“Pre-Racial Society”: 5 Policies That Republicans Loved (Until Obama Did, Too)
On Friday, Texas senator and likely 2016 presidential candidate Ted Cruz (R-TX) took some heat when Mother Jones reported that the right-wing Republican once offered a resolute defense of the 2009 stimulus law that he now derides as an archetypal government overreach. As a private-practice lawyer representing the Texas Retired Teachers Association, Cruz declared that stimulus money “will directly impact the [Texas] economy…and will directly further the greater purpose of economic recovery for America.” But today, he considers the law to be a failure.
Cruz is far from the first Republican to change his mind on an issue championed by the White House. Here are five policies that high-profile Republicans loved — until President Obama came along.
Obamacare
Since before it even became law, Republicans have decried the Affordable Care Act as a job-killing, freedom-crushing abomination. But the right wasn’t always so vehemently opposed to the law’s underlying ideas, like the health care exchanges, the individual mandate, and Medicaid expansion. In fact, they were developed by the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank, and favored by many Republican politicians.
As recently as 2008, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney considered his health care law — which was largely the inspiration for Obama’s — to be “the ultimate conservative plan,” and a “model” for the rest of the nation. But with Obama in the White House, that didn’t last.
Common Core
Today, Republicans widely agree that the Common Core education standards are a hostile, oppressive government takeover of the education system. Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal has compared Common Core to “centralized planning” in the Soviet Union. Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) derides it as “the Obamacare of education.” Senator Cruz has vowed to repeal it (even though it’s not a law passed by Congress). State Representative Charles Van Zant (R-FL) warns that it will “attract every one of your children to become as homosexual as they possibly can.”
But before Republicans began associating the new educational guidelines with the Obama administration (and, by extension, gay communism), they were quite fond of them. After all, Common Core takes after George W. Bush’s education policy, was introduced by the bipartisan National Governors Association, and at one point was adopted by 46 states. Even the aforementioned Jindal, now a leader of the anti-Common Core push, once defended it by promising that his state would not “move one inch off more rigorous and higher standards for our kids.”
Cap And Trade
Before Barack Obama became president, public officials broadly agreed that climate change was a real problem that required a serious policy response. Newt Gingrich even sat on a couch with Nancy Pelosi to talk about it( http://youtu.be/qi6n_-wB154).
Many Republicans agreed that cap and trade, which was developed by a “strange alliance of free-market Republicans and renegade environmentalists,” was the solution that combined the most economic and environmental benefits. In fact, almost every Republican candidate in 2012 backed the plan — until they decided to run against Obama, at which point they reflexively turned against it.
Today, carbon limits remain unpopular on the right, where they are falsely considered to be a job-killing abomination.
Deficit Spending
When President Obama released his 2016 budget plan, congressional Republicans reacted as they often do to his proposals: by attacking it for failing to close the budget deficit.
“While Washington is still racking up debt, this budget doesn’t even try to balance the books,” House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy complained. “In fact, despite the best efforts of Republicans over the past four years to rein in spending and cut the deficit, this budget would erase all those gains over the 10-year budget horizon by increasing the deficit and adding even more to the debt. Our children and grandchildren can’t afford such recklessness.”
But back during the Bush administration, McCarthy and his fellow Republicans didn’t seem to mind budgets that never balanced; that’s why they voted for deficit-busting plans like the Bush tax cuts or the Iraq War, among many others.
Indeed, the Republican Party’s pre-Obama attitude towards balancing the budget can be best summed up by former vice president Dick Cheney: “Deficits don’t matter.” There’s a pretty good case that he was right — but don’t expect any Republican to make the argument while Obama is in the White House.
Immigration Reform
For years, many Republicans have agreed that the United States desperately needs to reform its immigration laws. In 2013, the Senate even passed a rare bipartisan bill which would strengthen border security and establish a pathway to citizenship for the millions of undocumented immigrants who are already in the country. In other words, it closely mirrored President Obama’s goals. And that became a major problem for many Republicans. For example, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) voted against the 2013 bill despite having supported similar measures in 1986 and 2006.
But no Republican illustrates President Obama’s effect on the GOP better than Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL). Rubio helped craft the 2013 bill in the first place, arguing that the issue is a question of human rights. But a year later, he had abandoned his plans — because “the Obama administration has ‘undermined’ negotiations by not defunding his signature health care law.”
By: Henry Decker, The National Memo, February 13, 2015
“A Lesson Not Learned”: There’s Another Shutdown Fight In Washington. Republicans Will Lose This One, Too
Congressional Republicans are in a tough spot. Funding for the Department of Homeland Security expires on February 27, but conservatives are demanding that any DHS funding bill also block President Barack Obama’s executive actions on immigration. That’s unacceptable to Senate Democrats, who filibustered the legislation three times last week.
And now we’re stuck. Some Republican senators are urging their House colleagues to accept a “clean” funding bill that doesn’t block Obama’s unilateral actions, but that’s unacceptable to House Republicans. “The House did its job,” Speaker John Boehner said Wednesday. “Now it’s time for the Senate to do their work.” No one is quite sure how this will end. “I guess the lesson learned is don’t put yourself in a box you can’t figure out a way to get out of,” Republican Senator Shelley Moore Capito said.
The exact outcome may be unpredictable, but this impasse wasn’t.
Think back two months ago, when Congress needed to reach an agreement to fund the entire government. Conservatives were still seething at the president for taking executive action on immigration and wanted to use the government funding deadline as leverage to enact concessions from Obama. Republican leadership, on the other hand, was terrified that another government shutdown would be a political disaster for the GOP, just as they regained full control over Congress. And, they argued, Republicans would have more leverage in the 114th Congress, having won the Senate in November. The compromise was to fund the government through the rest of the fiscal year—with the exception of the Department of Homeland Security, which was funded only until February 27.
Conservatives weren’t happy with the deal, but Boehner’s job was safe. More importantly, the Republican leadership had limited the political downside of a potential shutdown. Now, it wouldn’t be a full government shutdown, just one department. Given the Tea Party’s fury at Obama, that was a huge victory for Boehner.
But even though the current impasse was the best case scenario for Republicans, they still are in a tough position. The practical effects of a DHS shutdown are relatively minor, since most of DHS’s employees are classified as essential and thus would continue to work in the case of a shutdown. But the political implications of it are much worse. Obama can criticize the GOP for putting the U.S.’s national security at risk. “I can think of few more effective ways for Republicans to re-surrender national security as an issue to Obama than by taking the Department of Homeland Security hostage like this,” The New Republic’s Brian Beutler wrote in December. And that’s exactly what Obama has done in recent weeks. As February 27 approaches, Obama and other Democrats will only amplify that message.
Republicans are already trying to avoid blame for a DHS shutdown. “If there’s a shutdown, it wouldn’t be because of us,” Republican Senator Orrin Hatch said Tuesday. “The Democrats are filibustering it. I don’t know how we get blamed for that this time.” Hatch is right—Democrats did filibuster the House-passed legislation on three separate occasions. But Republicans will probably take the blame. That’s how the politics of the filibuster work. The minority uses it to obstruct legislation and the majority takes the blame. Americans know that Republicans control both chambers of Congress. They aren’t paying attention to parliamentarian rules.
In all likelihood, this will end the same way every funding fight ends these days: Republican leadership will eventually bring up a clean bill and it will pass with mostly Democratic votes. That’s long been the GOP game plan. It’s also possible that Republican leadership will see this fight, with its relatively small stakes, as a good opportunity to build credibility with the Tea Party by standing up to Obama and refusing to pass a clean bill.
Neither of those outcomes are good for the GOP. But this is what happens when one ideological group has outsized control over a party and wants to pick funding fights that they are certain to lose.
By: Danny Vinik, The New Republic, February 12, 2015
“GOP Irrational Hostility”: A Mean-Spirited Interpretation Would Deny Millions Health Care Coverage
Millions of Americans only recently rescued from worry and hardship by acquiring health insurance now face losing it because Obamacare’s foes won’t end their obsessive opposition.
The latest threat to the Affordable Care Act is a Supreme Court case, due to be decided this spring, that will determine whether all Americans are eligible for the subsidies that make coverage affordable. The Court should allow working families all across the country to keep their life-saving subsidies.
The case turns on the kind of technicality that only a lawyer could love. The law says citizens are eligible for subsidies purchased through health-insurance exchanges established “by the State.”
Because of intense ideological hostility, 36 state governments betrayed their uninsured residents and refused to set up exchanges. In those cases, the law called for the federal government to set up exchanges for the states.
Obamacare’s implacable enemies are arguing that only Americans who were lucky enough to live in the 14 states that set up their own exchanges are eligible for subsidies, thereby excluding those who live in two-thirds of our country.
Since 85 percent of purchasers need subsidies to make insurance affordable — the subsidies cut monthly premiums on average from $346 to $82 — that nonsensical, mean-spirited interpretation would deny millions of working Americans decent health insurance.
That’s not what Congress intended when it passed the most sweeping reform of American health care in nearly 50 years. It didn’t mean to punish millions of citizens by denying them health insurance because of what state they live in. The architects of reform — the chairmen of the relevant committees — confirmed this obvious truth in a recent op-ed.
And it’s not only the five million Americans losing coverage who will suffer if the Supreme Court rules against national subsidies. The whole system will risk collapse as healthier enrollees succumb to the cost squeeze first and drop out, leaving sicker, more desperate, more expensive clients behind. Other components of the law — such as the one requiring large employers to offer coverage to their workers — could also be questioned in states that didn’t establish their own exchanges.
Trying to downplay the impact of a potential decision that would cut off millions of Americans from their health insurance, some Obamacare opponents claim states would quickly set up their own exchanges in response.
But there’s no sign that irrational hostility has weakened much to the law — even as millions of Americans experience its benefits, and besides, the vast majority of state legislatures will be out of session by the time the High Court rules in June, so no quick fix will be available.
Another answer would be to change the health-care law to remove any uncertainty about who’s eligible for subsidies, but of course the new GOP majority in Congress is too busy trying to repeal the law altogether to usefully amend it.
Indeed, the current legal attack on the Affordable Care Act is only part of an unrelenting five-year campaign of opposition, one that will presumably continue regardless of the Supreme Court’s decision in this case. There’s no clear historical precedent for so much time, effort and emotion being poured into resisting an improvement in the material well-being of fellow citizens.
Think how American health care could be improved if all that angry passion was redirected into fruitful cooperation! Not even its biggest supporters are content with the Affordable Care Act as it is. Health care is still too expensive, too many people are still left out, health outcomes are still disappointing.
But we can’t address those problems until fiery Obamacare opposition cools. The Supreme Court can help the process along by acknowledging that Congress intended for all Americans — not just those living in certain states — to have access to affordable health care.
By: William Rice, The National Memo, February 12, 2015
“The Insurgent Strategy”: It’s Going To Be Hard To Convince Voters Of Republicans’ Compassion On The Economy
In recent months, Republicans have been searching for ways to talk about the economy that go beyond their traditional supply-side focus on growth, which says that if we do a few key things (cut taxes, reduce regulations), the economy will grow and everyone will benefit. Since the conversation about economics has shifted to things like inequality and wage stagnation, potential 2016 candidates want to show that they’re concerned about more than growth; this need is particularly acute in the wake of 2012, when Mitt Romney was caricatured as a ruthless plutocrat crushing the dreams of regular people in order to amass his vast fortune, all while heaping contempt on the “47 percent.”
Many Republicans believe that this entirely explains Romney’s loss, and if they can convince voters that they understand their struggles and have ideas to help them, then victory in 2016 is possible. But that would require them to counter some powerful and deeply ingrained stereotypes about their party. As Brendan Nyhan explains today, there is some political science research into the question of whether it can be done, under the heading of “issue ownership” and “issue trespassing”:
The Republican focus on inequality could address this vulnerability by helping the party look more caring, reducing the G.O.P.’s “damaging reputation for caring only about the economic interests of the rich,” as National Review‘s Ramesh Ponnuru put it.
But there is risk in issue-trespassing of the sort that the Republicans are attempting. One political science study found that the strategy is rarely successful and that voters tend to rely on party stereotypes instead — a conclusion that is reinforced by miscues like the infamous Dukakis tank ride. Democrats are already likening Jeb Bush to Mr. Romney in an attempt to buttress the stereotype of the G.O.P. as the party of the rich.
And even if the move to address inequality lessens Republican image problems, it will be only a stopgap. Assuming the economy continues to improve, Republicans will be forced to pursue what Lynn Vavreck, an Upshot contributor, calls an “insurgent” strategy in 2016, trying to focus the election on another issue in which its presidential candidate has an inherent advantage.
Unfortunately, good insurgent issues are hard to find. Inequality doesn’t look like a winner for Republicans in this election. That’s why Mr. Bush, like Mr. Dukakis, has struck some analysts as sounding like a technocrat — he can’t run on the economy and doesn’t have a good alternative issue or trait to emphasize (unlike his brother George, who successfully ran as the Not Clinton candidate in 2000).
The Dukakis example is an interesting and revealing one. In 1988, at the end of a huge military build-up, Dukakis tried to argue that the question wasn’t whether our military was big, but whether we were making smart decisions about what weapons we purchased and what we did with them. Then somebody thought it would be good for him to take a ride in a tank, just to show that he liked big things that go boom just as much as any Republican, ignoring the fact that it would violate the most important rule of presidential campaigning, which is “No hats.” Your candidate should never, ever put on a hat. The Republicans made an ad mocking him for riding in a tank, and suddenly the discussion on defense was back on the strong/weak axis, not on the smart/dumb axis Dukakis wanted.
In 2016, all it’s going to take is one thing to undo months of careful attempts by the Republican candidate to show he’s compassionate and understands people’s economic needs. Maybe it’ll be an infelicitous remark the candidate makes, or it might even be something someone else says. But the Democrats will be waiting to show the voters that the nominee is just like every other Republican, and when it happens they’ll be on it like white on rice.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Plum, Line, The Washington Post, February 13, 2015
“Who Are These People”: ‘I Don’t Like The Idea Of Throwing People Off Their Health Insurance’
When it comes to the insanity surrounding the King v. Burwell case, we already have a pretty good sense of most of the relevant angles. We know who supports the ridiculous case and why, what happens if Republican justices go along with this dangerous nonsense, how many families will suffer and where, etc.
We don’t, however, know much about the specific plaintiffs themselves.
Remember, when challenging a federal law, it’s not enough for someone to get a lawyer, go to court, and demand the law be struck down. In the American system, plaintiffs need standing – litigants have to demonstrate that a law harms them in some direct way.
And so, in the painfully absurd King v. Burwell case, anti-healthcare lawyers went out and found four people willing to sue because they’re eligible under the Affordable Care Act for insurance subsidies. They’ve been largely overlooked, but given the possibility that this case will end access to medical care for millions of families, it seems like a good time to ask, “Who are these people who want to destroy the American health care system?”
Stephanie Mencimer reports today on all four of the plaintiffs, and it’s quite a collection of folks. For example, David King of King v. Burwell notoriety, “brought up Benghazi” when asked about the anti-healthcare lawsuit. Rose Luck believes President Obama may be the “anti-Christ” and was elected by “his Muslim people.” But a Virginia woman Brenda Levy stood out as especially significant.
What was more surprising, though, was that she said she didn’t recall exactly how she had been selected as a plaintiff in the case to begin with. “I don’t know how I got on this case. I haven’t done a single thing legally. I’m gonna have to ask them how they found me,” she told me. She thought lawyers involved with the case may have contacted her at some point and she had decided to “help ‘em out.” […]
When I asked her if she realized that her lawsuit could potentially wipe out health coverage for millions, she looked befuddled. “I don’t want things to be more difficult for people,” she said. “I don’t like the idea of throwing people off their health insurance.”
Her case, whether Levy realizes it or not, exists to throw people off their health insurance.
She added that she intends to go to D.C. for the Supreme Court’s oral arguments “It’s an adventure,” Levy said. “Like going to Paris!”
Complicating matters further, three of the four plaintiffs are finding their standing suddenly facing new scrutiny. The Wall Street Journal reported late Friday that King “appears to qualify for veterans’ medical coverage, raising questions about his ability to challenge the law.”
The plaintiffs have persuaded courts to hear their case on the grounds that the subsidies allegedly harm them by subjecting them to the law’s requirement to carry insurance or pay a penalty. Without the subsidies, insurance would be too expensive for them, they contend, thus making them exempt from having to pay the fine for lacking insurance.
But Mr. King could avoid paying that fine or any insurance premiums because, according to him and his attorneys, he served in the Army in Vietnam. That qualifies him for medical coverage with no premiums through the Department of Veterans Affairs, benefits and legal experts say. In an interview at his home here, Mr. King said he had been to a VA medical center and had a VA identification card, which typically serves as proof of VA-care enrollment.
Legal experts say the fact that Mr. King could avoid paying the penalty for lacking insurance by enrolling in VA coverage undermines his legal right to bring the case, known as “standing.” The wife of a second plaintiff has described her husband on social media as being a Vietnam veteran. The government previously questioned the standing of a third plaintiff on the grounds that her income may exempt her from paying the penalty for lacking insurance, but a lower court didn’t address the issue.
Levy, the one who doesn’t want to throw people off their health insurance despite her role as a plaintiff in this case, will qualify for Medicare this June – which would remove her from the ACA coverage system anyway.
These fresh details reinforce the impression that the entire King v. Burwell case seems like a transparent scam, and as the WSJ added, the standing issues “could create skepticism about the strength of the challengers’ case and highlight the difficulty of finding plaintiffs to show the health law’s subsidies harm Americans.”
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, February 9, 2015
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