“Obamascare Tactics In Red State Races”: Passing Laws That Prevent Any Future Governor From Accepting Medicaid Money
If I asked you to name two states where the incumbent Republican governors might lose reelection this fall, you would likely, I expect, say Florida and Pennsylvania. I doubt very much you’d offer up Georgia and Kansas.
But lo and behold—the contests in both of those states are right now a little closer than you’d expect. In Kansas, Sam Brownback is the governor. You remember Brownback—he was a senator for a spell, best remembered (by me anyway) for his prominent role in that hideous Republican appropriation of poor Terry Schiavo in their zealotry to “promote life.” In Georgia, the bossman is Nathan Deal, also a former Congressman, whose term is best remembered for the way he announced a departure date for his gubernatorial run. (He realized that the House would be voting on Obamacare shortly thereafter, and delayed his departure so he could vote against it.)
It ought to be easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy for right-wing Republicans to get reelected in those states, but recent polls have shown them dangling along the margin-of-error cliff. Deal leads Jason Carter (yep, Jimmy’s grandson) by just 3.4 percent in the realclearpolitics average, and Brownback actually trailed Democrat Paul Davis 42-40 in one February poll. Brownback’s approval rating is also deeply underwater. So it’s conceivable—that’s as far as we should prudently go—that both could lose.
Now, here’s the rub. Both, naturally, oppose the expansion of Obamacare into their states. They say no force on earth or in heaven will make them take that Medicaid money. It’s estimated that 600,000 Georgians and 78,000 Kansans would benefit. But they’re having none of it. And that’s their right. But what they’re doing now, in cahoots with friendly legislators, is a step beyond: In both states, they’re passing laws that would prevent any future governor from accepting the Medicaid money.
It works like this. Under the Affordable Care Act, the process by which states decide to accept the money is entirely up to them. Some states determined that legislative action should be required. You may have read about the Republicans in the Florida legislature rebuffing GOP Governor Rick Scott for the five minutes he was toying with taking the money. New Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe wants the money badly, and his Democratic State Senate is with him, but they’re hamstrung by the GOP-controlled House of Delegates, which is against.
Initially, Georgia and Kansas were states where it was just the governor’s call. Which was fine as long as the Republicans looked like sure things. But the polls tightened up, and people started getting a little antsy. Hey, what if a Democratic governor got elected and said, ‘Okay, Barack, write me that check?’
And so Brownback signed his state’s law last Friday. His office just announced it this week. Why the delay? Shouldn’t one such as Sam Brownback be proud of signing this socialism-blocking law? Well, it turns out that it was originally a law about something else, requiring the state to provide quick payment to certain in-state Medicaid care providers. This provision was tacked on late. A Wichita Democrat, Jim Ward, said: “That bill is what I think is endemic with this legislative process under this governor and this speaker and Senate president. There was no hearing. There were no opportunities for people who have a stake in Medicaid expansion to come in and talk about it.”
In Georgia, it’s easier. The legislation was passed about a month ago. If Deal doesn’t veto it, it becomes law. And since he supports it—indeed, since his staff helped write this law that willingly hands gubernatorial power over to the legislature—it will. And into the bargain, the Georgia legislature also passed—on the next-to-last day of the session—a bill that blocks state employees from helping Georgians sign up for care under the ACA.
So stop and think about this. Kansas and Georgia have just taken what was a gubernatorial decision out of the hands of not only current but future governors. You can argue plausibly that the people’s representatives should have a say in such a decision, on principle. But principle wasn’t at work here. Political expediency was. Legislators in the two states know that Republicans are likely to have control as far as the eye can see. And they’ll never say yes. And they’re doing all this in the name of what? In the name of denying 678,000 people a chance at health-insurance coverage.
It gets worse. The ACA makes cuts to certain current Medicaid programs on the assumption that states would take this new Medicaid money. It cut funding for hospitals that serve the poor, cuts intended to be mitigated by the fact that a large number of poor would now be insured once the states they live in accepted the new money. But in states that did not, those people are suffering even more. Several rural hospitals in Georgia have closed. They could be saved if the state took the Medicaid money.
Carter vows he’s going to make this skeezy law, and the Medicaid question generally, an issue. The Georgia law has sparked large protests and arrests and might end up being the most important issue in the campaign. In Kansas, Davis supports Medicaid expansion—and according to a recent poll so do 55 percent of Kansans, against just 39 percent who oppose taking the money. So maybe there’s not as much the matter with Kansas as we thought. With the people, anyway. The governor and the legislators are another matter.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, April 23, 2014
“Protecting The Profits Of Big Carbon Barons”: Why Conservatives Are Trying To Strangle Solar Energy
As my colleague John Aziz wrote a few days ago, an alliance of right-wing operatives and Big Carbon barons are mounting a huge effort to try and throttle the solar industry in the crib. As the Los Angeles Times explains:
The Koch brothers, anti-tax activist Grover Norquist, and some of the nation’s largest power companies have backed efforts in recent months to roll back state policies that favor green energy. The conservative luminaries have pushed campaigns in Kansas, North Carolina, and Arizona, with the battle rapidly spreading to other states. [Los Angeles Times]
The Kochs and their allies argue that they’re just trying to get rid of unfair subsidies, but this is nonsense. Almost universally, utilities aren’t anywhere close to a free market. The most common model is the investor-owned regulated monopoly, where a particular firm is guaranteed a captive electricity market, and in return has to justify their prices to a government board so (in theory at least) they don’t gouge the public. (If you want all the details, David Roberts wrote a highly useful series of posts about utilities last year.)
According to American free-market dogma, such a frankly socialist production scheme should immediately collapse. But despite our generally low quality of governance, this set-up has actually worked (relatively) well for decades. The reason is that when we set these utility systems up, electricity was a picture-perfect example of a natural monopoly. Steam turbines exhibit large efficiencies of scale, so it makes sense to highly concentrate generation capacity, and alternating current allows electricity to be transmitted vast distances.
Solar throws a wrench into this long-standing model because it’s well-suited to individual generation. It would be very expensive and inefficient to build a coal-fired steam turbine in your backyard, but that works just fine for a solar panel. Therefore, something like 40 states have a policy called “net metering,” under which if you have a solar installation, any electricity you generate is canceled from your electric bill, and any excess you generate is sold back to the utility at retail rates. The problem with that, from a utility provider’s perspective, is that those retail rates don’t just cover the cost of generation — they also cover the construction and maintenance of the grid: power lines, transformers, and so forth. (As well as the investors’ profits.)
In essence, we’re trying to incorporate artisanal, small-batch electricity into a massive socialist production scheme based around colossal mega-generators. Unsurprisingly, it’s straining the system.
So enter the Brothers Koch (on Team Mega-Socialism, remember). And to be fair, they really do have a point: The grid is important to maintain, and it’s not exactly equitable for a quickly shrinking group of electricity customers without solar to bear most of the costs of maintaining it. (Though it’s important to also note that utilities tend to exaggerate the case. After all, any electricity generated at the point of use, for example, diminishes the load on the grid, thereby reducing costs.)
The problem, of course, is that the Kochs are not disinterested observers looking out for the little electricity consumer. They’re obscenely wealthy businessmen with enormous income streams at stake. Solar is a direct threat to their business model of selling climate-wrecking carbon to utilities, and as such, they’re obviously trying to use the political system to crush potential competition and protect their monopoly profits. That’s why this has become a heated fight only recently, as the overall price of solar electricity has fallen to be competitive with carbon sources in many places. Solar was a punch line until it was an economically viable alternative. And then it became a threat that must be destroyed.
So I don’t think Paul Krugman and Kevin Drum are quite right to say that conservatives’ fight against solar is simply an issue of tribalism. Clearly, this is also about the profits of very rich people.
In any case, what ought to be done? If solar were just one more generation model among many, we might say it’s not worth the effort. But with the catastrophic threat of climate change, it’s critically important to decarbonize electricity generation as quickly as possible, and solar must be part of that effort. We’ve got to find some way of maintaining the fixed infrastructure of electricity distribution without impeding solar’s deployment.
It’s a tricky problem. But the outlines of a solution ought to be fairly obvious: We should take a hard look at just how much centralized generation capacity is needed, and retire the carbon-intensive stuff as quickly as possible. (A carbon tax would help enormously here.) This means overhauling the regulated monopoly utility model, and will possibly require a new pot of money to maintain the grid until solar’s costs, which continue to plummet, can bear a few more extra fees.
But the details of implementation aren’t as important as the political and business implications. The Kochs, and all the other Big Carbon barons like them, would eventually be driven out of business by solar. In today’s GOP, billionaires who make a lot of money (even from socialist monopolies) are Galtian heroes. That’s why so many big money conservatives hate solar.
By: Ryan Cooper, The Week, April 22, 2014
“It’s Not About Content Of Character”: Hey, Fox Pundits! How Blatant Must The Anti-Obama Racism Be?
I have a question for George Will.
If he can’t answer it, maybe Brit Hume can. Both men were recently part of a panel on Fox News Sunday to which moderator Chris Wallace posed this question: Has race played a role in the often-harsh treatment of President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder? Wallace was reacting to a clip of Holder strongly hinting that a testy encounter with House Republicans was part of a pattern of race-based abuse of himself and the president.
Some of the panelists framed their answers in political dimensions, i.e., what does this mean for the midterms? But Hume and Will responded directly.
Has race played a part? Heck no.
Said Hume: “This strikes me as kind of crybaby stuff from Holder. My sense about this is that both Eric Holder and Barack Obama have benefited politically enormously from the fact that they are African-American and the first to hold the jobs that they hold.”
“Look,” added Will, “liberalism has a kind of Tourette’s Syndrome these days. It’s just constantly saying the word ‘racism’ and ‘racist.’ It’s an old saying in the law: If you have the law on your side, argue the law, if you have the facts on your side, argue the facts. If you have neither, pound the table. This is pounding the table.”
And here, let us remove Holder from the equation because, frankly, the question I’m here to ask is more pertinent to his boss than him. I just wish Messrs. Will and Hume would explain one thing:
You say race has played no role in the treatment of President Obama? Fine. What would it look like if it did?
I mean, we’re talking about a president who was called “uppity” by one GOP lawmaker, “boy” by another and “subhuman” by a GOP activist; who was depicted as a bone-through-the-nose witch doctor by opponents of his health care reform bill; as a pair of cartoon spook eyes against a black backdrop by an aide to a GOP lawmaker, and as an ape by various opponents; who has been dogged by a “Tea Party” movement whose earliest and most enthusiastic supporters included the Council of Conservative Citizens, infamous for declaring the children of interracial unions “a slimy brown glop”; who was called a liar by an obscure GOP lawmaker during a speech before a joint session of Congress; who has had to contend with a years-long campaign of people pretending there is some mystery about where he was born.
There’s much more, but you get the drift. So I wish those men would explain how, exactly, the treatment of the president would differ if race were indeed part of the mix. What misbehavior would make them say: “OK, this is definitely about color of skin, not content of character”? Because from where I sit, much of the behavior toward Obama would need white hoods to be more blatantly racial than it already is.
Hume, by the way, says some critics have called his comments themselves “racist.” They’ve also scored the fact that this discussion was undertaken by an all-white panel. While the optics were odd, there was nothing in what he or Will said that would seem to merit that label. Those who slap him with it are likely motivated by the same knee-jerk reflex by which my critics — depend on it — will claim that I consider any disagreement with the president to be — sigh — “racist.”
That’s silly. But then, discussion of this seminal American fault line often reveals in some of us an unfortunate fondness for clownish superficiality. And yet that silliness does not detract from the criticality of the fault line itself. Nor can I share Will’s conviction that manly taciturnity is the best way to seal that fissure.
So what I ask is not rhetorical, not abstract, not a joke. It is a serious question.
And I’d appreciate the same sort of answer.
By: Leonard Pitts, Jr., Columnist, The Miami Herald; The National Memo, April 21, 2014
“Boldly Ahead Of His Time”: South Carolina Republicans Snub Desegregation Judge
Of all the names of American heroes you probably don’t know, Julius Waties Waring has to rank near the top of the list. Waring was a judge in South Carolina in the mid-20th century. He’s famous to those who know for many courageous stands, but he’s probably best known for writing in one opinion that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” That was in 1951, three years before Brown v. Board of Education. In Charleston, South Carolina. Now that’s a set of stones, no?
Charleston these days is a gorgeous and ever more cosmopolitan city where, if you pick your spots carefully—the art galleries, certain restaurants—you can run into more Democrats than Republicans, maybe. But Chucktown has been molasses-slow to acknowledge the brave legacy of Waring. Finally this month, he got his due. A statue was dedicated outside the same federal courthouse building where he heard his cases.
Everyone of course came. Oh, wait. Everyone didn’t come. Some Democrats showed up, led by Eric Holder. But no local Republican of any note came.
According to the Charleston Post and Courier, Sen. Lindsey Graham had another event he’d planned “months before.” Rep. Mark Sanford, the Appalachian trail-hopping ex-governor who now represents the city in Congress, spent the day in Washington. (It was a Friday.) And the best excuse of all goes to Tim Scott, the junior senator after Graham, who is African-American. Scott had some meetings, and then “some personal things that needed attending.” He at least did send an aide.
If this seems like a small, so-what kind of thing to you, I submit two thoughts. First, you’re maybe not familiar enough with Waring’s career. He made it to the federal bench in 1942. He made, for a few years, no unusual rulings, although being on the bench did bring him face to face with his city and state’s official segregation in a way that simply being a prosperous attorney had not. He began by ending segregation in his courtroom. Somewhere in there he divorced his first wife, a Charleston girl, and took up with and married a Connecticut woman, who may have influenced his views. He issued an opinion holding that the state had to pay black teachers the same as it paid whites, and another ordering that the University of South Carolina law school admit black students, or that the state open a truly equal law school for African-Americans.
In 1948, Waring ended the state Democratic Party’s “white primary” and ruled that Charleston’s “Negroes” were entitled to “full participation in [Democratic] Party affairs.” The party had to let them enroll and vote, which they did, 35,000 strong, in that year’s primary elections. (Yes, as conservatives will gleefully note as if they’re scoring a point by mentioning 80-year-old and no longer relevant history, the Democratic Party was the racist party at the time.)
Then in 1951 came his famous dissent in Briggs v. Elliott, in which he wrote the sentence I quote above. Waring’s famous sentence came from his dissent—that is to say, by 2-1, the three-judge federal panel upheld South Carolina’s segregation. But the Supreme Court agreed to hear Briggs, which it then combined into Brown. When the high court ruled in Brown, the Charleston circuit court, of course, reversed itself. So Waring was boldly ahead of his time, and he provided the jurisprudential basis for Brown by being the first-ever federal judge to say, plainly and straightforwardly, that segregated schools were wrong and that “separate but unequal” was a practical impossibility and a pernicious lie.
So he was a huge figure. Charleston had rejected him in part because he rejected it. He retired shortly after his Briggs ruling and moved with his wife to New York City, of all lamentable places, obviously wanting to have nothing to do with Charleston, the South, or any of it. But now the city has finally decided to honor its own, so let’s not pretend no one down there understands the importance of what he did.
The second thought I submit is that while politicians do indeed have scheduling commitments that arise months in advance, they also cancel them regularly to go do something else. I’ve been on the business end of some of those cancellations myself. So Graham, Scott, and Sanford could have found a way to make it to Charleston if it really mattered to them.
I am not saying that the fact that they didn’t go makes them racists. That would be unfair in Graham’s and Sanford’s case, and kind of preposterous in Scott’s case. I am saying, however, that it seems as if they didn’t go because, well, no one they knew and cared about wanted them to go. For Graham, certainly, locked in a primary fight against Tea Partiers, but really for any South Carolina Republican no good could possibly come of attending a celebration of one of the state’s most important liberals.
The presence of Holder, Mr. Fast and Furious himself, only made things worse. Why, imagine. What with everyone having cameras on them these days, someone might have snapped a picture of one of the Republicans shaking Holder’s hand! So it’s not a reflection on the men—although it is that—so much as it is on the modern GOP, Palmetto State Branch. And it’s shameful.
Meanwhile, across our United States, schools are resegregating at a record clip, thanks to the Republican appointees who constitute a Supreme Court majority that believes trying to desegregate schools by edict is nearly as malevolent as the old practice of segregating them. The resegregation is happening faster, surprise surprise, down South than anywhere else. What they seem to need are more tributes to figures like Waring, and Republicans in particular are the people who need to attend them.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, April 21, 2014
“Last Gasps Of A Dying Movement”: Obamacare Obstructionists’ Self-Created Trap
Kevin McCarthy doesn’t have the best timing. The House majority whip released what he hoped would be the foundational document of Obamacare truthers, “Debunking Obamacare’s 7 million enrollees ‘success’ story,” the same day the White House announced that, in fact, 8.03 million Americans had enrolled in the insurance exchanges. Republicans will no doubt try to debunk the higher figure the same way, but the more we learn about who’s been covered under the Affordable Care Act, the harder it will be. It is, overwhelmingly, a success story.
I said the same thing back when the number was 7 million: Imagine how many more people might have been covered if shrill Republicans hadn’t made repealing and obstructing the ACA their top priority. The news that 35 percent of enrollees are under 35 is particularly heartening: it means many young people ignored the campaign to tell them not to sign up – remember that creepy Uncle Sam “doctor” and reports of cool campus keg parties? Yes, the president had Zach Galifianakis and Bradley Cooper – damn you, Bradley Cooper! Greg Gutfeld is still so angry at you – but imagine where we’d be without an organized national campaign to scare people out of signing up.
The campaign to discredit the act will continue. McCarthy’s dumb document lists five new metrics for measuring success, including how many enrollees have actually paid, and how many didn’t have insurance before. Those are old talking points, but they’ve added a new one – how many received subsidies — which is ugly in several ways. Republicans will use a high rate of subsidies, if that’s the case, to negate the act’s success, when in fact the subsidies were always key to it: You can’t have an individual mandate to purchase private insurance without making some provision to help those who can’t afford it. Affordability is why most didn’t have it in the first place.
But McCarthy also tacks on an ugly parenthetical, asking “how many received a subsidy (raising concerns about fraud).” Brian Beutler at the New Republic calls this an effort to “welfarize Obamacare,” to stigmatize it and also make it subject to the same hysteria about “fraud” that conservatives use to smear other social programs. Remember that Sen. Ted Cruz called the subsidies “sugar,” telling Sean Hannity that when Americans got a taste of it, they’d be “addicted to the sugar, addicted to the subsidies. And once that happens, in all likelihood, it never gets …”
“It’s over,” Hannity declared. “It never gets repealed.”
Exactly.
Still, a high rate of subsidies will let the GOP continue to demonize the “takers” vs. the “makers.” But some of them are going to have a big problem: A lot of the takers will turn out to be their voters. Poor Mitch McConnell: His own state of Kentucky, under the leadership of Democratic Gov. Steve Brashear, set up its own insurance exchange, expanded Medicaid and conducted a bold public health campaign to get folks into “Kynect.” Now Kentucky has reduced the number of uninsured by 40 percent – and many of those newly insured are McConnell’s aging white constituents.
McConnell seems appropriately alarmed. The man who has repeatedly pledged to “repeal” the law just this week told healthcare workers in Kentucky that repealing the law can’t happen while Obama is president, so “we’re going to figure out a way to get this fixed.” That softer tone isn’t sitting well with his Tea Party challenger Matt Bevin, who’s already accusing McConnell of being an Obamacare appeaser, but the Senate minority leader seems to be looking past Bevin to his November battle with Alison Lundergan Grimes.
The only thing that might get Republicans out of a mess of their own making is Democratic cowardice, and you can never underestimate the capacity of centrist and red state Democrats to sabotage themselves and their own party. We’ll see how hard Grimes hits McConnell over his role in obstructing the ACA; so far, it hasn’t been very hard at all. She needs to make him the man who’s trying to charge women more than men for insurance again; the man who’s trying to take healthcare away from 370,000 Kentuckians who have it thanks to Democrats.
Democrats have similar opportunities in Virginia and Arkansas. Republicans have been itching to make the midterms a referendum on Obamacare. Thursday’s news means that might not work the way they had planned.
By: Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon, April 18, 2014
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