“Standing Up For Democracy”: Bush 4th Circuit Judge Warns Conservative Lawyers Away From The ‘Tea Party Constitution’
Fourth Circuit Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson, one of President George W. Bush’s five finalists for the Supreme Court seat that eventually went to Chief Justice Roberts, has emerged as one of the most outspoken conservative opponents of efforts to toss out the nearly 200 years of precedent establishing that the Affordable Care Act is constitutional. As Wilkinson warned in an op-ed last March, “the prospect of judges’ striking down commercial regulation on ill-defined and subjective bases is a prescription for economic chaosthat the framers, in a simpler time, had the good sense to head off.”
At a recent gathering of one of the nation’s leading conservative lawyers’ groups, Judge Wilkinson offered a similar warning — telling the gathered group of conservatives to back off efforts to constitutionalize Tea Party ideology:
And last month, receiving the Federalist Society’s Lifetime Service Award at Georgetown University, Judge Wilkinson hinted that the high court he nearly joined should think twice before striking down the symbol of everything contemporary conservatives revile—the health care overhaul President Barack Obama signed into law over near-unanimous Republican opposition.
“It may of course seem tempting to press the advantage when one seemingly has a judicial majority at hand. But this wheel shall turn,” Judge Wilkinson said. “Lasting credibility on an issue such as judicial restraint requires us to practice it, as the old saying goes, when the shoe pinches as well as when it comforts.” . . .
“It is also one thing to welcome the Tea Party as a political movement, quite another to embrace a Tea Party Constitution. Political disputation and constitutional debate are simply different things, and it does our democracy no favors to confuse one with the other.”
Wilkinson deserves a lot of credit for standing up for democracy at a time when his fellow conservatives have largely abandoned it in favor of what the judge describes as an effort to “press one’s views into our fundamental charter such that our opponents are left with no quarter and are defeated not in the temporary sense of a political ebb and flow, but in the more absolute tones of constitutional condemnation.”
Moreover, there should be no doubt that Tea Party constitutionalists are calling for a sweeping attack on American democracy. As a Center For American Progress report explained last September, a short list of laws that leading Tea Party lawmakers claim are unconstitutional includes Social Security and Medicare, Medicaid, children’s health insurance, and other health care programs, all federal education programs, all federal antipoverty programs, federal disaster relief, federal food safety inspections and other food safety programs, national child labor laws, the minimum wage, overtime, and other federal labor protections and many federal civil rights laws.
By: Ian Millhiser, Think Progress, May 4, 2012
The Success Of Mitt Romney’s Health-Care Pander
Last year, at the University of Michigan, Mitt Romney gave a speech on health care to address his prior support for the individual mandate—the linchpin for the Affordable Care Act and Romneycare in Massachusetts. The core of his speech—and of his message on health care since then—was that it’s unacceptable for the federal government to require health insurance for its citizens. As he said:
Our plan was a state solution to a state problem. And his is a power grab by the federal government to put in place a one size fits all plan across the nation.
Of course, this isn’t true. The Affordable Care Act maintains the private health-insurance market and requires people to buy into it if they don’t have insurance or qualify for Medicaid. If the ACA is a “one size fits all” plan, than by dint of similarity, Romneycare is the same.
It’s for that reason that, at the time, I was skeptical of this whole maneuver. There was no way that conservatives could really believe Romney when he made the bogus distinction between his plan and the administration’s. In the same way that discrimination is discrimination, whether it’s practiced by local, state, or federal authorities, if the requirement to purchase health insurance is tyranny, then it’s tyranny everywhere, regardless of how it’s implemented.
As it turns out, I was completely wrong. Not only has Romney escaped any serious harm for his (huge) role in setting the template for “Obamacare” but his constant denunciations of the law have given him credibility with actual conservatives, who now endorse the former Massachusetts governor’s logic on Romneycare. Here’s Ann Coulter, for example:
As The New York Times put it, “Mr. Romney’s bellicose opposition to ‘Obamacare’ is an almost comical contradiction to his support for the same idea in Massachusetts when he was governor there.” This is like saying state school-choice plans are “the same idea” as the Department of Education. […]
As Rick Santorum has pointed out, states can enact all sorts of laws—including laws banning contraception—without violating the Constitution. That document places strict limits on what Congress can do, not what the states can do. Romney, incidentally, has always said his plan would be a bad idea nationally. [Emphasis mine]
It should be said that, before he flipped to the right in preparation for a presidential run, Romney insisted that his plan would make a good model for the country.
That aside, it’s simply incredible to me that conservatives would buy Romney’s ridiculous logic. But it seems that they trust Romney enough on health-care repeal to let the issue slide. Which should put a damper on liberal hopes that, if elected, Romney won’t try to dismantle the Affordable Care Act. For as much as the public is skeptical of politicians—especially presidential aspirants—students of the presidency have found that presidents genuinely try to fulfill the promises they made as candidates.
If you want to know how Mitt Romney will govern, all you have to do is listen to him. And in that case, a President Romney would cater to the rich, return to the bellicose foreign policy of George W. Bush, and dismantle the social safety net, Obamacare included.
By: Jamelle Bouie, The American Prospect, February 2, 2012
RomneyCare: Conservatives Attempt To Rescue Mitt From His Past
Now that Mitt Romney is well and truly inevitable, it is becoming imperative for conservatives to begin the arduous work of explaining why his Massachusetts health care plan is in no way similar to the evil, bureaucratic, freedom-destroying Obamacare monstrosity. Ann Coulter gives it a go, as do Yuval Levin and Ramesh Ponnuru in National Review.
The latter brush aside any purported similarities by quickly noting that “policy experts of various political stripes have claimed that Obamacare is essentially Romneycare taken national.” Right, one of those policy experts is Jonathan Gruber, the guy who designed Romney’s health care plan and then designed Obama’s. Let’s see what he has to say:
He credited Mitt Romney for not totally disavowing the Massachusetts bill during his presidential campaign, but said Romney’s attempt to distinguish between Obama’s bill and his own is disingenuous.
“The problem is there is no way to say that,” Gruber said. “Because they’re the same fucking bill. He just can’t have his cake and eat it too. Basically, you know, it’s the same bill. He can try to draw distinctions and stuff, but he’s just lying.
Any attempt to explain why Romneycare is so vastly different than Obamacare really ought to explain why the economist who designed both plans thinks they’re the same fucking bill.
Coulter, Levin, and Ponnuru all defend Romney by arguing that he was operating within the constraints of a distorted federal system. “There’s not much governors can do about the collectivist mess Congress has made of health care in this country,” writes Coulter. But of course Obama was also operating within the confines of a distorted system, including many interest groups and voters deeply resistant to change.
Levin and Ponnuru urge Romney to vigorously press the argument that his plan has no resemblance to Obama’s. Their advice centers on the one area of difference:
So what, then, should Governor Romney say, if he is the nominee and President Obama suggests that his health-care plan is modeled on the one the Republican enacted? Something, we suggest, like the following:
“Nice try. Your health-care plan, Mr. President, spends a trillion dollars on yet another uncontrollable federal entitlement program and on a massive expansion of a failing Medicaid system. It has an unconstitutional rationing board cut hundreds of billions from Medicare without being answerable to the public, without giving seniors more options, and without using the money to shore up the program or reduce the deficit. It raises hundreds of billions in taxes on employment, investment, and medical research; and after all of that, it wouldn’t even reduce the growth of health-care costs, which is the heart of the problem. And your defense of all that is that it was based on a state program that doesn’t actually do any of those things?
But that is what Romney is already saying, right down to the “nice try.” And what it’s saying, basically, is that Obama was fiscally responsible. Romney, owing to a quirk of federal funding, was able to finance his plan with a windfall grant from Washington, meaning he didn’t need to come up with any painful cuts to cover his insurance expansions. Obama raised taxes and found inefficient spending within the Medicare system to finance covering the uninsured. And one of the biggest elements of his tax increase was a reduction in the tax deduction for expensive private plans – basically, the strongest version Obama could get through Congress of a staple idea urged by conservatives, which is to eliminate the tax code’s favoritism for employer-sponsored insurance.
Now, you could argue that this should go even further, and I’d agree. If you had Republicans willing to continue advocating the health care principles they used to advocate before Obama tried to implement them, you could form a stronger political coalition for tearing up the status quo and combining market pressure with universal coverage. But rational reform is pretty hard when the opposition party is able to convince itself that anything you do, including things they favored just the other day, are the death of freedom.
By: Jonathan Chait, Daily Intel, February 2, 2012
Mitt Romney’s “Post-Truth Campaign”
Suppose that President Obama were to say the following: “Mitt Romney believes that corporations are people, and he believes that only corporations and the wealthy should have any rights. He wants to reduce middle-class Americans to serfs, forced to accept whatever wages corporations choose to pay, no matter how low.”
How would this statement be received? I believe, and hope, that it would be almost universally condemned, by liberals as well as conservatives. Mr. Romney did once say that corporations are people, but he didn’t mean it literally; he supports policies that would be good for corporations and the wealthy and bad for the middle class, but that’s a long way from saying that he wants to introduce feudalism.
But now consider what Mr. Romney actually said on Tuesday: “President Obama believes that government should create equal outcomes. In an entitlement society, everyone receives the same or similar rewards, regardless of education, effort, and willingness to take risk. That which is earned by some is redistributed to the others.”
And in an interview the same day, Mr. Romney declared that the president “is going to put free enterprise on trial.”
This is every bit as bad as my imaginary Obama statement. Mr. Obama has never said anything suggesting that he holds such views, and, in fact, he goes out of his way to praise free enterprise and say that there’s nothing wrong with getting rich. His actual policy proposals do involve a rise in taxes on high-income Americans, but only back to their levels of the 1990s. And no matter how much the former Massachusetts governor may deny it, the Affordable Care Act established a national health system essentially identical to the one he himself established at a state level in 2006.
Over all, Mr. Obama’s positions on economic policy resemble those that moderate Republicans used to espouse. Yet Mr. Romney portrays the president as the second coming of Fidel Castro and seems confident that he will pay no price for making stuff up.
Welcome to post-truth politics.
Why does Mr. Romney think he can get away with this kind of thing? Well, he has already gotten away with a series of equally fraudulent attacks. In fact, he has based pretty much his whole campaign around a strategy of attacking Mr. Obama for doing things that the president hasn’t done and believing things he doesn’t believe.
For example, in October Mr. Romney pledged that as president, “I will reverse President Obama’s massive defense cuts.” That line presumably plays well with Republican audiences, but what is he talking about? The defense budget has continued to grow steadily since Mr. Obama took office.
Then there’s Mr. Romney’s frequent suggestion that the president has gone around the world “apologizing for America.” This is a popular theme on the right — but the so-called Obama apology tour is a complete fabrication, assembled by taking quotes out of context.
As Greg Sargent of The Washington Post has pointed out, there’s a common theme to these whoppers and a number of other things Mr. Romney has said: the strategy is clearly to portray the president as a suspect character, someone who doesn’t share American values. And since Mr. Obama has done and said nothing to justify this portrait, Mr. Romney just invents stuff to make his case.
But won’t there be some blowback? Won’t Mr. Romney pay a price for running a campaign based entirely on falsehoods? He obviously thinks not, and I’m afraid he may be right.
Oh, Mr. Romney will probably be called on some falsehoods. But, if past experience is any guide, most of the news media will feel as though their reporting must be “balanced,” which means that every time they point out that a Republican lied they have to match it with a comparable accusation against a Democrat — even if what the Democrat said was actually true or, at worst, a minor misstatement.
This isn’t an abstract speculation. Politifact, the project that is supposed to enforce truth in politics, has declared Democratic claims that Republicans voted to end Medicare its “Lie of the Year.” It did so even though Republicans did indeed vote to dismantle Medicare as we know it and replace it with a voucher scheme that would still be called “Medicare,” but would look nothing like the current program — and would no longer guarantee affordable care.
So here’s my forecast for next year: If Mr. Romney is in fact the Republican presidential nominee, he will make wildly false claims about Mr. Obama and, occasionally, get some flack for doing so. But news organizations will compensate by treating it as a comparable offense when, say, the president misstates the income share of the top 1 percent by a percentage point or two.
The end result will be no real penalty for running an utterly fraudulent campaign. As I said, welcome to post-truth politics.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, December 22, 2011
How The Affordable Care Act Incorporates Many Of Gingrich’s Health Care Proposals
Despite growing evidence — and video footage— that he has previously supported a national health insurance mandate, Newt Gingrich continues to characterize the Affordable Care Act as a government takeover of the health care system that he would repeal on his first day in office. But a closer look at Gingrich’s past health care proposals, his work at the Center for Health Transformation, and numerous books about health care reform, suggest that the law he seeks to repeal includes many aspects of his own health care philosophies and proposals.
As the table below demonstrates, the provisions included in President Obama’s health reform law are more progressive than Gingrich would have allowed, but they aim to expand coverage and lower health care costs in very similar ways:
| Newt Gingrich | Affordable Care Act | |
| Individual Mandate | “You ought to either have health insurance, or you ought to post a bond.” [Healthcare Cease Fire, 2005] | Section 1501: U.S. citizens and legal residents who don’t obtain coverage by 2014, pay a tax penalty. |
| Group Purchasing | “Large risk pools…should be established so low income people can buy insurance as inexpensively as large corporations.” [Winning The Future, 2005] | Section 1321: States establish health insurance exchanges to allow individuals, families, and small businesses to harness the purchasing power of large employers. |
| Subsidies | “Some aspect of the working poor has to involve transfer of finances. To ask people in the lowest paying jobs to bear the full burden of their health insurance is just irrational.” [Healthcare Cease Fire, 2005] | Section 1401: Families with incomes between 133-400% of the federal poverty line will receive premium credits to purchase insurance through the Exchanges. |
| Comparative Effectiveness Research | “A health care system that is driven by robust comparative clinical evidence will save lives and money.” [NYT, 2008] | Section 6302: Establishes a non-profit Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute to identify research priorities and conduct research that compares the clinical effectiveness of medical treatments. |
| Improving Quality | “Don Berwick at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement has worked for years to spread the word that the same systematic approach to quality control that has worked so well in manufacturing could create a dramatically safer, less expensive and more effective system of health and health care.” [Washington Post, 2000] | TITLE X: Improves health care quality through numerous provisions, including the innovation of payment reform models and rewarding providers who deliver quality care. |
| Prevention | “The 21st Century System of Health and Healthcare will partner with you first to prevent illness and then to care for you as a patient if you become ill.” [Saving Lives & Saving Money, 2006] | TITLE IV: Prevention services will be available without additional cost-sharing and the law establishes a Prevention and Public Health Fund. |
| Health Information Technology (HIT) | “Going to a paperless all-electronic system is going to save lives, it’s going to save money, it’s going to lead to better outcomes, it’s going to give us new opportunities.” [Paper Kills, 2007] | The stimulus act invested in HIT and the ACA requires the government to develop standards “that facilitate electronic enrollment of individuals in Federal and State health and human services programs.” |
| Fraud | “First, we must dramatically reduce healthcare fraud within our current healthcare system.” [Stop Paying The Crooks, 2009] | The federal government has “more than tripled the amount of money it has recovered” in the past six years form fraud and the ACA includes numerous anti-fraud provisions from increasing the federal sentencing guidelines for health care fraud to appropriating an additional $350 million over 10 years to ramp up anti-fraud efforts. |
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