“The Real Roots Of The Filibuster Crisis”: This Is About Whether Barack Obama Is Legitimately The President Of The United States
We’re about to have ourselves a little filibuster crisis, and the only surprising thing is that it took so long. We’ve now reached a point where Republicans no longer accept that Barack Obama has the right, as president of the United States, to fill judicial vacancies. Unlike in previous battles over judicial nominations, we’re not talking about the nominees’ qualifications or their ideological proclivities. It’s merely a question of the president’s constitutional privileges. Republicans don’t think he has them. This is only the latest feature of a long descent for the GOP away from considering any Democratic president—but particularly this one—as a legitimate holder of the office to which he was elected.
There has never been a president, at least in our lifetimes, whose legitimacy was so frequently questioned in both word and deed by the opposition party and its adherents. Even today, many Republicans, including some members of Congress, refuse to believe that Obama was born in the United States. Right after he was re-elected, 49 percent of Republicans told pollsters they thought ACORN had stolen the election for Obama, a decline of only 3 points from the number that said so after the 2008 election, despite the fact that in the interim, ACORN had gone out of business. Think about that for a moment. How many times have you heard conservatives say that the Affordable Care Act was “rammed through” Congress, as though a year of debate and endless hearings and negotiations, followed by votes in both houses, followed by the president’s signature, was somehow not a legitimate way to pass a law? In short, we’ve seen this again and again: it isn’t just that Republicans consider Obama wrong about policy questions or object to the substance of one or another of his actions, it’s as though they don’t quite accept that he’s the president, and everything he does carries for them the taint of illegitimacy.
If that’s where you’re coming from, it seems perfectly justifiable to upend the norms that have traditionally determined how things work in Washington. One of those norms is that while it’s common to fight against the judicial nominees of a president from the other party, you have to at least have a gripe about each of those nominees. But Republicans are no longer bothering with that. The current argument is about three vacancies on the D.C. Court of Appeals, widely understood as the second most important court in the system, because it deals with many cases concerning government’s powers (four of the nine current Supreme Court justices came there from the D.C. Circuit). Republicans argue that by attempting to fill those vacancies, Obama is engaged in an unconscionable act of “court-packing,” and besides, the D.C. Circuit doesn’t have enough work to do anyway, so the seats should just remain empty.
Until there’s a Republican president, of course! Though they haven’t said so explicitly, here’s a suggestion for Capitol Hill reporters: Next time you’re interviewing a Republican senator who says he’s filibustering these nominations because the D.C. Circuit doesn’t have enough work to do, ask him if he’s willing to make a pledge, right there and on the record, to filibuster any appointment the next Republican president makes to that court. See what he says.
Anyhow, Harry Reid is now threatening to eliminate the filibuster for judicial nominees altogether, something he can do with a simple majority vote. But he’ll need to get 50 of the 55 Senate Democrats to vote for it, and there’s a good deal of reluctance to do so, particularly since Democrats won’t be in the majority forever, and whenever they’re back in the minority they’ll want to have the filibuster for themselves. But according to recent reporting by Greg Sargent and others, Reid thinks he has the votes and is just about ready to pull the trigger if Republicans don’t relent on these three nominees.
But the threat of the “nuclear option” of eliminating the filibuster for nominees could be just a negotiating tactic. The outcome Democrats would probably most prefer is what happened the last time we went through this, in 2005. In that case the controversy was over a group of Bush appointees who were true radicals, none more so than Janice Rogers Brown, who calls the New Deal a “socialist revolution” and says things like, “In the heyday of liberal democracy, all roads lead to slavery.” That controversy ended with an agreement in which Bush got his nominees—Brown now sits on the D.C. Circuit—and Democrats promised to use the filibuster only in “extraordinary circumstances.” In other words, it was a complete win for the Republicans. The biggest difference between then and now is that Democrats never questioned whether Bush had the right to fill judicial vacancies; they had specific objections to particular nominees.
In the various flare-ups of the birther controversy, reporters would occasionally ask Republican members of Congress very basic questions, like “Do you think the President was born in the United States?” The answers were incredibly revealing. Some simply said yes, but others hemmed and hawed, saying things like “It’s not my responsibility to tell people what to think” or “I take him at his word,” as though there were still some doubt. It’s time they got asked the same kind of questions about this crisis. If you asked Republicans, “Does Barack Obama have the right to fill judicial vacancies?”, I honestly have no idea what they’d say. But it would be interesting to find out.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, November 20, 2013
“What Nonsense”: Blaming President Obama For Passing A “Partisan” Health-Care Bill?
Here’s one thing I absolutely cannot stand hearing: that President Obama is getting what he deserves now because he passed such a “partisan” health-care bill. The suggestion is truly beyond belief and, quite literally, totalitarian in spirit, in the way it flips the truth so perversely on its head, turning the perpetrated-upon into the perpetrator and the aggressor into the victim. As Obamacare flails, one hears the “partisan” line frequently these days on television and radio. More maddeningly still, the alleged liberals and fact-based reporters on various panels often permit it to go unchallenged. Let’s set the record straight.
Obama came into office trying to reach out to Republicans and their voters. Remember Pastor Rick Warren at the inaugural? Remember how the president met with pro-abortion rights and anti-abortion rights groups early on? (You may not, but he did.) He also tried to horse-trade with them on the stimulus. True, he would not compromise on a tax credit for low-wage workers that Republicans opposed. (Interesting to read this article in retrospect; Obama was trying to help here the later-famous 47 percent.) But he did offer movement on tax cuts, and the Senate did pass a Charles Grassley amendment about the alternative minimum tax. And, at the White House’s request, certain expenditures the White House thought would repel Republicans were stripped out in the hopes of winning GOP support. But that, of course, did not happen in any meaningful way.
In the late spring of 2009, Obama started talking health care. He sat down with Republicans over the summer. He invited a group of Republicans into his office and told them he’d put tort reform in the bill if it would get him Republican votes. They stared at him. Other administration officials met with Republicans a number of times to see if anything could be put in the bill to appease them. The answer was always no. Remember here that the Affordable Care Act is basically a Republican plan to begin with, as the individual mandate idea came from the Heritage Foundation. So you might have thought that some Republicans would be OK with that.
Outside the administration, Democrats in the Senate negotiated with Republicans for months. Those Democrats finally did decide, on August 17, that it was time to throw up their hands, and they reluctantly proceeded without Republicans. “Given hardening Republican opposition to Congressional health care proposals, Democrats now say they see little chance of the minority’s cooperation in approving any overhaul…” is how the Times opened its article on the matter. But it wasn’t for want of trying. Democrats tried, for ages.
Why did they stop trying? Maybe because of things like then-Sen. Jim DeMint’s vow July 9 to make health care Obama’s “Waterloo.” Or maybe Democrats took the hint July 16, when they heard Minority Leader Mitch McConnell say, “We’re doing everything we can to defeat it.” Or maybe it was July 22, when Orrin Hatch, once a reasonable conservative, walked out of the Senate negotiations and announced he would not back any bill. That was, of course, the summer of the Tea Party town hall madness.
It was obvious by then—really before, but certainly by the time of Hatch’s departure—that Republicans would never agree to anything about health-care reform. They would say Obama wouldn’t accept their ideas, and there would be about a half an iota of a smidgeon of truth in that protestation, but of course the reason Obama didn’t accept their ideas is that their ideas were far worse than what ended up in the bill. They put out a four-page set of broad principles in June 2009. Then they filled in some details, and the Congressional Budget Office went over it. Unsurprisingly, it was a joke. The CBO found that it would have increased the number of uninsured and raised premiums for millions. Oh, and get this: Under their plan, insurance companies could still have denied coverage to people with pre-existing conditions. Ending that is the main point of reform, and ending that is why reform is so hard.
So Republicans gave no support at all, by design, essentially from the beginning. And then they blame Obama for passing a “partisan” bill? It’s beyond Kafkaesque. It really is like an old communist secret-police trick: We will seize most of your farmland and then jail you for failing to live up to the production quotas.
And then they vote 40 times to repeal it. And then Kevin McCarthy, the No. 3 Republican in the House, goes on MSNBC on Thursday, and Chuck Todd asks him if the Republicans want the Affordable Care Act to fail, and he says: “Never.” Never! Can you imagine? Voting to repeal something 40 times is kind of an odd way for a group of people to express their desire to see it succeed.
At a moment when Obamacare is on the ropes, and in a country of people with memories shorter than Michele Bachmann’s future in public life, Republicans know that they can repeat such a dishonest talking point and get a fair percentage of Americans to believe Obama behaved like some raging partisan. The associated corollary point is that this was about his ego or some such nonsense.
Uh, no. Progressive-minded people have been wanting to pass universal health care in the United States for a century. Usually they were Democrats, although back in the day some were Republicans, including Teddy Roosevelt. It has been the major unmet policy goal of American liberalism for decades—not because Democrats want to overpower Republicans politically, but because Democrats want people to have access to health care. Republicans don’t. Since the policy goal makes utterly no sense to them, they assume everything is about politics. Obama wasn’t being “partisan.” He was fulfilling a long-held policy goal—and a central campaign promise, by the way. I thought we were supposed to like it when politicians keep their promises. But now that’s partisan, too, at least to people who see everything through partisan glasses.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, November 19, 2013
“Blaming Obamacare Is A Smokescreen”: Sorting Out The Real Reasons Why Insurers Cancel Health Insurance Policies
Now that President Obama has said it’s OK with him if insurance companies keep their policyholders in health plans that don’t meet the standards established by the Affordable Care Act, at least for another year, the big question is whether insurers will take him up on the offer.
The answer: it depends.
Some insurance executives will view the offer as one they can’t turn down. Even though Karen Ignagni, president of America’s Health Insurance Plans, the industry’s big PR and lobbying group, had nothing good to say about Obama’s proposal, keep in mind that she doesn’t run an insurance company. While industry executives look to her to comment on what politicians do, they make their own decisions when it comes to their companies’ bottom lines.
Here’s what Ignagni was quoted as saying in a FOX News story Friday:
“The only reason consumers are getting notices about their current coverage changing is because the ACA (Affordable Care Act) requires all polices to cover a broad range of benefits that go beyond what many people choose to purchase today.”
Not so fast. There are other reasons some folks are being told they’ll have to change health plans next year. Many of them are having to switch plans not because of Obamacare but because their insurance companies want to move them into policies with higher profit margins.
Insurance companies have been sending similar notices to their customers for years. My son Alex — and thousands of other customers of a Blue Cross plan in Pennsylvania — got such a notice four years ago, months before Congress passed the health reform law.
Why? The insurer wanted to move those policyholders out of a plan with a reasonable $500 annual deductible and into one with a deductible ten times that amount. To accomplish that, Blue Cross notified its policyholders that their health plan would not be available in 2010. Their options were to switch to the high-deductible policy, which would still cost them a couple of dollars more each month, or to another plan with that reasonable $500 deductible. If they chose the latter, their monthly premiums would increase 65 percent.
Notices like the one Alex got have provided a mechanism for insurers to implement a years-long industry strategy of shifting more and more of the cost of medical care to their policyholders. And that strategy will continue until every last one of us is in a high-deductible plan.
Some of you are likely old enough to remember the days before managed care when almost all Americans with private health insurance were in indemnity plans. In an old-fashioned indemnity plan, the insurer didn’t constrain us in a limited network of doctors and hospitals and didn’t call the shots about whether a knee replacement or liver transplant your doctor recommended was really necessary.
Those days are long gone. Everybody eventually got notices that those plans were being discontinued. They were replaced by HMOs and PPOs with limited provider networks and armies of utilization review nurses and medical directors who decided if you would get coverage for your new knee or new liver.
In most cases, it was our employers who killed off the indemnity plans in favor of managed care. But eventually, HMOs and PPOs also fell out of favor. The managed care backlash of the late 1990s forced insurers to abandon some of their utilization review practices and to add more doctors and hospitals to their skinny networks. That led to shrinking profit margins — and to the latest silver bullet from the insurance industry: high-deductible plans.
Before Obama signed the Affordable Care Act, insurance companies already were making rapid progress in implementing their business plans of “migrating” their customers from traditional managed care plans to so-called “consumer-directed” plans, the industry euphemism for high-deductible policies. At the same time they’ve been requiring us to pay more out of our own pockets for care, they’ve also been implementing a strategy of reducing benefits. Investors and Wall Street financial analysts refer to these common industry practices as “benefit buydowns.” That’s another euphemism, by the way.
I myself — and thousands of my fellow Cigna employees — were notified several years ago, long before I left my job, that our HMOs and PPOs were being discontinued. Yep, we got notices in the mail. If we wanted to stay in a Cigna-subsidized health plan, we would have to switch to a high-deductible plan. The same thing has happened to tens of millions of other Americans in recent years.
Yet if you relied on the Washington media for your news and information about health care, you’d think that insurance companies would never have considered sending policy discontinuation notices to their policyholders until forced to do so by Obamacare.
The truth: they have always done this when profits were at stake.
Which is why some insurers will be happy as clams to be able to keep their policyholders in plans that don’t meet the ACA’s standards. Many of those plans — especially the junk insurance plans many folks are in — are exceedingly profitable.
For people who are in those plans who have complained about their discontinuation notices, I hope they will shop around. Chances are, they’ll be able to get much better coverage at a better price. Thanks to the Affordable Care Act.
By: Wendell Potter, The Center for Public Integrity, November 18, 2013
“Promoting The Right-Wing Agenda”: Ted Cruz And Koch Brothers Embroiled In Shadowy Tea Party Scheme
A national conservative network (whose backers include the Koch brothers, event sponsors include Facebook, and alumni include Ted Cruz) misrepresented its agenda and activities, and reaped the benefits of mainstream respectability and nonprofit status — while coordinating across states to push a hard-right agenda and enrich its corporate backers — a new report alleges.
Specifically, the report by the Center for Media and Democracy focuses on the State Policy Network, a little-known network. “What we uncovered through our investigation is that SPN along with its affiliates amount to $83 million just flooding into the states to push and promote this agenda …,” CMD director Lisa Graves told reporters on a Wednesday call. “And that money is on the rise.” The paper was released Wednesday along with a set of state-level reports on SPN affiliates, authored by affiliates of the progressive network ProgressNow.
The CMD report accuses SPN affiliates of mounting “coordinated efforts to push their agenda, often using the same cookie-cutter research and reports, all while claiming to be independent and creating state-focused solutions …” It charges that, “Although SPN think tanks are registered as educational nonprofits, several appear to orchestrate extensive lobbying and political operations to peddle their legislative agenda to state legislators, despite the IRS’ regulations on nonprofit political and lobbying activities.”
Asked about the CMD report, SPN emailed a statement from its president, Tracie Sharp, saying, “Because we are legally and practically organized as a service organization (not as a franchise), each of the 64 state-based think tanks is fiercely independent, choosing to manage their staff, pick their own research topics and educate the public on those issues they deem most appropriate for their state.” But Sharp said each of those 64 “rallies around a common belief: the power of free markets and free people to create a healthy, prosperous society.”
Sharp said that SPN respected “the privacy of our donors,” but that they gave “voluntarily,” which she contrasted with “groups like Progress Now and the Center for Media and Democracy who receive hefty gifts from unions, who in turn force their members to donate to political causes with which they may not agree.” The Supreme Court ruled in 1988 that contracts between unions and companies can only require workers represented by unions to pay what is “necessary to ‘performing the duties of an exclusive representative of the employees in dealing with the employer on labor-management issues.”
Based on a 2010 document, SPN lists a number of major corporations as past SPN funders including Microsoft, AT&T, GlaxoSmithKline, Kraft Foods, Philip Morris, Verizon Communications, Comcast and Time Warner Cable Share Service Center. Several of the same groups sponsored SPN’s 2013 annual meeting, as did Facebook.
While SPN is no household name, CMD notes it has at least one celebrity alum: former SPN-affiliated think tank fellow and current filibustering Sen. Ted Cruz, the co-author of a 2010 paper for Texas Public Policy Foundation arguing the Affordable Care Act violated the 10thAmendment. That paper notes that the TPPF is working with partners to develop an “Interstate Compact for Health Care Reform,” which it says would provide that member states “may opt out of Obamacare entirely …” The San Antonio Current noted that a “Health Care Compact Act” echoing Cruz’s concept is among the model legislation pushed by the American Legislative Exchange Council, the conservative group whose members include major companies and scores of state legislators. CMD notes that the same year Cruz issued that report, the Koch-backed Donors Capital Fund provided his think tank a $65,300 grant “for the organization’s project, Turning the Tide Unifying the States to Oppose Federal Outreach.”
The CMD report also cites numerous SPN ties to the better-known ALEC, including a grant from Donors Capital Fund, which Mother Jones called the “dark money ATM of the conservative movement,” specifically to fund SPN member groups to participate in an ALEC gathering. SPN or its member groups sit on eight ALEC task forces; the largest number are in the Task & Fiscal Policy and Education groups. According to CMD, SPN’s annual meeting in September included representatives from Koch Industries, the Charles Koch Institute, the Charles Koch Foundation and several Koch-backed right-wing groups like Americans for Prosperity.
CMD suggests that SPN’s billionaire backers may not be motivated by ideology alone. “Be it the Koch brothers and environmental policy, the Waltons and minimum and living wage laws, or the Bradley Foundation and education privatization,” charges the report, “SPN funders end up being a ‘client’ to the think tanks, receiving a service – influencing state legislators and promoting a right-wing agenda – that benefits them.”
By: Josh Eidelson, Salon, November 15, 2013
“Notorious Republican Prevaricators”: The Wrong Message, The Wrong Messengers
Over the last five or six years, Republicans have gone after President Obama with quite a bit of ferocity, launching attacks that most Americans have no doubt heard many times. Indeed, we can recite them from memory: Obama’s a radical socialist, power-mad tyrant who hates American traditions, wants to grab your guns, and is too dumb to speak without a teleprompter.
Putting aside whether that critique is in any way sane, Republicans generally haven’t had too much to say about President Obama’s trustworthiness. That changed rather dramatically in recent weeks, as we learned that instead of 100% of Americans gaining health care coverage or keeping the health insurance they like, about 95% of Americans will gain health care coverage or keep the health insurance they like.
And this has led some poor messengers to deliver an odd message. Here, for example, is Dick Cheney:
In an interview with Larry King, former Vice President Dick Cheney said that President Obama’s famous “If you like your plan, you can keep it” remark was a lie that the president repeated “over and over and over again.”
And here’s Mitt Romney:
Republican Mitt Romney is accusing President Barack Obama of being “dishonest” about his health care law…. In an interview on “CBS This Morning,” Friday, Romney said several times that Obama had been “dishonest.”
And here’s Paul Ryan:
“The next time you have a famous politician coming through Iowa, breezing through the towns, talking about big government, let’s be a little more skeptical,” Ryan said after berating President Barack Obama and Democrats for the troubled rollout of the health-care law.
Look, reasonable people can disagree about the severity of the “if you like your plan…” claim. It strikes me as an oversimplification of a complex policy, a position folks realized at the time was more of a shorthand than a 100% guarantee for literally every consumer in the nation, but if Obama’s critics want to consider it the Most Important Lie Ever Told, that’s up to them.
But listening to Dick Cheney, Mitt Romney, and Paul Ryan talk about honesty, credibility, and the need for skepticism is just a bit too much. Romney broke new ground as one of the most brazenly mendacious politicians of his generation; Ryan’s fondness for falsehoods is extraordinary even in a Congress where dishonesty is the norm; and Dick Cheney is, well, Dick Cheney.
Americans shouldn’t turn to Lance Armstrong for wisdom on performance-enhancing drugs in sports; we shouldn’t turn to Miley Cyrus for guidance on public modesty; and we shouldn’t turn to Cheney, Romney, and Ryan for lectures on honesty in politics. It’s not complicated: they have no credibility because they have a nasty habit for saying things that aren’t true.
It’s a subjective question and your mileage may vary, but on balance, I’d say President Obama’s track record on telling the truth has been very strong. Fair-minded observers can debate the efficacy of his agenda and the merit of his ideas, but it’s difficult for even the fiercest Obama detractor to say the president has established a track record of saying one thing and doing another, making promises he has no intention of keeping, or flat out lying.
He’s made predictions that haven’t panned out, and he’s changed direction based on circumstances, but thinking about some of the notable presidential whoppers, Obama hasn’t exactly offered his critics anything comparable to “Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa,” “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky,” or perhaps most alarmingly, “We did not – repeat, did not – trade weapons or anything else for hostages.”
So maybe notorious Republican prevaricators can pick something else to focus on?
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, November 18, 2013
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