Stop the presses: John Boehner admitted Thursday that the Republican Party’s long-awaited alternative to Obamacare needs a little more time in the oven. “You know, the discussions about Obamacare and what the replacement bill would look like continue. We’re trying to build consensus around one plan,” the Speaker told Hill reporters. “Not there yet.”
As if you even needed me to tell you, rest assured: It could be six months from now, a year from now, five years from now, or the day Bibi Netanyahu and Khaled Mashal share a Nobel Peace Prize—they aren’t going to have a plan. Oh, they might have a “plan.” They had a “plan” last year, or at least Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn and two others did. For about two days, they were really tooting its horn. Then it dawned on people that paying for it would involve a hefty middle-class tax increase, on higher-end insurance plans. You may have noticed since then that the Coburn “plan” has not exactly become a leading Republican talking point.
As conservatives continue to hail the Halbig decision, some historical context is called for. In my last column, I wrote that conservatives and Republicans are going to extraordinary lengths to see that more Americans die. Not every reader was won over by that opinion, as you might imagine. But I think it’s beyond dispute, as a little discussion of political history should show.
The problem of millions of uninsured has existed in this country since—well, since forever. But as a running news story that the media paid attention to, for the last 25 or 30 years. I remember when the then-horrifying number was 15 million uninsured. Then 20 million, then 30 million, on up to the 46 million figure we often saw bandied about before the Affordable Health Care was enacted (10 million new Americans are insured as a result of it—a very respectable dent, for just one year). So, 30 years, a full generation, tens of millions of people adversely affected. And what, in all that time, has the Grand Old Party proposed to do about it all?
Not. One. Thing. Republican presidents had (if we go back to 1984) 16 years to pass some kind of health-insurance law. But none of the three ever even proposed one. George W. Bush did pass his Medicare law, but that was about adding prescription-drug coverage for seniors; it didn’t insure any previously uninsured citizens. What the GOP did instead, of course, was to fight tooth-and-nail to stop the two Democratic attempts to insure more people, succeeding the first time, failing the second.
And “tooth-and-nail” hardly begins to describe the demented and nearly sociopathic reality of Republican and conservative opposition to trying to make health insurance affordable for working-class people. Opposition to doing so has been one of the four grand accomplishments of the Republican Party of our time, which I would rank as follows, one scratched on each side of the obelisk: one, start disastrous wars and commit torture; two, make people despise the government; three, nearly cause a new Depression; and four, deny health insurance to as many people as possible, as aggressively and nastily as possible. It’s a grim record generally, and with regard to health care specifically, inarguably one that has promoted insalubriousness and suffering and, indeed, deaths that might have been avoided or delayed if people had had insurance.
It is true that some conservative intellectuals have offered up some ideas—as we know, the same individual mandate that the right now calumniates was a conservative idea at first. And John McCain actually had a decent-ish health-care platform plank in 2008. But if McCain had been elected, it’s very unlikely that the constellation of interests and power centers in the GOP would have permitted him ever even thinking about pursuing it. It was just something he felt he had to say to have credibility with middle-of-the-road voters. And in any case he wasn’t elected, and those conservative intellectuals’ ideas were never seriously proposed by elected Republicans, so the historical record is what it is.
The 20-year war on health care—since their 1993 defeat of the Clinton plan—has been about Republicans’ hatred of government; their view of people who don’t have insurance as lazy or flawed and not worth lifting a finger for; and their fear that if a law is passed and succeeds in bringing health care to millions, they and their whole vision of society will be discredited in the eyes of millions. Of course, these days, all that is shot through with one more element: a heavy dose of Obama hatred.
I was on Hardball Wednesday evening with David Corn, and Chris Matthews showed poll numbers during our segment that surprised even me. The topic was “rooting for failure.” Back in 2006, he said, Democrats were asked in a Fox News poll whether they wanted President Bush’s policies to succeed or fail. Answers: 40 succeed, 51 fail. Not particularly generous. But earlier this year, he said, CNN asked Republicans the same question about President Obama. Answers: 14 succeed, 73 fail.
Think about that. Three-quarters of regular Republicans want Obama to fail. And just one in seven wants him to succeed. We pundits spend most of our time blaming politicians for inaction, but maybe it’s time to start blaming the people. If regular Republicans feel like this, there’s no way the elected officials who represent them are going to do anything that looks remotely like compromise or cooperation.
And no, they’re not going to offer a real health-care plan either. They first promised that in 2010, during the campaign season, so they could say “repeal and replace” instead of just “repeal” and sound like they had a positive side. Then they dropped “and replace,” and now that it’s election time again, it’s back. But it’s not in their DNA to do anything constructive about health care. Or—the VA crisis, the border crisis, the Middle East crisis, the wage-and-inequality crisis, et cetera—about much of anything.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, July 25, 2014
July 26, 2014
Posted by raemd95 |
Conservatives, Health Reform, John Boehner | Affordable Care Act, GOP, Halbig v Burwell, Repeal and Replace, Republicans, Tom Coburn, uninsured |
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After initially threatening to sue President Barack Obama over a variety of issues, House Speaker John Boehner settled on just one: the delay of the Affordable Care Act’s employer mandate. The legality of that action, as law school professor Nicholas Bagley has pointed out, is questionable. But the lawsuit also implies that the executive branch should have limited discretion in implementing laws. And Republicans only have to look toward Governor Chris Christie to show how that doesn’t make much sense.
In 2013, Obama delayed for a year the employer mandate, which requires all businesses with 50 or more full-time employees to provide health insurance to their employees or pay a penalty. Infuriated, Republicans called the president’s unilateral action illegal. On this count, they may be right. But it will be nearly impossible for Boehner to convince the courts that the House has suffered concrete damage that gives them the constitutional authority to challenge the action. In all likelihood, the lawsuit is meaningless.
However, this case has implications beyond its legal importance. Simon Lazarus, the senior counsel at the Constitutional Accountability Center, testified on Wednesday before the House Rules Committee about the historic discretion afforded presidents to implement laws.
“The Administration has not postponed the employer mandate out of policy opposition to the ACA, nor to any specific provision of it,” he said, according to his prepared remarks. “It is ludicrous to suggest otherwise, and at best misleading to characterize the action as a ‘refusal to enforce’ at all. Rather, the President has authorized a minor temporary course correction regarding individual ACA provisions, necessary in his Administration’s judgment to faithfully execute the overall statute, other related laws, and the purposes of the ACA’s framers.” The key is that Obama delayed the employer mandate in order to prioritize the success of the entire law. It does not fundamentally change the legislation or attempt to undermine it.
Lazarus also gave examples when former presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton used their discretion in implementing legislation. Bush, for instance, delayed certain EPA regulations not out of technical need, but because he opposed the policies. That is a much graver offense than delaying part of the law in order to increase the chances of its success. The Bush administration actively tried to undermine it. “Such intentional refusals to enforce or implement laws … do violate the laws in question, and are, by definition, failures to faithfully execute the laws as required by the Constitution,” Lazarus said.
Christie used discretion similarly in a decision regarding Tesla’s ability to sell directly to its customers. Under New Jersey statute, direct sales of automobiles are illegal. Christie opposes that law, but must enforce it—except, as he told CNBC’s John Harwood Wednesday, he gave Tesla a one-year grace period.
“The fact is we looked the other way for a year, to allow Tesla to do what they are doing,” he said. “I can’t just pick and choose the laws to enforce. So I give [sic] them what I felt was a reasonable period of time to operate the way they were operating.”
After a year, Christie believed that he had to enforce the law—and Republicans around the country freaked out. A.J. Delgado, of the National Review, questioned Christie’s commitment to the free market. “[Y]ou’d expect Christie, who claims to believe in free markets, to recognize a protectionist swindle, as he did when he took on the state’s powerful public-school teacher unions,” he wrote.
Legally, Christie’s selective enforcement on the ban on direct automobile sales might be more justifiable than Obama’s delay of the employer mandate. Executives frequently prioritize certain laws based on their limited resources. Obama defied a specific deadline in the law. But the functional implications of them are the same. Christie and Obama both used their discretion in enforcing laws to improve their administration’s governance. For Obama, that meant delaying the employer mandate to ease the implementation of Obamacare. For Christie, it meant giving Tesla a year-long reprieve from the direct-sales ban to give the legislature time to change the law.
That’s not to say that executives should have unlimited authority to adjust legislation. But they should be able to use discretion in implementing laws so that they have the greatest chance of success. The House’s lawsuit threatens to eliminate that discretion.
By: Danny Vinik, The New Republic, July 17, 2014
July 21, 2014
Posted by raemd95 |
Chris Christie, House Republicans, John Boehner | Affordable Care Act, Employer Mandate, EPA Regulations, George W. Bush, GOP, Tesla |
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In times past, Sarah Palin’s blunt call for the impeachment of President Obama for his alleged bungling of the border crisis would have been laughed off, as it deservedly should. Simply consider the source to understand why. But Obama didn’t laugh it off. During his recent swing through Texas, without referring to Palin directly, he derisively mocked her impeachment call with the shout to an audience, “Sue me! Impeach me!”
Obama has heard this call before, many times, from the legion of right-wing bloggers, websites, and talk-show gabbers, and from a motley group of tea-party-affiliated GOP House reps. Though House Speaker John Boehner and GOP establishment leaders quickly squash any talk of impeachment, the truth is that the call is very much on their table, for very good cynical, crass, and politically chilling reasons. It’s the perfect ploy to further hector, cower, and intimidate Obama into backpedaling fast from the use of executive orders to get even faint action on his major initiatives on gun control, health care, jobs, education and transportation-spending measures, and of course immigration reform. The GOP-controlled House has repeatedly declared these measures “DOA” the instant they come from the White House. The GOP set this up nicely by hammering away on the myth that Obama is recklessly ignoring the Constitution by skirting Congress and going it alone in wielding the executive pen.
This is a gross falsehood. Obama is near the bottom on the list of presidents in the number of executive orders issued. The last president who issued orders at a lower rate than Obama was Grover Cleveland. GOP Presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush issued far more executive orders per day in office than Obama. But then the issue is not, nor has it ever been, executive orders but intimidation, pure and simple.
The GOP knows that crying, “Obama is cavalierly using his executive power to bypass Congress and legislate from the Oval Office!” will trigger a powerful public backlash and reinforce its usual charge against him of dictatorial abuse. It has played this card with maximum skill in its fierce fight to wrest back control of the Senate. In this, the GOP can have it both ways on impeachment. Boehner and Arizona Sen. John McCain, who has also sharply dismissed talk of impeachment, can take the high ground on the issue by insisting that their goal is to get more Republicans elected in November — that’s Senate Republicans. But that’s exactly the point of tossing out the word. The hope is that this will stir more doubt and skepticism about Obama among many voters in the key states where GOP senatorial candidates and some House candidates are gunning to unseat Democratic incumbents.
The incessant talk of impeachment has yet another cynical plus for the GOP. It implants the ever-widening notion in the media that Obama is making a mighty effort to impose an “imperial presidency” on the nation. This charge is almost always accompanied by tossing out the words “arrogant,” “indifferent,” and “callous” to describe his alleged thumbed nose at Congress. Boehner played hard on this with his frivolous lawsuit against Obama over the use of executive orders. He self-righteously claimed that his aims were noble and pristine and designed only to protect the rights of the legislative branch against the alleged unconstitutional assault by Obama. This crude campaign to rock Obama and the Democrats back on their heels has gotten traction from a dozen court rulings that have rapped Obama on the issuance of executive orders.
Obama demanded to know how the GOP can sue and impeach him for doing his job. That’s the point. He’s done his job too well. A case in point is the hike in the minimum wage. The GOP adamantly opposes Obama’s proposal to hike the minimum wage. He had absolutely no chance of getting this through the House. Instead he issued an executive order that boosted the minimum wage only to new federal contracts issued, and then only if other terms of a contractual agreement change. This was entirely legal but had little overall effect on the nation’s wage structure. Yet it was significant in another respect.
It was a frontal challenge to the GOP to cease its relentless, dogged, and destructive campaign of dither, delay, deny, and obstruct anything that has the White House stamp on it. There’s always the possibility that the GOP’s loose talk about impeachment could backfire and turn off more voters than it turns on. It could make the GOP look even more rigid, rightist, and desperate to do and say anything to tarnish Obama, even at the risk of making itself look and sound even more ridiculous. The GOP’s hedge against this is to wink and nod at Palin’s call for impeachment while publicly disavowing it but still relentlessly assailing Obama as the “imperial president.” There’s a method to the madness in this ploy.
By: Earl Ofari Hutchinson, Author and Political Analyst, The Huffington Post Blog, July 15, 2014
July 16, 2014
Posted by raemd95 |
House Republicans, Impeachment, John Boehner | Border Crisis, Executive Orders, GOP, Immigration, John McCain, media, Right Wing, Tea-party |
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Serious lawsuits start with some specific legal grievance – a claim that someone was injured by a defective product, say, or that a search was unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment – and proceed from there. US House speaker John Boehner wants to sue the President of the United States – for no particular reason other than his alleged lawlessness – and fill in the details later.
The lawsuit, which a House committee will take up rather seriously on Wednesday, is a frivolous stunt that not only has no chance of succeeding but isn’t even intended to succeed. The belated choice of targets does provide a useful illustration of Republican priorities, though: most notably, registering more outrage at the Affordable Care Act and further attempting to legitimize various fake scandals wafting up from the conservative fever swamp.
Some of the GOP attacks on the Obama administration have had real substantive effects. This suit, however, is analogous to the endless House votes to repeal Obamacare – an impotent symbolic gesture by Republicans frustrated they were unable to deny access to health coverage to tens of millions of American citizens.
By speaking first in general terms about Obama’s alleged failure to “faithfully execute the laws” in favor of usurping the will of Congress, plus the president’s failure to do enough bombing of random foreign countries, Boehner allowed the Tea Party’s insatiable skree machine to fill in its own gibberish legalese. Why focus on one potential impeachable offense when the examples can be nearly infinite? Benghazi! Fast and Furious! Executive orders!
Now that Boehner has actually announced the basis for the lawsuit – and will spend the next two weeks getting it to the floor for another meaningless Obamacare vote – it turns out to be a narrow and almost certainly irrelevant one. The suit will focus on a claim that Obama acted illegally when the administration decided to effectively delay implementation of the employer mandate in the Affordable Care Act, by declining to penalize employers who didn’t comply in 2014.
In fairness, the argument isn’t unreasonable on its own terms, but to bring a legal challenge in federal court, a plaintiff must have “standing” – Boehner and Co must show that the House of Representatives has been directly injured or otherwise directly affected. Under existing precedents, that’s nearly impossible.
And even if the federal courts were to grant standing, for a lawsuit to proceed, there has to be an ongoing controversy. Since the employer mandate will almost certainly not be delayed another year, the issue is likely to be moot before the lawsuit gets very far, which will result in its getting thrown out. The American taxpayers will have funded a no-hope legal challenge because House Republicans needed to keep their base’s 24/7 scandal-invention machine going – not because there was an actual controversy.
It’s not clear what kind of bill the coming weeks might produce. Conservative legal experts will be happy to give testimony, some of which will be reflected in the final resolution. But the details are fundamentally irrelevant. The federal courts will almost certainly deny that they have jurisdiction, Boehner will have sent politically expedient signals to his base, and the successful implementation of Obamacare will proceed exactly as it would have – as if nobody had ever sued the President of the United States at all. As for the defective product that is the Republican-controlled House, well, the only remedy for the injuries they’ve inflicted is at the ballot box in November.
By: Scott Lemieux, The Guardian, July 15, 2014
July 16, 2014
Posted by raemd95 |
House Republicans, John Boehner, Tea Party | Affordable Care Act, Conservatives, Election 2014, Employer Mandate, Executive Orders, GOP, ObamaCare |
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On Thursday evening, House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) finally revealed the details of his long-awaited plan to sue President Barack Obama, and they come as something of a surprise. In essence, the Speaker is asking the House to sue the president for not implementing Obamacare quickly enough.
“Today we’re releasing a draft resolution that will authorize the House to file suit over the way President Obama unilaterally changed the employer mandate,” Boehner said in a statement. “In 2013, the president changed the health care law without a vote of Congress, effectively creating his own law by literally waiving the employer mandate and the penalties for failing to comply with it. That’s not the way our system of government was designed to work. No president should have the power to make laws on his or her own.”
Legally, Boehner’s plan is on shaky ground. While the House has never institutionally sued a president for not enforcing the law, several individual members of Congress have tried, and almost all of their cases were dismissed for lack of standing. Even if a court agrees to hear the case, it’s not at all clear that President Obama broke the law by delaying the implementation of the employer mandate, giving employers with more than 50 full-time employees an extra year to offer their workers health insurance. And even if the House wins its suit, its prize would likely be the immediate implementation of a policy which Republicans claim to hate.
Politically, Boehner’s plan seems destined to fall flat. It promises to undermine Republicans’ own talking points, while potentially pushing the far right even further towards open revolt against his authority.
When Speaker Boehner announced his intention to sue the president, he laid out a broad range of areas in which President Obama had supposedly acted illegally.
“On one matter after another during his presidency, President Obama has circumvented the Congress through executive action, creating his own laws and excusing himself from executing statutes he is sworn to enforce – at times even boasting about his willingness to do it, as if daring the America people to stop him,” Boehner wrote. “On matters ranging from health care and energy to foreign policy and education, President Obama has repeatedly run an end-around on the American people and their elected legislators, straining the boundaries of the solemn oath he took on Inauguration Day.”
But when it came time to pick an executive action for the lawsuit, he settled on one that Republicans themselves supported. House Republicans wanted to delay the employer mandate, and they voted to do so in July 2013. And when President Obama delayed it unilaterally, Republicans didn’t complain that he abused his power. Instead, they urged him to do it again.
“Is it fair for the president of the United States to give American businesses an exemption from his health care law’s mandate without giving the same exemption to the rest of America? Hell no, it’s not fair,” Boehner said at the time. “We should be thinking about giving the rest of America the same exemption that Obama last week gave businesses.”
Now House Republicans must explain why, one year ago, they were encouraging the president to “run an end-around” on them.
They also must explain what happened to all of the other examples of President Obama’s iron-fisted tyranny. As The New Republic’s Brian Beutler points out, Republicans — led by Boehner — have literally spent years accusing President Obama of recklessly breaking the law when it suits his needs. The fact that the employer-mandate delay from one year ago is the only example that they could come up with badly undermines that talking point.
Finally, by picking the employer mandate as the hill on which he’ll die, Boehner may have created an even greater political problem for himself. The Speaker’s decision to sue the president has been widely interpreted as a tactic to placate right-wing Republicans who would rather see Boehner attempt to impeach Obama. Whether he’s successful remains to be seen. Boehner’s lawsuit plan has certainly not changed the minds of those Republicans who have already called for Obama to be removed from office, and it seems very plausible that it won’t leave the congressmen who have accused Obama of breaking the law in other areas — such as immigration reform — satisfied. If one of them chooses to ignore Boehner’s wishes and introduces a resolution of impeachment, it would create a crisis for Boehner’s leadership — and end the Republican Party’s hopes of keeping its base under control through the midterms.
By: Henry Decker, The National Memo, July 11,2014
July 12, 2014
Posted by raemd95 |
Affordable Care Act, House Republicans, John Boehner | Congress, Employer Mandate, Executive Orders, GOP, Impeachment, Right Wing |
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