“Asking For A Bail Out Of His Self-Made Crisis”: Cut Taxes Or Expand Medicaid?; Florida Governor Rick Scott Is In Quite A Pickle
The Florida state government has been a hotbed of opposition to Obamacare, and has succeeded in resisting the law’s Medicaid expansion, in large part because of the state’s Low Income Pool: a multi-billion dollar, 10-year-old pilot program through which, right now, the federal government subsidizes health care providers who treat the poor.
Also right now, in Florida, Governor Rick Scott wants to enact hundreds of millions of dollars in annual tax cuts.
The budget room for those tax cuts, in other words, exists because the federal government is spending money—money that comes with no guarantee—in a way that bolsters Florida’s resistance to Obamacare.
Not keen on financing opposition to itself, the Obama administration is leaning toward ending this sweet arrangement, and phasing out the Low Income Pool, which has in any case grown obsolete in a world where Florida can adopt the Medicaid expansion and provide insurance to nearly a million of its poor citizens.
All of which is to say that if Scott and Florida Republicans want their tax cuts, they will have to use expanded Medicaid to fill the budget hole where the Low Income Pool used to be. But rather than push against that open door, Scott announced Thursday that he will sue the federal government. Specifically, he’s arguing that by rescinding the Low Income Pool, the Obama administration is coercing Florida into participating in Obamacare, so the Low Income Pool must continue. Put another way, he’s asking the courts to force the feds to bail out his tax cut.
This is all playing out against the backdrop of King v. Burwell, in which conservatives have asked the Supreme Court to rescind billions of dollars in Affordable Care Act subsidies in their own states—money they claim is contingent upon them establishing their own exchanges. Like most Republican governors, Rick Scott didn’t establish an exchange, but for some reason he isn’t sounding the coercion alarm over King.
Scott’s argument is transparently frivolous, but it underscores the extent to which the GOP’s deranged resistance to Obamacare is boomeranging on itself. As Greg Sargent notes at the Washington Post, “Scott’s lawsuit is designed to get the administration to fork over federal money for health care—but only if it isn’t part of Obamacare.” Without that money, Scott probably won’t get his tax cuts. Which means that in Florida, the GOP’s commitment to tax cuts is running up against its Massive Resistance to Obamacare. And the tax cuts might lose.
This adamant opposition to the Medicaid expansion is a relatively recent development. Scott claims his opposition stems from the administration’s coolness to the Low Income Pool. If the federal government can just end that program, how can Floridians trust them to commit to their end of the Medicaid expansion? But that doesn’t wash. The Low Income Pool was scheduled to expire, whereas the federal government is obligated by law to fund 90 percent of the Medicaid expansion in perpetuity.
Florida’s Senate president—a Republican—thinks Scott is being ridiculous. He released a statement that refutes Scott’s objection to the Medicaid expansion and undermines the lawsuit:
The federal government has no obligation to provide LIP funding, or to work within our timeframe. While we respect Governor Scott’s authority to protect the state’s interests in the way he sees fit, we have a constitutional responsibility to pass a balanced budget by a specific deadline. From where I sit, it is difficult to understand how suing [the federal government] on day 45 of a 60 day session regarding an issue the state has been aware of for the last 12 months will yield a timely resolution to the critical health care challenges facing our state. The Senate budget anticipated the potential reduction or elimination of LIP funding and included solutions to provide Floridians access to health care services and coverage. We remain hopeful CMS will approve the Senate proposal.
A likelier explanation for Scott’s change of heart is a combination of anti-Medicaid spending by the Koch-backed advocacy group Americans for Prosperity, and entrenched Obamacare opposition in the Florida House. Sensing that the Medicaid expansion might be in danger, Scott flipped, rather than be caught on the losing side of it.
But Scott could have solved this problem a long time ago if he’d ever fought for Medicaid expansion earnestly, and could solve it now by teaming up with the Senate to stare down the House.
Instead Scott is suing the federal government to bail him out of a self-made crisis. This isn’t an anomaly, but a pattern. Across the country, Republican governors are coping with the consequences of their own Obamacare intransigence—staring into a future where their insurance markets get destroyed by virtue of their refusal to help implement Obamacare and their unwillingness to take on the right as it pursued litigation.
It was inevitable that as Obamacare became more entrenched, Republicans would see their opposition to the law come into tension with their other core interests. This is exactly what’s happened, and to some extent it has exposed weaknesses in the resistance strategy. But that resistance—to the idea of providing health insurance to the poor—remains very strong. Stronger, perhaps, than the allure of tax cuts.
By: Brian Beutler, The New Republic, April 17, 2017
“Squirt Gun Rambo’s”: When Fake Guns Are Banned And Real Guns Are Protected
Three years ago, Tampa was getting ready to host the Republican National Convention, and local officials took a variety of steps to improve public safety for those attending the event. Among the items prohibited in the area outside the convention center? Water guns – but not real guns. The former was deemed a possible threat to public safety, while the latter was protected by state law.
A similar issue came up recently in Tennessee.
The Tennessee House of Representatives passed a bill Monday night that makes it illegal to take a squirt gun – but not a real gun – within 150 feet of a school.
The new ban was included in a larger bill that would nix any local laws prohibiting people with gun permits from taking guns to parks.
The headline in The Tennessean read, in all seriousness, “House bill bans fake guns – not real guns – near schools.”
What’s especially striking about this story are the circumstances that led state lawmakers to take a look at gun policy in the first place.
As Rachel noted on the show last night, the National Rifle Association’s annual conference starts this week in Nashville, and Tennessee’s Republican-led state government was looking for a way to approve a “thank-you” gift to the NRA in the form of new state policy. The legislature set aside several days of legislating on the issue, which affectionately became known as “gun week.”
As part of the process, lawmakers wondered what to do about a guy known locally as “the Radnor Lake Rambo,” who has a habit of walking around outside courthouses and schools while wearing a bulletproof vest and carrying an assault rifle, which tends to freak people out.
So, one Republican state legislator figured that as long as Tennessee was in the midst of “gun week,” maybe they should do something about the Rambo guy who tends to scare the bejesus out of people. But GOP lawmakers also didn’t want to do anything that might offend the National Rifle Association.
What’d they come up with? A ban on squirt guns. As Rachel explained:
“It’s a ban on fake guns, toy guns, things like squirt guns would be banned specifically anywhere near Tennessee schools. No squirt guns, no fake guns within 150 feet of Tennessee schools.
“Real guns are still OK. But squirt guns and toy guns would be illegal outside of schools under the new law. The ostensible reason for this new language was to respond to the Radnor Lake Rambo guy. The Tennessean newspaper helpfully points out that that guy is actually carrying real guns, so he’d still be OK to keep doing what he’s doing under the new law. But if your personal plan to stop that guy was to sully his bullet proof vest with a squirt from your super soaker, you would be the Tennessee gun criminal now, not him.”
Right. If you stood near a school with a loaded AR-15, that would be legal. If you stood near a school with a water pistol, that’d be illegal.
This, evidently, got a little too weird for the legislature, which decided to slow the whole process down, even if that meant not being able to present the NRA with a legislative gift by tomorrow.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, April 10, 2015
“A Reality-Avoidance Scheme”: The Republican List Of Things You Cannot Say
You are, perhaps, already familiar with the Republican List of Things You Cannot Say. If not, here’s a quick refresher:
1. “Vagina.” That’s a definite no-no. Three years ago, Republicans in the Michigan statehouse banned Democratic Rep. Lisa Brown from speaking after she used the v-word.
2. “Condom.” The Bush administration sought to ban sex-ed teachers from mentioning the c-word or, indeed, any contraceptive method but abstinence.
3. “Gun.” A 2011 Florida law prohibits pediatricians from asking if parents have a g-word in the house. Mind you, they can ask about swimming pools, tobacco, seatbelts, lead paint and other potential home-based threats to children’s health. But not firearms.
To that list, a new term has now been added. In Florida, you may not say “climate change.”
Now, you’d think the Sunshine State would be using the double c-word quite a bit just now. Florida is, of course, a lowlands state, home to the largest subtropical wilderness in the United States, i.e., the Everglades, and as such, one of the most environmentally vulnerable places in the country. That confluence of facts represents a challenge to which a governor can respond in one of two ways: 1) grapple with the problem and look for ways to solve it; or 2) ignore the problem and silence those who dare to bring it up.
Governor Rick Scott has chosen the second option. The state now operates under an unwritten gag order banning environmental officials from using the double c-word in any official email, correspondence or report to discuss the threat from human-caused planetary warming and rising seas.
The governor, for the record, denies any such rule exists. “It’s not true,” he told reporters last week. But Scott’s words are simply not credible in the wake of a withering report published last week by the Miami Herald. In it, multiple former state Department of Environmental Protection officials describe how they were, in fact, censored by their superiors. “We were told not to use the terms ‘climate change,’ ‘global warming’ or ‘sustainability,’” said former DEP attorney Christopher Byrd.
No, the GOP is not the only party to regulate what its officials may say. Yes, the Obama administration has lately come out against language conflating Islam and terrorism in order, it says, to deny gangs of criminal thugs the legitimacy of religious underpinnings. You may or may not find that reasoning persuasive, but give the White House this much credit: The ban seems designed to make a philosophical point — not to forestall discussion of terrorism.
What we see in Governor Scott, on the other hand, amounts to little more than a reality-avoidance scheme, a way of not having a debate he cannot win and would rather not have. The governor has previously tried denying the reality of global warming. He has used the “I’m not a scientist” dodge that the GOP adopted in lockstep last year. But this may be his most effective means yet: Commandeer the language, rendering discussion impossible.
It is not, however, the debate about global warming that threatens to submerge downtown Miami, but global warming itself. It turns out that, contrary to what we believed as children, if you ignore a thing, it doesn’t go away. Often times, it simply festers and gets worse. And as guns, condoms and vaginas continue to exist despite GOP silencing, so too does the threat to Florida, the country and the planet from rising seas and temperatures.
Yet in the face of that existential danger, the GOP continues its strategy of sowing doubt, denial and delay. It is a depressing sign of our times that Florida’s governor exerts so much energy to manage the language of catastrophe.
Here’s a thought: Address the catastrophe and the language will take care of itself.
By: Leonard Pitts, Jr., Columnist for The Miami Herald; The National Memo, March 18, 2015
“Walker Pushing Drug War Testing Scheme”: And He Doesn’t Care That The Courts Say That’s Unconstitutional
According to Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, what American employers are really looking for these days is “someone who can pass a drug test.”
Walker made that remark in a question-and-answer session in Washington, D.C., Friday following his remarks at the American Action Forum’s inaugural Fred Malek lecture series, which are named after the GOP powerbroker who served as Richard Nixon’s “Jew counter”). The Wisconsin governor is expected to formally unveil the drug testing proposal in his budget next week.
The imitative would require drug testing for recipients of government benefits like food stamps and Medicaid. Walker says his plan is justified because there are many open jobs waiting for people who can pass drug tests and know “how to show up [for work] everyday five days a week.”
Walker first touted the idea while running for re-election last year, and pledged to “require a drug test for those requesting unemployment and able-bodied, working age adults requesting Food Stamps from the state.” But, sadly for Walker, the plan is almost certainly unconstitutional.
Federal courts have found that laws that require all recipients of welfare benefits to be drug tested violate the 4th Amendment as an unconstitutional search and seizure. However, states have recently passed laws that only require drug tests for those on government assistance for whom there is “a reasonable suspicion” of illegal drug use. This is considered far more likely to pass constitutional muster than blanket drug testing of everyone who applies for public assistance.
Walker did seem aware of these obstacles at the event, describing the pushback from the courts as “a classic example where the federal government pushes back and says you can’t do that.”
But even if Walker does manage to require drug testing for welfare recipients, the plan would likely be quite expensive for taxpayers. Before it was overturned in federal court, Florida’s mandatory drug test law ended up costing the state more money than it saved.
In the meantime, it does make for good political rhetoric. Very few candidates have won election on a platform giving more money to drug addicts. But Walker’s plan is unlikely to turn into effective or lasting legislation.
By: Ben Jacobs, The Daily Beast, January 30, 2015
“Absurdity Of The Argument Is It’s Greatest Strength”: Republicans Know Their Obamacare Case Is Bogus; Here’s The Proof
On Thursday, the government filed its brief to the Supreme Court in the case that will determine whether Obamacare subsidies disappear in three dozen states. Its argument is comprehensive, but one part of it speaks directly to the political history of the law, and the fact that everybody, including Republicans in Congress who now claim out of convenience that the law plainly limits subsidies to states that set up their own exchanges, always understood it to authorize subsidies everywhere.
The government confines this part of its argument to the legislative debate in the run up to the law’s passage in early 2010, but it could make the point more succinctly (and perhaps convincingly) by fast forwarding to early 2011. These days, Republicans up to and including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell confidently pronounce that “the language of the law says … subsidies are only available for states that set up state exchanges.” But that’s not what they believed four years ago.
When Republicans took over the House in 2011, the political environment in Congress changed dramatically. Obamacare couldn’t be repealed, but it became fair game for damaging modifications, and the GOP took aim at it and other domestic spending programs whenever opportunities to offset the cost of new legislation arose. One of the first things Congress did back then was eliminate an Affordable Care Act provision that would have significantly expanded the number of expenses businesses are required to report to the IRS. Even before the law passed, business associations were livid about the “1099” requirement, and created such an uproar over it that the question quickly became how, not if, it would be repealed. Even Democrats wanted it gone.
The only problem was that the reporting requirement was expected to raise over $20 billion. Under GOP rule, it could only be offset with spending cuts elsewhere in the budget. As it happens, they found those spending cuts elsewhere in the ACA itself. Specifically, Republicans paid for repealing the 1099 provision by subjecting ACA beneficiaries to stricter rules regarding when they have to reimburse the government for subsidy overpayments. Make more money than you anticipated, and the government will claw back your premium assistance come tax season.
The congressional budget office scored the plan as essentially deficit neutral, and Republicans voted for it overwhelmingly. But you see the problem here. If the ACA plainly prohibits subsidies in states that didn’t set up their own exchanges, then there would be no subsidies in those states to claw back. And by April 2011, when the clawback passed, we already knew that multiple states were planning to protest ACA implementation and let the federal government set up their exchanges, including giant states like Florida, which now has a million beneficiaries. They would have needed a different, or additional, pay-for.
Obamacare’s legal challengers might chime in here to insist that their case is impervious to revelations like these. CBO’s analyses were premised on the idea that every state would set up its own exchange, and Republicans (and many Democrats) based their votes on what CBO told them. Other Democrats who actually understood the scheme may have simply pretended not to notice the problem. Nevertheless, they’d say, the law was designed to withhold subsidies from people whose states didn’t establish exchanges, and to ruin the individual and small-group insurance markets in those states, without providing any notice to either. In a perverse way, the absurdity of the challengers’ argument is it’s greatest strength. Because the scheme they insist Congress intentionally created was so far from Congress’ mind, it’s hard to find contemporaneous evidence that Congress absolutely didn’t mean to condition these subsidies. In much the same way, we can’t be sure that Congress didn’t mean to denominate those subsidies in Canadian dollars. A $ isn’t necessarily a $ after all.
But this familiar line of defense crumbles here. It is facially plausible—though incorrect—to posit that at the time the law passed, CBO believed subsidies would be available everywhere because it simply assumed every state would set up an exchange. But that assumption didn’t hold in April 2011. Something else must explain CBO’s 1099-repeal score, and the Republican votes that followed it. What we have in the form of this bill is clear evidence that everyone who voted for it (including every single Republican, save the two GOP congressmen and one GOP senator who weren’t present) understood the Affordable Care Act to provide subsidies everywhere.
Congress repealed the 1099 provision at an important moment—after multiple states announced that they would step back and let the federal government establish their exchanges, but before the IRS issued its proposed rule stipulating that subsidies would be available on both exchanges. The only thing Congress had to go on when it stiffened the clawback mechanism was its own reading of the Affordable Care Act, and Congress behaved exactly as you would expect. It operated with the understanding that subsidies were universal.
Today, many Republicans will tell you that the law plainly forecloses subsidies through the federal exchange. Six senators—John Cornyn, Ted Cruz, Orrin Hatch, Mike Lee, Rob Portman, and Marco Rubio—and nine congressmen—Marsha Blackburn, Dave Camp, Randy Hultgren, Darrell Issa, Pete Olson, Joe Pitts, Pete Roskam, Paul Ryan and Fred Upton—have even filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court, which begins, “The plain text of the ACA reflects a specific choice by Congress to make health insurance premium subsidies available only to those who purchase insurance from ‘an Exchange established by the State….’ The IRS flouted this unambiguous statutory limitation, promulgating regulations that make subsidies available for insurance purchased not only through exchanges established by the States but also through exchanges established by the federal government.”
All of them, save Cruz, who was elected in 2012, voted for 1099 repeal.
In its brief, the government argues that “it was well understood that the Act gave ‘States the choice to participate in the exchanges themselves or, if they do not choose to do so, to allow the Federal Government to set up the exchanges.’ And it was abundantly clear that some States would not establish their own Exchanges.“ It was more than well understood. Congress actually endorsed that very proposition.
By: Brian Beutler, The New Republic, January 23, 2015
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