“Republican America”: Voter Suppression Is The New GOP Strategy
Better bring some identification — and not just any identification, official though it may be — if you plan to vote in Republican-controlled states. However, if you contribute tens of millions of dollars to sway an election on Republicans’ behalf, the party will fight to keep your identity a secret.
Consider, for instance, what happened to some attempting to participate in this month’s elections in Texas. The New York Times reported that “Judge Sandra Watts was stopped while trying to vote because the name on her photo ID, the same one she had used for voter registration and identification of 52 years, did not exactly match her name in the official voter rolls.” Both Democratic state Sen. Wendy Davis and Republican Attorney General Greg Abbott — the front-runners in next year’s gubernatorial contest — encountered the same obstacle. As did Jim Wright, the 90-year-old former speaker of the U.S. House. Wright, who represented his Fort Worth district in Congress for 34 years, told the local paper that he had voted in every election since 1944 and that he had realized shortly before Election Day that his identification — a driver’s license that expired in 2010 and a university faculty ID — would not suffice under the state’s 2011 voter ID law. Indeed, officials required Wright to produce a certified copy of his birth certificate to procure a personal identification card that would allow him to vote.
Fortunately, no issues of cosmic importance appeared on this year’s Texas ballots. Next year, however, congressional seats and control of the statehouse will be up for grabs, and voter turnout probably will be much higher. The purpose of these and other vote-deterring measures, adopted in Texas and a slew of other GOP-controlled states, is to make sure turnout is not too much higher by reducing voter participation, particularly among the young (student IDs often don’t suffice), the poor (no driver’s license? Sorry.) and racial minorities. That is, groups that tend to vote Democratic.
Voter suppression has become the linchpin of Republican strategy. After Mitt Romney’s defeat in 2012, the GOP was briefly abuzz with talk of expanding the party’s appeal to young and Latino voters. Instead, the party doubled down on its opposition to immigration reform and its support for cultural conservatism — positions tantamount to electoral suicide unless the youth and minority vote can be suppressed.
Republicans have justified this crackdown as a way to keep non- citizens from infiltrating the electorate, not that there’s evidence such a thing is happening. But if a non-citizen wants to contribute millions of dollars to one of those “social welfare organizations” that spends gobs of money on an election campaign, Republicans fight to shield his or her identity. Recently released tax documents showed that one such organization — Crossroads GPS, the group headed by Karl Rove that spent $189 million in last year’s elections opposing President Obama and Senate Democrats — received 53 contributions of $1 million or more. The three largest were for $22.5 million, $18 million and $10 million.
Who did they come from? Because Crossroads GPS is classified as a 501(c)4 “social welfare” group, which is not legally required to list its donors, we’ll never know. Could such contributions come from a non-citizen? With donors’ identities shielded by law, there is no way of knowing.
Some states require donors to such campaign groups in state and local elections to be identified. But other states don’t, which allows for the kind of interstate shell games that wealthy right-wing donors played during the 2012 election. In one instance, an anonymous $11 million contribution to a California campaign opposing a ballot measure that raised taxes on the rich and supporting a measure to curtail unions’ political activities was tracked by state election officials to a 501(c)4 organization in Arizona that had gotten its funding from another such group in Virginia. The investigation revealed that a California GOP consultant had raised money for the ballot measure campaigns by promising his donors the anonymity that this shell game provided.
A pre-election tally by the Sunlight Foundation of “dark money” contributions to federal races as of Nov. 1, 2012, showed nearly $175 million going to GOP candidates and roughly $35 million to Democrats. A bill backed by Senate Democrats that would have required such groups to report the identity of donors who give more than $10,000 for electoral campaigns was killed last year by GOP opposition to a cloture motion, even though it was backed by a majority of senators.
So: If you want to vote in the Republicans’ America, remember to bring your birth certificate. But if you want to buy an election and stay under wraps, your secret is safe with them.
By: Harold Meyerson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, November 21, 2013
“Feigning Outrage”: The GOP’s Health Reform Playbook
The last thing Republicans want right now is to repeal the Affordable Care Act.
They may claim it is destroying the country, but they need it, and desperately, to rebuild their party. They even have a detailed playbook to exploit it, outlining how and when to stage attacks against Democrats who support it in order to inflict maximum damage in the months before the 2014 midterm elections.
As Jonathan Weisman and Sheryl Gay Stolberg reported in this morning’s Times, House Republicans have been organizing their strategy behind closed doors for the last month. They began by capitalizing on the gifts given them by the White House in the form of the malfunctioning health care website and President Obama’s false promise that no one need lose an insurance policy. Then they moved on to claims that personal data is insecure on the insurance exchanges.
Next, according to the playbook, will come criticism of premium price hikes, and breast-beating about changes to Medicare Advantage plans, as well as the possibility that people will lose their doctors under some policies.
Republicans will also hold hearings, and come armed with anecdotes from outraged citizens who suddenly find their new health insurance options aren’t perfect.
Reform has given new life to a party that was in the depths after the shutdown debacle just last month.
This deep concern about Americans’ access to quality insurance is entirely new and utterly insincere, of course. Nearly one in 10 people on Medicare — 4 million people — are dissatisfied with that program, according to surveys, but you don’t hear their complaints broadcast at hearings or at Republican news conferences. In 2010, long before the health reform law took effect, 20 percent of people on employer-based insurance expressed dissatisfaction with their plans, as did a third of people on the individual market. They complained about high deductibles and constrained networks of doctors and hospitals, just as many of them will under the new system. And they complained about cancelled policies.
Republicans never cared about those concerns before the Affordable Care Act came around, and they don’t really care now, even though they’re doing a great job of feigning outrage. They’re simply using these grievances, magnified by anecdotal media coverage, to batter Democrats who are still standing up for the president’s program.
Some of those Democrats are fighting back. They’re pointing out, as the White House did yesterday, that the growth in health care costs is slowing significantly. They’re trying to highlight people who are saving money on their new policies, or who can buy insurance even if they are sick. And they will try to broadcast the voices of the previously uninsured, who have never appeared in a Republican diatribe and never will.
But the most attention, as always, will be paid to the shrillest critics. Just remember, as their attacks pick up in volume in the months to come, that they were prepared long in advance, as cheap as canned laughter.
By: David Firestone, Editors Blog, The New York Times, November 21, 2013
“Things Are Neither Perfect Nor Disastrous”: Obamacare Panic To Enter Even Stupider New Phase
No, Democrats are not abandoning it en masse, and no, it isn’t going to be repealed.
I want to follow up on what I wrote Friday about those who are deciding that because of a) web site problems and b) the largely manufactured controversy over people who have one private insurance plan but now face the unfathomable horror of moving to a different private insurance plan, the Affordable Care Act is an unrecoverable disaster that has destroyed Barack Obama’s second term. I’m sensing that this is about to move into a new phase of inane speculation that we should think about before it starts.
I’ll just use one article as an example. This morning, under the headline “Why Obamacare Is On Life Support,” Josh Kraushaar of the National Journal all but declares that the law is about to be repealed. “Unless the HealthCare.gov website miraculously gets fixed by next month,” he writes, “there’s a growing likelihood that over time, enough Democrats may join Republicans to decide to start over and scrap the whole complex health care enterprise.” That’s so blindingly stupid I’m almost not sure where to start, but let’s give it is a shot. First, would it really be “miraculous” if Healthcare.gov got fixed by next month? It’s a website. Yes, a complicated one, and yes, one that had many problems. But it isn’t as though those problems are somehow beyond the ken of human ingenuity to solve, requiring heavenly intervention. The administration isn’t trying to achieve faster-than-light transport or make us all immortal. It’s a website. It may not be perfect, but it’ll work.
Kraushaar then goes through some counting of vulnerable Democratic seats in both houses to argue that it’s a real possibility that a repeal of the entire ACA could not only pass, but pass with a wide enough margin to override a veto from the President. His main evidence is the 39 House Democrats who voted last week for a symbolic Republican proposal to undo some of the individual-market reforms; he thinks the number for full repeal of the ACA will be even greater. But that’s completely backwards. It would take some kind of as-yet-unforeseen utter catastrophe to transform even those votes into a vote for full repeal. As Jonathan Bernstein says, “There’s an enormous difference between playing along on a symbolic vote and abandoning a policy Democrats are stuck with, like it or not.” Not even House Democrats from swing districts are dumb enough to think that voting to repeal the law would serve their political interests, despite Kraushaar’s bizarre and demonstrably false assertion that already, “Even [the ACA’s] most ardent supporters are running for the hills.”
If you’re going to start speculating about repeal, you have to confront what’s going to happen six weeks from now, on January 1. Let’s have a little reminder:
- Millions of people will begin getting coverage through Medicaid. Repeal would mean kicking these people off their insurance.
- Millions of people will begin getting subsidies to pay for private insurance. Repeal would mean taking away their subsidies, making it unaffordable for them to get insurance.
- Denials for pre-existing conditions will be officially over. Repeal would mean that once again, insurers could deny people coverage if they’ve ever been sick.
- Annual limits on coverage will be outlawed. Repeal would mean that people will once again start being forced to pay huge medical bills, in many cases forcing them into bankruptcy, if they have a serious illness or accident.
And that’s not to mention the parts of the bill that have already gone into effect, like “rescission” becoming illegal, children not being allowed to be denied coverage for pre-existing conditions, or young people being allowed to stay on their parents’ insurance until they’re 26. You think some news stories about people in the individual market having to pay more for a new insurance plan tug at lawmakers’ heartstrings? Wait until you see the stories about the 5-year-old girl with leukemia who’ll get kicked off her coverage if Republicans in Congress have their way. Right now we’re talking about a few people who are supposedly the “losers” in the ACA, but the most they’ve lost is some money they’ll have to pay for a more comprehensive plan. If you repeal the law, the country would be overflowing with people whose losses are genuinely catastrophic.
January 1 is the end of any talk of repeal, and Republicans know it—as many of them have been saying all along, once you start giving people benefits, it’s all but impossible to take them away. That doesn’t mean there isn’t still work to do, and it doesn’t mean there aren’t things that could go wrong. Nor does it mean there might not be piecemeal fixes to one or another provision debated in the future; there almost certainly will be. But unless you think that in the next six weeks Republicans are going to manage to put together a two-thirds majority in both houses of Congress to repeal the ACA—something you’d have to be nuts to believe—it’s never going to happen.
I realize that there’s an impulse as a reporter or a pundit to cast everything in the most dramatic terms possible. “Things are neither perfect nor disastrous” is a much less interesting assertion to make than “Everything has changed! Earth-shattering developments are afoot!” But that happens to be the truth.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, November 18, 2013
“Such Noble Sentiments”: Why Republicans Suddenly Care, Deeply, About All Those Canceled Health Policies
Amid the current national uproar over the troubles of the Affordable Care Act, it is almost uplifting to hear the deep concern expressed by politicians, pundits, lobbyists, and corporate leaders over cancellation of existing health insurance policies. They empathize loudly with the millions of potential victims, whose plight infuriates these worthy observers. They fill hours of television and pages of print with expressions of outrage.
Suddenly everyone in Washington is intensely concerned about Americans who are losing their health insurance.
The outpouring of noble sentiment would be laudable — indeed, long overdue — if only there was any reason to believe these protestations are sincere. Sadly, the evidence points in the opposite direction, for a single obvious reason: Millions of people in this country have been losing health insurance for many years, resulting in untold thousands of serious illnesses, bankruptcies, and early deaths – but until insurance cancellations became a political embarrassment for Barack Obama, the usual right-wing reaction was silence. (Except for that awkward and revealing outburst during the Republican debates of 2012, when a live audience howled its approval for the “let him die” plan.)
For anybody who ever honestly cared about people losing their health coverage – for instance, President Obama or his Democratic predecessor Bill Clinton – the depressing statistical reality has long been plain. Every day of every year, thousands of people leave the rolls of the private insurance industry in this country, almost never voluntarily.
People often forfeit insurance after losing a job, which happened to millions during the Great Recession. At the recession’s height, when the Tea Party Republicans were fighting to kill Obamacare in the cradle, more than 44,000 people were losing their health coverage every week. In May 2009, the policy journal Health Affairs published a projection that nearly 7 million Americans would lose coverage by the end of 2010.
People also lose insurance because their insurance company doesn’t want to pay the cost of a grave illness (having gorged on costly premiums for years), which has happened to many thousands more. The most recent congressional report on the subject found that three major insurance companies had saved at least $300 million through “rescission” of policies held by 20,000 seriously ill clients, while their profits mounted.
Or people lose insurance because the cost rises and they can no longer afford it, which happens routinely to nearly half the population at some point during every decade. A report released by the Treasury four years ago found that “nearly half of non-elderly Americans” had lived without health coverage at some point between 1997 and 2006, a period of relative prosperity and high employment.
The consequence, as everybody ought to know by now, is that upward of 45 million Americans have gone without health insurance at any given moment since 2007. And the further consequence is that many of those uninsured – men, women, and children — go without needed health care, leading to untold suffering and premature deaths for as many as 45,000 annually, perhaps more.
But such dismal facts have never seemed to trouble the Republicans who are screaming so loudly now about the terrible toll of Obamacare. The perennial GOP attitude was set forth by neoconservative eminence Bill Kristol back in 1993, when the prime objective was to kill the nascent Clinton health plan. “There is no health care crisis,” Kristol famously declared, and for him — then a well-paid flack in the Murdoch empire — that was true enough.
After two decades of medical costs skyrocketing above inflation, threatening fiscal and economic ruin, while millions went without insurance, such smug right-wing complacency remains largely intact. The only “health care crisis” ever feared by Republicans like Kristol is the prospect that reform will help Americans – as Obamacare is already doing, despite their worst efforts.
Let’s hope that the president’s team swiftly solves the inherent problems of providing universal coverage through private insurers. It is certainly possible, if never optimal, as Massachusetts and other states seeking to advance that goal are already proving.
And meanwhile, let’s please have no illusions about this momentary flurry of concern on the right over insurance lost. It would disappear instantly and permanently — if only Obamacare could be repealed.
By: Joe Conason, Featured Post, The National Memo, November 15, 2013
“The Burdens Of A Contradictory Message”: Is The Republican Position, “We’d Prefer To Leave You Behind With Nothing”?
On the surface, the Republican strategy on health care is proving to be more effective than they probably could have hoped. After waging a three-year sabotage campaign, the rollout of the Affordable Care Act has gone poorly; Democrats are divided; President Obama’s poll numbers are falling; the media is in a frenzy; the website still doesn’t work; and no one seems to remember the time Republicans shut down the federal government – just last month.
If RNC officials had written a script, it would look something like this.
And in the short term, at least as far as the politics are concerned, it’s quite possible that nothing else will matter. But at some point, I wonder if the political world will pause to consider the Republican message with a little more depth.
A few weeks ago, Matt Miller raised an important point: “What conservative officials, pundits and advocates are screaming is closer to the following: How dare you totally screw up something that we think shouldn’t exist!” Indeed, as we talked about as oversight hearings got underway a few weeks ago, conservatives are complaining about the functionality of a website that they’d just as soon destroy. They’re furious Americans are struggling to sign up for benefits that Republicans don’t want them to have. They’re demanding better performance of a system they’ve spent years deliberately trying to gut, and have no intention of trying to help fix.
The contradiction was more acutely obvious yesterday, with the release of October enrollment numbers: 106,185 consumers signed up for health insurance through an exchange, another 396,261 Americans have gained coverage through Medicaid expansion, and another million consumers were deemed eligible for coverage but have not selected a plan. GOP lawmakers considered this hilarious, noting a variety of sports venues that hold more than 106,185 attendees.
And that’s fine. Indeed, it’s predictable. About 500,000 Americans signed up for health care coverage last month, but because that number was far below the Obama administration’s original projections for the exchange marketplaces, critics of “Obamacare” want to take this opportunity to strut and gloat.
But that was yesterday. Today, I’d love to hear some of those same critics answer a couple of simple questions. First, for those mocking October enrollment numbers, do you wish that number was bigger or smaller? Because at this point, the answer appears to be “both,” which doesn’t make any sense. The Republican line currently seems to be, “We’re outraged that the number was so small, and we wish the totals were zero.”
That plainly doesn’t make any sense.
Second, for the 106,185 Americans who signed up for coverage through an exchange, and the 396,261 Americans who are now insured under Medicaid, is the Republican position, “We’d prefer to leave you behind with nothing?” What about those who sign up for coverage in November? And December?
By: Steve Benen, The Maoow Blog, November 14, 2013
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