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“Watch What You Pray For, You May Get It”: Republicans Have Boxed Themselves In A Corner On Obamacare

There’s an adage that perfectly captures the Republicans’ conundrum on Obamacare: Watch what you pray for; you may get it. Having spent the past five years viciously battling the Affordable Care Act, GOP leaders are worried that the U.S. Supreme Court may grant them a victory.

If the high court rules in favor of conservatives who have challenged the health care law — essentially gutting it — millions of Americans will lose the subsidies that allow them to purchase health insurance.

They’ll no longer be able to afford to see a doctor. They won’t be able to pay for knee replacements or chemotherapy treatments. They won’t have the money for drugs for hypertension and diabetes.

And they’ll be furious — just in time for the 2016 presidential election. Now that so many people have reaped the benefits of access to medical care, they want to keep enjoying them. They will be fighting mad if their health insurance is suddenly taken away.

That’s because the Affordable Care Act is doing exactly what it was designed to do. Consider a report from the highly respected RAND Corp. — a nonpartisan research group — which issued its latest judgment on the Affordable Care Act in May.

Its study found that nearly 17 million people now have health insurance because of Obamacare. In addition, families may keep adult children on their policies until age 26. There are no longer “lifetime caps” that limit the amount of money insurers will spend on the chronically ill. Patients are no longer turned down for health insurance because they are already sick.

“The Affordable Care Act has greatly expanded health insurance coverage, but it has caused little change in the way most previously covered Americans are getting health insurance coverage,” said Katherine Carman, who, according to a RAND press release, was the study’s lead author. In other words, the law didn’t wreak havoc on those who already had health insurance, as its critics had predicted.

It has slowly dawned on some Republican leaders that the law has provided tangible benefits to millions of Americans, and that they are likely to be blamed if those benefits are jerked away. But they have locked themselves into a very small room and lost the key. They can’t seem to find a way out.

President Obama noted the GOP’s intransigence in a speech to the Catholic Health Association a few days ago. “Once you see millions of people having health care, once you see that all the bad things that were predicted didn’t happen, you’d think that it’d be time to move on. It seems so cynical to want to take coverage away from millions of people,” he said.

But leading GOP officials have taught their aging base, many of whom are Medicare recipients, that the passage of Obamacare was tantamount to a communist takeover. Republican politicians have insisted for years that the Affordable Care Act would corrupt the health care system, ruin the economy and pave the way for a dictatorship. Now, they’d have a hard time persuading those voters, especially the Tea Partiers, it was all just extreme partisan rhetoric.

This latest high court challenge, King v. Burwell, is itself a symbol of Republicans’ determination to strip health care away from millions of Americans. (It’s also a sign of the partisanship that has overtaken the nation’s highest court, which should never have accepted the case.) It’s a frivolous suit that turns on the interpretation of four words in the statute — even though it’s perfectly clear what Congress meant.

If the court agrees with the challenger, chaos will ensue. The GOP will have to take responsibility for finding coverage for millions of people, although its fractious caucus is unlikely to agree on a fix.

Given the stakes, there are undoubtedly those among GOP elders who want the U.S. Supreme Court to maintain the status quo, even if they won’t say so publicly. After all, as Obama put it, “This isn’t … just about the Affordable Care Act. … This is now part of the fabric of how we care for one another. This is health care in America.”

Let’s hope at least five justices concur.

 

By: Cynthia Tucker, Pulitzer Prize Winner for Commentary in 2007; Featured Post, The National Memo, June 13, 2015

June 14, 2015 Posted by | Affordable Care Act, King v Burwell, Republicans | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“Scott Walker Would Be A Very Dangerous President”: Vicious And Vindictive, With An Attack Dog’s Contempt

Joe Nocera has a piece today in the New York Times confirming what many of us have been saying for a while now, including here at the Washington Monthly and at the Political Animal: Scott Walker isn’t a terribly attractive presidential candidate for the GOP, but he would make a vicious and vindictive President.

Walker’s shtick has been to make up for personal lack of charm and charisma with a bluntly cynical eye to maximizing his appeal to the right-wing base not improving their lives, but rather by aggressively making punching bags of traditional liberal targets. These include labor unions, teachers, universities in general, people who work for a living, women who need abortions, and so on.

And why? Not even because it helps him with big donors, although that certainly doesn’t hurt. It’s mostly just a matter of spite, political gamesmanship and riling up his base as a warrior against anything and anyone Rush Limbaugh and Fox News have ever hated. As Nocera notes:

To put it another way, Walker busted the public employee unions not because he had to but because he could.

Similarly, there was no deep desire on the part of the business community to have Wisconsin become a right-to-work state, even though it would most likely bring about lower labor costs. Kaufman quotes a leader of the Wisconsin Contractors Coalition, who told him that “right-to-work is going to compromise my quality, my competitiveness.” That’s because the unions have long served to screen workers and keep them up to date on new technologies.

No, what motivated Walker, clearly, was politics. Unions, which have long been traditional Democratic allies, have been in steep decline — except for public employee unions, which now make up just under half of all union workers. By crippling them, Kettl told me, “Walker is trying to put a stake in the heart of a strong piece of Democratic support that has long been a thorn in the side of the Republicans.”

Once they reach the Oval Office, presidential candidates tend to keep doing what got them there in the first place. In Walker’s case, that would constitute an all-out assault on both the economic and social fronts, including and especially wage and worker protections. While the entire Republican Party has gone off a radical cliff over the last few decades and its current crop of candidates is no exception, most of the current aspirants to the nomination are simple demagogues, plutocrats and also-ran Congressional pretenders. Walker, on the other hand, isn’t just an egotistical bluffer seeking to capture billionaire donor dollars for his friends. He’s a committed soldier with an attack dog’s contempt and commitment to destroy his political opponents.

A Walker presidency would be a very dangerous thing indeed–not just for the left, but for the entire country. As demographic changes shrink the GOP base further and further, a man who gains his power by stoking the angers of a shrinking minority of angry conservatives by sticking the maximum possible pain on the majority of the country and the few remaining pillars of the middle class could be a serious threat to democracy.

 

By: David Atkins, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, June 13, 2015

June 14, 2015 Posted by | GOP Presidential Candidates, Middle Class, Scott Walker | , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

“The G.O.P. Opts Out Of Equality”: Conscience Is Never Just Personal When The Occasion Is A Fraught Debate Over Public Morality

On May 28th, North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory vetoed Senate Bill Two, which proposed allowing public officials to temporarily stop performing weddings based on “any sincerely held religious objection.” In other words, if a public official were confronted by a gay couple who wished to marry, he could refuse to perform the ceremony. McCrory’s veto put the Republican governor at odds with a Tea Party legislature, which immediately promised to override it. On June 1st, the state senate voted to override, and, this morning, the house of delegates did, too, making it legal for North Carolina magistrates to turn away gay couples.

The Bartleby-like public official who “would prefer not to” marry same-sex couples would not have been asked to just one year ago. In 2012, North Carolina adopted a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage, in line with thirty other states where a majority at one point opposed it. Then, in June, 2013, the Supreme Court struck down the Defense of Marriage Act, and federal courts turned decisively in favor of gay marriage. In October, 2014, a federal judge ruled North Carolina’s marriage amendment unconstitutional, and same-sex ceremonies began. That month alone, court decisions also lifted same-sex-marriage bans in thirteen other states—Alaska, Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Indiana, Nevada, New Jersey, Oklahoma, Utah, Virginia, West Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming—more than twice the number of states where same-sex marriage was legal in 2010.

Following this rout, conservatives have moved rapidly from enforcing a unified public morality based on traditional marriage to speaking the language of pluralism as they seek exemptions from the rising legal norm of marriage equality. Their model has been the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (R.F.R.A.), of 1993, which exempts believers from federal laws that “substantially burden” their religious exercise, except where the regulation is the least burdensome way to fulfill a “compelling governmental interest.”

The R.F.R.A.—which was intended to protect neglected religious minorities, such as Native American worshippers who had recently lost public-sector jobs in Oregon because of their ritual use of peyote—was the basis of last year’s Supreme Court decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, which held that certain business owners can refuse to offer insurance coverage for contraception based on their religious objections. The Indiana Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which was signed into law this March, is a model for the state-level expansion of religious exemptions, applying its protections to all corporations and making religious belief a defense in private legal actions, such as anti-discrimination suits. A similar bill passed in Arkansas later that month.

Supporters describe the state R.F.R.A.s and other religious accommodation laws as acknowledging the “increasing religious pluralism in American culture,” and protecting “religious liberties and the freedom to live out religious convictions,” as Russell Moore, the president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, put it in March. These exemptions, for the individuals, public officials, and business owners who wish to say, “I would prefer not to,” have become the new front in the culture war, the redoubt of attitudes that were recently in the majority. Invoking tolerance to defend intolerance is ironic at best, but at a moment when disapproval of gay marriage looks ever more like plain bigotry, it is better to say not, “I disapprove of you,” but rather, “This is who I am.”

The Bartleby strategy has taken center stage in conservative resistance to a wide range of liberal policies. In 2012, the Supreme Court nearly overruled the Affordable Care Act’s requirement that individuals buy insurance. Five justices voted to protect the consumer’s freedom to opt out of a market, such as the health-insurance market, warning that, if Congress could require this purchase, it could also command people to buy health-club memberships, American cars, or broccoli. (The insurance requirement survived through a sleight of hand, as Chief Justice John Roberts, who agreed with the rest of the Bartleby argument, found a hook for the law in Congress’s constitutional power to impose taxes.) In 2014, the Court held that certain members of public-sector unions could opt out of paying their union dues, which fund organizing and advocacy. Writing for the majority, Justice Samuel Alito argued that mandatory dues impinge on the First Amendment’s rights of free expression and voluntary association, and hinted that dues requirements in general might be found unconstitutional in the future.

As conservatives press these claims for personal exemptions, they have also been highly solicitous of states that would prefer not to accept new federal standards. The Supreme Court did real damage to the Affordable Care Act when, as part of its 2012 ruling, it found that states could not be penalized for refusing to expand Medicaid, which was an essential part of the A.C.A.’s path to near-universal coverage. As a result, twenty-one states have not signed on to the Medicaid expansion, and nearly four million low-income Americans have not obtained health insurance that the federal government intended them to have.

Similarly, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is urging state governments to disobey the Obama Administration’s order to develop climate-change regulations. McConnell has some support for his argument that the Clean Air Act does not stretch far enough to require these regulations, and there is sure to be litigation on the issue. But his call for a coordinated strategy of passive resistance in the meantime is extraordinary. The more opt-outs any climate policy includes, the more likely it is to fall apart in a wave of free-riding, as everyone decides to let someone else make the sacrifice, leaving no one to make the sacrifice at all.

Of course, a state refusing to make law is different from an individual refusing to bake a wedding cake for a gay couple. Medicaid policy and pollution regulation directly affect millions of people and billions of dollars of economic activity. The argument for conscience-based individual exemptions is that they concern the exempted individual most of all. The problem with this argument is that an individual’s conscience is never just a personal matter when, as in the case of the Hobby Lobby decision, it bears on the terms of employment. Then the person denied contraceptive benefits, or who is looking for a new job where she can get those benefits, is also part of the picture. Economic life is deeply interdependent, and involves conflicting interests and unequal power. This is why, from the New Deal until very recently, the Supreme Court did not permit many opt-outs from economic regulation. The new raft of conscience claims is creating unprotected spaces within an already precarious economy.

A second problem with individual opt-outs is just as basic. Conscience is never just personal when the occasion is a fraught debate over public morality. Once public laws banning same-sex marriage are gone, authorizing supposedly private discrimination against same-sex couples continues the cultural fight by other means. In hindsight, no one doubts that allowing business owners to discriminate against black people during the Civil Rights era would have denied them full equality and hampered desegregation. (Arguably, the continued tolerance of discrimination by private clubs also undermines desegregation, though club membership is less essential to daily life than shopping.) Similarly, allowing private discrimination against gay couples is not an exemption from a new rule of full equality; it is a compromise that allows inequality to persist. Proposals to let magistrates withhold marriage licenses have the same problems, with the added insult that the discrimination is effectively coming from the state. If officials can decide not to implement laws they dislike, then equality under the law—for gay couples, at least —is just a slogan.

The Bartleby position appeals to touchstone liberal values: personal conscience, diversity, tolerance, and autonomy. On their face, these values seem to promise there are no hard conflicts: there is room for everyone’s conscience, everyone’s outlook, and tolerance enough for each person’s freedom. The new generation of opt-outs show that this is a misconception: there is conflict over what these values mean, and there is never enough room for all their meanings. The politics of tolerance, diversity, and autonomy are distributive politics, with winners and losers.

From Thoreau’s night in jail protesting slavery and the Mexican-American War to the Greensboro lunch-counter sit-ins, sitting still and not doing as you are told has been among the most potent of political tactics, though its effects are often complex and long delayed. As in much else, initiative in this tradition of creative refusal belongs to the political right today. There is no paradox in conservatives using liberal values and tactics to their ends. By the same token, there should be no liberal embarrassment in resisting. There is no incoherence here, but there is disagreement too sharp for tolerance alone to resolve it.

 

By: Jedediah Purdy, The New Yorker, June 11, 2015

June 13, 2015 Posted by | GOP, Marriage Equality, North Carolina | , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“GOP Bad Faith Legal Mischief”: Democrats Have Every Reason To Save Republicans From An Obamacare “Bloodletting”

Sometime this month, possibly as early as Monday morning, the Supreme Court will issue its ruling in King v. Burwell. If the Court ignores both the text and purpose of the Affordable Care Act, and rules for the challengers, millions of the law’s beneficiaries in 34 states will quickly lose their insurance subsidies and be forced off their health plans. The ensuing chaos would be the consequence not just of the ruling itself, but also of the Republican Party’s expected unwillingness to pass a one-sentence bill clarifying that Obamacare subsidies are available in every state, whether or not each state established its own health insurance exchange.

When King, and similar cases, were first conceived, they quickly became vessels of hope for conservatives, who recognized how difficult and punishing it would be to hobble or eliminate Obamacare through the legislative process. What many of them have come to recognize in the subsequent years is that farming out the job to the judiciary can’t spare them from the subsequent political cost: As decision day approaches, more and more of these conservatives are acknowledging candidly—and typically anonymously—that they will suffer badly if the Supreme Court does the very thing they’ve asked the Supreme Court to do.

“The most likely option is that Congress is unable to pass a fix,” an anonymous Republican Hill staffer told Joel Gehrke of the conservative National Review—a magazine that has beseeched the Court to void the subsidies. “Either Republicans won’t be able to settle on a fix or the president will veto whatever we do come up with. At that point, it will be up to the governors to pass their own laws deeming the national exchange a state exchange. That is the path of least resistance.”

Gehrke looks at the cross-pressures Republicans would face after a ruling for King and wonders whether they “could be in for a bloodletting.” Though they can’t admit it publicly, the promise of a bloodletting—compounded by the fact that every vulnerable Republican senator in cycle next year represents an affected state—is precisely why so many Republicans privately hope the Court will uphold the subsidies.

If the conventional wisdom which took shape after oral arguments—and to which I subscribe—is correct, the government will win, and this painful exercise in bad faith legal mischief will come to nothing. But if the challengers win, and a bloodletting ensues, Democrats won’t be able to stand back while Republicans absorb the political damage. Bloodletting or no, Obamacare will be crippled in most states. It could easily remain crippled indefinitely. Its fate will turn on the question of whether the political consequences for Republicans resemble the consequences of a government shutdown or collision with the debt limit. But either way Democrats will have to play an active role in bringing about a resolution.

The best-case scenario for Democrats is a public outcry so severe and sustained that Republicans cave, and agree to restore the subsidies with a clean fix.

Republicans have tacitly acknowledged that they won’t be able to sit on their hands while state insurance markets collapse. They have introduced legislation in both the House and Senate that would restore subsidies, but only for existing beneficiaries, and only on conditions Democrats could never accept, like the repeal of the ACA’s individual mandate.

You can interpret these offers in two ways. The first, as Greg Sargent of The Washington Post has noted, is that these bills are designed to be vetoed, allowing Republicans to blame an uncompromising Obama for perpetuating the crisis. But they could also serve as bases for a compromise, or surrender. If the public responds to a ruling for King the way they’ve responded to other GOP-instigated crises, Republicans would have to scale back their demands and eventually agree to reinstate the subsidies, perhaps for a modest price.

Two different forces will push in that direction. Even if sprinkled liberally with poison pills, and even if its proximate purpose is to invite a veto, Republican-sponsored legislation to partially reinstate ACA subsidies probably can’t pass. Democrats aren’t going to vote for an ersatz fix and neither will many rank-and-file conservative members of Congress. “As soon as the messaging is out there saying, ‘Look, a half-a-sentence fix saves millions of people from either losing their coverage or having massive spikes,’ we as a party won’t be able to sustain that pressure very long — certainly not through the August recess,” another Republican aide tells Gehrke.

But that doesn’t mean Democrats will win a standoff outright. Though their case for a clean fix will be compelling, they will also be highly motivated to reinstate the subsidies immediately, even if it means Republicans get to pocket unreciprocated concessions. Those can’t include structural damage to the core of the law, but could include eliminating things like the medical device tax and the employer mandate.

Real danger arises if, per Gehrke’s other source, an adverse King ruling registers somewhere below a government shutdown on the political Richter scale, inflicting damage on the GOP but not enough to make them seek a solution in earnest. Against the backdrop of a paralyzed Congress, Obamacare would begin to unravel in dozens of states, and would continue to do so until at least 2017. A ruling for the challengers would boomerang violently on Republicans, but Democrats have every reason in the world to want them spared from it.

 

By: Brian Beutler, Senior Editor, The New Republic, June 8, 2015

June 13, 2015 Posted by | Affordable Care Act, Democrats, King v Burwell, Republicans | , , , , , , | 1 Comment

“Let’s Talk About What Makes Governing Harder”: The Problem Is One Political Party Catering To An Ever Decreasing Group Of Voters

By now almost everyone has weighed in on the article in the NYT by Jonathan Martin and Maggie Haberman about Hillary Clinton’s strategy for winning the 2016 presidential election. Chuck Todd and his friends at First Read adopted the conventional wisdom of the Washington D.C. pundit class with their response titled: This is the Way to Win Elections (But it Makes Governing Harder).

Campaigns see an America more polarized than ever, and winning is all about coming out ahead in this polarized world. But it makes governing harder than it already was. Bottom line: Campaigns don’t engage in persuasion anymore. They simply look for unmotivated like-minded potential voters and find an issue to motivate them. And if someone wins office by not having to persuade a voter who actually swings between the two parties, there isn’t any motivation for said elected official to compromise.

Of course Ron Fournier joined that chorus immediately with his entry titled: The Right Way and Wrong Way to Win the Presidency.

My problem with this approach is that it works only until Election Day, when a polarizing, opportunistic candidate assumes the presidency with no standing to convert campaign promises into results.

Naturally, David Brooks agrees.

…this base mobilization strategy is a legislative disaster. If the next president hopes to pass any actual laws, he or she will have to create a bipartisan governing majority. That means building a center-out coalition, winning 60 reliable supporters in the Senate and some sort of majority in the House. If Clinton runs on an orthodox left-leaning, paint-by-numbers strategy, she’ll never be able to do this. She’ll live in the White House again, but she won’t be able to do much once she lives there.

This is a classic case of the media’s addiction to “both sides do it” as a way of explaining gridlock in Washington. It is a lie they tell themselves (and us) about what is going on in order to claim a false sense of balance in reporting to appease conservatives who constantly decry the “liberal media.” The fact that it is a lie matters less than their desire to prove that claim wrong.

So let’s take a moment to deal with the facts. As I pointed out before, the positions Hillary Clinton has articulated enjoy broad support among voters – including independents. In reacting to the same article, Steve M. dug up some of the actual numbers.

Americans support gay marriage by a 60%-37% margin, and 58% want the Supreme Court to legalize gay marriage nationwide — and Hillary’s is a “liberal position”? There’s 72% support for legalization of undocumented immigrants — and her position on immigration is too left-wing? And when I Google “bipartisan support for criminal justice reform,” one of the first hits is a post with precisely that title from, um, FreedomWorks — but Clinton’s out of the mainstream? Oh, please.

So if Clinton is talking about issues that enjoy 60-70% support from Americans, where is the polarization coming from? What stops elected officials from compromising to address their concerns? Do you suppose it has anything to do with a Republican Speaker of the House who finds it hard to even utter the word “compromise?”

Let’s take a close look at just one example to make the point: immigration reform. Typically Democrats have prioritized a pathway to citizenship for the 11 million undocumented people in this country while Republicans have prioritized border security. Not that long ago, a bi-partisan group of Senators got together to compromise by drafting a bill that included both priorities. With Democrats still in control of the Senate, it passed there. But Speaker Boehner refused to bring it up for a vote in the House. Part of Hillary Clinton’s agenda in her campaign is to support the Senate’s bi-partisan approach to immigration reform.

So let’s be clear about what makes governing harder: the problem is that we have one political party that is catering to an ever-decreasing group of voters that completely rejects any form of compromise to their agenda. When/if folks like Chuck Todd, Ron Fournier and David Brooks figure that one out – they will finally be able to start telling the American people the truth.

 

By: Nancy LeTournau, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, June 9, 2015

June 12, 2015 Posted by | GOP Obstructionism, Governing, Voters | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

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