A Debate Confrontation Would Be Enlightening”: Walker, Kasich And The GOP’s Midwest Bracket
Republicans won’t win the presidency in 2016 without making inroads in the Midwest. Happily for the GOP, two Midwestern governors are running for their party’s nomination.
Both won reelection in 2014. The one from the state with more electoral votes won with 64 percent of the vote with wide appeal to Democrats and independents. The one from the smaller state got just 52 percent of the vote after a divisive campaign.
The former fought to have his state accept the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion. He made his case on moral grounds, arguing that at heaven’s door, Saint Peter is “probably not going to ask you much about what you did about keeping government small. But he is going to ask you what you did for the poor.”
The latter adamantly opposed expanding Medicaid under the ACA, and his speeches are compendiums of every right-wing bromide party activists demand. “We need a president who — on the first day in office — will call on Congress to pass a full repeal of Obamacare,” this hopeful declared when he announced his candidacy last week. “Next, we need to rein in the federal government’s out-of-control regulations that are like a wet blanket on the economy.” And on he went.
Now: Guess which one is seen as a top contender, and which is dismissed as the darkest of dark horses? Which one was running third behind only Jeb Bush and Donald Trump in the Real Clear Politics poll average as of Sunday, and which one was in 12th place with all of 1.5 percent?
You have no doubt figured out that I’m talking about John Kasich of Ohio, who is expected to announce his candidacy on Tuesday, and Scott Walker of Wisconsin. It’s telling about the contemporary Republican party: Kasich would probably be the better bet in the general election but barely registers in the surveys, while Walker has the better chance of winning the nomination.
It’s preposterous to see Kasich as anything but a conservative. He was a drill sergeant for Newt Gingrich’s Republican Revolution in the 1990s. When Kasich was chairman of the House Budget Committee, “60 Minutes” produced a segment about him titled “The Axman Cometh.” As governor, Kasich pushed big tax cuts that included repealing the estate tax. (The Republican obsession with protecting large fortunes is beyond me.) He also took on the unions with what was known as Senate Bill 5 to end collective bargaining for public employees.
And it’s on the labor question that the Kasich and Walker stories diverge, in large part because of the accident of state election laws. In Ohio, the unions could put Bill 5 directly to the voters, and they repealed it in 2011 by a 61-percent-to-39-percent landslide. A chastened Kasich recalibrated.
Walker is best known for a very similar attack on public employee unions, but Wisconsin had no provision for a comparable referendum. The unions felt they had no choice but to organize a recall of Walker. Voters typically don’t take well to recalls that aren’t a reaction to outright skullduggery and corruption. Walker prevailed, and he’s been bragging about busting unions and surviving ever since. Conservatives love him for it.
Kasich, by contrast, reached out to his previous enemies. When he was endorsed by the Carpenters Union last year, Kasich said: “For too long, there’s been a disconnect between people like me and organized labor.” Walker is as likely to say something like this as he is to sing a rousing chorus of “Solidarity Forever.”
When Kasich talks about his time as governor, as he did to my Post colleague Michael Gerson last year, the things he brags about include his work on autism, mental illness and drug addiction. He notes — the Almighty again — that all his constituents “are made in the image of God.”
You can tell Kasich knows he will have to run a rebel’s campaign because he has hired rebellious Republican consultants, including John Weaver, John McCain’s campaign strategist who feuded famously with Karl Rove, and Fred Davis, who specializes in offbeat (and sometimes controversial) political commercials.
Kasich’s poll standing might well exclude him from one or more of the early debates. That would be a shame. Perhaps there should be a Midwest debate bracket. A Kasich-Walker confrontation would be especially enlightening.
“I have a little bit of a different message here,” Kasich said at a Republican Governors Association meeting last year. Indeed he does. It’s probably why he can’t win. It’s also why his party needs to listen.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, July 19, 2015
“Conservatives Lost Outright”: John Roberts, Liberal Hero; How The Chief Justice Destroyed The Conservative Case Against ObamaCare
Since ObamaCare passed in 2010, Republicans have been searching desperately for a way to destroy the law through legal trickery (or as they call it, “judicial activism”), since they don’t have the means to kill it through legislation. In 2012, with the Supreme Court decision NFIB v. Sebelius, they got a partial victory, with the court badly wounding the law’s Medicaid expansion but leaving the rest unharmed.
In the case decided on Thursday, King v. Burwell, conservatives sought to cripple the insurance markets in states that had not set up their own health care exchanges. They did this by advancing a spurious reading of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) that would forbid insurance subsidies from flowing through the federal exchange website, thus devastating the private insurance markets in those states.
This time, conservatives lost outright. Chief Justice John Roberts, joined by Justice Anthony Kennedy and the four liberals on the bench, wrote the opinion — and it delivers a stark rebuke to the conservatives who have been fumbling around for an alternative to ObamaCare since 2010. “Repeal and replace” has been their mantra, but they never even got close to uniting around an actual replacement policy. Today, Roberts shows us why: It’s impossible.
King focused on a single phrase in the ACA, “established by the State,” which, taken out of all legal and policy context, could be construed to restrict subsidies to the state exchanges only. Because the Chevron doctrine requires that, in case of ambiguous wording, the implementing agencies get to decide how to interpret a law (in this case the IRS), it was necessary to construct an alternate history of the ACA. In this version, Congress meant to restrict subsidies to the state exchanges, to coerce states into creating one.
Liberals carefully explained that no, that was a completely insane version of ObamaCare’s history. Health care policy reporters, the staffers who drafted the law, and members of Congress who voted for it all swore up and down that this had never even been seriously discussed, let alone that it was their intention. State-level politicians, who are responsible for deciding whether to create their own exchanges, reported they had never heard of such a threat. Why would Congress create a mechanism to force states to do something, and then never mention it?
Roberts’ opinion delivers total victory to the liberal case. First, he examines the statute and finds that, in fact, it is not ambiguous — the government’s interpretation is correct. He writes that, considered in context, the plaintiff’s reading of “established by the State” would make great swathes of the rest of the law totally nonsensical. The ACA clearly states that all exchanges are to provide qualified plans to qualified people, which would be impossible for the federal exchange without subsidies. Moreover, why would the law provide for a creation of a federal exchange at all, if nobody can actually use it?
Second, and more fundamentally, Roberts finds that the plaintiff’s reading of ACA is poles apart from the obvious policy intention of the law. He accurately describes ObamaCare’s three-pronged approach: guaranteed issue and community rating, requiring insurance companies to offer policies to everyone at a reasonable price; an individual mandate, so that healthy people will participate in the risk pool; and subsidies for people who can’t afford the insurance.
All three are necessary for ObamaCare to work, but the plaintiffs’ reading would eliminate two of the three prongs in states without their own exchange. Subsidies would go, and so would the individual mandate, because it doesn’t apply if people are spending more than 8 percent of their income on a policy. Roberts notes that this would likely cause an insurance death spiral in those states, as healthier people flee an increasingly expensive market, turning the ACA into a health insurance doomsday device. Indeed, just such a death spiral happened in several states before ObamaCare passed — which is partly why it included all three prongs. “Congress passed the Affordable Care Act to improve health insurance markets, not to destroy them,” he concludes.
That brings me to the “replacement” rhetoric. Roberts’ clear account of ObamaCare’s policy mechanism, and the damage that would be done should any of its main prongs be removed, deals a body blow to the conservative health care wonks who have been trying to cook up a replacement policy for the last five years — in particular, a plan without the unpopular individual mandate. But as Roberts plainly shows, that leads straight to disaster.
It’s an implicit concession that ObamaCare is the most conservative possible policy that could get even close to universal coverage — if five years of Republican policy failure weren’t enough evidence.
By: Ryan Cooper, The Week, June 25, 2015
“Products Of Today’s Republican Party”: The Only Way GOP Governors Can Run For President Is By Shafting Their Own States
Given that there are currently 31 Republican governors, it’s natural that more than a few of them would be both successful enough and ambitious enough to run for president. Two more governors are about to formally enter the race: Louisiana’s Bobby Jindal will announce his candidacy today, and New Jersey’s Chris Christie is reportedly ready to join as early as next week. There will end up being as many as four current governors in the race (those two, plus Scott Walker and John Kasich), plus four former governors (Jeb Bush, Rick Perry, Mike Huckabee, George Pataki).
Let’s put the former governors aside for the moment. There’s something curious going on with the sitting governors: three of them are extremely unpopular at home, and the fourth may be the one who provides the explanation why.
Let’s start with the new entrants. Bobby Jindal has long been regarded as a future presidential candidate, but his current profile makes you wonder why he’s bothering to run for president. It’s not just that he’s currently averaging 0.7 percent in presidential polls, putting him in 15th place. Jindal just got through a budget crisis with a ridiculous tax gimmick that made him an object of national ridicule, and nobody is arguing they need to emulate Louisiana’s record of success. One recent poll put his approval in the state at 31 percent.
Chris Christie isn’t doing any better. His approval is now at 30 percent, and it’s pretty clear his tough-guy schtick wore thin a while ago, even in New Jersey (let alone in places like Iowa).
Then there’s Scott Walker, who’s in the first tier of presidential candidates, but has the approval of only 41 percent of Wisconsinites. As the New York Times describes today, he’s in a battle with Republicans in the state legislature:
Leaders of Mr. Walker’s party, which controls the Legislature, are balking at his demands for the state’s budget. Critics say the governor’s spending blueprint is aimed more at appealing to conservatives in early-voting states like Iowa than doing what is best for Wisconsin.
Lawmakers are stymied over how to pay for road and bridge repairs without raising taxes or fees, which Mr. Walker has ruled out.
The governor’s fellow Republicans rejected his proposal to borrow $1.3 billion for the roadwork, arguing that adding to the state’s debt is irresponsible.
And therein lies part of the problem: appealing to the GOP primary electorate means, among other things, never raising taxes, even when refusing to do so initiates a budget crisis. It also means rejecting the Affordable Care Act’s expansion of Medicaid, which shoots your state in the foot for the purpose of ideological anti-Obama purity.
In many ways, Walker has governed from the outset like someone thinking about a presidential primary. He set out to destroy the state’s public employee unions, and now wants to slash hundreds of millions of dollars from the University of Wisconsin budget, not to mention going after tenure (take that, elitists!), which would make it much harder to recruit quality faculty to the state’s beloved university. Those kinds of moves guarantee that he’ll always be a divisive governor, cheering members of his own party and alienating those in the opposing party.
But that’s how you need to govern if you’re going to be able to mount a presidential campaign that isn’t consumed by explaining your heresies. Which brings us to Ohio governor John Kasich, who not only accepted the Medicaid expansion, he invoked a religious imperative to explain his decision to do so. “I don’t know about you, lady,” he told a GOP donor who criticized him for it, “but when I get to the pearly gates, I’m going to have an answer for what I’ve done for the poor.”
Chris Christie accepted the Medicaid expansion too, but at least he can argue that he did so under pressure from a Democratic legislature. And he has attempted to make up for his sin of allowing 400,000 low-income people to get health insurance by proposing to cut Social Security. But Kasich could find himself explaining over and over that he’s a real conservative despite his accommodation to the ACA.
Kasich might try this argument: If this was so terrible, how come I’m the only governor in this race with approval ratings at home over 50 percent?
The problem is that GOP primary voters will probably reply, Who cares? As far as they’re concerned, “success” isn’t defined by whether your constituents are happy with the job you’ve done. Practical achievements like improving the health of your state or even fostering strong job creation are all well and good, but they have to take a back seat to ideological achievements like crushing a labor union, fighting Obamacare, or resisting tax increases.
Governors who run for president are happy to tell you that being a governor is the best preparation for being president, and they have a point. While senators can get away with just making self-aggrandizing speeches without actually accomplishing anything (see Cruz, Ted), governors have no choice but to make similar kinds of decisions to the ones presidents make. They have to set priorities, formulate budgets, and work with a legislature, not to mention the fact that most governors eventually face some kind of crisis that tests their ability to act in trying circumstances. While senators can say “I sponsored some nice bills,” governors have lengthier records to run on.
But it may be no accident that most of the Republican governors currently running for president aren’t popular at home. They’re products of today’s Republican Party, where unflagging commitment to conservative doctrine is what counts as success.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Plum Line Blog, The Washington Post, June 24, 2015
“GOP Failure Theater”: How Conservatives Convinced Themselves That Another ObamaCare Loss Is Just Prelude To Greater Victory
There’s a ritual carried out by losing candidates on election night, in which they come before their supporters gathered in a hotel ballroom, look out at all the long faces and tired eyes, and say, “This has been a noble crusade. And though we may have lost today, the battle for the things we believe in goes on. I’ll be there fighting for that vision, and I hope you’ll be there with me.” Everyone applauds, and then they all go home.
Now that the Supreme Court has ruled against what was simultaneously the most absurd and the most threatening challenge to the Affordable Care Act, conservatives are enacting something similar to that election night ritual. In private, many are expressing relief, since there was widespread worry that if the King v. Burwell lawsuit had succeeded, they would have been responsible for at least six million Americans losing insurance subsidies, and quite appropriately gotten the blame for it. But what are they saying publicly?
The politicians are finding virtue in consistency; their line is that this changes nothing.
“Today’s ruling won’t change ObamaCare’s multitude of broken promises,” said Mitch McConnell.
“ObamaCare is fundamentally broken,” said John Boehner. “Today’s ruling doesn’t change that fact.”
“Today’s ruling makes it clear that if we want to fix our broken healthcare system, then we will need to elect a Republican president,” said RNC chair Reince Priebus, who also made the fascinating observation that a Hillary Clinton presidency would be terrible for America.
Naturally, conservatives are disgusted with Chief Justice Roberts, whom they regard as an unreliable ally, unlike Justices Scalia, Thomas, and Alito. Quin Hillyer of the National Review summed up their feelings: “He is a disgrace. That is all.” But as far as conservative commentators are concerned, the perfidy extends beyond the Supreme Court to the cowards and quislings in Congress. And so, in a particularly optimistic strain of thought, they’re arguing that the decision is really an excellent outcome.
That’s because it has saved the right from another round of what blogger Allahpundit calls “GOP failure theater,” in which Republicans in Congress “make a pretense of putting up a fight in hopes that conservative voters will be impressed and to obtain some sort of mostly meaningless concession to wave at them when the inevitable, and predestined, cave finally happens.”
Similarly, Ben Domenech argues that the decision is a good thing for conservatives, because now Republican candidates will have to come up with really good health care plans to enact when they take back the White House: “Thus, I think the ruling today probably increases the likelihood of repealing ObamaCare in 2017 by a not insignificant margin.” On a similar note, Bill Kristol tweeted, “Repeal of ObamaCare and replacement with limited-government alternative in 2017 will be one of modern conservatism’s finest hours.”
That presumes that the Republican nominee will win, of course. But it also presumes that he would have the ability and willingness to repeal the ACA upon taking office.
There’s no question that the Republican presidential candidates will continue to express their eagerness to do so, at least until we get to the general election. Though none of them has anything resembling a fully-formed plan for the “replace” part of “repeal and replace” that Republicans have been advocating for years, they still have to pay lip service to the idea that the consensus conservative health care plan is coming any day now. When you’ve spent the last five years arguing that this law is a poison-tipped dagger plunging into liberty’s heart, you can’t just say, “Eh, looks like we’ll live with it,” no matter what the practical reality might be.
The practical reality is that whatever public opinion may be about this large abstraction called “ObamaCare,” the law is delivering particular benefits of which Americans are quite fond and that they don’t want to lose. Taking away those subsidies through a lawsuit would have been a political disaster for Republicans, and that would have affected only a portion of the public. What if Republicans were to take away subsidies from people in all 50 states, and toss millions more off Medicaid, and make it so that now insurance companies can deny you coverage because of a pre-existing condition again? That’s what repealing the ACA would mean. Republicans may not be able to admit it, as they promise that their phantom alternative plan would take care of all that, but they know that just undoing the ACA would be a disaster.
They can’t acknowledge that fact, because they have a constituency that has been fed heaping plates of apocalyptic rhetoric on this issue ever since the ACA became law. Those Republican base voters need to be told that, though they’ve suffered a loss, the fight is not over. As Ted Kennedy said 35 years ago in what may be the prototypical example of that losing candidate’s speech to his dismayed supporters, “the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.”
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributing Writer, The Week, June 25, 2015
“Hooray For Obamacare”: The Great Conservative Nightmare Has Come True, And It’s A Beautiful Thing
Was I on the edge of my seat, waiting for the Supreme Court decision on Obamacare subsidies? No — I was pacing the room, too nervous to sit, worried that the court would use one sloppily worded sentence to deprive millions of health insurance, condemn tens of thousands to financial ruin, and send thousands to premature death.
It didn’t. And that means that the big distractions — the teething problems of the website, the objectively ludicrous but nonetheless menacing attempts at legal sabotage — are behind us, and we can focus on the reality of health reform. The Affordable Care Act is now in its second year of full operation; how’s it doing?
The answer is, better than even many supporters realize.
Start with the act’s most basic purpose, to cover the previously uninsured. Opponents of the law insisted that it would actually reduce coverage; in reality, around 15 million Americans have gained insurance.
But isn’t that a very partial success, with millions still uncovered? Well, many of those still uninsured are in that position because their state governments have refused to let the federal government enroll them in Medicaid.
Beyond that, you need to realize that the law was never intended or expected to cover everyone. Undocumented immigrants aren’t eligible, and any system that doesn’t enroll people automatically will see some of the population fall through the cracks. Massachusetts has had guaranteed health coverage for almost a decade, but 5 percent of its nonelderly adult population remains uninsured.
Suppose we use 5 percent uninsured as a benchmark. How much progress have we made toward getting there? In states that have implemented the act in full and expanded Medicaid, data from the Urban Institute show the uninsured falling from more than 16 percent to just 7.5 percent — that is, in year two we’re already around 80 percent of the way there. Most of the way with the A.C.A.!
But how good is that coverage? Cheaper plans under the law do have relatively large deductibles and impose significant out-of-pocket costs. Still, the plans are vastly better than no coverage at all, or the bare-bones plans that the act made illegal. The newly insured have seen a sharp drop in health-related financial distress, and report a high degree of satisfaction with their coverage.
What about costs? In 2013 there were dire warnings about a looming “rate shock”; instead, premiums came in well below expectations. In 2014 the usual suspects declared that huge premium increases were looming for 2015; the actual rise was just 2 percent. There was another flurry of scare stories about rate hikes earlier this year, but as more information comes in it looks as if premium increases for 2016 will be bigger than for this year but still modest by historical standards — which means that premiums remain much lower than expected.
And there has also been a sharp slowdown in the growth of overall health spending, which is probably due in part to the cost-control measures, largely aimed at Medicare, that were also an important part of health reform.
What about economic side effects? One of the many, many Republican votes against Obamacare involved passing something called the Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act, and opponents have consistently warned that helping Americans afford health care would lead to economic doom. But there’s no job-killing in the data: The U.S. economy has added more than 240,000 jobs a month on average since Obamacare went into effect, its biggest gains since the 1990s.
Finally, what about claims that health reform would cause the budget deficit to explode? In reality, the deficit has continued to decline, and the Congressional Budget Office recently reaffirmed its conclusion that repealing Obamacare would increase, not reduce, the deficit.
Put all these things together, and what you have is a portrait of policy triumph — a law that, despite everything its opponents have done to undermine it, is achieving its goals, costing less than expected, and making the lives of millions of Americans better and more secure.
Now, you might wonder why a law that works so well and does so much good is the object of so much political venom — venom that is, by the way, on full display in Justice Antonin Scalia’s dissenting opinion, with its rants against “interpretive jiggery-pokery.” But what conservatives have always feared about health reform is the possibility that it might succeed, and in so doing remind voters that sometimes government action can improve ordinary Americans’ lives.
That’s why the right went all out to destroy the Clinton health plan in 1993, and tried to do the same to the Affordable Care Act. But Obamacare has survived, it’s here, and it’s working. The great conservative nightmare has come true. And it’s a beautiful thing.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, June 25, 2015
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 