“An Assault Upon The Very Notion Of Secular Law”: Corporate Owner’s Religious Beliefs Stop At Their Employees’ Doctors’ Offices
The Hobby Lobby case, which the Supreme Court agreed last month to hear, shouldn’t only scare you if you’re a woman concerned about reproductive rights. It should scare you if you’re an American concerned about civil rights and the very principle of secular law. The Hobby Lobby case threatens to extend corporate personhood to allowing companies to force employers’ religious beliefs onto individual employees, deny them health care, and opt out of laws they don’t like.
Last week, the Supreme Court agreed to hear two cases – Hobby Lobby Stores Inc. v. Sebelius and Conestoga Wood Specialties Corp. v. Sebelius – challenging the Affordable Care Act’s requirement that employer-provided health plans included birth control coverage. Previous court rulings have been all over the map, including one in Hobby Lobby’s favor from the shorthanded 10th Circuit here in Denver.
The companies object to certain forms of birth control because the “religious beliefs” of their owners forbid them from covering contraceptives that prevent implantation of a fertilized egg and thus in their minds are “abortifacients.”
Unfortunately for their women employees, the companies’ “science” is in line with those who think people and dinosaurs walked the earth at the same time. According to a friend of the court brief filed in the Hobby Lobby case by Physicians for Reproductive Health, the companies “fail to cite any scientific authority for their assertions that any FDA-approved contraceptives are abortifacients … there is no scientific evidence that emergency contraceptives available in the United States and approved by the FDA effect an existing pregnancy. None, therefore are properly classified as abortifacients.”
Pregnancy itself is a complicated concept, as is the science of contraception. According to Jessica Arons of the Reproductive Health Technology Project, “Contrary to popular belief, pregnancy does not occur in a ‘moment’ of conception within hours of intercourse, but rather over a span of several days. An embryo can be present in a woman’s body for up to 9 days before she becomes pregnant.” Approximately 50 percent of fertilized eggs never implant, so Mother Nature is a pretty thorough abortionist by Hobby Lobby’s definition.
Also worth noting: the employer birth control coverage mandate didn’t come from the Obama administration. Most of it has been law well over a decade. According to Mother Jones:
In December 2000, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission ruled that companies that provided prescription drugs to their employees but didn’t provide birth control were in violation of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prevents discrimination on the basis of sex. That opinion, which the George W. Bush administration did nothing to alter or withdraw when it took office the next month, is still in effect today.
The difference now is that contraceptive coverage falls under the umbrella of the Affordable Care Act, and is covered with no or little out of pocket costs.
Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood aren’t individuals or churches. They are corporations. Nobody is stopping them from practicing their religion or forcing them to use the pill or get an IUD. But their religious beliefs do not entitle them to make those decisions for their employees – their beliefs stop at their employees’ doctors’ offices. None of these personal, private health care decisions by workers are any of Hobby Lobby’s damn business.
What if these companies decided they didn’t want to cover AIDS drugs? Or plans that included blood transfusions? Or that their religion forbade them hiring different races or abiding by wage and hour guidelines? Where does it stop?
This is why these two cases are so dangerous: if a company can invoke religion to exempt itself from a law it doesn’t like, it destroys the very notion of secular law. And it turns employees into chattel whose personal, private health care decisions are owned by their employer.
By: Laura Chapin, U. S. News and World Report, December 6, 2013
“When The Worm Turns”: Republican Fallacies On Obamacare, The Greatest Hits
Before the holiday spirit makes Republican-bashing a little unseemly, it’s time to get in a last ornery blast at the party’s Obamacare stance. Republicans have enjoyed themselves immensely during the Affordable Care Act’s bungled rollout, but most of the claims they’re making are preposterous and phony. Since anyone able to take a longer view knows we’ll one day be well past Obamacare’s self-inflicted wounds, I’d like as a public service to catalog the GOP’s shabbiest arguments, so we’ll all have a handy reference once the worm fully turns.
The selective “humanitarian crisis.” Conservatives have warned of the “humanitarian disaster” that will ensue if several million people with cancelled policies are unable to secure new coverage before January 1. But this theoretical woe (which will almost certainly be avoided thanks to Web site fixes and policy extensions) pales next to the much larger humanitarian disaster of America’s nearly 50 million uninsured — a crisis that’s persisted for decades without conservatives caring a whit. I can’t be the only one who finds the right’s sudden concern for a small subset of the uninsured a bit rich.
The bogus oppression of the young and healthy. Another confused conservative trope bemoans the enslavement of younger or healthier Americans, who’ve supposedly been conscripted to subsidize their older, sicker countrymen. “Liberals justify these coercive cross-subsidies as necessary to finance coverage for the uninsured and those with pre-existing conditions,” the Wall Street Journal editorialized last Saturday. “But government usually helps the less fortunate honestly by raising taxes to fund programs.” Actually, the Journal has the American way of health subsidy exactly wrong. Most people aged 19 to 34 who have health coverage get it from their employer. And, as I’ve noted before, at nearly every firm, young people pay the same premiums as employees who are older and get more expensively sick. In other words, Obama’s scheme to rob Peter to fund health care for Paul already exists, at vastly larger scale, in corporate America. And while Obamacare is only hoping to sign up 2 million or so young people, 20 million Americans aged 19 to 34 get their coverage on the job. Where’s the Wall Street Journal’s rant against corporate America’s “coercive cross-subsidies”? And while we’re at it, when will we stop making all those people whose houses don’t burn down subsidize those whose do?
The “men and 55 year old women don’t need maternity care” fallacy. Well, yes, and people whose genes don’t predispose them to cancer (which tests will reveal soon enough) don’t need cancer coverage. As Bob Kocher, a doctor and former senior Obama health care advisor, explained, if one of our goals is to not charge women higher premiums than men, all plans have to cover maternity. Among younger women, moreover, maternity is the biggest driver of costs — so if you allow optional coverage, the plans young people buy would be super-expensive. “For insurance to work, you can’t allow people to opt into benefits like maternity right before they get pregnant,” Kocher adds. “When spread across the population, it’s not expensive.” Sounds like Insurance 101. Which in the social insurance context, conservatives can’t abide.
Insurance “bailout” baloney. Sen. Marco Rubio talks opportunistically (but I repeat myself) of Obama’s pledge to “bail out” health plans if the folks they sign up end up being unduly costly to treat. Once again, conservatives eat their own. Such “risk adjustment” — after-the-fact payments to reflect the actual vs. expected risk experience of health plans — has been a sensible staple of conservative insurance market reforms since George H.W. Bush proposed it in 1992. Little known but true: Before Romneycare begat Obamacare, Bushcare begat Romneycare. Rubio was only 21 then. He must not know. Or care.
The “Obama is taking over one-sixth of the economy” ruse. In the Fox News cocoon, this truth is self-evident. But it makes as much sense as crying that Ben Bernanke is “remaking 6/6ths of the economy” every time the Fed touches interest rates. The fact that health-care spending is 18 percent of GDP doesn’t mean Obama is “remaking” or “taking over” anything. He’s tweaking a dysfunctional corner of the market where 5 percent of us get our health coverage. He’s also testing ideas that health gurus in both parties have long suggested might help reign in future costs.
Worse than these GOP fallacies is the party’s smug sanctimony. It’s as if conservatives have decided to parody the moral preening they loathe in liberals, except that the right is serious. As one pundit lectured, “the administration didn’t care enough to make sure the people of their country were protected. In the middle of a second age of anxiety they decided to make America more anxious.”
Yes, the rollout was botched. But what is this person talking about? Finally assuring that illness in the United States can’t be the cause of financial ruin is the very essence of “protection.” How galling that conservatives can make such hollow charges while putting forward no plan of their own to “protect” anyone from anything!
Or take the pundit who wrote that “extending enrollment periods does nothing but provide Americans more time to contemplate their miserable choices.” Only someone with no empathy — someone who has never tried and failed to get coverage in the individual market — could possibly say such a thing.
I’ve spent a lot of time over the years arguing that we can solve big problems such as providing insurance coverage in ways that honor both liberal and conservative values. It’s entirely doable — John Rawls and Milton Friedman can be reconciled, trust me. Apart from being sound policy, I’ve assumed such approaches would also be necessary, because with power closely divided in the United States, we’d need to strike big cross-party deals to make progress. The breathtaking intellectual and moral dishonesty of those driving the Obamacare debate in the GOP today makes me feel foolish for having tried.
By: Matt Miller, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, December 4, 2013
“Better Pay Now”: Let’s Give It A Try For The Person On The Other Side Of The Cash Register
’Tis the season to be jolly — or, at any rate, to spend a lot of time in shopping malls. It is also, traditionally, a time to reflect on the plight of those less fortunate than oneself — for example, the person on the other side of that cash register.
The last few decades have been tough for many American workers, but especially hard on those employed in retail trade — a category that includes both the sales clerks at your local Walmart and the staff at your local McDonald’s. Despite the lingering effects of the financial crisis, America is a much richer country than it was 40 years ago. But the inflation-adjusted wages of nonsupervisory workers in retail trade — who weren’t particularly well paid to begin with — have fallen almost 30 percent since 1973.
So can anything be done to help these workers, many of whom depend on food stamps — if they can get them — to feed their families, and who depend on Medicaid — again, if they can get it — to provide essential health care? Yes. We can preserve and expand food stamps, not slash the program the way Republicans want. We can make health reform work, despite right-wing efforts to undermine the program.
And we can raise the minimum wage.
First, a few facts. Although the national minimum wage was raised a few years ago, it’s still very low by historical standards, having consistently lagged behind both inflation and average wage levels. Who gets paid this low minimum? By and large, it’s the man or woman behind the cash register: almost 60 percent of U.S. minimum-wage workers are in either food service or sales. This means, by the way, that one argument often invoked against any attempt to raise wages — the threat of foreign competition — won’t wash here: Americans won’t drive to China to pick up their burgers and fries.
Still, even if international competition isn’t an issue, can we really help workers simply by legislating a higher wage? Doesn’t that violate the law of supply and demand? Won’t the market gods smite us with their invisible hand? The answer is that we have a lot of evidence on what happens when you raise the minimum wage. And the evidence is overwhelmingly positive: hiking the minimum wage has little or no adverse effect on employment, while significantly increasing workers’ earnings.
It’s important to understand how good this evidence is. Normally, economic analysis is handicapped by the absence of controlled experiments. For example, we can look at what happened to the U.S. economy after the Obama stimulus went into effect, but we can’t observe an alternative universe in which there was no stimulus, and compare the results.
When it comes to the minimum wage, however, we have a number of cases in which a state raised its own minimum wage while a neighboring state did not. If there were anything to the notion that minimum wage increases have big negative effects on employment, that result should show up in state-to-state comparisons. It doesn’t.
So a minimum-wage increase would help low-paid workers, with few adverse side effects. And we’re talking about a lot of people. Early this year the Economic Policy Institute estimated that an increase in the national minimum wage to $10.10 from its current $7.25 would benefit 30 million workers. Most would benefit directly, because they are currently earning less than $10.10 an hour, but others would benefit indirectly, because their pay is in effect pegged to the minimum — for example, fast-food store managers who are paid slightly (but only slightly) more than the workers they manage.
Now, many economists have a visceral dislike of anything that sounds like price-fixing, even if the evidence strongly indicates that it would have positive effects. Some of these skeptics oppose doing anything to help low-wage workers. Others argue that we should subsidize, not regulate — in particular, that we should expand the Earned Income Tax Credit (E.I.T.C.), an existing program that does indeed provide significant aid to low-income working families. And for the record, I’m all for an expanded E.I.T.C.
But there are, it turns out, good technical reasons to regard the minimum wage and the E.I.T.C. as complements — mutually supportive policies, not substitutes. Both should be increased. Unfortunately, given the political realities, there is no chance whatsoever that a bill increasing aid to the working poor would pass Congress.
An increase in the minimum wage, on the other hand, just might happen, thanks to overwhelming public support. This support doesn’t come just from Democrats or even independents; strong majorities of Republicans (57 percent) and self-identified conservatives (59 percent) favor an increase.
In short, raising the minimum wage would help many Americans, and might actually be politically possible. Let’s give it a try.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, December 1, 2013
“Promoting The Right-Wing Agenda”: Ted Cruz And Koch Brothers Embroiled In Shadowy Tea Party Scheme
A national conservative network (whose backers include the Koch brothers, event sponsors include Facebook, and alumni include Ted Cruz) misrepresented its agenda and activities, and reaped the benefits of mainstream respectability and nonprofit status — while coordinating across states to push a hard-right agenda and enrich its corporate backers — a new report alleges.
Specifically, the report by the Center for Media and Democracy focuses on the State Policy Network, a little-known network. “What we uncovered through our investigation is that SPN along with its affiliates amount to $83 million just flooding into the states to push and promote this agenda …,” CMD director Lisa Graves told reporters on a Wednesday call. “And that money is on the rise.” The paper was released Wednesday along with a set of state-level reports on SPN affiliates, authored by affiliates of the progressive network ProgressNow.
The CMD report accuses SPN affiliates of mounting “coordinated efforts to push their agenda, often using the same cookie-cutter research and reports, all while claiming to be independent and creating state-focused solutions …” It charges that, “Although SPN think tanks are registered as educational nonprofits, several appear to orchestrate extensive lobbying and political operations to peddle their legislative agenda to state legislators, despite the IRS’ regulations on nonprofit political and lobbying activities.”
Asked about the CMD report, SPN emailed a statement from its president, Tracie Sharp, saying, “Because we are legally and practically organized as a service organization (not as a franchise), each of the 64 state-based think tanks is fiercely independent, choosing to manage their staff, pick their own research topics and educate the public on those issues they deem most appropriate for their state.” But Sharp said each of those 64 “rallies around a common belief: the power of free markets and free people to create a healthy, prosperous society.”
Sharp said that SPN respected “the privacy of our donors,” but that they gave “voluntarily,” which she contrasted with “groups like Progress Now and the Center for Media and Democracy who receive hefty gifts from unions, who in turn force their members to donate to political causes with which they may not agree.” The Supreme Court ruled in 1988 that contracts between unions and companies can only require workers represented by unions to pay what is “necessary to ‘performing the duties of an exclusive representative of the employees in dealing with the employer on labor-management issues.”
Based on a 2010 document, SPN lists a number of major corporations as past SPN funders including Microsoft, AT&T, GlaxoSmithKline, Kraft Foods, Philip Morris, Verizon Communications, Comcast and Time Warner Cable Share Service Center. Several of the same groups sponsored SPN’s 2013 annual meeting, as did Facebook.
While SPN is no household name, CMD notes it has at least one celebrity alum: former SPN-affiliated think tank fellow and current filibustering Sen. Ted Cruz, the co-author of a 2010 paper for Texas Public Policy Foundation arguing the Affordable Care Act violated the 10thAmendment. That paper notes that the TPPF is working with partners to develop an “Interstate Compact for Health Care Reform,” which it says would provide that member states “may opt out of Obamacare entirely …” The San Antonio Current noted that a “Health Care Compact Act” echoing Cruz’s concept is among the model legislation pushed by the American Legislative Exchange Council, the conservative group whose members include major companies and scores of state legislators. CMD notes that the same year Cruz issued that report, the Koch-backed Donors Capital Fund provided his think tank a $65,300 grant “for the organization’s project, Turning the Tide Unifying the States to Oppose Federal Outreach.”
The CMD report also cites numerous SPN ties to the better-known ALEC, including a grant from Donors Capital Fund, which Mother Jones called the “dark money ATM of the conservative movement,” specifically to fund SPN member groups to participate in an ALEC gathering. SPN or its member groups sit on eight ALEC task forces; the largest number are in the Task & Fiscal Policy and Education groups. According to CMD, SPN’s annual meeting in September included representatives from Koch Industries, the Charles Koch Institute, the Charles Koch Foundation and several Koch-backed right-wing groups like Americans for Prosperity.
CMD suggests that SPN’s billionaire backers may not be motivated by ideology alone. “Be it the Koch brothers and environmental policy, the Waltons and minimum and living wage laws, or the Bradley Foundation and education privatization,” charges the report, “SPN funders end up being a ‘client’ to the think tanks, receiving a service – influencing state legislators and promoting a right-wing agenda – that benefits them.”
By: Josh Eidelson, Salon, November 15, 2013
“The Radicals Are Actually Gaining Ground”: Sorry, There’s No Evidence Big Business Has Abandoned The Tea Party Or GOP
The current conventional wisdom floating around the media, seemingly extrapolated largely from quotes to the press from businessmen and their surrogates, is that “Big Business [is] trying to unseat the Tea Party.” However, there’s no evidence that this is happening.
Remember the first time Tea Party House Republicans held a gun to the US economy, refusing to pay America’s debts unless Democrats accepted a wide-ranging set of demands, and as a result, business leaders promised to spend big to defeat hostage-taking radicals?
“We’ll get rid of you,” said Tom Donohue, president of the US Chamber of Commerce to the Tea Party lawmakers.
That was 2011, during the first debt ceiling stand-off. And the following election year, none of the threats materialized.
In 2012, the Chamber ended up spending millions in undisclosed business funds to help elect Todd Akin, Ann Marie Buerkle, Dean Heller, Connie Mack, Denny Rehberg and other lawmakers who supported taking the debt ceiling hostage. Political action committees for the largest corporate interests in America, including General Motors, Goldman Sachs, Deloitte, the American Bankers Association and Honeywell, gave several million in direct donations to Tea Party hostage-takers, helping many survive the election last year and repeat their antics this year.
Now, it seems big business is bluffing again and advancing a false narrative that they are flexing their political muscle against the Tea Party. The storyline, boosted by ThinkProgress, Bloomberg, National Journal and the Associated Press, among others, is that corporate America has lost influence with the GOP and is helping to defeat lawmakers who threatened to push America into default.
So far, the spin makes the business community appear moderate, though there is nothing backing it up. Despite making statements and sending letters voicing their concern, the Chamber has failed to spend a single penny in advocacy against the Tea Party hostage-takers. It hasn’t rescinded any of its so-called “Free Enterprise Awards,” either. (The award has been given to many Tea Party lawmakers, including repeat hostage-takers like Representatives Steve Scalise (R-LA), Tom Graves (R-GA), and Morgan Griffith (R-VA), who encouraged a debt default by comparing it to a second American Revolution.)
Contrast this with how the Chamber behaved in 2009, when Democrats controlled the House of Representatives. By November of that year, twelve months before the midterms, the Chamber launched an onslaught of attack advertisements against House Democrats who did not vote their way, after months of issue ads in targeted districts.
Then, after helping the Tea Party seize the House and several governors’ mansions during the midterms, business groups pumped funds into an effort to gerrymander the Tea Party into permanent rule. CitiGroup and the US Chamber—both of which now complain about flirting dangerously close to default—provided huge donations to the RSLC, the political committee devoted to gerrymandering seats to the House GOP and Tea Party caucus’ advantage.
Will we see a reversal? Next year, there are a handful of high-profile primary races in which establishment Republicans are challenging incumbents, but none of them are proof that there is a concerted effort by business to drive out the Tea Party. Representative Justin Amash (R-MI) is being challenged on social issues and for his outspoken views on foreign policy, not on the debt ceiling. Representative Kerry Bentivolio (R-MI) has been a target for a primary well before his vote to shut down the government, largely because he is seen as a political novice who doesn’t know how to raise money. Representative Walter Jones (R-NC) is facing an establishment challenge, once again, but because he is an outsider within the party for his persistent votes to regulate Wall Street and crack down on political corruption.
Finally, Representative Scott DesJarlais (R-TN) may lose his seat because of revelations that he pressured a patient with whom he was having an affair to seek an abortion—not for his vote over the debt ceiling.
In fact, in terms of primary challenges, it looks like well-heeled GOP interest groups will successfully oust Boehner Republicans to make way for additional Tea Party–style politicians. Politico reports that Republican Representatives Mike Simpson (R-ID), Pete Sessions (R-TX), Lamar Smith (R-TX) and Bill Shuster (R-PA) face challenges from the right next year. Challengers in these races are calling for more debt ceiling hostage-taking. The Club for Growth, a pro-government shut down group funded largely by wealthy investors and businessmen, is leading the charge.
Here’s the reality: the large political action committee and trade associations that control much of corporate America’s campaign spending decisions will help the Tea Party and House GOP win re-election next year.
Big business political operatives lean Republican, and will stick with the party even if Republicans disrupt the economy for political reasons. Over the years, congressional Republicans waged a multifaceted effort to place partisans in their party in charge of the most influential lobby groups within the Beltway.
In the nineties, a mid-career John Boenher helped oust US Chamber president Richard Lesher—a moderate who sided with Democrats at times—to pave the way for Tom Donohue, a known GOP loyalist. During the George W. Bush era, Rick Santorum, Tom DeLay, Grover Norquist, Ed Gillespie and others created the “K Street Project” to install GOP operatives into key business lobbying positions.
Tom Perriello, a former one-term House Democrat from Virginia who was one of the first to be targeted by the US Chamber in attack ads aired a year before his re-election, says business leaders are too cozy with the GOP. Now the leader of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, he tells me that he’s “disappointed but not particularly surprised in the business community’s failure to force the Republicans to act reasonably on the CR, default or immigration, for that matter.… there seems to remain a broad cultural and political aversion [among lobbyists] to do anything that seems to help the Democrats and President Obama in particular.”
Still, Perriello thinks a change could be on the horizon. Many traditionally Republican business groups in Virginia have sat out the gubernatorial race, partially out of disgust for Ken Cuccinelli’s Tea Party extremism. Even GOP corporate lobbyists like John Feehery have been vocal in calling for the business community to do more to challenge the Tea Party.
But right now, it’s too early to say if 2014 will be any different than the last few congressional elections. The evidence suggests in fact that radicals are gaining ground within the GOP while facing little accountability. When it comes to taking on the Tea Party, business leaders have a lot of bark and no bite.
By: Lee Fang, The Nation, October 30, 2013
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