“To Secede Or Not To Secede?”: The Colorado Secession Movement Exemplifies The GOP’s Problems
If you want to understand the demographic shift in Colorado, go to the H Mart on Parker Road in Aurora on a Sunday morning before a football game. The giant Asian superstore resembles a multicultural Costco, complete with food samples of kimchi, dumplings, pickled vegetables and soymilk. The shopping cart traffic jam includes a cross-section of all ages and ethnicities, including Latinos, Africans and Korean families in Broncos jerseys.
I think it’s great. I love seeing the American mosaic and the changing American West epitomized in a grocery store. Aurora itself is the third largest city in Colorado, and Colorado’s Sixth Congressional District the most diverse in the Rocky Mountain region.
But others disagree. They feel alienated from a state that’s not what it used to be. Sixty miles away, in Colorado’s Fourth Congressional District, a group of eleven Colorado counties are serious enough about seceding from the state that the proposal is on the ballot November 5th. As secession leader Sean Conway put it in a Bloomberg News story, “The state I love, as a third-generation Coloradan, has really left me.”
If it has, that’s his choice. And that’s exactly the problem for Colorado and national Republicans. They’re going backwards as Democrats gain votes in a new, different, more diverse state. University of Denver Political Science Professor Seth Masket explained in the Bloomberg piece, “Colorado is a perfect example of demographic change leading to political change.”
Secession leader Conway is also a friend and former Senate colleague of Fourth District Rep. Cory Gardner, a Republican. Next Tuesday, Gardner himself will have to vote on whether or not to secede from his own Congressional district since it will be on his home ballot in Yuma County. Gardner has repeatedly dodged the question from reporters about how he will vote, after initially stating in June he was sympathetic to the movement.
Meanwhile, tea party U.S. Senate candidate and Weld County District Attorney Ken Buck told the Denver Post he’s voting no.
Gardner is widely regarded as a rising star in the Republican party. He’s been mentioned as a dark horse candidate for speaker, despite only being elected three years ago as part of the 2010 Tea Party wave. He’s respected by both the tea party caucus and House leadership, but straddling those two worlds can create complications for someone who needs to be taken seriously on the Georgetown cocktail party circuit.
But the secession question, like immigration, put leadership-seeking Washington D.C. Republican Cory Gardner at odds with Yuma County Republican Cory Gardner. It’s the same tea party internal struggle that’s tearing the Republicans apart nationally. Do you cater to a retrograde base nostalgic for a time that never was and never will be again, or do you alienate your base in the long-term interests of your party?
So which way will Gardner go, to secede or not to secede? How he votes will tell us a lot about the direction he thinks he and the Republicans are going.
By: Laura Chapin, U. S. News and World Report, November 1, 2013
“The Uproar Over Insurance “Cancellation” Letters”: Offering Terrible Products To Desperate People Is No Longer Acceptable
Kathleen Sebelius, the Health and Human Services secretary, took a lot of grief this morning from Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee who were outraged that some people’s individual insurance policies had been “cancelled” because of health care reform.
Some of the rants bordered on the comical. Cory Gardner, Republican of Colorado, brandished his “cancellation” letter and demanded that Ms. Sebelius nullify the health law for all residents of his congressional district.
Most lawmakers mentioned President Obama’s unfortunate blanket statement that all Americans would be allowed to keep their insurance policies if they liked them. He failed to make an exception for inadequate policies that don’t meet the new minimum standards.
But in between lashings, Ms. Sebelius managed to make an important point. Yes, some people will be forced to upgrade their policies, she said. But that’s preferable to the status quo before the passage of the Affordable Care Act, when insurers could cancel policies on a whim.
“The individual market in Kansas and anywhere in the country has never had consumer protections,” she testified at the hearing. “People are on their own. They could be locked out, priced out, dumped out. And that happened each and every day. So this will finally provide the kind of protections that we all enjoy in our health care plans.”
A true cancellation is when someone gets a letter saying that she’s losing her insurance and cannot renew. That was common practice in the individual market for people with expensive conditions. Under the new law, no one will ever get a letter like that again. They cannot be turned down for insurance.
The so-called cancellation letters waved around at yesterday’s hearing were simply notices that policies would have to be upgraded or changed. Some of those old policies were so full of holes that they didn’t include hospitalization, or maternity care, or coverage of other serious conditions.
Republicans were apparently furious that government would dare intrude on an insurance company’s freedom to offer a terrible product to desperate people.
“Some people like to drive a Ford, not a Ferrari,” said Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee. “And some people like to drink out of a red Solo cup, not a crystal stem. You’re taking away their choice.”
Luckily, a comprehensive and affordable insurance policy is no longer a Ferrari; it is now a basic right. In the face of absurd comments and analogies like this one, Ms. Sebelius never lost her cool in three-and-a-half hours of testimony, perhaps because she knows that once the computer problems and the bellowing die down, the country will be far better off.
By: David Firestone, Editors Blog, The New York Times, October 30, 2013
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