“Pre-Racial Society”: 5 Policies That Republicans Loved (Until Obama Did, Too)
On Friday, Texas senator and likely 2016 presidential candidate Ted Cruz (R-TX) took some heat when Mother Jones reported that the right-wing Republican once offered a resolute defense of the 2009 stimulus law that he now derides as an archetypal government overreach. As a private-practice lawyer representing the Texas Retired Teachers Association, Cruz declared that stimulus money “will directly impact the [Texas] economy…and will directly further the greater purpose of economic recovery for America.” But today, he considers the law to be a failure.
Cruz is far from the first Republican to change his mind on an issue championed by the White House. Here are five policies that high-profile Republicans loved — until President Obama came along.
Obamacare
Since before it even became law, Republicans have decried the Affordable Care Act as a job-killing, freedom-crushing abomination. But the right wasn’t always so vehemently opposed to the law’s underlying ideas, like the health care exchanges, the individual mandate, and Medicaid expansion. In fact, they were developed by the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank, and favored by many Republican politicians.
As recently as 2008, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney considered his health care law — which was largely the inspiration for Obama’s — to be “the ultimate conservative plan,” and a “model” for the rest of the nation. But with Obama in the White House, that didn’t last.
Common Core
Today, Republicans widely agree that the Common Core education standards are a hostile, oppressive government takeover of the education system. Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal has compared Common Core to “centralized planning” in the Soviet Union. Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) derides it as “the Obamacare of education.” Senator Cruz has vowed to repeal it (even though it’s not a law passed by Congress). State Representative Charles Van Zant (R-FL) warns that it will “attract every one of your children to become as homosexual as they possibly can.”
But before Republicans began associating the new educational guidelines with the Obama administration (and, by extension, gay communism), they were quite fond of them. After all, Common Core takes after George W. Bush’s education policy, was introduced by the bipartisan National Governors Association, and at one point was adopted by 46 states. Even the aforementioned Jindal, now a leader of the anti-Common Core push, once defended it by promising that his state would not “move one inch off more rigorous and higher standards for our kids.”
Cap And Trade
Before Barack Obama became president, public officials broadly agreed that climate change was a real problem that required a serious policy response. Newt Gingrich even sat on a couch with Nancy Pelosi to talk about it( http://youtu.be/qi6n_-wB154).
Many Republicans agreed that cap and trade, which was developed by a “strange alliance of free-market Republicans and renegade environmentalists,” was the solution that combined the most economic and environmental benefits. In fact, almost every Republican candidate in 2012 backed the plan — until they decided to run against Obama, at which point they reflexively turned against it.
Today, carbon limits remain unpopular on the right, where they are falsely considered to be a job-killing abomination.
Deficit Spending
When President Obama released his 2016 budget plan, congressional Republicans reacted as they often do to his proposals: by attacking it for failing to close the budget deficit.
“While Washington is still racking up debt, this budget doesn’t even try to balance the books,” House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy complained. “In fact, despite the best efforts of Republicans over the past four years to rein in spending and cut the deficit, this budget would erase all those gains over the 10-year budget horizon by increasing the deficit and adding even more to the debt. Our children and grandchildren can’t afford such recklessness.”
But back during the Bush administration, McCarthy and his fellow Republicans didn’t seem to mind budgets that never balanced; that’s why they voted for deficit-busting plans like the Bush tax cuts or the Iraq War, among many others.
Indeed, the Republican Party’s pre-Obama attitude towards balancing the budget can be best summed up by former vice president Dick Cheney: “Deficits don’t matter.” There’s a pretty good case that he was right — but don’t expect any Republican to make the argument while Obama is in the White House.
Immigration Reform
For years, many Republicans have agreed that the United States desperately needs to reform its immigration laws. In 2013, the Senate even passed a rare bipartisan bill which would strengthen border security and establish a pathway to citizenship for the millions of undocumented immigrants who are already in the country. In other words, it closely mirrored President Obama’s goals. And that became a major problem for many Republicans. For example, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) voted against the 2013 bill despite having supported similar measures in 1986 and 2006.
But no Republican illustrates President Obama’s effect on the GOP better than Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL). Rubio helped craft the 2013 bill in the first place, arguing that the issue is a question of human rights. But a year later, he had abandoned his plans — because “the Obama administration has ‘undermined’ negotiations by not defunding his signature health care law.”
By: Henry Decker, The National Memo, February 13, 2015
“Where Employees Are Treated With Contempt”: Obama Blasts Staples, And Reveals Larger Partisan Divide Over Workplace
Another big interview with President Obama came out today, this one from Buzzfeed, and this section, in which Obama slammed Staples for limiting employee hours, supposedly in response to Obamacare, is creating a bit of buzz:
BEN SMITH: If I can move on to the Affordable Care Act. We reported yesterday that the office supply store Staples is — I’m sure this is an issue you’ve heard about before — is telling its workers that it will fire them if they work more than 25 hours a week. A manager had told a worker we talked to that “Obama’s responsible for this policy,” and they’re putting these notices on the wall of their break room saying that. I wonder what you’d say to the CEO of Staples, Ronald Sargent, about that policy?
OBAMA: What I would say is that millions of people are benefiting from the Affordable Care Act. Satisfaction is high. The typical premium is less than 100 bucks.
SMITH: But this is a specific consequence…
OBAMA: No, I’m gonna answer the question. And that there is no reason for an employer who is not currently providing health care to their workers to discourage them from either getting health insurance on the job or being able to avail themselves of the Affordable Care Act. I haven’t looked at Staples stock lately or what the compensation of the CEO is, but I suspect that they could well afford to treat their workers favorably and give them some basic financial security, and if they can’t, then they should be willing to allow those workers to get the Affordable Care Act without cutting wages.
This is the same argument that I’ve made with respect to something like paid sick leave. We have 43 million Americans who, if they get sick or their child gets sick, are looking at either losing their paycheck or going to the job sick or leaving their child at home sick. It’s one thing when you’ve got a mom-and-pop store who can’t afford to provide paid sick leave or health insurance or minimum wage to workers — even though a large percentage of those small businesses do it because they know it’s the right thing to do — but when I hear large corporations that make billions of dollars in profits trying to blame our interest in providing health insurance as an excuse for cutting back workers’ wages, shame on them.
Obama obviously didn’t know any details of the Staples situation when he was asked the question, but Buzzfeed reported Monday that the company is becoming particularly aggressive in making sure its part-time workers don’t work more than 25 hours a week, now that an Affordable Care Act provision mandating that large companies offer health insurance to employees working over 30 hours is in effect. Staples says that the policy is years old and has nothing to do with health insurance; the employees Buzzfeed talked to say it’s being enforced with renewed vigor.
Regardless of those details, this is another example of the fundamental difference between the approach to workplace issues Obama is trying to move Democrats toward, and the ways that Republicans are pushing back. As I argued a few weeks ago when Obama raised the issue of paid sick leave — which the United States is alone among highly developed countries in not mandating — Republicans essentially want to help people get to the employer’s door, while Democrats want to go inside with the worker and help make the workplace more humane.
The Staples story illustrates the environment of so many contemporary American workplaces, where employees are treated with contempt and suspicion while being told how much they’re loved. The original Buzzfeed story contains a Staples memo threatening part-time employees with discipline up to termination if they clock in for more than 25 hours in a week. The memo ends with, “I appreciate and value you.” I’m sure that warmed the workers’ hearts.
There may be some part-time workers who find that in response to the ACA’s insurance mandate, their employers try to limit their hours in the way Staples is doing. That’s why Republicans want to change the mandate’s definition of full-time employment from 30 to 40 hours. But we should be clear about what would happen if Republicans got their way. Some number of people like those at Staples might be able to work a few more hours (though if Staples is telling the truth, it wouldn’t matter for their part-timers, because they’re adamant about keeping them below 25 hours regardless). But a much larger group — full-time hourly workers — would then be in danger of losing their health coverage.
Right now if a large company (remember, this provision only applies to large companies) wanted to cut a full-time employee’s hours so they wouldn’t have to offer her health insurance, they’d have to cut her all the way down from 40 to 29 hours, which in most cases just isn’t practical. But if the law’s definition of full-time work was 40 hours, they could cut her from 40 to 39 and be able to take away her health coverage, which would be a lot easier. One hopes that few companies would want to do that, and indeed, over nine out of ten large companies were already offering insurance to full-time workers even before the Affordable Care Act. But some would, and the number of employees at risk of losing their coverage would be much higher than it is under the current 30-hour definition.
The populist stance Obama is taking here is undoubtedly good politics; Republicans will try to say that they’re the ones on the side of the part-time workers, but voters generally understand that they’re always in favor of giving employers the power to treat employers however they wish. In any case, this kind of dispute is just one more reason why we should try to move away from a system where most people get insurance through their employers. If we did that, people wouldn’t have to rely on the generosity of their bosses, and we wouldn’t have to argue about who’s part-time and who’s full-time. And neither party has a particular stake in, or ideological commitment to, the employer-based insurance system; it’s an artifact of history. Moving beyond it would be a major change, and we all know by now that when it comes to their health coverage, people fear change. But it would be better for everybody.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Plum Line, The Washington Post, February 11, 2015
“Who Are These People”: ‘I Don’t Like The Idea Of Throwing People Off Their Health Insurance’
When it comes to the insanity surrounding the King v. Burwell case, we already have a pretty good sense of most of the relevant angles. We know who supports the ridiculous case and why, what happens if Republican justices go along with this dangerous nonsense, how many families will suffer and where, etc.
We don’t, however, know much about the specific plaintiffs themselves.
Remember, when challenging a federal law, it’s not enough for someone to get a lawyer, go to court, and demand the law be struck down. In the American system, plaintiffs need standing – litigants have to demonstrate that a law harms them in some direct way.
And so, in the painfully absurd King v. Burwell case, anti-healthcare lawyers went out and found four people willing to sue because they’re eligible under the Affordable Care Act for insurance subsidies. They’ve been largely overlooked, but given the possibility that this case will end access to medical care for millions of families, it seems like a good time to ask, “Who are these people who want to destroy the American health care system?”
Stephanie Mencimer reports today on all four of the plaintiffs, and it’s quite a collection of folks. For example, David King of King v. Burwell notoriety, “brought up Benghazi” when asked about the anti-healthcare lawsuit. Rose Luck believes President Obama may be the “anti-Christ” and was elected by “his Muslim people.” But a Virginia woman Brenda Levy stood out as especially significant.
What was more surprising, though, was that she said she didn’t recall exactly how she had been selected as a plaintiff in the case to begin with. “I don’t know how I got on this case. I haven’t done a single thing legally. I’m gonna have to ask them how they found me,” she told me. She thought lawyers involved with the case may have contacted her at some point and she had decided to “help ‘em out.” […]
When I asked her if she realized that her lawsuit could potentially wipe out health coverage for millions, she looked befuddled. “I don’t want things to be more difficult for people,” she said. “I don’t like the idea of throwing people off their health insurance.”
Her case, whether Levy realizes it or not, exists to throw people off their health insurance.
She added that she intends to go to D.C. for the Supreme Court’s oral arguments “It’s an adventure,” Levy said. “Like going to Paris!”
Complicating matters further, three of the four plaintiffs are finding their standing suddenly facing new scrutiny. The Wall Street Journal reported late Friday that King “appears to qualify for veterans’ medical coverage, raising questions about his ability to challenge the law.”
The plaintiffs have persuaded courts to hear their case on the grounds that the subsidies allegedly harm them by subjecting them to the law’s requirement to carry insurance or pay a penalty. Without the subsidies, insurance would be too expensive for them, they contend, thus making them exempt from having to pay the fine for lacking insurance.
But Mr. King could avoid paying that fine or any insurance premiums because, according to him and his attorneys, he served in the Army in Vietnam. That qualifies him for medical coverage with no premiums through the Department of Veterans Affairs, benefits and legal experts say. In an interview at his home here, Mr. King said he had been to a VA medical center and had a VA identification card, which typically serves as proof of VA-care enrollment.
Legal experts say the fact that Mr. King could avoid paying the penalty for lacking insurance by enrolling in VA coverage undermines his legal right to bring the case, known as “standing.” The wife of a second plaintiff has described her husband on social media as being a Vietnam veteran. The government previously questioned the standing of a third plaintiff on the grounds that her income may exempt her from paying the penalty for lacking insurance, but a lower court didn’t address the issue.
Levy, the one who doesn’t want to throw people off their health insurance despite her role as a plaintiff in this case, will qualify for Medicare this June – which would remove her from the ACA coverage system anyway.
These fresh details reinforce the impression that the entire King v. Burwell case seems like a transparent scam, and as the WSJ added, the standing issues “could create skepticism about the strength of the challengers’ case and highlight the difficulty of finding plaintiffs to show the health law’s subsidies harm Americans.”
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, February 9, 2015
“An Unexploded Ordnance”: Why Republicans Secretly Hope The Supreme Court Will Save Obamacare
Because a Supreme Court decision for plaintiffs in King v. Burwell would impose extreme hardship on Affordable Care Act beneficiaries in 34 states and leave President Obama’s signature achievement in a frightening state of limbo, the law’s supporters are united in opposition to such a ruling.
And for the same reason, most analyses of the consequences of an adverse King decision have centered around the practical nightmare the ruling would create: How would states react? Congress? Insurance companies and providers? Obama himself? Will the pressure to fix the problem grow severe enough to force Republicans into surrender or to cut a reasonable deal?
These are important questions. But individually and combined, they hint at a premise that the aftermath of an adverse King ruling will exclusively effect, and be driven by, existing stakeholders. They neglect that the case itself, which will be decided in late June, is an unexploded ordnance lying in the middle of the 2016 presidential campaign field. An adverse King ruling wouldn’t just introduce familiar, crisis-driven legislative politics. It would likely become the defining issue of the Republican primary and general election. It would leave Republicans strategically and substantively divided over how to contain the fallout. And it would transform Obamacare as an issue from a modest liability for the Democratic candidate, into a factor that unifies the entire party against Republicans and the Supreme Court.
Because movement conservatives have signed on enthusiastically to the arguments of the King case, they convey the impression that the right is poised and eager for the Court to do their bidding. But activists and elected officials have different imperatives, and if you immerse yourself in the Republican Party’s posture toward this case—its public attestations, blind quotes, and conspicuous silences—a much more nuanced picture emerges. If the Court grants Republicans a “victory,” many actual Republicans won’t consider it a victory at all, and the competing concerns of anti-Obamacare zealots, industry-friendly pols, swing state incumbents, governors, and presidential candidates will break out into the open.
Democrats would obviously rather win than lose this case, and Republicans vice versa. But the truth is, as one anonymous GOP congressional health care aide conveyed to TPM’s Sahil Kapur, “In fact: King wins, they [the Obama administration and Democrats] hold a lot of high cards. And we hold what?”
That’s just one anonymous aide. But a lot of Republicans are privately “joking” that they’d be happier losing this case than winning.
Some Republican insurance commissioners take a dim view of the King case publicly. Others have communicated their squeamishness by keeping their heads down.
States on both side of the issue have filed briefs with the Supreme Court. But only six red states—Oklahoma, Alabama, Georgia, Nebraska, South Carolina, and West Virginia—joined a brief on behalf of the petitioners. Conspicuously missing are deeply conservative states like Texas, with large beneficiary pools, or any swing states under GOP control. Republican senators from many of those states—including Wisconsin, Ohio, and Florida—are in cycle in 2016.
By contrast, the following states have signed on to a brief supporting the government: Virginia, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, California, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, Mississippi, New Hampshire, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington, and the District of Columbia. Many of these are healthcare.gov states, and thus have a direct stake in the outcome.
The outcry for a fix will be broad, sustained, and lockstep, but it will meet wildly different audiences. Everyone in the GOP primary field will face extensive pressure to treat an adverse decision as an opportunity to get rid of the law altogether, but some of them will be governors or former governors who won’t be as amenable to using constituent suffering to leverage an unrealistic political goal. Republican Senate candidates from the above-mentioned Wisconsin, Ohio, and Florida, but also from Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Illinois and elsewhere, will quickly see their political fortunes become entwined with the cause of fixing Obamacare.
As chaos grows, it will be tempting for these Republicans to claim that they and the broader right bear no culpability. Obama and Obamacare did this to them. But that message won’t wash outside of precincts where antipathy to the president already runs extremely deep. Elsewhere it’ll be drowned out by a simple but forceful argument, promulgated by people with much larger megaphones—and by the fact that everything was basically OK until five Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices intervened. Unlike Republicans, the team of organizers, lawyers, and political operatives who have banded together to save the ACA have adopted a strategy that precludes them from discussing their political contingency planning. But it stands to reason that Obama and Clinton would both lay the damage at the feet of those justices, and the party on whose behalf they had acted. The ruling would create a hydra of loyal but politically disengaged Obama supporters, consumer groups, health care providers, and other actors, none of whom will be satisfied with Republican excuse-making and inaction.
That returns us to the related question of whether Republicans would respond to the pressure by betraying the conservative base. Would they fix the law? Or perhaps patch it temporarily? Generally speaking, Republicans only break faith in this way when persisting would invite unsurvivable political damage. The various debt limit and government shutdown fights of the Obama years are the most similar precedents. But there are others. In recent years, Republicans proved they were willing to allow extended unemployment benefits to lapse, and the payroll tax holiday to expire. By contrast, they also revealed that they preferred to allow taxes on top earners to increase rather than explain to the broader public why they allowed taxes to increase up and down the income ladder.
In Arkansas, a now-retired Democrat expanded the state’s Medicaid program dramatically. The GOP-controlled legislature has since balked at multiple opportunities to rescind the expansion—even as its majority grew and a Republican moved into the governor’s mansion this year.
Which is the long way of saying that gaming this out is tough. But the question will be whether a ruling for King plaintiffs puts Republicans on their heels briefly, or whether it dominates campaign politics through November 2016.
By: Brian Beutler, The New Republic, February 9, 2015
“King v. Burwell And Jindal’s Real Leverage”: Interfering With The Signals Other Republicans Are Trying To Send To The Supreme Court
Well, fate may have given Bobby Jindal his heart’s desire: a way to exert real leverage on the GOP via his aborning presidential campaign.
He sure needed some help. His efforts to be a holier-than-anyone ally of the Christian Right were probably doomed to failure against competition with the credentials of Mike Huckabee, Ted Cruz, Ben Carson and Rick Perry. And his record in Louisiana–increasingly criticized by Republicans as well as Democrats–is becoming a real millstone.
But thanks to a proposal on health care he first tossed into the mix last spring, Jindal is well-positioned to argue against any Obamacare “replacement” that relies on the basic structure of the Affordable Care Act, or that incorporates its budgetary assumptions, or that can be said to “compete” with the satanic instrument of socialized medicine by treating people well.
The Washington Examiner‘s Philip Klein thinks this is potentially a very big, and not necessarily (for Republicans) very good deal:
Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal has laid down a marker on conservative alternatives to President Obama’s healthcare law that could shape the 2016 Republican presidential race — even if he doesn’t win.
On Tuesday, Jindal wrote a letter to Congress, putting members on notice: “(C)onservatives need to focus on truly conservative health reforms — and not merely a slightly-less-liberal plan.”
He followed this up with a speech in Washington, D.C., where he took a swipe at Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio.
“If the whole point of this election was simply to give John Boehner and Mitch McConnell nicer offices, let’s give them back,” Jindal said, as reported by my Washington Examiner colleague Jason Russell. “What is the point of having a Republican Party if it’s only going to become a second liberal party?….”
One Republican alternative plan, first unveiled last year but re-introduced for this Congress on Thursday by Sens. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, Richard Burr, R-N.C., and Rep. Fred Upton, R-Mich., does lean on the current Obamacare baseline. And it includes a tax increase on employer-based health insurance that helps finance generous subsidies for low-income Americans to purchase coverage.
But Republicans have another option. They could wipe out Obamacare completely, return tax and spending levels to where they would have been if the law had never passed, and build a free market alternative from scratch. This is the approach that Jindal favors and that he took when he released his own healthcare plan last year.
Going this route would mean that Republicans couldn’t spend much on subsidizing health coverage, opening them up to attacks that they’re stripping away Obamacare without offering a sufficient life raft for its beneficiaries. Jindal argues that Republicans shouldn’t fall into the trap of competing with Democrats on coverage totals and that they should instead focus on reducing costs.
Whatever the policy debate, politically speaking, it’s clear to see how Jindal’s position could influence other candidates in the Republican presidential primary. Though Jindal hasn’t been among the leaders in early presidential polls, he’s still viewed as an important policy voice among conservatives, especially on healthcare.
But there’s an even more immediate way Bobby’s attacks on any Obamacare replacement plan that seeks to “compete” with Democratic beneficence could cause problems: by interfering with the signals other Republicans are trying to send to the Supreme Court that they can avoid chaos if the Court knocks out the ACA’s subsidies in states using a federally created exchange. As reformicon Ramesh Ponnuru notes in a column criticizing Jindal’s proposal, it doesn’t just fail to avoid disruption of insurance markets and coverage–it promises a whole lot of it. And if other presidential wannabes pick up on his line of attack, the fiction that Republicans can be expected to behave responsibly in the aftermath of a shocking Supreme Court decision would vanish once and for all.
Yeah, in some respects it would be nice if Bobby just went back to his Muslim-bashing.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Political Animal, The Washington Monthly, February 6, 2015
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 