“Iran And The Case For Realism”: The Choices We Face Are ‘Often Between Greater And Lesser Evils’
Foreign policy debates rarely get away from being reflections of domestic political conflicts, but they are also usually based on unstated assumptions and unacknowledged theories.
That’s true of the struggle over the Iran nuclear agreement, even if raw politics is playing an exceptionally large role. There are many indications that Republican Sens. Jeff Flake (Ariz.) and Susan Collins (Maine) might in other circumstances be willing to back the accord. But they have to calculate the very high costs of breaking with their colleagues on an issue that has become a test of party loyalty.
There is also the unfortunate way in which Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has chosen to frame Congress’s vote as a pro- or anti-Israel proposition. Many staunch supporters of Israel may have specific criticisms of the inspection regime, but they also believe that the restraints on Iran’s nuclear program are real. Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.), for example, has said that U.S. negotiators “got an awful lot, particularly on the nuclear front.” And the “nuclear front,” after all, is the main point.
But the pressures on Cardin, who is still undecided, and several other Democrats to vote no anyway are enormous. A yes vote from Cardin, the ranking Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, would be a true profiles-in-courage moment — and have a real influence on his wavering colleagues.
President Obama and his allies are right to say that the dangers of having the agreement blocked by Congress are much higher than the risks of trying to make it work. The notion that the United States could go back and renegotiate for something even tougher is laughable, because this is not simply a U.S.-Iran deal. It also involves allies who strongly back what’s on the table. Suggesting that the old sanctions on Iran could be restored is absurd for the same reason: Our partners would bridle if the United States disowned what it has agreed to already.
The administration’s core challenge to its critics is: “What is the alternative?” It is not a rhetorical question.
The counts at the moment suggest that Obama will win by getting at least enough votes to sustain a veto of legislation to scuttle the pact. He has a shot (Cardin’s decision could be key) of getting 41 senators to prevent a vote on an anti-deal measure altogether.
But once this episode is past us, the president, his congressional opponents and the regiment of presidential candidates owe the country a bigger discussion on how they see the United States’ role in the world. Obama in particular could profit from finally explaining what the elusive “Obama Doctrine” is and responding, at least indirectly, to criticisms of the sort that came his way Friday from Republican hopefuls Scott Walker and Marco Rubio.
There are many (I’m among them) who see Obama primarily as a foreign policy realist. Especially after our adventures in Iraq, realism looks a whole lot better than it once did. I say this as someone who still thinks that the United States needs to stand up for democratic values and human rights but who also sees military overreach as a grave danger to our interests and long-term strength. The principal defense of Obama’s stewardship rests on the idea that, despite some miscues, his realism about what military power can and can’t achieve has recalibrated the United States’ approach, moving it in the right direction.
A useful place to start this discussion is “The Realist Persuasion,” Richard K. Betts’s article in the 30th anniversary issue of the National Interest, realism’s premier intellectual outpost. Betts, a Columbia University scholar, argues that realists “focus more on results than on motives and are more attuned to how often good motives can produce tragic results.” While idealistic liberals and conservatives alike are often eager to “support the righteous and fight the villainous,” realists insist that the choices we face are “often between greater and lesser evils.”
“At the risk of overgeneralizing,” he writes, “one can say that idealists worry most about courage, realists about constraints; idealists focus on the benefits of resisting evil with force, realists on the costs.” On the whole, “realists recommend humility rather than hubris.”
For those of us whose heads are increasingly realist but whose hearts are still idealist, realism seems cold and morally inadequate. Yet the realists’ moral trump card is to ask whether squandering lives, treasure and power on impractical undertakings has anything to do with morality. Critics of realism confront the same question that opponents of the Iran deal face: “What is the alternative?”
By: E. J. Dionne Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, August 31, 2015
“Republicans Find Their Next Anti-Choice Innovation”: Coming Up With New Ways To Restrict Abortion Rights; The Government Decides
If you’re looking for true Republican policy innovations, don’t bother with tax policy or national security; the place where the GOP is really exercising its creativity is in coming up with new ways to restrict abortion rights. In the latest inspired move, Republican state legislators in Ohio have introduced a bill to make it illegal for a woman to terminate her pregnancy because she has discovered that the baby would have Down syndrome. The bill is expected to pass, and though he hasn’t yet taken a position on it, it would be a shock if Governor John Kasich—who is both an opponent of abortion rights and currently in search of votes in the Republican presidential primary—didn’t sign it.
After it passes in Ohio (and even if by some strange turn of events it doesn’t), look for identical bills to come up in state after Republican-controlled state. Anyone who objects will of course be accused of wanting to kill children with disabilities.
As the New York Times article about the Ohio bill notes, this isn’t entirely unprecedented; there are a few states that have outlawed abortion for sex selection, and North Dakota has a similar law passed in 2013 forbidding abortions because of fetal genetic anomaly, though “advocates are not aware of enforcement of any such laws in the states that have them.” But this one lands not only in during a presidential primary, but also amid Republicans’ latest offensive against Planned Parenthood, driven by secretly recorded videos in which Planned Parenthood officials discuss the transfer of fetal tissue for research.
That effort may not accomplish all that much; while many conservatives (and a few presidential candidates) would like to shut down the government in order to “defund” the group, that probably won’t happen, and efforts by states to discover that Planned Parenthood is doing something illegal have come up empty. But it still creates a context in which Republicans are aggressive on the issue of abortion—particularly when it may be the only “culture war” issue on which they aren’t in full retreat.
This is one of those issues where there’s an emotionally freighted case for one side, a case that can seem compelling as long as you don’t think about it too deeply. Conservatives will argue that the law is necessary because so often when women learn that a fetus they’re carrying has the genetic anomaly that causes Down’s, she winds up having an abortion. And they’ll note that people with Down’s can have happy, fulfilling lives, which they can. They’ll no doubt tell stories of wonderful individuals they know who have the condition.
But if the question is only, “If this woman carried her pregnancy to term, would it be possible for the baby that would ultimately result to have a happy, fulfilling life?” then no abortion would be allowed. Some women have abortions because they got pregnant accidentally and are too young to raise a child. Is it possible for a child born to a young woman to grow up to have a happy, fulfilling life? Of course. Some women have abortions because they don’t want to raise a child with the biological father. Is it possible for a child raised by a single mother to grow up to have a happy, fulfilling life? Of course. Some women have abortions because they already have all the children they want. Is it possible for a child born to a family that already has plenty of children to grow up to have a happy, fulfilling life? Of course.
But if we’re going to say that a woman who wants to end her pregnancy because of Down syndrome will be legally barred from doing so, we’re saying that it will now be the government’s job to evaluate whether her reasons are good enough, and if the government thinks they aren’t, then she will be forced against her will to carry the pregnancy to term. For all the restrictions Republicans have successfully placed on abortion rights throughout the country, it isn’t yet the case that women have to explain to the government why they want the abortion and prove that they’re doing it for what the government considers the right reason.
Perhaps to expedite things, every women’s health clinic could come equipped with a special hotline to the state legislature, where any woman who wants to end her pregnancy would have to justify it to a Republican state representative, who would have the final say. Maybe that will be the next bright policy idea from the party that says it’s committed to getting government off your back.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect, August 23, 2015
“A Vague Hand-Waving Promise Is Not A Plan”: The Republican Plans To Replace Obamacare Have Been Tried, And They Failed
Before Obamacare, the individual insurance market for people who could not get health care through their job was a nightmare. The only way for insurers to make money was to avoid getting stuck with customers who would rack up high medical bills, forcing them to expend enormous time and expense to screen potential customers for preexisting conditions. Even people who could find plans with affordable premiums had to sign contracts loaded with fine-print exclusions leaving them responsible for unexpected costs. Obamacare overhauled that market, eliminating insurers’ ability to screen out healthy customers. In the new, regulated individual markets, people buy plans regardless of their prior health status. This has been a godsend to those unable to obtain coverage before.
Republicans would repeal all these new protections. But never fear, conservatives insist. In their place will be new protections. Ramesh Ponnuru, writing in National Review, points to two protections put in place by Scott Walker’s proposal, which is the prototypical Republican “see, we do too have a plan to replace Obamacare” plan.
Ponnuru mentions two protections. The first is a provision that would “bar insurers from charging higher prices to sicker customers provided they had maintained continuous coverage.” Republicans have taken to using this line a lot, because it sounds to the average person tuning in a lot like a promise to protect people with preexisting conditions, but the last six words are crucial. Maintaining continuous coverage is really hard. We know this because Congress passed a law in 1996 letting people who have employer-provided insurance keep their plan if they maintain continuous coverage. It has proven nearly useless. Maintaining continuous coverage is really hard for people who have financial distress, and it’s harder if the insurance company has every incentive for you to miss a payment or fail to dot one of your i’s or cross one of your t’s, so they can kick you out. And, of course, in a market where insurers can charge higher prices to sicker customers, “maintaining continuous coverage” means buying insurance that’s really expensive and can deny you coverage for lots of treatments you need.
The second provision is high-risk pools. This is a special market for the customers with the most expensive medical needs. Many states have tried high-risk pools. They also work really, really badly. There are all sorts of practical barriers that make it hard to operate a special insurance system for people with the most expensive conditions. For instance, how do you determine eligibility? Tens of millions of Americans have something in their medical history that makes them a less than perfect risk, from the insurance company’s standpoint. Where do you draw the cutoff for eligibility? And how do you keep insurance companies from skimming the high-risk pools, too — after all, they’ll want to cover the least costly people in the high-risk pool, not the most costly ones.
Even if it is possible to devise solutions to these problems, the biggest single impediment is that high-risk pools cost money. There’s no magic secret in a high-risk pool that makes insurers able to sell affordable insurance to people who need lots of medical care. And where would Republicans get the money to finance the high-risk pools? They don’t say. And they all have signed the Grover Norquist pledge that they will never raise taxes under any circumstances — even if aliens come to Earth and threaten to destroy humanity unless the president agrees to raise taxes by a single penny.
The funding problem is not ancillary. There’s an old joke in which a chemist, a physicist, and an economist are trapped on a desert island, and some cans of food wash up onshore. The physicist devises a plan to smash open the cans. The chemist comes up with a plan to heat them open. And the economist says “assume a can opener.” This is the problem not just with the high-risk pools, but the Republican health-care plans as a whole. They assume the availability of funding, but the party is theologically opposed to raising revenue of any kind. Like having a can opener, if the Republicans were able to overcome their fanatical opposition to revenue, the problem wouldn’t exist in the first place. Any reform that assumes Republicans will find a way to fund it is assuming a can opener. It’s premised on a fantastical assumption. That is why, in the absence of some concrete way around the no-taxes-ever problem, a vague hand-waving promise can’t be called a real plan.
Before Obamacare took effect, different measures were tried to reform America’s cruel and dysfunctional individual health-care marketplace. The continuous-coverage protection and high-risk pools both failed. One thing that succeeded was tried in Massachusetts, by Mitt Romney. The Obama administration decided to build that model out nationally, and it has worked very well — premiums have actually come in well under projections. But since it was Obama’s plan, Republicans oppose it. But since Obamacare is working, they need to have something they can say they’ll replace it with, and they’ve turned to the things that have already failed.
By: Jonathan Chait, Daily Intelligencer, New York Magazine, August 21, 2015
“Marco Rubio; Let Me Be Your Front Man, Republicans”: To Continue To Advocate The Fiscal And Regulatory Policies The GOP Craves
Today, Marco Rubio delivers a speech in Detroit, where he will again make the case to Republicans that the solution to their economic vulnerabilities lies in nominating Marco Rubio. “If I’m our nominee … We will be the party of the bartenders and the maids, of the people that clean our rooms and fix our cars,” Rubio promises. The choice of working-class occupations is hardly an accident — Rubio is describing the occupations held by his parents when they came to the United States. Rubio’s idea of a “party of” is quite literal — he means the party would be identified with the classes of the parents of its candidate rather than, say, its policies.
Many Republicans blame Mitt Romney’s defeat on his personal wealth, and there has been a renewed vogue for the always-popular appeal to personal working-class authenticity. Scott Walker has a story about buying a really cheap sweater. John Kasich is the son of a mailman. (National Review’s Kasich profile begins, “Have you heard that John Kasich’s dad was a mailman? If not, then you’ve probably never been around Ohio’s Republican governor.”) Hillary Clinton, too, reaches back to her mother to cast herself as the child of working-class toil. But Clinton grounds her appeal to hard-pressed Americans primarily in terms of her policy platform, which she has emphasized in a series of detailed speeches.
Rubio is unusually clear about his strategy to respond to Clinton’s arguments about policy with appeals to his background. “If I’m our nominee, how is Hillary Clinton gonna lecture me about living paycheck to paycheck?” he said at the first Republican debate. “I was raised paycheck to paycheck. How is she — how is she gonna lecture me — how is she gonna lecture me about student loans? I owed over $100,000 just four years ago.” This is Rubio’s plan. Clinton will attack the Republican economic program, and Rubio will talk about his life story.
Rubio’s platform is not entirely devoid of appeals to the working class. He emphasizes an expanded child-tax credit, which would provide benefits to families of modest means. George W. Bush, likewise, portrayed his tax cut as a plan aimed primarily at people like a low-income waitress mom, even though the overall impact was to make the tax code much more regressive. Rubio’s program would have the same effect, but more so. Even Rubio’s tax-cut plan, the most allegedly moderate aspect of his platform, would overwhelmingly benefit the wealthy. Other elements would compound the impact. Rubio would raise the Social Security retirement age, a change with little impact on white-collar workers, but a punishing blow to people who work on their feet or in some other physically demanding way. He would repeal Obamacare, whose benefits are heavily tilted toward low-income workers:
Rubio has sketched out a vague concept that would replace Obamacare, which — to the extent its effects can be defined — would shift much higher costs onto low-income workers, like bartenders and maids.
Rubio has voted for the Ryan budget, which would effect the largest upward redistribution of resources in American history. Indeed, he has set himself to Ryan’s right, criticizing the chairman’s compromise to slightly ease the impact of budget sequestration. He was also an early supporter of the 2013 government shutdown.
Rubio promises to repeal Dodd-Frank, a position that finds immense favor on Wall Street. Rubio may be the most forthrightly pro–Wall Street candidate in the race. His undiluted attack on Dodd-Frank prompted a grateful Richard Bove to write a column headlined “Thank You, Marco Rubio.” Bove is the author of Guardians of Prosperity: Why America Needs Big Banks. Some critics of Dodd-Frank favor (or like to position themselves as favoring) even more stringent regulation. Bove makes no such pretense. His book’s own summary begins, “Since the financial crisis, amid outrage at the likes of Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase and Washington’s rejiggering of the financial system, the banking industry has had one major defender: Richard X. Bove.”
It is positions like this — along with his past, retracted but perhaps still secretly held support for immigration reform — that have endeared Rubio to his party’s donor class. “At the American Enterprise Institute’s annual donor retreat in Sea Island, Ga., one attendee says Rubio got rave reviews from a crowd that included several billionaires,” reported National Review’s Eliana Johnson. “And in late January, the senator impressed the libertarian-leaning crowd at the Koch brothers’ donor conference in Palm Springs, Calif., and came out on top of an informal straw poll conducted there.”
In 2004, Democrats did not think they could frontally attack the Bush administration’s hawkish policies, so they wanted to use their candidate’s biography instead. That was the all-but-explicit message of John Kerry, who promised Democrats his military background would insulate him from attacks. Republicans who favor tax cuts for the rich, cuts in social benefits for working-class Americans, and deregulation of Wall Street face a similar dilemma. What these donors want is a candidate who will continue to advocate the fiscal and regulatory policies they crave, but can sell it to the public. Rubio is all but explicitly making the case for himself as the front man to make that sale.
By: Jonathan Chait, Daily Intelligencer, New York Magazine, August 20, 2015
“The Equivalent Of Thinking The Iraq War Would Be A Cakewalk”: Why The GOP Presidential Candidates Can’t Reform Health Care
In the last few days, Scott Walker and Marco Rubio released health care plans, and other Republican candidates are sure to follow soon. Most will probably be pretty similar, even if some are more fully fleshed out than others.
But they’ll all share one feature, the thing that tells you that they aren’t even remotely serious about this issue: they will take as their starting point that the entire Affordable Care Act should be repealed.
I say that that shows they aren’t serious not because I think the ACA has done a great deal of good, though I do think that. I say it because it shows that they’re completely unwilling to grapple with both the health care system as it exists today, and how incredibly disruptive the wholesale changes they’re proposing would be. Walker’s plan even says, “unlike the disruption caused by ObamaCare, my plan would allow for a smooth, easy transition into a better health care system.” This is the health care equivalent of thinking the Iraq War would be a cakewalk.
The reality is that repealing the ACA now that it has been implemented would mean a complete and utter transformation of American health care. Republicans have often lamented that the law was so terribly long and included many different rules and regulations — yet now they act as though the law amounts to just a couple of rules here and there that can therefore be tossed out without too much trouble. But they were right the first time: the law is indeed complex, and has brought hundreds of changes big and small to American health care, not just in how people get insurance but in how Medicare and Medicaid work, how doctors and hospitals are paid, and in all sorts of other areas.
The ACA established health care exchanges. It brought millions of people into Medicaid, it closed the Medicare prescription drug “doughnut hole.” It gave subsidies to small businesses. It funded pilot projects to explore new means of providing and paying for care, it imposed new regulations on insurance companies. It created new wellness and preventive care programs, it provided new funding for community health centers. It did all that, and much more. You can argue that each one of these was a good or a bad idea, but you can’t pretend that unwinding them all would be anything resembling a “smooth, easy transition.”
We know why every Republican health care plan has to start with repealing the ACA: politics. Republicans have spent the last five years telling their constituents that they’re going to repeal it any day now, and they’ve held over 50 repeal votes in Congress. They’ve refused to admit that a word of it has any merit, even as they try to incorporate some of its more popular reforms (like protections for people with pre-existing conditions) into their own plans. So they’ve backed themselves into a corner where whatever any Republican offers has to start with repeal.
Which is why all their plans, the ones that have been released and the ones yet to come, are absurdly unrealistic. They pretend that it will be no problem to completely transform the American health care system — and there will be no losers in such a transformation, only winners — which shows that they have no intention of actually doing so. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that if a Republican gets elected next November, he’ll be relieved when his health care plan dies in Congress.
Let’s contrast that with how Democrats acted in 2008, when there was a vigorous debate in the presidential primary over health care. The three leading candidates, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John Edwards, all had very similar plans, similar because they reflected the Democratic consensus on health care reform that had evolved in the decade and a half since Bill Clinton’s reform effort failed. One major disagreement was over whether there had to be an individual mandate — Clinton’s plan had one, and Obama’s didn’t — but when he took office, Obama accepted that the mandate was necessary to make the entire plan work. It wasn’t a fantasy plan that just pandered to liberal hopes, it was something that could actually pass and be implemented.
Whenever liberals told Obama that a single-payer health plan would be far superior to what he was proposing, he would respond that if we were starting from scratch, that would probably be true. But, he’d say, we aren’t starting from scratch, so the ACA has to accommodate itself to the health care system that already exists. The result was a gigantic kludge, new complexity layered on top of an already complex system in an attempt to solve its varied shortcomings. Like all kludges, it seemed like the realistic option given the situation we confronted, but it left us with something that was far from perfect.
A Republican who actually wanted to pass real health care reform would have to approach the problem the same way: by saying that for better or worse, the Affordable Care Act has already affected the system in profound ways, so any realistic plan has to understand what those changes are, and find the most efficient way to keep the ones that are working and change the ones that aren’t. That doesn’t mean that repeal is impossible, just that it would be a spectacular upheaval, one that I promise you Republicans have no genuine appetite for. Remember all the screaming and shouting they did over the people on the individual market whose previous plans didn’t qualify under the new regulations, and who had to shop for new plans? Multiply that by ten or twenty times, because that’s how many people would likely lose their existing coverage if you repealed the ACA in one fell swoop.
And that would be only the beginning. So when any Republican candidate says he or she has a plan to reform health care, take a close look. If it starts with repealing the ACA — and it will — then you’ll know it isn’t serious and it’s never going to happen.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The PlumLine, The Washington Post, August 20, 2015
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