“And Four Years Later?”: How Much “Repeal” Must “Replace” Involve?
If you’re wondering why it’s taking so long for congressional Republicans to unite behind an Obamacare Replacement plan when there are several of them out there, look no further than the North Carolina U.S. Senate primary, where “Establishment” candidate Thom Tillis has incautiously said not all aspects of Obamacare are bad, yet appears to be afraid to endorse the “replacement” bill originally cosponsored by the senior senator from that state, Richard Burr. WaPo’s Greg Sargent has more:
Tillis has so far refrained from endorsing the Burr plan. And similarly, in interviews, he has claimed that of course he would replace Obamacare with something that would protect people with preexisting conditions and others who need protection, without specifying what that replacement would be. Republicans appear increasingly aware that they can’t be just for repeal, and have to promise replacements that would accomplishment some of what Obamacare accomplishes….
As the case of Tillis shows…Republicans must also simultaneously remain vague enough about those replacements so as to avoid embracing the tradeoffs they would require — since specificity there risks angering the right. Indeed, Tillis’ embrace of even some of Obamacare’s general goals has drawn fire from his primary opponent, Tea Partyer Greg Brannon.
The Coburn-Burr-Hatch proposal is dangerous politically for a primary-challenged Republican because it simultaneously embraces aspects of Obamacare (an insurance purchasing exchange, albeit one selling “deregulated”—which means less generous—products; and subsidies for purchases on those exchanges by certain low-income folk) and aspects of more conventional conservative health care thinking that are wildly disruptive of the status quo at a time when Republicans are making big hay over Obamacare “disruptions” (notably the partial rollback of the federal tax write-off for employer-based plans). Indeed, messing with employer-based coverage has been a conservative policy pet rock for years, even though GOP politicians have been leery of it since John McCain proposed junking it in 2008, and left himself exposed to a “tax increase” charge.
There simply isn’t, and can’t be, an “Obamacare replacement” proposal that lets everyone who likes the status quo keep it, while dealing with pre-existing condition exclusions, expanding coverage, and holding down costs. This is why Republicans prefer to insist they want to repeal Obamacare and are stilling “working” on a replacement, four years after enactment of the Affordable Care Act.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, April 1, 2014
“Calling The Republican’s Bluff”: Who Cares About The Value Of Work?
Finding a way out of our current political impasse requires some agreement on what problems we need to solve. If anything should unite left, center and right, it is the value of work and the idea, in Bill Clinton’s signature phrase, that those who “work hard and play by the rules” ought to be rewarded for their efforts.
This is why one of last week’s most important and least noted political events was the introduction of the 21st Century Worker Tax Cut Act by Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash. Murray favors a minimum wage increase to $10.10 an hour, but she also has other ideas that would help Americans at the bottom of the income structure to earn more.
Let’s start with principles, and then move to specifics.
There’s a new vogue among conservatives: to talk less about entrepreneurs and to stop talking altogether about “makers” and “takers.” Instead, many of the wisest heads on the right are urging a focus on work. The new emphasis reflects a realization that President Obama won in 2012 in large part because Mitt Romney and his party failed to convey empathy for those who live on wages and salaries.
An early champion of this view was Ramesh Ponnuru, a writer for National Review. “The Republican story about how societies prosper — not just the Romney story — dwelt on the heroic entrepreneur stifled by taxes and regulations,” he wrote shortly after the election. It is, Ponnuru added, “an important story with which most people do not identify.”
Writing earlier this year in National Affairs magazine, Henry Olsen of the Ethics and Public Policy Center was more biting. “Modern conservatives,” he argued, “have tended to discount the moral value of the average person, focusing instead on extolling the moral superiority of the great.”
Two other conservative thinkers, Reihan Salam and Rich Lowry, say the antidote is for Republicans to become “the party of work.” As they see it, work “stands for a constellation of values and, like education, is universally honored.” The GOP, they said, “should extol work and demand it.”
Yes, that last phrase — “demand it” — could lead to a darker kind of politics involving the demonization of those who simply can’t find jobs. Thus did Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., get into trouble for mourning “this tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working.”
No matter what Ryan was trying to say, he seemed to be emphasizing the flaws of the unemployed themselves rather than the cost of economic injustice. My Post colleague Eugene Robinson captured this well: “Blaming poverty on the mysterious influence of ‘culture’ is a convenient excuse for doing nothing to address the problem.”
Nonetheless, many conservatives really do realize that they need to embrace hardworking Americans. But the question stands: What are they willing to do about it?
This is where Murray comes in. Her bill would rid the tax code of certain disincentives to work. She notes that “the second earner in a household often pays a higher tax rate on his or her earnings than the first.” Her plan would right this by offering a 20 percent deduction on the second earner’s income up to roughly $60,000 a year. (The benefit is focused on lower-income families, so it phases out at about $130,000 in joint annual income.) For a $25,000-a-year second earner in the 25 percent bracket, she says, this would mean $1,250 “back in their pocket for groceries, child care or retirement savings.”
She’d also expand the earned-income tax credit for workers without children and lower the eligibility age from 25 to 21. The changes would increase their maximum benefit from $487 to about $1,400 a year. It’s hardly nirvana. But it’s real money, especially for someone earning around $15,000 a year. The proposal would cover its roughly $15 billion annual cost by closing loopholes already identified as worthy of being scrapped by the GOP’s leading tax reformer, Rep. Dave Camp of Michigan.
You can, of course, look at what Murray is doing as a way of calling the conservatives’ bluff on the matter of work. But that will be true only if the right allows its bluff to be called.
In making their case, Salam and Lowry quoted Abraham Lincoln on the need “to advance the condition of the honest, struggling laboring man.” If conservatives are serious about this (and about the honest, laboring woman, too) they’ll join Murray in raising the minimum wage and in seeking a tax code more in harmony with the dignity of work.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, March 30, 2014
“It’s No Big Deal”: Fifth Circuit Seems To Find No “Burden” As “Undue”
A three-judge panel of the conservative Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals has upheld Texas’ new anti-abortion law, a classic of the genre insofar as it uses late-term abortion restrictions to mask a more general effort to shut down abortion clinics via medically dubious “health” requirements.
You can expect conservatives to make hay of the fact that all three judges on the panel are women (one of them the famous conservative judicial activist Edith Jones, who wrote the opinion). But they certainly had no sympathy for the women affected by their action, arguing that it’s no big deal if they have to travel across or beyond Texas to obtain abortion services. MSNBC’s Irin Carmon assesses the damage:
The Supreme Court has held that laws restricting access to abortion can’t put an “undue burden” or have the purpose of putting a “substantial obstacle” in the path of a woman seeking an abortion. But in a decision written by Judge Edith Jones and signed onto by Judges Jennifer Elrod and Catharina Haynes, the Fifth Circuit argued that Texas’s law wasn’t harsh enough to meet that standard. Despite the fact that the admitting privileges requirement has been rejected as medically unnecessary by the American Medical Association and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the Fifth Circuit opinion accepted the state of Texas’s reasoning at face value – that it was intended to protect women’s health, not end access to abortion.
The Fifth Circuit wasn’t impressed at how much harder it has become for Texas women to have abortions, both because clinics whose providers have been rejected for privileges have closed outright and because clinics with doctors that have been able to get privileges are operating at reduced capacity. According to a map by RH Reality Check’s Andrea Grimes, “As of March 6, there are 25 open abortion clinics, six of which are ambulatory surgical centers, in Texas.” There were 36 abortion clinics in Texas at the time the law was passed, meaning that the dire prediction that a third of the clinics would close has come true. When requirements that abortions be provided in ambulatory surgical clinics go into effect in September, that will leave only six clinics, plus another one Planned Parenthood is building in San Antonio.
Since the 7th Circuit reached the opposite conclusion in striking down a similar law in Wisconsin, it’s now almost certain the Supreme Court will have to weigh in, giving Justice Anthony Kennedy a fresh chance to recite his paternalistic approach to women’s health, and the Court’s conservative bloc the best chance they’ve had in years to weaken the “undue burden” standard for abortion restrictions.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, March 28, 2014
“No Constitutional Freedom Is Limitless”: Companies Are Not Churches, And Must Conform To Modern Laws
What do contraceptives have to do with religion?
As a liberal Protestant, I see no connection — but that’s beside the point. There are plenty of sincere Catholics and conservative Protestants who believe the use of contraceptives, or at least some types of them, is sinful. That’s reason enough to be careful about any broad government regulations involving birth control.
Religious liberty is a cornerstone of the American way of life, a fundamental principle of the U.S. Constitution. The Founding Fathers were close enough to the bloody religious wars in Europe to try to found a country safe for pluralism, respectful of all religions while requiring none. If there is any such thing as American exceptionalism, freedom of religion is certainly one of its hallmarks.
Still, no Constitutional freedom is limitless. For more than a century, jurists have restricted religious liberties when they interfered with other important values. The Supreme Court did so as early as 1879, when it ruled against polygamy, practiced by some Mormons at the time.
That’s why the U.S. Supreme Court ought to rule against two corporations whose owners are fighting the requirement — a tenet of Obamacare — that employers’ health insurance plans pay for birth control. If businesses are given an exemption from a valid law that serves a useful public purpose because they claim it violates religious beliefs, where would it end?
(I’m leaving it to others to argue the perfectly valid point that corporations don’t have religious beliefs. They are not people. How many corporations have you ever seen sitting in the pews on Sunday?)
There are plenty of businesses and institutions that believe they have the right to fire gays and lesbians because homosexuality violates their religious beliefs. Some religious groups would keep outdated practices toward women, banning them from most high-powered jobs. While many people genuinely believe their God requires that, our civil society puts a premium on promoting equality.
If the two values are in conflict, individuals’ right to equality ought to win out. In a 1993 religious liberties case involving the use of peyote, Justice Antonin Scalia, himself a hyper-conservative Catholic, quoted from an earlier case when he wrote for the majority: “Can a man excuse his practices … because of his religious belief? To permit this would be to make the professed doctrines of religious belief superior to the law of the land, and in effect to permit every citizen to become a law unto himself.”
The case involving contraception is no different. The government has an overriding interest in ensuring that women’s health care is treated no differently from men’s, and reproductive services are vital. (As President Obama has noted, if men could have babies, contraception would already be a standard provision of all health insurance policies.)
For the record, laws have long been necessary to require health insurers to pay for certain procedures and pharmaceuticals. For example, the Georgia Legislature insisted in that 1990s that insurers pay for breast cancer screenings, which has helped to improve survival rates.
Since contraceptive use would help prevent abortions, religious conservatives ought to be among the most enthusiastic proponents of birth control coverage in health insurance. But one of the companies that opposes the law — Hobby Lobby, a chain of craft-supply stores — is owned by Southern Baptists who believe some forms of birth control, such as intrauterine devices, are tantamount to abortion. The other company involved in the Supreme Court case, Conestoga Wood Specialties, is owned by Mennonites who don’t believe in birth control of any sort.
The Obama administration has rightly compromised over religious objections to birth control mandates, exempting churches and other religious institutions. But corporations are not churches, no matter who owns them. Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood should be required to abide by the laws of a modern state.
Otherwise, where would this end? Bigotry operating under the auspices of the Bible could once again become the law of the land.
By: Cynthia Tucker, The National Memo, March 29, 2014
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