“Not A Good Sign”: Wisconsin’s Walker, Struggling, Rolls Out New Platform
Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) had a plan: win a second term, take advantage of a good year for Republicans, and soon after prepare for a national campaign. The plan is looking a little shaky right now, with polls show him in the midst of a very competitive re-election campaign against Democratic businesswoman Mary Burke.
A month ago, the Republican incumbent and his allies tried moving to the left, blasting Burke as an “outsourcing one-percenter.”
That didn’t do much to improve Walker’s standing, so the governor is now moving back to the right, promising big tax cuts and drug testing for those receiving public aid in a second term.
With less than two months to go in a tight re-election race, the Republican governor put forward a 62-page plan that sums up the actions of his first term, defends them against the critique of his Democratic rival, former Trek Bicycle executive Mary Burke, and offers several new proposals.
“It’s our next wave of the Wisconsin comeback. It’s our plan to make sure that everyone who wants a job can find a job,” Walker said in a telephone interview.
As a rule, when an incumbent is still scrambling seven weeks before Election Day, looking for a platform while struggling to defend his record, it’s not a good sign.
Walker, referencing a one-page summary of his agenda, told the AP, “That’s our plan of action for the next four years. Tear it off. Hang it up. Put it next to your computer. Put it on your fridge.”
Part of the trouble is, Walker used similar rhetoric four years ago, when he promised Wisconsin he’d create 250,000 private sector jobs by the end of his first term – and said he should be judged according to that standard. Nearly four years later, the governor is less than halfway to his goal, and has yet to explain why he couldn’t keep his highest-profile promise.
But even putting that aside, the two key tenets of the Republican’s new agenda – tax cuts and drug testing – probably polled well, but they each come with one big flaw.
On the former, Walker already cut taxes in his first term, and it’s caused a mess for Wisconsin’s state finances. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel editorialized last week:
Wisconsin’s state budget may be out of balance by nearly $1.8 billion when the new two-year cycle begins next July, and for that you can thank Gov. Scott Walker’s fiscal policies.
While the expected shortfall may end up being smaller – or larger – than it appears to be now, it’s clear that a combination of Walker policies and lagging growth in tax revenue blew a hole in the state’s finances.
The governor, facing this reality, is calling for more tax breaks. Perfect.
But the latter is arguably even more offensive. The plan would require “drug testing at an undisclosed cost for able-bodied adults receiving unemployment insurance payments or benefits under FoodShare, the successor to the food stamps program.” It’s part of a political phenomenon we discussed earlier this year: conservative policymakers keep targeting welfare recipients with drug tests, and the policies keep failing rather spectacularly.
We know exactly what drives these efforts. For many, especially on the right, it makes sense to assume those who are struggling are to blame for their plight. If you’re relying on TANF aid to help your family keep its head above water, maybe there’s something wrong with your lifestyle. Maybe the state should assume you have a drug problem.
But recent real-world evidence points in a different direction. Requiring those who are relying on the safety net to give the government their bodily fluids in exchange for benefits is not only legally dubious; it’s also ineffective and a waste of money.
If Walker doesn’t know these previous experiments have failed, he should. If he does know and chooses to push the idea anyway, it would seem the governor’s plan for the next seven weeks is built on little more than callous cynicism.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, September 16, 2014
“A Serious And Accessible Right For All”: America Is A Democracy; So Why Do We Make It Hard For Certain People To Vote?
Since I first registered to vote on my 18th birthday, I haven’t missed voting in a single election that I can remember. My feat has been nothing short of a pain in the ass, given that I have moved 14 times in the 19 years since.
This week, I almost failed to vote for the first time: I had moved – again – in the gap between the board of elections deadline to change my address and the New York state primary election. I did try to update my voter registration online, but didn’t receive a confirmation. I was confused if I was eligible to vote where I now live, or at the last address where I had been registered.
We don’t have same-day registration here in New York, so I steeled myself against the guilt and decided not to bother. But the guilt set in anyway: I saw on Facebook how many of my friends had voted; I felt the ghosts of my father, grandfather and great-grandfather prepare to raise up from the grave and beat my black behind for giving up so easily when they’d fought much harder challenges – like the Klan – to exercise their right to vote.
So I went down to what should be my precinct (and will be, once the change of address takes effect). My name wasn’t on the rolls, but because I was already a registered voter, I was allowed to fill out a provisional ballot. It wasn’t an easy process to navigate, it took a lot of time, and my vote may not even be counted.
Most people like me don’t have hours to spend voting by provisional ballot, as I did on Tuesday. And by “people like me”, I mean those of us who are somewhat fringe and move often. According to Demos, “Almost 36.5 million US residents moved between 2011 and 2012,” and “low-income individuals were twice as likely to move as those above the poverty line.”
Voter transience has a huge demographic effect on the electorate. As the Pew Center on the States explains:
About one in eight Americans moved during the 2008 and 2010 election years … Some Americans – including those serving in the military, young people, and those living in communities affected by the economic downturn – are even more transient. For example, census and other data indicate that as many as one in four young Americans moves in a given year.
“Mobility is the primary driver of problems with the voter lists,” David Becker, director of the Pew Charitable Trusts’ election initiatives, told me. “And there’s not any question that young people, and people who are socioeconomically disadvantaged, are much more likely to be mobile.”
The causes of voter mobility are varied, from Superstorm Sandy and Hurricane Katrina, to economic marginalization and gentrification and beyond. The population of people who move often, particularly in-state or in-town for economic reasons, would benefit most from “portable registration”, in which states would allow residents to remain properly registered as long as they stay in the state and without officially updating their records with the board of elections. As it stands now, one in four Americans already mistakenly believes, for example, that if you update your address with the post office, your voter registration information has been updated. (It hasn’t.)
With voting, “the onus is on the voter to register, and re-register” with the government, explained Becker – unlike Social Security, in which the onus is on the government to track citizens. Technology exists to allow individual election boards to similarly track voters’ moves – even just syncing voter rolls with, say, a state’s motor vehicle registration or drivers license database would be more efficient and cheaper, according to the Electronic Information Registration Center (Eric).
But, as Jonathan Brater, the counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice, pointed out, people who are more transient “tend not to be homeowners, to be poorer, and to be non-white” – and, since they don’t vote as often, there’s little political will to make it easier for them to do so.
And so, the chaos and confusion – and low voter turn-out – will continue.
Universal American suffrage feels precarious: only 11 states and the District of Columbia are members of Eric; the federal government is still fighting the states over who gets to vote when, much as it did half a century ago; and, worst of all, the federal judicial branch has eviscerated the executive branch’s greatest tool, the Voting Rights Act.
Does America really care about making voting a serious and accessible right for all? Given the obsessive focus on voter ID initiatives aimed at minority communities in the absence of evidence of widespread voter fraud, and the myriad ways in which we make it difficult for the very young and the very old, the poor, the transient, those who served their time in our nation’s disgusting prison pipeline, the non-white, those who don’t speak perfect English and even members of the armed forces serving overseas (and their families) to vote, the answer, it seems, is no.
This nation, as much as we like to talk about it being a democracy, was at its inception as concerned with which residents it wanted to keep from participating in its democratic experiment as it was in the experiment at all. It is hard, when the average American moves every five years and has to reaffirm and defend their right to vote each time, to feel like very much has changed.
By: Steven Thrasher, The Guardian, September 12, 2014
“Grappling With Their Shortsighted Rejection”: The Tough Politics Of Medicaid For Republicans
In the world of Republican politics, there is no surer bet than opposing ObamaCare. But conservative obstruction to the health care overhaul may finally be catching up with a handful of Republican governors running for re-election. Their rejection of ObamaCare’s expansion of Medicaid — the federal health assistance program for the poor and disabled — has been them losing both the argument and voters.
Princeton political scientist Sam Wang recently published an analysis of polling data from this year’s gubernatorial races. It found that Republican incumbents who resisted ObamaCare’s Medicaid expansion — including Wisconsin’s Scott Walker, Pennsylvania’s Tom Corbett, and Kansas’ Sam Brownback — are in much tighter races than those who accepted it. “Republican governors who bucked their party’s stance and accepted the policy are faring better with voters — in these races, an average of 8.5 percentage points better,” Wang discovered.
This shouldn’t be surprising. Setting aside the incendiary politics surrounding ObamaCare and its alleged freedom-killing agenda, the simple truth is that Republican governors have blocked health insurance for nearly six million citizens. And they’ve done so despite the fact that under ObamaCare, the federal government covers all the cost of expanding Medicaid for the next six years, and at least 90 percent of the cost in 2020 and beyond.
Why have Republican governors spurned this incredibly good deal? Their ostensible justification has been disbelief that the federal government would hold up its end of the bargain, leaving states to pick up the tab.
But researchers at the Urban Institute threw cold water on this argument in a study last month. They found that the federal government has almost never reduced funding to the states for Medicaid. In fact, it has not done so since 1981, when President Reagan and Congress imposed a temporary funding cut.
Indeed, Congress has been far more likely to increase funding for state Medicaid programs. It has done so twice in recent memory — in 1997 and in 2005 — boosting state funding even while making other cuts to the program.
The sanctity of the federal commitment to Medicaid has only grown in recent years. As evidence of federal faint-heartedness, conservatives point to an administration proposal floated during 2011 budget negotiations that would have reduced federal Medicaid funding to the states.
But this bad idea was dropped after the states got newfound bargaining power from the Supreme Court’s 2012 decision making the Medicaid expansion entirely voluntary. With the expansion now optional, the administration can ill afford to weaken the financial carrot for red states to buy in. This has also made the administration agreeable to some conservative twists on traditional Medicaid, like using public dollars to enroll people in private health plans in Arkansas and Iowa.
The Urban Institute also quantified how much intransigent red states are losing by resisting ObamaCare. They’re turning down $400 billion in free federal money over 10 years. They will have missed out on over 172,000 new jobs in 2015 alone. And they’ve cost their hospitals $168 million, enough to completely offset ObamaCare’s reimbursement cuts to hospitals for Medicare and Medicaid.
And, of course, these states have also frozen themselves at pre-ObamaCare rates of high uninsurance. “While the number of uninsured in other states fell by 38 percent since September 2013,” the researchers explain, “non-expanding states experienced a decline of just 9 percent.”
As the midterm elections approach, Republican candidates are discovering that the politics around health care reform are becoming unexpectedly complicated. Trailing badly in the polls, Gov. Corbett announced last month that Pennsylvania will expand its Medicaid program. In states that have already expanded their programs, pro-repeal conservative candidates are stumbling to explain how they would handle new Medicaid enrollees.
But this is what happens when you engage with the actual policy implications of health care reform. Conservatives can whip up fear and hostility over an abstract big-government monolith called ObamaCare. But the actual programs contained therein (like expanding public health insurance for the poor) tend to be pretty appealing to voters.
As their arguments are rendered hollow, obstructionist Republicans are paying the electoral price for thwarting these types of programs. When they picked a fight against expanding Medicaid, conservatives chose the wrong bulwark for massive resistance against national health care reform.
By: Joel Dodge, The Week, September 9, 2014
“The Campaign For Liberty”: The War On Obamacare Has Become A War On Minorities And The Poor
Like many eleventh-hour strategies, the right’s final offensive against the Affordable Care Act has a last-gasp quality to it. Where better-laid plans to defeat the ACA in Congress and via Constitutional challenge were fraught with ideological purpose, the challengers in Halbig v. Burwell are engaged in something much smaller. Their argument is merely that if you read a poorly drafted section of the statute out of context, it appears that the law doesn’t contemplate subsidies in states that availed themselves of the federal government’s backstop, Healthcare.gov. Millions of people would lose their health insurance in service of teaching Congress a lesson about the importance of legislative draftsmanship.
That’s not a very becoming political argument, though, so the Halbig supporters have stapled a grandiose claim to their core challenge. Because many of the people who would lose their insurance would also qualify for an exemption from the law’s insurance coverage mandate, they frame it as a principled campaign for liberty.
But many is not all. It’s probably not even most. As University of Michigan law professor Nicholas Bagley noted on Tuesday, a conservative victory in Halbig would eliminate subsidies for everyone, but the hardship exemption would only apply to a subset. Many, many people—those above about 180 percent of the federal poverty level—would still be required to purchase insurance. It would just become more expensive for them. The exemption—the escape hatch to freedom—would only be available to those whose coverage costs more than eight percent of income: the poor, and near-poor. These are the people whose liberty conservatives claim to be fighting for—the people who were only able to purchase insurance because the subsidies made it affordable. The people who, as Bagley writes, would “be free to decline coverage that, without tax credits, they can’t afford anyhow.”
This kind of post hoc appeal to liberty long predates the Affordable Care Act, but it has become particularly salient in the fight against Obamacare as enrollment has grown and weakened traditional tools of opposition. When the Supreme Court made the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion optional back in 2012, it vouchsafed an old but typically losing conservative argument that using federal spending as an incentive to force state action can be unconstitutionally coercive—a freedom-crushing blow against states’ rights. But the freedom the Court upheld two years ago looks, in effect, an awful lot like the freedom the challengers in Halbig claim to be fighting for. In both cases there’s something conspicuous about the people to whom these strange conceptions of liberty apply.
As of early April, per this Kaiser Family Foundation map, 19 states remained fully unwilling to consider Medicaid expansion. In the weeks since, Wyoming and Tennessee joined Utah and Indiana among GOP-controlled states working toward expanding Medicaid. So the chips are slowly falling. But they are falling along fairly predictable racial and income lines.
Tennessee was a genuine surprise, in that it isn’t lily white, and has fairly high rates of poverty. But the GOP-controlled states that have expanded Medicaid, or are considering Medicaid expansion, are pretty white relative to GOP-controlled states where expansion is out of the question. Deep Southern states, where poverty is most concentrated and black population rates approach 30 percent, aren’t calling up the Department of Health and Human Services in Washington to negotiate a conservative Medicaid expansion compromise. To the contrary, that’s probably where resistance to the expansion runs strongest.
The story won’t be much different if conservatives get their way and ACA subsidies disappear in Healthcare.gov states. If you haven’t caught on by now, the conspicuous thing about the Medicaid freedmen and those who would be freed from the individual mandate is that they’re disproportionately black and poor. ACA rejectionism isn’t enhancing their liberty at all.
But there’s something conspicuous about the Obamacare opponents posing as tribunes for liberty, too. They’re nearly all affluent white people, who take their own health insurance for granted and probably wouldn’t consider themselves liberated if a court or legislature took aim at it for any reason. And though their rhetoric suggests otherwise, they’re waging the final Obamacare battles against poor people and minorities, not on their behalf.
By: Brian Beutler, The New Republic, September 4, 2014
“Boehner’s Constitution Of Convenience”: Sermonizing Politicians Cannot Meet Even Their Most Rudimentary Responsibilities
People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. Especially when your glass house is the House of Representatives. Speaker of the House John Boehner made headlines last month, when he launched a misguided lawsuit against President Obama for ostensibly violating “his constitutional authority.” Yet if anybody is treading on the Constitution, it is Boehner himself. Speaker Boehner and his conservative caucus have shown a blatant disregard for the Constitution’s Sixth Amendment, which guarantees criminal defendants “the assistance of counsel.” In the process, they have failed to meet their basic constitutional responsibilities.
Boehner is cynically using the very process he refuses to fund for others less fortunate. In announcing his decision to sue the President, Boehner made the anodyne observation that “the legislative branch has an obligation to defend the rights and responsibilities of the American people.” These rights include those contained in the Sixth Amendment, which specifies the procedures of criminal prosecution. Notably, the Amendment protects the fundamental rights of criminal defendants to a speedy trial and to be represented by legal counsel.
Congressional Republicans’ extreme budget cuts threaten the core of the Sixth Amendment. Since 2010, Congress slashed hundreds of millions of dollars from the federal judiciary and federal public defense programs. Simultaneously, Congressional Republicans allowed states to enact draconian cuts to public defense. From Michigan to Mississippi, state legislators balanced their budgets on the backs of poor Americans who rely on public defenders. States rights are all well and good, but states do not have the right to violate the Constitution. Despite efforts by Democrats in Congress to stop the damage, Congressional Republicans refused to increase appropriations and provide reasonable levels of funding.
The results have been catastrophic. And the victims are some of the most vulnerable people in our society: low-income Americans trapped in a biased justice system. As noted by the ACLU and other advocacy organizations, the “deep cuts to the federal public defenders’ budget” resulted in “significant layoffs, 15-20 day furloughs, and the complete elimination of defender training.” Continuing on this dangerous path, according to the advocacy coalition, would “decimate the federal defender system.” On the state level, the consequences have been equally devastating. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, many state public defenders spend as little as six minutes per case because of paltry funding. The Brennan Center also found that public defenders often juggle “more than 300 cases at one time.”
Gideon v. Wainwright (1963) and Argersinger v. Hamlin (1972) are unequivocal: the Sixth Amendment of the Constitution entitles criminal defendants to effective legal representation. Congress has the responsibility to secure this right with appropriate funding. And it is not doing so. Low-income Americans are paying a very real price for this constitutional abdication.
Tea Party Republicans frequently pontificate about the Constitution. The 112th Congress, in which John Boehner was elevated to Speaker, began with a ceremonial reading of the document “for the first time ever.” The House Republican Caucus introduced a rule in 2011 that requires all legislation to “cite its specific constitutional authority.” Republicans routinely allege that President Obama’s actions menace the Constitution. To quote Republicans in Congress, America faces a “constitutional crisis” because “King Obama” has “rewritten the Constitution for himself.” But when it is time to actually stand up for the Constitution, these sermonizing politicians cannot meet even their most rudimentary responsibilities. America doesn’t need politicians who lecture about the Constitution; we need politicians who follow it.
Conservative Republicans don’t stop at undermining public defense. They also embrace extreme cuts to civil legal assistance. While not protected by the Sixth Amendment, civil legal aid is a vital component of the safety net. Every year, it helps 1.8 million low income Americans facing everything from domestic violence to foreclosure. Like criminal legal aid, it is also egregiously underfunded. Almost every House Republican supported a 2011 plan to chop nearly 20% from the annual appropriation of the Legal Services Corporation (LSC), the nation’s primary provider of civil legal aid. For some Republicans, these severe cut to LSC did not go far enough. 170 Republicans, or 70% of the Congressional Republican Caucus, subsequently voted to eliminate all funding for the LSC.
Fortunately, the Obama Administration and Congressional Democrats have successfully blocked the most radical reductions in public defense. Attorney General Holder and Solicitor General Verrilli have been tireless advocate for reversing the cuts and establishing an equitable judicial system.
Ironically, Speaker Boehner resorted to the American justice system to sue President Obama, the very system he has worked relentlessly to underfund for indigents. Instead of suing Obama, he should start fixing the system he and his colleagues broke.
By: Duncan Hosie, The Huffington Post Blog, August 26, 2014
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