“The Rise Of Obamacare McCarthyism”: Anti-Obamacare Republicans Attack Each Other For Being “Crypto-Supporters” Of Obamacare
We talked yesterday about Rep. Jack Kingston, one of several House Republicans running for the U.S. Senate in Georgia, who infuriated the right. His transgression? The congressman pushed a bill to add a conservative provision to the Affordable Care Act.
Conservatives were livid, not because of the idea itself, but because House Republicans aren’t supposed to try to “fix” the health care law. To take even a modest step towards moving the law to the right, some conservatives said, is to “surrender on Obamacare.”
We’re seeing a similar situation play out in Wyoming.
A conservative nonprofit group is set to launch a TV attack ad Monday intimating that Republican Sen. Mike Enzi is less than pure in his opposition to Obamacare.
Americans for Job Security highlights the incumbent’s support for exchanges during the 2010 debate over Obamacare…. “I like the exchanges,” Enzi says in a brief clip. “These exchanges can be good.”
The ad is incredulous, as if the senator’s 2010 comments are ridiculous are on their face. It doesn’t matter if Enzi has repeatedly fought to destroy the Affordable Care Act and voted to repeal it; what matters now is that he once said it’s possible that marketplaces with competing private insurance plans are “good.”
And in 2013, that’s apparently a bridge too far.
What’s emerging is an expansive list of litmus tests – it’s not enough to hate “Obamacare,” Republicans must also hate everything within the law, including the Republican ideas.
In this case, the Wyoming attack ad concludes, “Tell Mike Enzi we don’t like these liberal, Big Government Obamacare exchanges.”
Got that? If private insurers compete for consumers’ business in a marketplace originally touted by the Heritage Foundation, it’s “liberal, big government.”
It’s hard to believe in the most gullible GOP primary voter would find this persuasive, but the takeaway here is the attack itself. We’ve reached the point at which a far-right Republican is being condemned for having described the single most capitalistic, free-market aspect of the health care law as “good.”
Josh Marshall described this as an example of “Obamacare McCarthyism,” in which “different anti-Obamacare Republicans attack each other for either being crypto-supporters of Obamacare, being Obamacare-curious or even just having earlier periods of Obamacare confusion.”
Ed Kilgore added this is “likely to be a continuing weapon against any Republican who doesn’t favor the most radical tactics available at any given moment to bring down the Great White Whale of the Affordable Care Act.”
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, November 27, 2013
“What If We Just Called It NixonCare?”: Republicans Have No Business Being Upset About Obamacare
House Majority Leader Eric Cantor says Republicans will seek to delay a requirement of the 2010 Affordable Care Act that all Americans obtain health insurance or face a tax penalty. “With so many unanswered questions and the problems arising around this rollout, it doesn’t make any sense to impose this one percent mandate tax on the American people,” Cantor said last week.
While Republicans plot new ways to sabotage the Affordable Care Act, it’s easy to forget that for years they’ve been arguing that any comprehensive health insurance system be designed exactly like the one that officially began October 1st, glitches and all.
For as many years Democrats tried to graft healthcare onto Social Security and Medicare and pay for it through the payroll tax. But Republicans countered that any system must be based on private insurance and paid for with a combination of subsidies for low-income purchasers and a requirement that the younger and healthier sign up.
Not surprisingly, private health insurers cheered on the Republicans while doing whatever they could to block Democrats from creating a public insurance system.
In February 1974, Republican President Richard Nixon proposed, in essence, today’s Affordable Care Act. Under Nixon’s plan all but the smallest employers would provide insurance to their workers or pay a penalty, an expanded Medicaid-type program would insure the poor and subsidies would be provided to low-income individuals and small employers. Sound familiar?
Private insurers were delighted with the Nixon plan but Democrats preferred a system based on Social Security and Medicare and the two sides failed to agree.
Thirty years later a Republican governor, Mitt Romney, made Nixon’s plan the law in Massachusetts. Private insurers couldn’t have been happier although many Democrats in the state had hoped for a public system.
When today’s Republicans rage against the individual mandate in the Affordable Care Act, it’s useful to recall this was their idea as well.
In 1989, Stuart M. Butler of the conservative Heritage Foundation came up with a plan that would “mandate all households to obtain adequate insurance.”
Insurance companies loved Butler’s plan so much it found its way into several bills introduced by Republican lawmakers in 1993. Among the supporters were Senators Orrin Hatch (R-UT) and Charles Grassley (R-IA). Both now oppose the mandate under the Affordable Care Act. Newt Gingrich, who became Speaker of the House in 1995, was also a big proponent.
Romney’s heathcare plan in Massachusetts included the same mandate to purchase private insurance. “We got the idea of an individual mandate from [Newt Gingrich] and [Newt] got it from the Heritage Foundation,” said Romney, who thought the mandate “essential for bringing the health care costs down for everyone and getting everyone the health insurance they need.”
Now that the essential Republican plan for healthcare is being implemented nationally, health insurance companies are jubilant.
Last week, after the giant insurer Wellpoint raised its earnings estimates, CEO Joseph Swedish pointed to “the long-term membership growth opportunity through exchanges.” Other major health plans are equally bullish. “The emergence of public exchanges, private exchanges, Medicaid expansions … have the potential to create new opportunities for us to grow and serve in new ways,” UnitedHealth Group CEO Stephen J. Hemsley effused.
So why are today’s Republicans so upset with an Act they designed and their patrons adore? Because it’s the signature achievement of the Obama administration.
There’s a deep irony to all this. Had Democrats stuck to the original Democratic vision and built comprehensive health insurance on Social Security and Medicare, it would have been cheaper, simpler and more widely accepted by the public. And Republicans would be hollering anyway.
By: Robert Reich, The Robert Reich Blog, October 29, 2013
“Fighting Magneto And Dr No”: Dick Cheney Still Thinks He Was A Character On “24”
Dick Cheney felt moved to write an entire book about the heart troubles he’s had over the years, which I can understand. After all, we all find our particular maladies fascinating. What I don’t get is why anybody else would care, since we don’t tend to find other people’s maladies interesting in the least. If you’d let me, I’d love nothing more than to blather on about my various knee injuries, but since I’m not RGIII, I have the sense to know that you really don’t give a crap. Nevertheless, there’s apparently an interesting tidbit or two in Cheney’s book, including this reported by CBS News, which may validate what you already thought about him:
Cheney had [his defibrillator] replaced in 2007 and his doctor, cardiologist Jonathan Reiner, with whom he wrote the book, had the device’s wireless function disabled so a terrorist couldn’t send his heart a fatal shock. Some years later, Cheney was watching an episode of the SHOWTIME hit “Homeland,” in which that terrorist scenario was woven into the plot. “I was aware of the danger…that existed…I found it credible,” he responds to Gupta when asked what went through his mind. “I know from the experience we had and the necessity for adjusting my own device, that it was an accurate portrayal of what was possible,” says Cheney.
Did he also avoid sea travel, since the terrorists could use their nuclear-powered subs to send microwaves at him and fry his brains? What world was he living in?
The answer, in case you’ve forgotten, is that he and so many other Bush administration officials were basically enacting a fantasy in which the enemy—”the terrorists”—were not actually a bunch of semi-literate religious fanatics who got incredibly lucky one time with an extraordinarily low-tech attack, but were actually evil geniuses, had unlimited resources at their disposal, and could execute complex, highly technical schemes with multiple interlocking parts that enabled them to do things like get close enough to the Vice President to deliver him a fatal electric shock. And of course, we can’t close Guantanamo and house the prisoners now there in supermax prisons in the United States, from which no inmate has ever escaped, because they’re terrorists, and who knows what super-powers they might have developed in the fantastically well-equipped lab in their hollowed-out-mountain lair? I joke, but do you remember Bin Laden’s mountain fortress? It was quite a remarkable feat of engineering—check out this conversation between Tim Russert and Donald Rumsfeld, going over all its amazing details. “A ventilation system!” marveled Russert. “The entrances large enough to drive trucks and even tanks!” Even computer systems and telephone systems. It’s a very sophisticated operation!” “Oh, you bet,” responded the Secretary of Defense. “This is serious business. And there’s not one of those. There are many of them.” You may also remember that the mountain fortress never existed. It was all made up.
Back in the real world, actual terrorists were struggling unsuccessfully to make their shoes or their underwear explode. So why did people like Cheney want so badly to believe they were fighting Magneto or Dr. No? I think it’s because they all wanted to be Jack Ryan or Jack Bauer. The more terrifying your enemy is, the more courageous and heroic you are. While Bin Laden was holed up in a house in Abbottabad watching DVDs of Three’s Company reruns, Bush and Cheney were imagining that their foe was so unstoppable that at any moment he could penetrate the Secret Service perimeter and kill them with death rays.
You may not remember, but there was a time when actual government officials talked about the television show 24 as though it were not absurd escapist entertainment, but a real representation of reality. Here’s a little blast from the past :
According to British lawyer and writer Sands, Jack Bauer—played by Kiefer Sutherland—was an inspiration at early “brainstorming meetings” of military officials at Guantánamo in September 2002. Diane Beaver, the staff judge advocate general who gave legal approval to 18 controversial interrogation techniques including waterboarding, sexual humiliation and terrorizing prisoners with dogs, told Sands that Bauer “gave people lots of ideas.” Michael Chertoff, the Homeland Security chief, gushed in a panel discussion on 24 organized by the Heritage Foundation that the show “reflects real life.”
John Yoo, the former Justice Department lawyer who produced the so-called torture memos—simultaneously redefining both the laws of torture and of logic—cites Bauer in his book War by Other Means. “What if, as the Fox television program 24 recently portrayed, a high-level terrorist leader is caught who knows the location of a nuclear weapon?” Even Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, speaking in Canada last summer, shows a gift for this casual toggling between television and the Constitution. “Jack Bauer saved Los Angeles … He saved hundreds of thousands of lives,” Scalia said. “Are you going to convict Jack Bauer?”
Well no, your honor, because Jack Bauer is a fictional character. We also don’t need to pass a law boosting penalties for using the Imperius curse on someone without their permission, because that isn’t real either.
There’s a practical side to this, which is that the more people thought 24 represented the reality of terrorism, the more willing they’d be to shrug their shoulders at things like vastly expanded surveillance and the use of torture. In the real world, “ticking time bombs” are so rare as to be essentially non-existent, and the torture policy (and even the actual torture techniques) were designed by people who knew virtually nothing about how to get information from a prisoner who doesn’t want to give it to you. But hey, on 24, not only did torture always work, it worked fast—60 seconds was about average—and everything a terrorist said under torture turned out to be true. How could you not use it?
This still matters because these fantasists built an infrastructure—legal, programmatic, psychological—that we still live with today. And they don’t seem to have regained their ability to distinguish between fiction and reality.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, October 21, 2013
“A Revisionist History Mistrial”: Jim DeMint’s Silly Argument On Obamacare Was Soundly Overruled
The Heritage Foundation’s Jim DeMint – the proto Ted Cruz – has an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal this morning where he makes the case against Obamacare and explains why his organization pushed Cruz and the tea party right to shut down the government (and, presumably, why Cruz is threatening to try to do it again). Most of it is pretty standard anti-Obamacare fare, but one section is worth noting for its casual dismissal of last year’s election results.
Responding to the notion that Republicans should lay off Obamacare because the president won and they lost last November, DeMint writes:
… ObamaCare was not the central fight in 2012, much to the disappointment of conservatives. Republicans hoped that negative economic news would sweep them to victory, and exit polls confirmed that the economy, not health care, was the top issue. The best thing is to declare last year’s election a mistrial on ObamaCare.
Sorry, but you don’t get to declare a mistrial on election results because you don’t like them.
First, this raises the obvious question: Would DeMint entertain a similar argument against repealing Obamacare were Mitt Romney president right now? If negative economic news had indeed swept the GOP to victory, would anyone on the right find credible the argument that because the economy, not Obamacare, had been the big issue of the campaign, the GOP had no business trying to roll back the law?
Of course they would not – because the mistrial argument is silly. It’s true that exit polls showed the economy to be overwhelmingly the biggest issue of the campaign, with 59 percent of voters citing it as their top issue and health care a distant second at 18 percent. But there’s a difference between something being the driving issue of the campaign and being the only one. Voters didn’t cast their ballots in an issue void and it’s not like Obamacare was some sub-rosa topic that wasn’t properly litigated. It was the focus of politics for most of President Obama’s first term. Mitt Romney made it a mainstay of his campaign and ran ads on it.
So the fact that voters had bigger concerns isn’t grounds for a mistrial, but instead is a clarifying fact about their priorities. Last November, voters, having had years to digest the Obamacare wars, decided that the law isn’t the existential crisis that DeMint, Cruz and their ilk do and also decided to rehire the fellow who instituted it. Oh, and among the 18 percent of voters who did name health care as their top priority, three-quarters voted for President Obama.
I suppose there is one positive to come out of DeMint’s op-ed. By arguing that elections don’t count when it comes to secondary issues, he’s implicitly saying that elections do have consequences in regard to the top issue. That being the case, I look forward to DeMint and the Heritage Foundation graciously ending their opposition to President Obama’s economic agenda.
By: Robert Schlesinger, U. S. News and World Report, October 18, 2013
“The Do Nothing House Of Boehner”: Even Before the Shutdown, House Republicans Couldn’t Get Anything Done
For House Republicans, shutting down government has one distinct upside: It obscures how hapless the party has become at the basic work of governing the country.
In the months before they turned out the lights in Washington, House Republicans were in disarray. Hardliners were threatening Speaker John Boehner’s job over immigration reform. Moderate Republicans were balking the spending cuts that would actually be required to implement Paul Ryan’s budget. Trying to get something – anything – accomplished, GOP leaders went on a fishing expedition for Democratic votes on the Farm Bill. And when that effort collapsed, even the fallback position – intended to unite conservatives – ended up sparking a feud between House extremists and even extreme outside groups like the Heritage Foundation.
Here, a recap of the chaos that reigned in the House of Boehner:
Immigration Reform
In June, the Senate passed a bipartisan bill for comprehensive immigration reform that includes a “path to citizenship” for undocumented workers. It is clear that, were it put to a vote in the House, the reform would pass – with a majority of Democratic votes and a small bloc of Republicans.
These days, House conservatives fetishise the “Hastert Rule” – which is not actually a rule but an often-respected convention that only bills supported by a majority of the Republican conference receive a vote on the floor. Throughout this Congress, however, Boehner has used big, bipartisan votes in the Senate as a get-out-of-Hastert-free-card. Over the objection of a strong majority of GOP members, Boehner steered passage of the Senate’s Fiscal Cliff compromise, the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act and $50 billion in Hurricane Sandy relief.
Anti-immigration hardliners in the House are determined that the Senate immigration bill, adopted on a vote of 68-to-38 in the upper chamber, not join this list. And they have threatened to topple Boehner if it does. This summer, Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) gathered more than 50 signatures to call a “special conference” on immigration. It was a show of force. The same conference procedure is all that’s required to force a new leadership election in the middle of a congress. Boehner got the message: The Speaker soon declared that under no circumstances would an immigration bill opposed by a majority of House Republicans reach the floor.
If King’s parliamentary threat was subtle, Dana Rohrabacher’s anything but. In June, the California Republican said that if Boehner broke the Hastert Rule on immigration “he should be removed as Speaker” for his “betrayal of the Republicans throughout the country.” Rep. Tim Salmon (R-Arizona) echoed that threat – and expanded it to the rest of the leadership team. “There’s a great unrest,” he said. “We’ve already had several pieces of legislation that have gone out of this place with majority Democrats and minority Republicans. There gets to be a proverbial straw that breaks the camel’s back. A lot of members in the conference,” he said, “would be frustrated to the point of seeking new leaders.”
Transportation Funding
The Paul Ryan budget has long been criticized as a fantasy document. Former Reagan budget director David Stockman, for one, slammed it in an interview with Rolling Stone for proposing “absurd rollbacks in discretionary spending” that House members “would never vote for, on a program-by-program basis.”
The fate of the Transportation Housing and Urban Development spending bill known as THUD proved Stockman’s point. Working to bring the austere spending caps required by Ryan’s budget to reality, the GOP bill slashed transportation funding by $4 billion. The proposal cut development block grants to cities nearly in half, and cut funding to highways, bridges and tunnels by some 15 percent.
THUD’s reception in the conference in July was onomatopoetic. For the House GOP’s small bloc of moderate and urban members, the cuts were simply too great to swallow. Facing a “bleak” vote count, leadership was forced to pull the bill.
House Appropriations chair Hal Rogers – an inveterate cigar puffer who runs one of the last smoke-filled back rooms in Washington – slammed his own conference. “With this action, the House has declined to proceed on the implementation of the very budget it adopted three months ago,” he said, adding: “A good number of members who had supported the Ryan budget ideals, when it came time to implement it with specific cuts, were unwilling to support it. They abandoned ship.”
The Farm Bill
The Farm Bill has long been a bastion of bipartisanship in the House. The same legislation funds subsidies for agribusiness as well as the nation’s food stamp program – uniting a strong rural/urban coalition from both parties.
In July, Republican leaders looked to Democrats for help passing a bipartisan bill, and believed they’d rounded up 40 votes – despite nearly $20 billion in cuts to food stamps that would have kicked nearly 2 million Americans out of the program.
The move angered House hardliners who were demanding nearly $40 billion be slashed from nutrition funding. And, in a bit of mischief, extremists who had no intention of supporting the final bill, began voting to lard it up with a slew of amendments – including provisions that would allow states to drug test recipients of food aid and that would require able-bodied food stamp recipients to work – despite an economy that’s not producing jobs.
The measures grew more and more extreme, and finally Democrats bolted en masse – leading to an embarrassing losing vote, 195-to-234, on the House floor. Nancy Pelosi called it “amateur hour.”
Regrouping, House Republicans resolved to pass a farm-only bill. Splitting the farm funding from food stamps had long been a goal of outside groups like the arch-conservative Heritage Foundation. And House conservatives appeared confident that their vote would leave them in the good graces of the group’s much-feared elections scorecard.
But the reason that Heritage advocated the split was to break what Heritage Action CEO Mike Needham calls “the unholy alliance between Republicans from square states and urban Democrats” who vote for the joint bill, which Heritage considers a “bad pile of policy.”
Instead of applying their avowed small-government principles to their new, agriculture-only farm bill, House Republicans actually made it worse. In the failed bipartisan bill, lawmakers were going to create a new price floor for farmers – meaning that if crop prices fall from their historically high prices, taxpayers would be on the hook to make up the difference. In the bipartisan bill, this provision would last only five years. In the Republicans-only bill, it never expired. “It was the same bad farm bill we’d just been against,” says Needham, “but worse because it is permanent law. And we were still opposed to it.”
This was not the message that House hardliners wanted to hear. “We went into battle thinking they were on our side,” South Carolina Republican Mick Mulvaney fumed to reporters, “and we find out they’re shooting at us.”
Outraged that hardliners were being called to account on their own wasteful Washington spending, the chairman of the caucus of the most conservative members in the House, the Republican Study Committee, barred Heritage from the group’s weekly meetings – which Heritage had attended since the early 1970s.
“Some members,” says Needham, “were very, very upset at us over our opposition to farm pork.”
By: Tim Dickinson, Rolling Stone Magazine, October 8, 2013
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