceiving customers and charging predatory interest rates.
Regulators say predatory lenders are pairing to Native American groups to exploit tribal sovereignty.
Western Sky, which operates on a reservation in South Dakota but markets its loans through national television and Internet advertising, says its location on tribal land prevents authorities from using state law to regulate its business. The Consumers for Choice site takes that argument a step further, declaring, “With your help, we can tell our elected leaders to put a stop to baseless attacks on tribal business and eliminate government fraud!”
Though the website contains no information about the type of loans in jeopardy of being eliminated, there is plenty of incendiary language designed to incite readers into action. Consumers for Choice warns of “elitist Federal regulators” seeking to deny “access to much-needed credit and funding for the average American family.”
The Consumers for Choice site, registered in August shortly after the New York State and Department of Justice probe began, also does not disclose any information about who is behind the effort. The Contact Us page lists an address for Aristotle, a political website company.
The only names listed on the site are Republican members of Congress who have issued supportive blurbs.
“I applaud the efforts of Consumers for Choice to promote free market principals and help make the general public aware of how federal and state regulators are now working to limit consumers and small businesses ability to access consumer credit,” reads one message from Senator Jerry Moran (R-KS). Similar quotes are provided from Representatives Dennis Ross (R-FL), Dave Schweikert (R-AZ) and Tom Graves (R-GA). In August, thirty-one House Republicans signed a letter to the government, accusing the Department of Justice of “intimidating” banks for working with online lenders.
A look into Florida state business records, where Consumers for Choices Inc. is registered, provides more clues.
On August 30, 2013, an attorney named Andrew L. Asher filed documents to change the name of “Floridians for Good Government, Inc.” to “Consumers for Choices, Inc.”
Asher is attorney with Jenkins Hill Consulting, a lobbying firm that represents a trade association for installment lenders called the American Financial Services Association.
The group spends about $6 million a year, with a large portion of its budget devoted to advocacy and government relations. Last week, AFSA held its annual meeting at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Washington, DC, where member companies, along with their lobbyists, met with lawmakers and were treated to a private talk on “inside politics” by Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace.
By: Lee Fang, The Nation, October 28, 2013
“Health Care Sabotage 101”: The GOP, Not A Botched Website, Is The Real Obstacle To Implementing Obamacare
It’s the latest chapter of Barack vs. the Health Care Killers, The Continuing Saga of Posturing, Bad Faith, Spite and Ineptitude.
Republicans, who have used every trick in their playbook to gum up the works of the Affordable Care Act, are now holding hearings to investigate how the works got so gummed up.
They could save themselves the trouble by looking in the mirror, just as O.J. Simpson could have done to find his wife’s killer. But that would rob them of the chance to grandstand.
In fairness, they do have one point. The Obama administration botched the debut of its insurance marketplace website so badly that it fairly begged for an investigation. And since Republicans had little or nothing to do with the website, the blame for its failures falls squarely on the president and his deputies.
The screw-up was a gift. GOP lawmakers were calling the law a failure before most of it went into effect, but lacking any evidence they had to rely on mere accusation. Now, finally, they can say that their worst predictions had some validity.
Nevertheless, Republican “outrage” over the glitches is hard to take seriously. If they’re really looking to find what went wrong — and there was plenty — one suspects it’s only so they can clone the virus. Then anyplace where the law is working, such as Kentucky, Washington and Oregon, they can infect the system, watch it crash, shake their heads and snicker.
Come on, folks. Republicans want to “fix” what’s broken here as much as they want to “protect” women by targeting their reproductive rights and “defend” the vote by obstructing it. But because Healthcare.gov went live on the same day that the party crazies shut down the government over the law’s funding, they were too deep in their own morass to capitalize on it. Worse, they had to fold on the shutdown without getting anything in exchange. No wonder they’re pouncing on the chance to grill the people whose job it was to enable what they’ve called the worst law in the history of man.
Yes, the administration deserves to be on the hot seat. There was more than enough time to make sure the website worked properly and there is no excuse for its failure to do so.
Mr. Obama had to know that the first weeks would set the tone for public perception. If he had wanted to raise doubts about the program or shoo people away, he couldn’t have done a better job of it.
Once again, we have to wonder what goes on in his mind. This legislation is only the most important accomplishment of his presidency. He put everything on the line for it. Millions of people are counting on it for coverage they cannot otherwise afford. If he can’t get the introduction right, well, let’s just say it’s a good thing he won’t be running again.
But then there’s that pesky caveat called perspective. A botched website, which can and will be repaired, is nowhere near the biggest obstacle to the success of health care reform. That distinction goes to the program’s sworn enemies, who have been conducting a misinformation campaign of false claims and scare tactics since the law was passed. To hear them tell it, “Obamacare” will turn people into devil worshipping socialist homosexual vegetarians who want the terrorists to win. So of course they will do everything they can to stop it.
Exhibit One: The quickest and easiest way for states to enact the law’s reforms is to expand Medicaid, which would trigger a huge infux of federal dollars for the first several years. Yet Republican governors in 26 states have refused to do so. The primary excuse is that they won’t be able to afford it once the federal money stops. The subtext is that they’d rather sabotage the president than help their own citizens get the treatment they need. Thanks to them, according to a New York Times analysis, the new law will leave out two-thirds of the nation’s black citizens and single mothers, and half of the low-wage workers who currently lack insurance.
In addition, GOP governors (including our own Tom Corbett and, regrettably, a few Democrats) have refused to create insurance exchanges that would facilitate reaching the uninsured. Instead, those people will have to go to the federal exchange.
They’re also refusing to assist applicants and blocking the use of so-called “navigators,” whose job is to help people understand the law and sign up for its benefits. When a constituent calls with questions, they are making sure they’ll get no answers.
Then there was the government shutdown, during which Republicans offered more than 40 measures to cripple the law. They failed in every sense, but it still cost the country $24 billion.
It doesn’t take a genius to see where the real obstruction lies. For all its screw-ups, the Obama administration is trying to make health care reform work. And for all their public posturing, Republicans are trying to ruin it. But the law was duly passed, it’s here, and it’s not going away. They should save the fake righteousness for a cause that isn’t already lost.
By: Sally Kalson, Pittsburg- Post Gazette, October 26, 2013
“Rule And Ruin Party Crashers”: The Tea Party’s Drive For Ideological Purity
In the late nineteen-sixties, Mitch McConnell came to Washington to work as an aide to Senator Marlow Cook, a Kentucky Republican. Cook backed clean-air standards and limits on strip mining. It was a time of political diversity among Republicans: in 1970, Senate Republicans endorsed the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. McConnell was briefly a fellow-traveller of those who regarded government as a source of public protection. He once called the Nixon Administration “at worst, completely reactionary.”
In 1984, McConnell was elected to the Senate, on the coattails of Ronald Reagan’s landslide reëlection. By then, a movement of Southern and evangelical conservatives was rising within the Party. McConnell tacked right periodically, saluting the new Republican leaders. During the Administration of George W. Bush, he backed the President by voting, with Ted Kennedy, to enact No Child Left Behind and the expansion of the Medicare drug benefit. By 2009, after Wall Street melted down, McConnell had risen to Minority Leader, and he forged a deal with Democrats to bail out big banks.
Then the Tea Party rose up in fury, and McConnell moved right again, in an effort to reinvent himself as an anti-government insurgent. It wasn’t easy; he was sixty-nine, and his long jowls and round eyeglasses gave him the look of a Taft Administration clerk. Nonetheless, in 2011, he led the Senate Republicans through a ruthless, extortionate campaign to threaten default on the national debt. It succeeded. President Obama wobbled and accepted budget cuts. Afterward, McConnell called the national debt “a hostage worth ransoming.”
This autumn, he supported the Tea Party radicals’ second threat to default on the debt and a sixteen-day shutdown of the federal government. This time, though, Obama held firm, and, in the end, McConnell and House Speaker John Boehner were forced to choose between Tea Party principles and the viability of the world economy. McConnell negotiated his party’s late-hour capitulation, and, within days, Tea Party groups called for his ouster. The Senate Conservatives Fund, a PAC founded by Jim DeMint, the president of the Heritage Foundation, which has bankrolled Senator Ted Cruz, of Texas, and other highly conservative candidates, announced that it would finance a Republican primary challenge against the Minority Leader next year, because he “has a liberal record and refuses to fight for conservative principles.”
Other veteran Republicans who joined McConnell on the debt-ceiling vote are facing similar challenges from Tea Party-backed candidates. Those targeted include Thad Cochran, of Mississippi, who was elected to the Senate in 1978; Lindsey Graham, of South Carolina; and Lamar Alexander, of Tennessee. In 2012, such primary challenges weakened the Party’s competitive position, and allowed the Democrats to win an eight-seat majority in the Senate. Even now, the insurgents seem less interested in victory than in purification. “We know which senators fought for liberty, and which ones caved to Obama,” Lee Bright, the South Carolina state senator who is challenging Graham, told Slate recently. “We’ve got a list.” The Tea Party’s approval ratings have plummeted since the shutdown ended. Business lobbies and their PACs, appalled by the shutdown’s estimated twenty-four-billion-dollar cost to the economy, are signalling that they may pull back from uncompromising candidates. But the fact that PACs like the Senate Conservatives Fund are willing to force incumbents into expensive, distracting primary fights makes it even less probable that the Republicans can retake control of the Senate.
Like a guerrilla army, the Tea Party is learning how to influence public opinion even when it loses a conventional battle. The budget caps that Obama conceded in 2011 have already enshrined in law a portion of the movement’s draconian fiscal agenda. And although Cruz and his allies in the House won no additional cuts this time, they managed to spread magical thinking among their followers about a possible future debt default. (The next debt-ceiling deadline arrives early next year.) Cruz and the others systematically promoted the idea—the fantasy—that, if the Treasury Department were prohibited from issuing any new debt to finance interest payments and government operations, the country would do just fine. The global economy, this story goes, far from collapsing into crisis, would prove resilient, and, while some nonessential federal departments might wither for lack of funds, that would only demonstrate how Americans could get by with a much smaller government.
This campaign has been dismissed by some Wall Street analysts as just a form of coercive bargaining. Washington is a grand opera of phony crises. Congress has raised the debt ceiling more than seventy times since 1960 without forcing an actual default. It’s tempting to believe that even a diva like Cruz, who, after all, holds a law degree from Harvard and evidently aspires to higher office, would never countenance a final default. Yet history is rife with political radicals who have shocked the world by doing just what they always said they would: Confederate secessionists, for example, who seem to inspire so many Tea Partiers today.
The Tea Party’s anti-intellectualism reflects a longer, deeper decline in the Republican Party’s ability to tolerate a diversity of ideas and public-policy strategies, and to adapt to American multiculturalism. Mitt Romney’s poor showing among Latino voters in 2012 helped insure Barack Obama’s reëlection. Republican leaders, chastened and without any other obvious way to increase their vote base before 2016, pledged earlier this year to revive a comprehensive immigration-reform bill. Yet party leaders, in part because they have been tied down since July by the debt confrontation, haven’t found a way to move legislation past the nativist caucus in the House.
As recently as 2007, when the Bush Administration almost passed a similar bill, it still seemed possible that a modernizing Republican Party might build a formidable political coalition of Latinos, evangelicals, disaffected Catholic Democrats, high-tech entrepreneurs, libertarians, social and educational reformers, and eclectic independents. Instead, as Geoffrey Kabaservice puts it in his history of the Republican decline, “Rule and Ruin,” movement conservatives have “succeeded in silencing, co-opting, repelling, or expelling nearly every competing strain of Republicanism from the party.” Political purges have no logical end point; each newly drawn inner circle of orthodoxy leaves a former respected acolyte suddenly on the outside. That a Tea Party-influenced purification drive now threatens such a loyal opportunist and boardroom favorite as Mitch McConnell seems a marker of the times.
McConnell’s would-be usurper is Matt Bevin, a businessman who owns a bell company; his campaign slogan is “Let Freedom Ring.” He told Glenn Beck recently, “We have got to wean people from this idea of free lunches.” (He might start with fellow Kentuckians; their state pays sixty-six cents in federal taxes for every dollar of federal spending it takes in.) Bevin pleaded, “What we need to tell the American people is that the party’s over.” Presumably, he didn’t mean the Grand Old Party, but the American people may be forgiven for thinking that he did.
By: Steve Coll, The New Yorker, November 4, 2013
“Confronting The Pathologies Of Poverty:” Do We Invest In Preschools Or Prisons?
Congress is often compared to pre-K, which seems defamatory of small children. But the similarities also offer hope, because an initiative that should be on the top of the national agenda has less to do with the sequester than with the A.B.C.’s and Big Bird.
Growing mountains of research suggest that the best way to address American economic inequality, poverty and crime is — you guessed it! — early education programs, including coaching of parents who want help. It’s not a magic wand, but it’s the best tool we have to break cycles of poverty.
President Obama called in his State of the Union address for such a national initiative, but it hasn’t gained traction. Obama himself hasn’t campaigned enough for it, yet there’s still a reed of hope.
One reason is that this is one of those rare initiatives that polls well across the spectrum, with support from 84 percent of Democrats and 60 percent of Republicans in a recent national survey. And even if the program stalls in Washington, states and localities are moving ahead — from San Antonio to Michigan. Colorado voters will decide next month on a much-watched ballot measure to bolster education spending, including in preschool, and a ballot measure in Memphis would expand preschool as well.
“There’s this magical opportunity” now to get a national early education program in America, Education Secretary Arne Duncan told me. He says he’s optimistic that members of Congress will introduce a bipartisan bill for such a plan this year.
“When you think how you make change for the next 30 years, this is arguably at the top of my list,” Duncan said. “It can literally transform the life chances of children, and strengthen families in important ways.”
Whether it happens through Congressional action or is locally led, this may be the best chance America has had to broaden early programs since 1971, when Congress approved such a program but President Nixon vetoed it.
The massive evidence base for early education grew a bit more with a major new study from Stanford University noting that achievement gaps begin as early as 18 months. Then at 2 years old, there’s a six-month achievement gap. By age 5, it can be a two-year gap. Poor kids start so far behind when school begins that they never catch up — especially because they regress each summer.
One problem is straightforward. Poorer kids are more likely to have a single teenage mom who is stressed out, who was herself raised in an authoritarian style that she mimics, and who, as a result, doesn’t chatter much with the child.
Yet help these parents, and they do much better. Some of the most astonishing research in poverty-fighting methods comes from the success of programs to coach at-risk parents — and these, too, are part of Obama’s early education program. “Early education” doesn’t just mean prekindergarten for 4-year-olds, but embraces a plan covering ages 0 to 5.
The earliest interventions, and maybe the most important, are home visitation programs like Nurse-Family Partnership. It begins working with at-risk moms during pregnancy, with a nurse making regular visits to offer basic support and guidance: don’t drink or smoke while pregnant; don’t take heroin or cocaine. After birth, the coach offers help with managing stress, breast-feeding and diapers, while encouraging chatting to the child and reading aloud.
These interventions are cheap and end at age 2. Yet, in randomized controlled trials, the gold standard of evaluation, there was a 59 percent reduction in child arrests at age 15 among those who had gone through the program.
Something similar happens with good pre-K programs. Critics have noted that with programs like Head Start, there are early educational gains that then fade by second or third grade. That’s true, and that’s disappointing.
Yet, in recent years, long-term follow-ups have shown that while the educational advantages of Head Start might fade, there are “life skill” gains that don’t. A rigorous study by David Deming of Harvard, for example, found that Head Start graduates were less likely to repeat grades or be diagnosed with a learning disability, and more likely to graduate from high school and attend college.
Look, we’ll have to confront the pathologies of poverty at some point. We can deal with them cheaply at the front end, in infancy. Or we can wait and jail a troubled adolescent at the tail end. To some extent, we face a choice between investing in preschools or in prisons.
We just might have a rare chance in the next couple of months to take steps toward such a landmark early education program in America. But children can’t vote, and they have no highly paid lobbyists — so it’ll happen only if we the public speak up.
By: Nicholas D. Kristof, Op-Ed Contributor, The New York Times, October 26, 2013
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