“Hatred Overwhelming Judgment”: The “Refuse To Enroll” Campaign Gets To Work Against Obamacare
When Reuters reported last week that Republicans and their allies “are mobilizing … to dissuade uninsured Americans from obtaining health coverage,” it caused a bit of a stir. After all, what kind of people would invest time and energy into convincing struggling families to turn down access to affordable health care? Who would be so callous as to put partisan spite over the basic health care needs of their community?
Well, now we know. The Dayton Daily News has hidden the story behind a paywall, but the paper reported yesterday on groups like the “Citizens’ Council for Health Freedom,” which is rallying behind the “Refuse to Enroll” campaign.
With time running out, opponents of the Affordable Care Act have taken to the airwaves in Ohio and elsewhere with ad campaigns not only attacking the bill’s merits but also actively encouraging uninsured Americans not to sign up for coverage under the health care law.
The Obama administration has acknowledged the success of the law, commonly referred to as Obamacare, depends in large part on broad-based participation in federal and state-run health exchanges that will begin selling government-subsidized health plans to the uninsured on Oct. 1.
The anti-enrollment campaigns reflect the resignation and desperation of many Obamacare opponents who have given up hope of a government repeal or court-ordered injunction to stop full implementation of the law beginning next year.
This is clearly an important stage in the larger fight. Desperate right-wing activists know the law won’t be repealed; they know it can’t be stopped in the courts; and they know there’s a limit to Republican efforts to sabotage the federal health care system. So they’ve been reduced to one last-ditch effort: convince people with no health care coverage to voluntarily turn down affordable insurance so as to advance their ideological cause.
And why do conservative activists want this? It’s not altogether clear, exactly, but apparently their hatred for President Obama has overwhelmed their judgment and basic sense of morality to a degree that can only be considered alarming.
Twila Brase, for example, is putting the “Refuse to Enroll” campaign on her radio show, which is “broadcast on more than 350 stations nationwide, including the American Family Radio Network with stations throughout Ohio.” And she’ll have lots of company, including support from her Koch brothers allies.
The conservative group Americans for Prosperity, which has a chapter in Ohio, has launched another campaign attacking Obamacare with television and online ads that began airing in Ohio last week.
Joan McCarter summarized this nicely: conservatives “have to convince people that either paying through the nose for insurance or going without, all to make a political point, makes sense. Because ‘Freedom’ means never being able to go to the doctor. Seriously. They are spending millions of dollars to try to con people out of getting affordable health insurance.”
To reiterate what we discussed last week, I hope folks will pause to let this sink in for a moment. Unlike every other industrialized democracy on the planet, the United States — easily the wealthiest nation on earth — has tolerated a significant chunk of its population going without basic health care coverage. These Americans and their families can’t afford to see a doctor and are one serious illness from financial ruin. Many have died because they live in a country that allows people to go without access to basic care.
After nearly a century of politicians talking about the problem, President Obama actually signed the Affordable Care Act into law three years ago, giving working families a level of health-care security they’ve never had before, and throwing a life preserver to the uninsured. Now, Republicans aren’t just actively trying to sabotage the law, they’re telling struggling Americans it’s better to drown than accept the life preserver.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, July 30, 2013
“The Axis Of The Unhinged”: Why Republicans Want To Shut Down The Government, This Time
Count Texas Sen. Ted Cruz among the growing ranks of Republicans who want to shut down the government – because Republicans always look good when threatening a shutdown – over the party’s Quixotic quest to repeal the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare.
Cruz is in Iowa today laying the groundwork for his presumptive 2016 presidential bid and, according to a Tweet from National Review Online’s Robert Costa (h/t Dave Weigel), told conservatives this morning that he won’t support continued funding of the government without a full defunding of Obamacare. That makes him the third GOP senator this month to push that line, joining Utah conservative Mike Lee and Florida’s Marco Rubio, who told a Weekly Standard breakfast last week that “I will not vote for a continuing resolution unless it defunds Obamacare.” (At the risk of being pedantic: The current continuing resolution runs through the end of the current fiscal year; the next funding fight will be over regular appropriations bills, not another continuing resolution.)
As a group, the three men form a conservative thought leader critical mass. Cruz and Lee can be counted on as reliable barometers of the GOP base’s id. Rubio is desperately scrambling to get back into the party base’s good graces after displaying a dangerous proclivity toward actually trying to constructively legislate – as opposed to confining himself to angry stands on principle – on the immigration issue. That sort of thing (an ability to work with political adversaries to get something done) might play well with swing voters in a general presidential election, but it won’t fly in GOP primaries.
It seems clear that while the Obama administration and congressional Democrats are gearing up for a pro-Obamacare push, we can expect an increasing drumbeat of far-right lawmakers and commentators to talk up the idea of shutting down the government barring an Obamacare defunding. Can it be very long before Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul adds his support, completing the Axis of the Unhinged?
Look, the Affordable Care Act remains unpopular with voters. But the groundswell of support for a defund-or-shutdown stand will be confined to consumers of Fox News, Rush Limbaugh’s shtick and redstate.com. I’d like Cruz, Lee and Rubio to explain how exactly the results of the 2012 presidential election – where a president whose signature accomplishment is Obamacare was re-elected by a comfortable margin – can be interpreted as a mandate to threaten government shutdowns.
On the one hand, the whole thing’s as absurd as the endless Obamacare repeal votes the House insists on taking. There’s no chance of Obamacare getting repealed or defunded this year or next. None. Zero. It won’t pass the Senate and it won’t get by the president’s veto stamp.
But that’s also what makes this flavor of Obamacare Derangement Syndrome irresponsible and dangerous. At least the House repeal votes merely waste Congress’s time. Threatening a shutdown is akin to threatening a debt default: Republicans would be holding out the prospect of deliberately harming the economy (as my colleague Pat Garofalo ably illustrated when there was talk of a shutdown in 2011) unless they get their way on policy. Even sustained talk of a shutdown will further undermine public confidence in the government’s ability to walk and chew gum at the same time.
And it’s also politically dumb for the GOP, which is already suffering from dismal public approval in polls. Opinion surveys show that the GOP is unpopular and that most of the public wants our political leaders to work together to get things done, valuing that over taking uncompromising stands. People like Lee might try to spin a prospective shutdown as the Democrats’ choice – “If congressional Democrats want to oppose appropriations bills without additional Obamacare funding, shut down the government, and side with the president and Big Business against the American people, then it’s their choice” – but voters will see through that. What this talk does is present, again, the GOP’s radical, intransigent side to the public – although that may admittedly be the only side the party has left at this point, talk of a party revamp be damned.
But this is what the GOP has become: a poseur party, where the importance of ideology is matched by the way it is expressed – the more aggressive and uncompromising the better. (That’s basically why Liz Cheney is challenging incumbent Sen. Mike Enzi, Wyo., in a primary – sure they’re both conservative, but she brings Fox News flash to the table.)
Talk of a government shutdown will boost Cruz’s presidential prospects and help rescue Rubio’s with the GOP base. And really, that’s all the party seems to care about these days anyway.
By: Robert Schlesinger, U. S. News and World Report, July 19, 2013
“Beneath Any Reasonable Standards Of Elected Officials”: The Unprecedented And Contemptible Attempts To Sabotage Obamacare
When Mike Lee pledges to try to shut down the government unless President Obama knuckles under and defunds Obamacare entirely, it is not news—it is par for the course for the take-no-prisoners extremist senator from Utah. When the Senate Republicans’ No. 2 and No. 3 leaders, John Cornyn and John Thune, sign on to the blackmail plan, it is news—of the most depressing variety.
I am not the only one who has written about House and Senate Republicans’ monomaniacal focus on sabotaging the implementation of Obamacare—Greg Sargent, Steve Benen, Jon Chait, Jon Bernstein, Ezra Klein, and many others have written powerful pieces. But it is now spinning out of control.
It is important to emphasize that this set of moves is simply unprecedented. The clear comparison is the Medicare prescription drug plan. When it passed Congress in 2003, Democrats had many reasons to be furious. The initial partnership between President Bush and Sen. Edward Kennedy had resulted in an admirably bipartisan bill—it passed the Senate with 74 votes. Republicans then pulled a bait and switch, taking out all of the provisions that Kennedy had put in to bring along Senate Democrats, jamming the resulting bill through the House in a three-hour late-night vote marathon that blatantly violated House rules and included something close to outright bribery on the House floor, and then passing the bill through the Senate with just 54 votes—while along the way excluding the duly elected conferees, Tom Daschle (the Democratic leader!) and Jay Rockefeller, from the conference committee deliberations.
The implementation of that bill was a huge challenge, and had many rocky moments. It required educating millions of seniors, most not computer-literate, about the often complicated choices they had to create or change their prescription coverage. Imagine if Democrats had gone all out to block or disrupt the implementation—using filibusters to deny funding, sending threatening letters to companies or outside interests who mobilized to educate Medicare recipients, putting on major campaigns to convince seniors that this was a plot to deny them Medicare, comparing it to the ill-fated Medicare reform plan that passed in 1989 and, after a revolt by seniors, was repealed the next year.
Almost certainly, Democrats could have tarnished one of George W. Bush’s signature achievements, causing Republicans major heartburn in the 2004 presidential and congressional elections—and in the process hurting millions of Medicare recipients and their families. Instead, Democrats worked with Republicans, and with Mark McClellan, the Bush administration official in charge of implementation, to smooth out the process and make it work—and it has been a smashing success.
Contrast that with Obamacare. For three years, Republicans in the Senate refused to confirm anybody to head the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the post that McClellan had held in 2003-04—in order to damage the possibility of a smooth rollout of the health reform plan. Guerrilla efforts to cut off funding, dozens of votes to repeal, abusive comments by leaders, attempts to discourage states from participating in Medicaid expansion or crafting exchanges, threatening letters to associations that might publicize the availability of insurance on exchanges, and now a new set of threats—to have a government shutdown, or to refuse to raise the debt ceiling, unless the president agrees to stop all funding for implementation of the plan.
I remember being shocked when some congressional Democrats appeared to be rooting for the surge in troops in Iraq to fail—which would mean more casualties among Americans and Iraqis, but a huge embarrassment for Bush, and vindication of their skepticism. But of course they did not try to sabotage the surge by disrupting funding or interfering in the negotiations in Iraq with competing Shiite, Sunni, and Kurdish power centers. To do so would have been close to treasonous.
What is going on now to sabotage Obamacare is not treasonous—just sharply beneath any reasonable standards of elected officials with the fiduciary responsibility of governing. A good example is the letter Senate Republican Leaders Mitch McConnell and Cornyn sent to the NFL, demanding that it not cooperate with the Obama administration in a public-education campaign to tell their fans about what benefits would be available to them and how the plan would work—a letter that clearly implied deleterious consequences if the league went ahead anyhow. McConnell and Cornyn got their desired result. NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell quickly capitulated. (When I came to Washington in 1969-70, one of my great pleasures was meeting and getting to know Charles Goodell, the courageous Republican senator from New York who took on his own president on Vietnam and was quietly courageous on many other controversial issues. Roger Goodell is his son—although you would not know it from this craven action.)
When a law is enacted, representatives who opposed it have some choices (which are not mutually exclusive). They can try to repeal it, which is perfectly acceptable—unless it becomes an effort at grandstanding so overdone that it detracts from other basic responsibilities of governing. They can try to amend it to make it work better—not just perfectly acceptable but desirable, if the goal is to improve a cumbersome law to work better for the betterment of the society and its people. They can strive to make sure that the law does the most for Americans it is intended to serve, including their own constituents, while doing the least damage to the society and the economy. Or they can step aside and leave the burden of implementation to those who supported the law and got it enacted in the first place.
But to do everything possible to undercut and destroy its implementation—which in this case means finding ways to deny coverage to many who lack any health insurance; to keep millions who might be able to get better and cheaper coverage in the dark about their new options; to create disruption for the health providers who are trying to implement the law, including insurers, hospitals, and physicians; to threaten the even greater disruption via a government shutdown or breach of the debt limit in order to blackmail the president into abandoning the law; and to hope to benefit politically from all the resulting turmoil—is simply unacceptable, even contemptible. One might expect this kind of behavior from a few grenade-throwing firebrands. That the effort is spearheaded by the Republican leaders of the House and Senate—even if Speaker John Boehner is motivated by fear of his caucus, and McConnell and Cornyn by fear of Kentucky and Texas Republican activists—takes one’s breath away.
By: Norm Ornstein, The National Journal, July 24, 2013
“Republican Health Care Panic”: Willing To Risk Economic And Fiscal Crisis To Deny Essential Health Care And Financial Security To Millions
Leading Republicans appear to be nerving themselves up for another round of attempted fiscal blackmail. With the end of the fiscal year looming, they aren’t offering the kinds of compromises that might produce a deal and avoid a government shutdown; instead, they’re drafting extremist legislation — bills that would, for example, cut clean-water grants by 83 percent — that has no chance of becoming law. Furthermore, they’re threatening, once again, to block any rise in the debt ceiling, a move that would damage the U.S. economy and possibly provoke a world financial crisis.
Yet even as Republican politicians seem ready to go on the offensive, there’s a palpable sense of anxiety, even despair, among conservative pundits and analysts. Better-informed people on the right seem, finally, to be facing up to a horrible truth: Health care reform, President Obama’s signature policy achievement, is probably going to work.
And the good news about Obamacare is, I’d argue, what’s driving the Republican Party’s intensified extremism. Successful health reform wouldn’t just be a victory for a president conservatives loathe, it would be an object demonstration of the falseness of right-wing ideology. So Republicans are being driven into a last, desperate effort to head this thing off at the pass.
Some background: Although you’d never know it from all the fulminations, with prominent Republicans routinely comparing Obamacare to slavery, the Affordable Care Act is based on three simple ideas. First, all Americans should have access to affordable insurance, even if they have pre-existing medical problems. Second, people should be induced or required to buy insurance even if they’re currently healthy, so that the risk pool remains reasonably favorable. Third, to prevent the insurance “mandate” from being too onerous, there should be subsidies to hold premiums down as a share of income.
Is such a system workable? For a while, Republicans convinced themselves that it was doomed to failure, and that they could profit politically from the inevitable “train wreck.” But a system along exactly these lines has been operating in Massachusetts since 2006, where it was introduced by a Republican governor. What was his name? Mitt Somethingorother? And no trains have been wrecked so far.
The question is whether the Massachusetts success story can be replicated in other states, especially big states like California and New York with large numbers of uninsured residents. The answer to this question depends, in the first place, on whether insurance companies are willing to offer coverage at reasonable rates. And the answer, so far, is a clear “yes.” In California, insurers came in with bids running significantly below expectations; in New York, it appears that premiums will be cut roughly in half.
So is this a case of something for nothing, in which nobody loses? No. In states like California, which have allowed discrimination based on health status, a small number of young, healthy, affluent residents will see their premiums go up. In New York, people who don’t think they need insurance and are too rich to receive subsidies — probably an even smaller group — will feel put upon by being obliged to buy policies. Mainly, though, those insurance subsidies will cost money, and that money will, to an important extent, be raised through higher taxes on the 1 percent: tax increases that have, by the way, already taken effect.
Over all, then, health reform will help millions of Americans who were previously either too sick or too poor to get the coverage they needed, and also offer a great deal of reassurance to millions more who currently have insurance but fear losing it; it will provide these benefits at the expense of a much smaller number of other Americans, mostly the very well off. It is, if you like, a plan to comfort the afflicted while (slightly) afflicting the comfortable.
And the prospect that such a plan might succeed is anathema to a party whose whole philosophy is built around doing just the opposite, of taking from the “takers” and giving to the “job creators,” known to the rest of us as the “rich.” Hence the brinkmanship.
So will Republicans actually take us to the brink? If they do, it will be crucial to understand why they would do such a thing, when their own leaders have admitted that confrontations over the budget inflict substantial harm on the economy. It won’t be because they fear the budget deficit, which is coming down fast. Nor will it be because they sincerely believe that spending cuts produce prosperity.
No, Republicans may be willing to risk economic and financial crisis solely in order to deny essential health care and financial security to millions of their fellow Americans. Let’s hear it for their noble cause!
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, July 25, 2013
“Fire One, Fire Two, Fire Three”: GOP Circular Firing Squad Locked And Loaded
Apparently, it’s Republican circular firing squad week here in Washington. Item 1: David Corn of Mother Jones got hold of the proceedings of a secret group of conservatives scheming to take hold of American politics and shove it where it needs to go:
Dubbed Groundswell, this coalition convenes weekly in the offices of Judicial Watch, the conservative legal watchdog group. During these hush-hush sessions and through a Google group, the members of Groundswell—including aides to congressional Republicans—cook up battle plans for their ongoing fights against the Obama administration, congressional Democrats, progressive outfits, and the Republican establishment and “clueless” GOP congressional leaders. They devise strategies for killing immigration reform, hyping the Benghazi controversy, and countering the impression that the GOP exploits racism. And the Groundswell gang is mounting a behind-the-scenes organized effort to eradicate the outsize influence of GOP über-strategist/pundit Karl Rove within Republican and conservative ranks.
I have to commend Corn for getting these documents, but unfortunately, Groundswell isn’t exactly the right-wing A-Team. It’s more like the C-Team. Members include Ginny Thomas, wife of Clarence Thomas; anti-Muslim zealot Frank Gaffney; religious nutball and former Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell; and some reporters from the Washington Examiner and Breitbart.com. Nevertheless, despite their lack of actual influence, it’s interesting just to see what these kinds of folks do when they get together and try to conspire.
And the answer is, pretty much exactly what liberals do when they try the same thing. They complain about their enemies. Everyone offers their own brilliant messaging ideas, few of which anyone ever uses. They say, “If I were making a 30-second ad, this is how it would go…” They begin with a sense of urgency that gradually fades. And eventually, attendance at the meetings declines, people stop bothering to contribute as much to the email lists, and it just peters out.
In my previous work as a partisan, I was part of some efforts that were similar to Groundswell, though none of them had such a snappy name. Some consisted of nothing more than a monthly meeting of various liberals to share gripes and toss around ideas, few of which were ever implemented. Others were a little better-organized, meaning they produced—prepare yourself—the occasional memo. None resulted in dramatic political change.
So if this is the group that’s gunning for Karl Rove — which apparently is their main focus—I don’t think he has much to worry about. Rove may be overrated, but he’s still a professional, and these people are amateurs.
On to item 2: According to Politico, there’s a feud a-brewin’ between, on one side, congressional Republicans who hate Obamacare so much they want to cry, and on the other side, congressional Republicans who hate Obamacare so much they want to stamp their feet. The strategic question at play has to do with the fact that in order for the government to keep functioning, Congress is going to have to pass a continuing resolution in September. A CR is what you do when you haven’t passed an actual budget; it says that funding for everything will continue at its current level. Congress passes CRs all the time, because if you don’t, it’s kind of disastrous. But where you and I see disaster, someone like Marco Rubio, desperate to restore his Tea Party cred in the wake of immigration reform apparently failing, sees an opportunity. So he and a few other GOP senators like Ted Cruz and Rand Paul are pushing their colleagues to make this threat: They’ll block the CR and thus shut down the government unless Congress votes (and President Obama agrees!) to defund the Affordable Care Act, for all intents and purposes repealing it.
So threatening to shut down the government has become the all-purpose means by which some Republicans believe they can achieve almost any policy goal. Can’t cut food stamps? Shut down the government! Can’t repeal Obamacare? Shut down the government! “Mr. Chairman, if our proposal to declare August to be National Ted Nugent Appreciation Month is not passed by this body, we will have no choice but to shut down the government!”
Fortunately, many Republican senators are sane enough to realize that shutting down the government in an attempt to stop Obamacare would be a political catastrophe for the GOP, so they’re not going to let it happen. But the whole thing is sure to breed plenty of displeasure and resentment. Just what the party needs.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, July 26, 2013
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