“The Obamacare Swindle”: Republican Grifters Using Defunding To Raise Money From Gullible Tea Partiers
House Republican leadership does not want a government shutdown over Obamacare, but the agitation of conservative activists might make one inevitable.
That’s not good news for Republicans. After the debt ceiling crisis in 2011, congressional approval ratings dipped to their lowest ever, with Republicans taking a huge hit; in one survey, 71 percent of respondents disapproved with the GOP’s handling of the debt limit. In another, 68 percent said the same (PDF).
Conservatives must know they have nothing to gain politically from taking this stance, which raises the question: why do it? One answer, as suggested by the National Review’s Robert Costa in August, is money. Tea party organizations, he writes, “aren’t worried about the establishment’s ire. In fact, they welcome it. Business has boomed since the push to defund Obamacare caught on. Conservative activists are lighting up social media, donations are pouring in, and e-mail lists are growing.” [Emphasis mine]
To illustrate the point, Heritage Action for America—the political arm of the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank—has a standing website devoted to collecting donations. “Conservatives in Congress have proposed using the fight over a key budget bill, called the continuing resolution, to strip funding from this law. But Establishment Republicans and special interests in Washington are resisting this plan,” it explains. But there’s no reason to panic: “You can ensure Obamacare is defunded,” it asserts. All it takes is a small donation to Heritage. “Time is of the essence. Please donate now to ensure we have the resources to fight and win.”
As of Tuesday afternoon, this particular push had raised over $327,000, and it’s no stretch to assume that other, similar efforts have raised as much if not more cash. To wit, the Senate Conservatives Fund—a political action committee devoted to electing “true conservatives to the United States Senate”—also has a specific website that collects donations for Obamacare repeal. It asks supporters to “Join Mike Lee and Ted Cruz in the fight to stop Obamacare” with a small contribution. The same goes for the National Liberty Federation, a Tea Party group that wants to know if you have a few dollars to spare in the fight against Obamacare.
Of course, no matter how much money these groups collect, the Affordable Care Act is here to stay. And they know it. “Even they admit privately that they won’t succeed in defunding Obamacare,” notes The Wall Street Journal in a recent editorial urging “kamikaze” Republicans to give up their self-defeating crusade against the law. As President Obama said in a speech on Monday, “the Affordable Care Act has been the law for three-and-a-half years now. It passed both houses of Congress. The Supreme Court ruled it constitutional. It was an issue in last year’s election, and the candidate who called for repeal lost.” Simply put, there is no conceivable scenario that ends with Obama dismantling his signature legislative achievement.
It should be said that the most fervent opponents of the Affordable Care Act are Republican base voters. Of those who “always” vote in GOP primaries, notes the Pew Research Center, 53 percent oppose the law and want lawmakers to make it fail. When they demand action—as they have for the last four years—Republican politicians and conservative activists have a choice. They can try to channel this anger into something constructive, or they can cynically use it to boost their own prospects. For lawmakers like Ted Cruz and organizations like Heritage Action, the choice was simple: Give them what they want, even if it’s doomed to fail.
If there were no money involved, I’d call this a misguided bid for relevance. As it stands, the effort to defund Obamacare is a lucrative business. Which is why it continues to go forward, even as the odds for success dip to the quantum level. For the lawmakers and groups spearheading this movement, Tea Party voters aren’t dedicated citizens as much as they are gullible customers; ripe targets for their brand’s commercialized outrage.
Ted Cruz may style himself as a leader, but the reality is that he and his fellow travelers are just the latest in a long line of shameless grifters. And like the presidential campaigns of Newt Gingrich and Herman Cain, this grift will continue for as long as there is money to earn, and Republican voters to con.
By: Jamelle Bouie, The Daily Beast, September 18, 2013
“The GOP Mental-Health Hypocrisy”: Obstructing The Law That Does More To Advance The Cause Since ‘You-Know-Who’ Became President
So now we’re being treated to the charming spectacle of Republicans, or a few of them anyway, purporting to care about mental-health treatment in the wake of the Washington Navy Yard shooting. How touching. This doesn’t mean, of course, that they care about mental health. They’re just coming up with something to say in the wake of the tragedy that sounds to the willfully credulous like action and that won’t offend the National Rifle Association. Meanwhile, they have devastated mental-health funding since you-know-who became president. And more important than that, they voted against, and are now preparing to vote en bloc to defund or delay, the law that will do more to address mental health and give society at least a chance that future Aaron Alexises will get treatment that could prevent them going on shooting sprees since … well, pretty much since ever.
Alexis bought his weapon in Virginia, a state where anyone this side of Charles Manson can buy virtually any kind of gun he lusts after as long as he’s a resident. Current federal guidelines bar gun sales only to people who have been institutionalized or “adjudicated as a mental defective.” Neither of these narrow criteria applied in Alexis’s case. Not that it would even matter if one had, as The Atlantic noted; the Virginia Tech shooter had been so adjudicated and still was able to purchase his firepower in the commonwealth. (Alexis, being a nonresident, was blocked from purchasing an AR-15).
Alexis was fairly typical of the type of person who stands precious little chance of getting any mental-health treatment in this country. For starters, he was male, young, and black. That’s an unlucky combination of things to be in the United States for millions of people. But hitting that trifecta and being mentally ill on top of it constitutes the holding of a very unfortunate ovarian-lottery ticket. Single mothers, children, and the elderly all qualify for more forms of assistance than men do. Increasingly, there is a place where men like this wind up where they finally might get a little bit of treatment. It’s called jail. Our prisons are full of mentally ill substance abusers who committed crimes.
There are two things society can do about future Aaron Alexises. One, it can do nothing to improve mental-health approaches and let people fester, but even then it can at least take tougher steps to prevent the mentally ill from buying guns. Two, it can try to be a little more proactive about this whole category of illness, which affects nearly 60 million Americans (yep, one in five). On both counts, there is one party in Washington that’s eager to act, and one that is perfectly happy to let crazy people buy guns and perfectly content that we have more and more mentally ill people walking around with no treatment. Any guesses?
You may think I have phrased the above unfairly, but this is what the GOP position amounts to. On tougher background checks for the mentally ill, there were provisions in the Manchin-Toomey background-check bill, the one that nearly every Senate Republican voted against. This week New Hampshire Republican Sen. Kelly Ayotte is talking up new legislation. You perhaps have read that “even the NRA” supports toughening mental-illness regulations. That’s nice in theory, but in fact, the Senate is not going to do anything on guns and mental illness right, and the reason it’s not going to do anything is that Harry Reid knows he doesn’t have 60 votes to pass anything, especially with huge votes on a possible government shutdown and the debt limit looming. Republican Sen. Tom Coburn, a physician who isn’t hostile to tighter regulation in this case, acknowledged to The New York Times that “it’s all politics”—which in this case means that no one has the stomach or stones to take another gun-related vote.
They did, however, have the stomach and stones to cast votes over the past few years that have sliced away at funding for mental-health services. Decreased federal grants have forced states to make massive cuts to mental-health services. The National Alliance on Mental Illness referred in 2011 to the “crisis” that has resulted from states’ slashing of mental-health programs. It’s of course mainly Republicans in Congress who pushed for those block-grant cuts. The sequester made things worse. While the sequester doesn’t affect Medicaid, which funds most mental-health services, the non-Medicaid mental-health services have taken a serious hit, including 103,000 fewer treatment admissions in 2013.
And the Republicans will have the stomach and stones to vote very soon here to defund the Affordable Care Act, which, says University of Chicago health-care expert Harold Pollack, “is the most important change to mental-health and substance-abuse policy in decades,” for two reasons. First, the expansion of Medicaid to all citizens with incomes up to 138 percent of the poverty line will mean that millions of people will be able to afford mental-health care who simply couldn’t before. And second, the ACA requires that coverage of mental illness and substance abuse be offered by insurers “at parity” to more traditional medical treatments. Up to now, these treatments have been more expensive, less likely to be covered, and so on.
Republicans on the Senate Finance Committee actually supported those particular provisions of the ACA on unanimous voice vote. So by that measure Republicans are “reasonable” on this issue. But final votes on legislation is where the rubber meets the road, and that’s where Republicans have voted and voted and voted—and will clearly continue to vote—to make sure that we have more potential mass murderers walking among us, listening to those voices until they can’t take it anymore and go out and slaughter innocents. It’s a party of nihilism that has no desire to solve any social problem, holding the rest of us hostage to its craziness as the bodies mount.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, September 20, 2013
“Collapse Of Their Credibility”: GOP Desperate To Defund ObamaCare Now Because They Know Its Popularity Is About To Skyrocket
Why are the Tea Party Republicans so desperate to defund ObamaCare right now? Because they know that once it goes into effect its popularity will skyrocket.
They know that once it is fully implemented, it will be impossible to take away the many benefits of ObamaCare. It is one thing to prevent something good from being passed by Congress. It’s quite another to take something away from the voters.
The Republicans know that once it is in effect, it will be impossible to tell the millions of Americans who have a pre-existing condition that they have to return to the days when they either were denied insurance coverage or had to pay an arm and a leg to get it.
They know that once it is in effect, it will be impossible to end the affordable coverage that will soon be available to the millions who are not covered by their employers and will have access to health insurance through the health insurance exchanges – where prices have come in lower than projected.
They know that once it is in effect, it will be very difficult to end coverage for the millions who will for the first time have health insurance through expanded Medicaid.
They know that once it goes into effect, it will be very hard to convince Americans to turn the health care system back over to the big insurance companies.
Most importantly, they know that all of the many ObamaCare “horrors” they have predicted – from “death panels” to price increases to a “government takeover” – will not happen.
As a consequence, they believe that once ObamaCare is fully implemented their credibility on the subject will collapse, support for major new progressive initiatives will increase, the popularity of the President – and of Democrats in Congress – will go up, and their chances of hanging on to the House or taking the Senate in 2014 – and the White House in 2016 – will decline.
All of that is why the Tea Party Republicans are so desperate to stop ObamaCare. That’s why they will risk shutting down the government or defaulting on America’s obligations – on the chance that they can force President Obama and the Democrats to delay its implementation and allow them to live to fight another day.
They are desperate. And to achieve their narrow ideological goal, they are willing to use the same desperate measures that other marginal movements have adopted around the world: they have taken a hostage. Except their hostage is not one person – it’s 320 million people – it’s the American economy.
The success of their hostage taking strategy faces two virtually insurmountable obstacles:
First, the President has made clear that he is not willing to negotiate at all over the debt ceiling or ObamaCare.
Many of these hostage takers are the same people who would demand, categorically, that the American government should never negotiate with hostage takers, because to do so only encourages them to take more hostages and make more demands.
President Obama apparently agrees with them. He knows that if he negotiates with people who are willing to collapse the American economy just to get their way, that they will then use the same threat again and again. And he is unlikely to budge, since he is obviously unwilling to sacrifice his signature initiative — ObamaCare.
Second, many key GOP stake holders think that the Tea Party’s willingness to shut down the government or cause a default is sheer madness and would severely damage the GOP brand. Democratic pollsters Jim Carville and Stan Greenberg wrote in a memo last Wednesday:
The Republican Party has a serious brand problem, and it keeps getting worse. The GOP is viewed unbelievably negatively, and even Republicans themselves agree that it is deeply divided.
Polls show the Republican brand problem manifesting itself in the Virginia gubernatorial race, and in Senate races across the country. And if Republicans damage their brand even worse by shutting down the government, we think that they could trigger a revolt that might even imperil their House majority in 2014.
The GOP demand that President Obama and the Democrats surrender or face a government shutdown or default is like a combatant in a war demanding that the other side surrender or he’ll blow his own head off. From a purely political point of view -if it weren’t so bad for the country and economy – you’d have to say: “Go ahead, make my day.”
All the polls show that if either a shutdown or default takes place, the Republicans will take the blame by a factor of at least two to one.
And after they have taken the blame, in the end they will collapse. Even the Wall Street Journal editorial page said recently:
The evidence going back to the Newt Gingrich Congress is that no party can govern from the House, and the Republican Party can’t abide the outcry when flights are delayed, national parks close and direct deposits for military spouses stop. Sooner or later the GOP breaks.
So while the state of desperation in evidence among Tea Party Republicans at the prospect of ObamaCare going into effect — and becoming very popular — might be understandable, their desperate strategy of holding the economy hostage in order to kill it is downright suicidal.
Then again, while suicide bombers end up as victims of their own actions at the end of the day, there is no question they can inflict enormous amounts of pain and suffering on everyone else.
By: Robert Creamer, The Huffington Post Blog, September 20, 2013
“Money For Medical Bills Grows On Trees”: New Koch-Funded Front Group Tells Youth They Are Better Off Uninsured
For a new Koch-funded front group for young people, money for medical bills apparently grows on trees.
Generation Opportunity, a nonprofit financed with $5.04 million from a fund controlled by the Koch brothers’ lobbying team, just launched a new television advertisement to kick off an anti-Obamacare campaign. The ads, which provides no actual information about healthcare reform and instead seem designed to scare people away from doctor visits, have already been dissected by many in the media. What’s more revealing is Generation Opportunity’s real agenda, which was explained to Yahoo News in a story unveiling the new campaign (emphasis added):
Their message: You don’t have to sign up for Obamacare. “What we’re trying to communicate is, ‘No, you’re actually not required to buy health insurance,’” Generation Opportunity President Evan Feinberg told Yahoo News in an interview about the campaign. “You might have to pay a fine, but that’s going to be cheaper for you and better for you.”
So, the big idea here is that young people should decline health insurance? Having no health insurance is “better for you?” When a car accident happens, or someone is sent to the hospital needing critical care, who picks up the bill? For slash-and-burn Koch groups, that doesn’t seem to matter.
Notably, the young men and women hired by Generation Opportunity are provided health insurance, says organization’s communications director David Pasch, who spoke to TheNation.com over the phone. Lucky them.
Ethan Rome, the executive director of Health Care for America Now, says young Americans without health insurance will be “buried by bills and unable to recover for the rest of their lives.” “What they’re advocating is seriously unconscionable,” says Rome in response to Generation Opportunity’s call for youth to go uninsured.
Generation Opportunity also told Yahoo News that it will be passing out pizza and hosting tailgate parties to promote its campaign of opposing health insurance.
These antics, of course, are nothing new for the Koch brothers and their endless array of front groups. In the nineties, Koch-funded fronts fought healthcare reform by sponsoring a “broken-down bus wreathed in red tape symbolizing government bureaucracy and hitched to a tow truck labeled, ‘This is Clinton Health Care.’ ” They also fought environmental regulations, from acid rain to industrial air pollutants, not through sound policy arguments but by sponsoring populist-appearing agit-prop. More recently, Koch fronts have paid for moonbounces and other festival-type forms of outreach to lobby on issues critical to Koch Industries’ bottom line, like weakening the Environmental Protection Agency rules that affect Koch-owned facilities.
In the end, Koch operatives seem willing to use any marketing device that works, regardless of the truth or how it might affect regular people. In this case, encouraging young Americans to abandon health insurance is worth scoring political points against healthcare reform.
By: Lee Fang, The Nation, September 19, 2013
“A Self Righteous Verbal Tick”: Ted Cruz Doesn’t Speak For “The American People”
Can we please leave “the American people” out of the debate over defunding the Affordable Care Act (better known as Obamacare)? I’m not talking about the citizens of this great nation, but rather the politically self-righteous verbal tick our elected officials and commentators employ in an effort to invest in themselves the authority of the electorate.
So for example, Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, the “defund” ringmaster, said earlier this week that while his grand idea has little chance in the Senate, “House Republicans must stand firm, hold their ground, and continue to listen to the American people.” And on Fox News on Wednesday night, Cruz praised “House leadership for listening to the American people,” adding that, “We’ve got to respond to the American people.” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Cruz said, “needs to listen to” – you guessed it! – “the American people.”
Appearing on the same show, Utah GOP Sen. Mike Lee declared that “the American people are coming together, and they’re standing together and they’re saying, please defund this law.” He went on to praise House Speaker John Boehner for standing “with the American people. We now need to stand with him and with the people and defund this law.” And so on. (Boehner’s House this morning actually did pass a continuing resolution which would keep the government open through Dec.15 while defunding the Affordable Care Act; the bill stands no chance of passing the Senate.)
It must be bracing to carry a mandate to speak on behalf of the American people … even if, as is the case with Cruz, Lee and their tea party pals, they don’t have anything of the sort. Instead they have the insufferable pretension of one: They alone speak for the people because, well, they say so. Their belief in their own popular righteousness recalls Mr. Dooley’s definition of a fanatic: someone who “does what he thinks th’ Lord wud do if He knew th’ facts iv th’ case.”
And from whence does their mandate to speak so authoritatively for “the American people” derive? Cruz referenced an Internet petition which garnered 1.3 million signatures. “Look, today’s decision is a victory for the American people,” he said. “Those 1.3 million Americans … that went and signed that petition and spoke out.” That might explain the difference between the American people and Cruz’s “the American people”: He defines the term as people who share his radical agenda.
More broadly Cruz, Lee and company would presumably point to polls showing that Obamacare remains broadly unpopular. But that reflects, charitably, a superficial knowledge of the polling. Take the Pew Research Center/USA Today poll released earlier this week. Fully 53 percent disapprove of the Affordable Care Act as opposed to only 42 percent who approve. (The Real Clear Politics average of polls has 38 percent approving and 52 percent disapproving.) But dig deeper and you’ll find that that 53 percent is split over how to deal with the law they don’t like – more than half of them, 27 percent, want pols to try to make the law work; a lesser number, 23 percent, want to see elected officials try to make it fail. In other words something like one-quarter of the actual American people stand with Cruz, Lee and the rest of the fanatics. Some mandate.
This is not an unusual result. Even a laughably skewed poll which Heritage Action – the activist branch of the Heritage Foundation – commissioned to bolster the “defund” push found that 52 percent of Americans (or more precisely 52 percent of Americans in a selection of 10 GOP-leaning House districts) think that implementation of the law should go forward, while only 44.5 percent favor repeal. This makes intuitive sense: Not everyone who dislikes the law does so because they’re conservative; some portion of the law’s critics is progressives disappointed that it wasn’t more liberal.
But there are a couple of more important points to be made about polls. For one thing, the most authoritative poll taken in the last year occurred in November, at great expense. It had a sample size of more than 125 million and the results were not particularly close: The candidate who campaigned on repealing Obamacare lost by four percentage points – nearly five million votes – to the fellow who signed Obamacare into law. You’d think that if the American people saw stopping Obamacare as a cause worth fighting for “with every ounce of breath we have,” as Cruz put it Thursday, they might have so indicated at the ballot box. And yet Cruz, Lee and their cronies seem to see in this result a mandate from “the American people” (if not the American people) to obstruct the law to the maximum extent, even to the extent of shutting down the government to stop it.
And while the tea party right’s fidelity to the will of “the American people” as expressed by more recent public opinion polls is admirable, it takes on a far more self-serving aspect when considered in light of other polls which left people like Ted Cruz and Mike Lee unmoved. For example 86 percent of Americans support background checks for people buying guns; on immigration reform, 64 percent of Americans support the comprehensive bill that the Senate passed and 78 percent support a qualified path to citizenship for illegal immigrants. Oh, and 71 percent of Americans oppose shutting down the government, according to a poll conducted over the summer for House Republicans. For those keeping track at home, those figures are more impressive than the 50-something opposed to Obamacare – perhaps no one has told Cruz, Lee et al. about these judgments from “the American people?”
The list goes on. The fact is, as I have written over and over and over and over, there are a number of prominent issues where the GOP seems immune to the charms of “the American people.”
And to be clear, this is not a partisan problem. Pols in both parties are promiscuous with the desires of “the American people,” while none have a monopoly on it. So let’s agree that it’s time to retire “the American people” – or more specifically their demands and expectations – from the political lexicon.
By: Robert Schlesinger, U. S. News and World Report, September 21, 2013
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