“Just Don’t Say It Out Loud”: Every Member Of Congress Who Gets Coverage Through An Exchange Will Be Participating In Obamacare
In the very near future, congressional Republicans have some important decisions to make when it comes to health care policy. Will they threaten a government shutdown over funding for the Affordable Care Act? Will they use the issue as the basis for a debt-ceiling crisis?
And perhaps more directly, will they personally sign up for subsidized insurance through an exchange created by the health care law?
As we discussed a couple of weeks ago, the right is heavily invested in the idea that members of Congress are “exempt” from “Obamacare.” The claim is plainly untrue — thanks to a scheme Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) stumbled into, lawmakers will give up their current health care coverage and get coverage through a marketplace where insurers compete for their business.
There are, however, some complications — these exchanges were designed for the uninsured and small-business owners looking to cover their employees, not wealthy federal lawmakers who already have perfectly good coverage. It’s why the Obama administration had to work out a fix for members of Congress and their aides a few weeks ago.
But for Republicans this creates yet another problem: if they sign up for coverage, doesn’t that mean they’re necessarily participating in the health care system they claim to hate? As far-right groups urge the uninsured to stay that way on purpose by staying out of the exchange, won’t those same lobbying efforts apply to lawmakers themselves?
If conservatives genuinely believe that Obamacare is a threat to the country they will extend their campaigns to convince people to skip Obamacare from nameless powerless young people to elected officials and their aides. And if those members and aides have the courage of their convictions they’ll follow suit.
To the extent that none of this happens — that conservative groups keep quiet, and conservative members and aides enroll in the exchanges — it’ll expose the right’s anti-Obamacare activism as a shallow enterprise undertaken by people who are happy to see millions go without insurance, so long as it’s not themselves or their families.
So, what are far-right lawmakers going to do? I’m glad you asked.
As Igor Volsky reported, so far, two current members are prepared to bypass the system on purpose.
[North Carolina Republican Robert Pittenger has] voluntarily withdrawn from health coverage altogether. [North Carolina Republican Mark Meadows] added that his staff has also voluntarily declined the subsidies. And while most members of Congress may be able to afford to forfeit the government contribution — Meadows has a net worth between $1,674,034 to $12,017,998 [and] Pittenger is worth between $18,615,005 to $48,551,997.
Two GOP members out of 233 in the House obviously isn’t a large number, but don’t be surprised if this number grows as right-wing lobbying becomes more intense.
Also note, a lot of these folks have convenient outs — if they have spouses with employer-based coverage of their own, members and staffers can get insurance anyway. For that matter, if you’re a multi-millionaire lawmaker, you can afford to get coverage without a subsidy anyway.
But the underlying point remains the same: every member of Congress, in both parties, who gets coverage in the coming months through an insurance exchange will be participating in “Obamacare,” even conservatives who will be reluctant to say so out loud.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, August 26, 2013
“A Dog’s Life Can Be Dizzying”: The Obamacare Opposition Has Finally Caught Its Own Tail
It’s time to pop the champagne and blow the kazoos: the war on Obamacare has officially reached its point of reductio ad absurdum. Two of the opposition’s favored fevered conspiracy theories about the law have clashed, like two asteroids headed for the planet that smash into each other before they can do any damage below.
First, there was the opposition’s demand that members of Congress and their staff be subjected to Obamacare—that they be forced to give up their coverage in the health plans for federal employees and join the new insurance exchanges on the theory that “if Congress was going to impose Obamacare upon the country, it should have to experience what it is imposing firsthand.” This never really made sense from the outset since the exchanges, at least for the foreseeable future, are meant only for people without employer coverage and for small businesses buying coverage for their workers. That is, most of “the country” is not going to have anything to do with the exchanges—they are just going to keep being covered by their employers.
Forcing the incongruous requirement that Hill employees enter the exchanges resulted, inevitably, in a snafu: the exchanges are not designed for employers and employees to share the cost of plans that are selected by workers, since the exchanges are meant for people buying coverage on their own. Congress, like most large employers, covers the lion’s share of their workers’ premiums, but wasn’t going to be able to do so as the law was written, leaving Hill workers with thousands more dollars a year in premium costs than they now pay. To fix this problem—which was never intended even by the members of Congress who wanted Hill staff to share in the burdens of Obamacare—the administration and Congress agreed on a tweak that would maintain the requirement for congressional staff to enter the exchanges, while allowing for the federal government to pick up its share of the costs. Conservatives decried this as an “exemption” from Obamacare, which was flatly untrue: in fact, the Hill is being included in Obamacare to an extent beyond what the law was built to allow for. For a pithy dismissal of the “exemption” trope, see the recent letter to the editor in the Wall Street Journal by the gentleman from Verona.
Meanwhile, opponents of the law have since the early days of its drafting been busy fanning flames on another front as well: charging that the law would allow for federal funding of abortions, which has been barred for years. This line almost managed to stop the legislation in its tracks before supporters settled on a highly unwieldy compromise—plans on the exchanges can cover abortions (as many insurance plans now do) but the abortion coverage must be offered in a supplemental plan, purchased separately from the main coverage, and without the help of the federal subsidies many people will receive to help them buy the plans. This is such a messy arrangement that abortion rights supporters fear that precious few plans on the exchanges will even bother to include abortion coverage. And the law also allows states to pass laws banning abortion coverage, period, from plans in their exchanges, as many states have already done.
Do you see where this is headed? The law forces Congress and its staffers into the exchanges…the law, in theory, allows for plans with abortion coverage to be sold on the exchanges…and, voila, the crash in the skies above. Take it away, Associated Press:
The politics of the abortion debate are always tricky for lawmakers. They may soon get personal. An attempt to fix a problem with the national health care law has created a situation in which members of Congress and their staffers could gain access to abortion coverage. That’s a benefit currently denied to them and to all federal employees who get health insurance through the government’s plan…
Abortion opponents say the regulation would circumvent a longstanding law that bars the use of taxpayer funds for “administrative expenses in connection with any health plan under the federal employees health benefits program which provides any benefits or coverage for abortions.” Unlike many private corporate plans, federal employee plans only cover abortions in cases of rape, incest or to save the life of the mother.
“Under this scheme, (the government) will be paying the administrative costs,” said Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., author of the abortion funding ban for federal employee plans. “It’s a radical deviation and departure from current federal law, and it’s not for all federal employees, but for a subset: Congress. Us.” Smith is calling on the Obama administration to specify that lawmakers and staffers must choose a plan that does not cover abortions. The funding ban, in place since the 1980s, is known as the Smith amendment.
This framing is actually off the mark. It’s not “an attempt to fix a problem” with the law that has created this situation. It was the original demand by Republicans (Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley led the way) that members of Congress and their staff be forced into the exchanges. The administration is downplaying the whole matter, noting that, technically, Hill members and staffers who buy a plan on the exchanges that comes with the abortion coverage will be paying for that part of the coverage out of their own pocket. But yes, in theory, a member of Congress and his or her staff may now be able to have abortion coverage, which was not the case previously. The horror! After all, we know that some members of Congress have a messy track record with abortions—like, say, demanding that their mistresses get one.
So, tiger, how does that tail of yours taste?
By: Alec MacGillis, Senior Editor, The New Republic, August 20, 2013
“No Pleasing Some People”: Republicans Mad That The President They Despise, Obstruct, And Lie About Doesn’t Call More Often
Iowa senator Chuck Grassley is something of an odd character. As I’ve said before, he used to be considered a reasonable moderate, but in the last couple of years he has basically turned himself into a Tea Party wingnut, combining the ideological extremism, face palm-inducing stupidity, and general craziness that makes that political movement so charming (although I was recently informed that even a couple of decades ago, before Grassley began publicly yelling at clouds, people in the Senate privately considered him kind of a nut).
Today, The Hill reports that Grassley, who has spent the last five years floating conspiracy theories, impugning Barack Obama’s motives, and telling truly vicious lies about his policies, is upset that Obama doesn’t call him more often. Seriously.
In 2009, Obama basically had Grassley on speed dial, calling him frequently during negotiations over an overhaul of the nation’s healthcare system. Grassley at the time was one of three Republicans on the Group of Six, which also included Sen. Mike Enzi (Wyo.) and former Sen. Olympia Snowe (Maine).
“During that period of time, the president would call me on my cellphone and talk to me. I don’t know if it was a half a dozen times or a dozen times, but enough so you remember he called you,” Grassley said.
The relationship unraveled after a meeting at the White House in August 2009.
“We had a meeting down at the White House about Aug. 5, 2009 — the six of us — and he asked me this question: ‘Would you be willing to be one or two or three Republicans voting with the Democrats to get a bipartisan bill?’ and I said, ‘No,’ ” Grassley recalled.
“I never had a phone call from him since,” Grassley added.
So Grassley told Obama flat out that he would never vote for a health care bill, no matter what—and Obama stopped bothering to win his support. Amazing! But that’s not even the whole story. At the same time, Grassley was out telling constituents that the Affordable Care Act contained death panels that would “pull the plug on Grandma.” And for some reason, the president no longer found it worthwhile to massage Grassley’s ego.
And it isn’t just Grassley. Other Republicans are upset that Obama has abandoned his “charm offensive” meant at finding bipartisan compromise on things over which Republicans have made clear they will never compromise. Republicans are appalled, appalled I tell you, that Obama is going out and making speeches arguing for the policy changes he’d like to see. “I preferred it when he sat down for dinner with Republicans,” huffs Sen. Lamar Alexander, who presumably is now eating alone, gazing at an 8×10 photo of him and Barack Obama in happier days, their arms around each other’s shoulders as they share a tender moment, just before Alexander joins every other Republican to filibuster every bill the president supports.
You might be able to argue that Republican behavior over Obama’s tenure has been defensible. They dislike him intensely, but more importantly they disagree with his policy priorities, so they very consciously adopted a strategy of total and unwavering opposition to everything he wants to do, not only because they object to the particular goals but because they calculated that by obstructing and hobbling him they could make future political victories more likely. Fair enough. But you can’t choose that path, and then complain that the president isn’t working hard enough to win you over, when you’ve already made it quite clear you won’t be won over. It’s as though a salesman came to your door and asked if you might be interested in buying aluminum siding, and you immediately began screaming in his face that he’s trying to destroy your home and you’d never buy his siding in a million years, and then started swinging a baseball bat at him, and when he retreated, you turned to your spouse and said, “That guy didn’t even try to win me over—what a jerk!”
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, June 6, 2013
“Chuck Grassley’s Pretext”: Why The GOP Is So Obsessed With Three Little Judges
It’s beginning to feel a bit like 1937 in Washington this week as the White House and Senate Republicans hurl allegations of “court-packing” up and down Pennsylvania Avenue at one another. The what — Republican obstruction of Obama’s nominees to fill three vacant seats on the powerful D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals — has been widely and well covered elsewhere. What bears further explanation is the why. It goes without saying that the GOP has an interest in blocking Obama’s nominees in general; the fewer judges the president appoints, the less liberal the courts overall. But why do they care so much about these three particular nominees — who haven’t even been named yet — that they’re willing to risk triggering a “nuclear war” on filibuster reform while also trying to change the basic makeup of the court.
First, there’s the numbers. Right now, Republican appointees have an effective 9-5 majority on the D.C. Court. There are only 11 “active” seats, but another six judges serve as a sort of auxiliary corps in a semi-retirement status where they participate in cases as needed. With three vacancies on the active bench, these “senior” judges are needed often. Of all the judges, three were appointed by George W. Bush, two by George H.W. Bush, and four by Ronald Reagan, compared to just three by Bill Clinton, and one by Jimmy Carter. Until last week, when the Senate finally confirmed Sri Srinivasan, Obama had made zero successful appointments in over four years, despite the vacancies, thanks to GOP obstruction.
“That’s what this is about. It’s that the court is already packed in favor of Republican judges,” Judith Schaeffer, the vice president of the Constitutional Accountability Center, told Salon.
Second, the stakes couldn’t be higher. With near-exclusive purview over federal government action, the D.C. Circuit will be a critical battleground in legal challenges against everything from the Affordable Care Act to new EPA regulations to curb greenhouse gas emissions, not to mention labor policy, gun safety regulations, Wall Street reform, national security issues, campaign finance, voting rights, and much more. With Congress deadlocked, executive action has become an increasingly important tool for the Obama White House, and the D.C. Circuit is where people trying to stop those reforms will mount their fights. Already, the Republican majority on the court has rolled back a major EPA air pollution rule, curbed Obama’s recess appointment powers and hamstrung the National Labor Relations Board.
Outside of the House of Representatives, the court is one of the most important roadblocks to Obama’s agenda. Obviously, Republicans would like to keep it that way.
But now, the White House is reportedly planning to push through three nominations simultaneously in an effort to overcome GOP filibusters. Republicans have filibustered plenty of nominees, but they pounced on this plan with unusual vigor and a unified message. Sen. Chuck Grassley, the Judiciary Committee’s top Republican, called this scheme “court packing.” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said the White House is trying “to pack the D.C. Circuit with appointees.” Utah Sen. Mike Lee, a constitutional lawyer hailed by conservatives for his legal smarts, also invoked the term.
It’s a little disturbing to think that three of the Senate’s top Republicans on judicial matters have no idea what court packing is, but that’s what we’re lead to believe if we assume they’re being honest in their charges. FDR tried to “pack” the Supreme Court in 1937 by dramatically expanding its size, so he could appoint more justices who agreed with him. Court packing involves trying to change the rules of the game in your favor. Obama is following the rules set forth by the Constitution and Congress by aiming to fill three already vacant seats. To accuse Obama of court packing is plainly ridiculous.
Now, wouldn’t it be ironic if Grassley and his colleagues were in fact the ones who wanted to change the rules of the game? As it turns out, they do. Grassley wants to eliminate the three vacant seats from the court entirely, thus cementing the current Republican majority indefinitely. This is the plan that has led the White House to turn the “court packing” allegation back on Republicans, as White House senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer did in a blog post today. “[O]n the merits, Senator Grassley’s ‘court unpacking proposal’ fails to make any sense,” the Obama aide wrote.
Grassley’s argument — or pretext, depending on where you sit on the political spectrum — is that the D.C. Circuit is underworked, because it sees fewer cases per judge than other appellate courts. Eliminating each judgeship would save $1 million per judge per year. Million with an “m” — a pretty puny amount of money when it comes to government.
Critics, meanwhile, see Grassley’s plan as little more “pure partisan hypocrisy,” as Schaeffer said, predicated on an erroneous assumption about the court’s workload. Currently, the D.C. Circuit has 120 pending cases per authorized judgeship, which Grassley says is too few. But under George W. Bush, Grassley voted to confirm two judges when the court had just 109 cases per judge.
And everyone agrees the cases the D.C. Circuit deals with are far more complicated than those seen on other circuits, so you can’t really compare the numbers. “There is cause for extreme concern that Congress is systematically denying the court the human resources it needs to carry out its weighty mandates,” wrote Pat Wald, who was the chief judge on the D.C. Court of Appeals, in the Washington Post.
You don’t have to be a federal courts scholar to see the stakes here, or the politics at play, but they’re probably hoping only scholars will pay attention.
By: Alex Seitz-Wald, Salon, May 30, 2013
“The Viciousness Is Over”: Michele Bachmann Wasn’t Funny, She Was Awful
I used to think Michele Bachmann was hilarious, and so did you: I know because you clicked the blog posts that I wrote about her. It didn’t matter what she did. She could make a funny face, pronounce a word incorrectly, pronounce a word correctly—the traffic would always come. She provided a constant fix of comical escapism that readers loved. Like Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann was always a sure success.
It became part of the daily routine: Post a 20-second clip of Michele Bachmann saying something silly, secure ten trillion page views, then work on a lengthier piece with actual value that five or six people would read. Many young political writers were able to have their jobs because traffic was heavily subsidized by Michele Bachmann saying something weird at a barbecue in Ames or whatever, everyday.
Many commentators will miss her for this reason. James Carville, for one, called her retirement announcement a “sad day.” Who will deliver the funnies now? Texas Representative Louie Gohmert, Carville suggested. We’ve still got Gohmert.
Yeah, I don’t know. It’s difficult to call Bachmann’s retirement a “sad” event right now, even with tongue in cheek. Face it: The show had been getting less and less worth watching in recent seasons. Almost entirely infuriating, really, if worth caring about at all. Let’s not remember Michele Bachmann as the goof she got away with portraying for so many years, while she was really doing so much damage. Her “legacy,” which, hope against hope, will eventually prove nil, was a very nasty, egomaniacal one, rife with smears and dark innuendo. The harm she caused to the political culture far outweighs the lift of a daily laugh. Peak Bachmann coincided with her political career’s high-water mark—that period in the summer of 2011, when she briefly led the polls for the Republican presidential nomination, before collapsing. Inflated, perhaps, by her success, she began to flaunt her uglier beliefs. Bachmann’s tumble from the top (which would have happened over one thing or another, eventually) accelerated into free fall during an early September 2011 debate, when she attacked fellow eventual loser Rick Perry over his 2007 gubernatorial mandate for all sixth-grade Texas girls be vaccinated against HPV. There were legitimate angles to work here—Perry’s close ties with a lobbyist from Merck, the pharmaceutical company that made the HPV vaccine Gardasil. She made that point during the debate. Afterwards, however, she went on television to describe her encounter with a woman in the audience:
“She told me that her little daughter took that vaccine, that injection, and she suffered from mental retardation thereafter,” Bachmann said. “There is no second chance for these little girls if there is any dangerous consequences to their bodies.”
Repeating this without qualification wasn’t just sloppy; it was pernicious and wholly inappropriate. Medical professionals are constantly working to swat back such rumors that embed in the mind quickly and are difficult to erase. And here was a presidential candidate, bizarrely trusted by a not insignificant number of parents, voicing it as truth on national television. That’s not stupidity, or whimsy, or comical ineptness. It’s viciousness. This was the year of the debt ceiling crisis, as well. Perhaps you remember it? It was that fantastic time when Congress considered arbitrarily destroying the credit of the United States and, along with it, the entire global economy, all because Republican politicians thought it would be too much of a hassle to explain what the debt ceiling was to their constituents. (Or, in a scary number of cases, to learn what it was themselves.) Michele Bachmann was a prominent player in that group. And even after the crisis had passed, at the non-fatal but still very avoidable cost of an S&P downgrade of U.S. debt, Bachmann was still out there, explaining to America that she had witnessed the crisis and proudly learned no lessons from it:
“I think we just heard from Standard & Poor’s. When they dropped—when they dropped our credit rating, what they said is, we don’t have an ability to repay our debt. That’s what the final word was from them. I was proved right in my position: We should not have raised the debt ceiling. And instead, we should have cut government spending, which was not done. And then we needed to get our spending priorities in order.”
And so she pledged repeatedly to never sign a debt ceiling hike if she were elected president. To call this position of hers, or her personally, stupid, would have let this off the hook too easily. What if she wasn’t? What if she was just awful? Her most egregious move may have come last summer, when she smeared Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s longtime aide Huma Abedin as being in cahoots with the Muslim Brotherhood’s perceived attempts to infiltrate “the highest reaches of the federal government.” Her evidence was … limited. She relied upon lunatic sources like Frank Gaffney, who likely checks for Muslims under his bed each night before going to sleep. Per Salon:
In case Abedin hasn’t already been through enough already, Bachmann is now questioning her loyalty to the U.S. by asserting that Abedin has three family members who are connected to the Muslim Brotherhood (Abedin is Muslim). She’s been targeted before by anti-Muslim activists, and Bachmann notes that Abedin’s position “affords her routine access to the Secretary and to policy-making.” Bachmann also claims the state has “taken actions recently that have been enormously favorable to the Muslim Brotherhood and its interests.”
At some point in the last year, the voters in Bachmann’s district decided that maybe they would be better served by an alternate member of Congress. She won with only 50.4 percent of the vote in 2012, and now, facing a more difficult rematch for 2014, Bachmann is choosing to make the exit on her grounds. Nevertheless, she managed to win a whole four terms to the House of Representatives. What many laughed at for the early years were the same things that others took as reasons to support her candidacies.
Maybe it’s because I no longer have the pleasure of scrambling to meet traffic quotas each day, but right now, I see no cheeky reasons to mourn Bachmann’s loss from public service. She’s not funny anymore. She’s only terrible. Louie Gohmert isn’t funny anymore. Chuck Grassley’s Twitter isn’t funny anymore. Sarah Palin isn’t funny anymore. (Okay, she was sort of funny at CPAC.) If you never thought any of these sure-things were ever even slightly funny, consider our caps doffed. And join us in being content to see that for Bachmann, it’s all over.
By: Jim Newell, The New Republic, May 29, 2013
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