“The Real Cost Of Republican Cruelty”: Voters Should Know Who’s Holding Up Their Health Care
With one week remaining before the March 31 deadline for health coverage this year, a Republican filing a lawsuit against the Affordable Care Act has become a familiar, if tiresome, sight.
But Republicans filing a lawsuit against the law on the grounds of copyright infringement? That’s something new.
Yet that is effectively what happened this month in Louisiana. On March 14, the state’s lieutenant governor sued the progressive group MoveOn.org over a billboard criticizing Gov. Bobby Jindal’s refusal to expand Medicaid in the state. The billboard uses Louisiana’s tourism slogan — “Pick Your Passion!” — and adds: “But hope you don’t lose your health. Gov. Jindal’s denying Medicaid to 242,000 people.” The lawsuit claims that the MoveOn ad will “result in substantial and irreparable harm, injury, and damages” to the Louisiana tourism office — as if denying health insurance to the neediest will not cause the state “substantial and irreparable harm.”
Legal experts say Jindal’s ploy has no chance of succeeding, thanks to the First Amendment. (This would be the same First Amendment that the governor passionately invoked in defense of “Duck Dynasty” patriarch Phil Robertson’s right to spew racist and homophobic vitriol.)
Jindal’s reason for refusing to expand Medicaid is as specious as his reason for suing MoveOn. He claims, falsely, that the expansion would divert funds that now go to disabled individuals under traditional Medicaid. In reality, the health-care law doesn’t harm the existing program. It creates several programs to improve care for the disabled receiving Medicaid; Jindal enrolled Louisiana in three of them. But this hasn’t stopped him from blaming the ACA for his own bad policies, including cuts he made to state Medicaid funding for pregnant women.
Louisiana isn’t the only state where Republicans are preventing thousands of low-income Americans from receiving health care. In Virginia, where state lawmakers refuse to expand Medicaid, hospitals will face higher costs and reduced services as a result. One million Texans will be denied access to coverage if the state continues to reject the Medicaid expansion. Meanwhile, Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant is willing to leave 300,000 of his neediest citizens uninsured. His reasoning? He’s afraid that the law might be repealed, leaving his state no way to meet its commitments — an ironic stance for a Republican to take, since they’re the ones trying to repeal it!
The 19 states that are refusing to expand Medicaid aren’t just leaving low-income Americans out to dry — they’re also leaving billions of health-care dollars on the table. While Bobby Jindal busies himself over a billboard, his state’s internal analysis found that Medicaid expansion would save Louisiana as much as $134 million in 2015 alone.
The real cost of Republican cruelty, however, cannot be measured in dollars and cents, but in people’s lives. Researchers at Harvard and the City University of New York concluded that without the Medicaid expansion, individuals will go without checkups, cancer screenings and treatment for diseases such as diabetes and depression — leading to thousands of premature and preventable deaths.
So much for compassionate or fiscal conservatism.
Amid the misinformation and fear-mongering, however, lies a real opportunity for Democrats to increase support for the ACA and win more races in November.
Consider the recent special election in Florida’s 13th Congressional District, where Republican David Jolly’s victory is being widely interpreted as a rebuke of the Affordable Care Act. Polls suggest that it wasn’t Obamacare that hurt Democrat Alex Sink but the same factor that often hurts Democrats in midterm elections: low turnout.
To combat this, what if Democrats organized a clear, concerted effort to demonstrate how Republicans are denying millions of Americans access to health insurance?
There are already signs that raising awareness is working. The Moral Monday movement, which favors expanding Medicaid, has been getting attention for its protests at public meetings in several southern states. Other states are considering following the lead of New Hampshire, where the state Senate voted, with Republican support, for a modified expansion.
At the same time, progressives should back MoveOn’s brilliant billboard campaign parodying the tourism slogans of not just Louisiana but also Texas, Florida, Nebraska, Virginia and Wisconsin — which are all blocking the Medicaid expansion.
The campaign might consider going to South Dakota, Alaska, Georgia, North Carolina, Mississippi and Maine, which have Republican governors, contested Senate races and huge numbers of residents who are being denied access to health care. They need to know who is at fault.
High-profile Democrats running for federal office this cycle should be similarly bold. Voters, especially low-income voters who are most hurt by the GOP’s cruel stance on health care, need to understand just what’s at stake. It’s time for Democrats to run on health-care reform, not away from it — and Medicaid expansion is a worthy place to start. If they need to know how far Republicans have gone to prevent it, there’s a billboard along Interstate 10 in Louisiana that’s a pretty good guide.
By: Katrina vanden Heuvel, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, March 25, 2014
“John Boehner’s Hypocritical Griping About The Obamacare Deadline Delay”: Conservatives’ Real Beef, That People Want To Sign Up
The Obama Administration has made another adjustment to the Affordable Care Act and the critics are making another fuss.
The adjustment, first reported (I think) by Amy Lotven for Inside Health Policy, is an extension of the open enrollment period for buying private insurance through the new Obamacare marketplaces. Officially, most people have until March 31 to sign up for a plan. (The exception are people who lose a job or have some other, similar life-altering experience. They can sign up throughout the year.) But on Wednesday, the administration announced that it will be offering some extra time to consumers who don’t finish their applications in time. They’ll be able to use the websites, just like they can now, only they’ll have to check a box attesting to the fact that they started the application process before April 1.
Exactly how many extra days will these folks get? And what’s to prevent somebody from lying—effectively taking advantage of the grace period to get insurance after the official deadline? On a predictably painful and frustrating conference call Wednesday, officials from the Department of Health and Human Services wouldn’t answer these questions directly. Obamacare critics, meanwhile, were quick to express their displeasure.”What the hell is this? A joke?” House Speaker John Boehner said at a press conference. “Another deadline made meaningless. If he hasn’t put enough loopholes in the law already, the administration is now resorting to an honor system to enforce it.”
Boehner appears to be right about the lack of enforcement. Nothing can stop people from gaming this new system. And establishing some kind of fixed date might be a good idea, as Philip Klein points out at the Washington Examiner, although in practice the insurers will basically do that on their own. (If they don’t get applications by the middle of the month, they won’t start coverage on May 1.) But even insurers are shrugging at this and it’s not clear why Boehner or anybody else should react differently.
There’s genuine reason to think that people who waited until the last minute to sign up really might have problems completing the process in time. Traffic to the online marketplaces has been increasing rapidly, with levels now rivaling the surge that took place in late December. On Tuesday, 1.2 million people visited healthcare.gov, according to officials. At some point, the congestion could trigger a built-in queuing system—making it difficult for last-minute applicants to finish enrollment by midnight on March 31. As administration officials pointed out, you don’t stop people from voting because they were standing in line when the polls closed. Or, to borrow a phrase I saw on twitter, you don’t kick somebody out of a restaurant because their dish wasn’t ready before closing time.
As for people gaming the system to buy themselves extra time, sure, it’s going to happen. But it’s unlikely to happen that frequently, certainly not enough to upset the actuarial balance of insurance plans. And it’s not like this is unprecedented. As Igor Volskly explained in an item for ThinkProgress, the Bush Administration did pretty much the same thing with Medicare Part D:
In May of 2006, just days before the end of open enrollment, President Bush took administrative action to waive “penalty fees for very low-income seniors and people with disabilities who sign up late” and allowed “the same impoverished beneficiaries to sign up for Medicare drug coverage until Dec. 31.” …
Like Obamacare, the launch of President George W. Bush’s prescription benefit plan was hampered by technical glitches, setbacks, and mass confusion. As the May 15 deadline for enrollment loomed, a bipartisan group of lawmakers advocacy organizations, and a surprising number of newspaper editorials, urged the administration to extend the enrollment period and protect seniors from the penalties associated with late enrollment.
Of course, the real issue here for conservatives isn’t this one delay. It’s all of the delays, plus all of the exceptions and waivers. And it’s totally reasonable to ask hard questions about these, particularly when it comes to the limits of presidential authority and the precedent it sets for the future. (I’m still waiting to hear from more lawyers on the constitutional issues.) But, for what it’s worth, the Affordable Care Act really did give HHS a huge amount of leeway over how to implement the law—and it did so for a very good reason. Given the inherent complexity of health care, there’s no way Congress could have figured out all of the details. It made sense to delegate that authority—to put in place new systems, but leave the nitty-gritty of regulations and transitions to the administration.
For each one of these extensions or delays, the ultimate question is whether they change the law’s ability to realize its basic goals—which, in this case, means encouraging people to buy new private health plans while maintaining a stable insurance market. Giving people a little extra time to enroll wouldn’t seem to impede this kind of progress. If anything, it would seem to enhance it. And maybe that’s what really bothers some of the law’s fiercer critics.
By: Jonathan Cohn, The New Republic, March 26, 2014
“The Toxic Culture Of Conservatism”: Conservatives Have A “Racist Jokes” Culture Problem
Florida Gov. Rick Scott’s reelection campaign had one of those days yesterday. You know, one of those days where you hold a press call with the lieutenant governor but instead of asking about your latest campaign ad like they’re supposed to, all the reporters insist on asking about how the campaign’s finance co-chair recently stepped down because campaign staffers made racist jokes.
Billionaire healthcare mogul Mike Fernandez was Rick Scott’s top fundraiser until last week, when he abruptly quit. The Miami Herald offered some detail on what led up to the decision:
Despite the praise, Fernandez has been unhappy for weeks with the struggling campaign’s direction and the attitude of some of its workers.
Fernandez began expressing his frustrations at least a month ago when he sent an email to top Scott allies and complained about two campaign aides who had joked around in a cartoon-style Mexican accent en route to a Mexican restaurant in Fernandez’s home town of Coral Gables.
The Scott campaign can assure you that it was not that bad:
“Mike was not in the van,” Scott’s campaign manager, Melissa Sellers, said in an email to the Herald.
So no harm done! Sellers also said: “If something was said in an accent, no one remembers what it was.” (Obviously someone remembers, but fine.)
The incident was reminiscent of the recently released internal emails from the staff of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker. Those emails revealed an office where campaigning and politicking trumped governing, but they also showed a staff that saw absolutely no issue with forwarding deeply offensive (and stupid, and unfunny) “jokes” involving the inherent hilarity of people of color.
There has been some debate recently on the subject of urban “culture” and its relation to poverty and white supremacy. Conservatives argue, essentially, that the structural forces (white supremacy) holding back “urban” economic advancement have largely receded, and so, where there is still poverty, the problem is “cultural.”
With that in mind, I’d like to posit that one reason conservative minority outreach fails so often and so consistently is because of a tailspin of culture, among Republicans, of generations of men being giant racist pricks. Not just racially “insensitive,” like an old man who doesn’t know it’s not OK to say “Oriental” anymore, but actively, intentionally, overtly, aggressively racist pricks. Like “attend a blackface-themed frat party on MLK Day” racist. Most of us don’t think forwarding a racist joke or speaking in an insulting “comedic” accent is appropriate at the workplace. Unfortunately, for those raised in the toxic culture of conservatism, the sort of mentality that leads government employees to do those things is widespread.
There will be no successful minority “outreach” for the GOP — not even among the “high-achieving” groups — until this culture is addressed. They’ll have to do this work for themselves. Charitable groups have tried for years to educate and help conservatives, but they keep falling back into the same tragic patterns: asking “why isn’t there a WHITE history month,” demanding access to institutions of higher learning based not on merit but on skin color, infringing on free expression merely because it makes them uncomfortable. The list goes on and on. It’s time for the right to stop feeling entitled to lessons in basic human decency, and start addressing their own pathological culture.
By: Alex Pareene, Salon, March 25, 2014
“Hatred, The New Republican Exceptionalism”: The GOP Just Screwed Ukraine Out Of Billions To Hurt Obama
You know those people who carry on all the time about how the United States looks weak to the world, and how we have to do everything we possibly can to help poor Ukraine stand up to the evil Vladimir Putin? Well, guess what they just did? They just made the United States look weak to the world—and they actually just reduced (yes, reduced) the amount of global aid that can flow to Ukraine to help it stand up to the evil Vladimir Putin.
The deal was this: The Obama administration’s aid package to Ukraine placed before the Senate included some long-sought International Monetary Fund reforms. These reforms, which the administration agreed to in 2010 with the leading nations of Europe, and which those nations have already signed off on, would have helped Ukraine get more money from the IMF after this quick tranche from the United States ran dry. It’s complicated, but in essence, the reforms shifted money from one narrow spending category to a broader one that could be tapped by countries for projects like building and sustaining democracy, of which Ukraine is in rather desperate need. So while there wasn’t a specific dollar figure on the table, the IMF reforms could potentially, a Senate Democratic aide explained to me, have led to several billion more in aid to the country.
What’s to object to? To Republicans, this: The reforms include an increase in the U.S. contribution quota to the IMF of $63 billion. They would also give more voice to emerging nations. Now, these two measures are offset by the facts that 1) the overall U.S. expenditure on the IMF wouldn’t go up, because the U.S. would be allowed to decrease other commitments by a like amount, and 2) the U.S. would still have enough voting shares at IMF meetings to retain the veto power it has currently.
But those points don’t matter on the right, of course. Over there, it all spells a diminution of American power, the hated global governance, like Pat Buchanan’s old warnings about sending our boys out to global hotspots donning light-blue (i.e. United Nations) helmets. John McCain and Bob Corker, to their credit, supported the aid with the IMF reform tacked on. But most Republicans didn’t, and even though the full package easily passed a procedural vote, Democrats were getting the strong sense that an aid deal with the IMF stuff included wasn’t going to make it.
And so, it emerged this week that the Obama administration and Senate Democrats apparently backed off their demand for the Ukraine aid bill on Capitol Hill to include the reforms. On Monday, John Kerry visited Congress and threw in the towel. Better to have whatever we can get now than fight over this and delay matters. Or worse, lose altogether, because there was no chance that the House would ever have passed the IMF-laden version.
Let’s take stock of this. The Crimea/Ukraine crisis broke. Republicans immediately were all over Obama for being weak. The whole thing was his fault. We are all Ukrainians now. We had to stand with Ukraine to send a strong message to the malefactor Putin.
So what happens when the bill reaches them? The Obama administration tries to live up to an agreement it made—with our friends, our closest allies—four years ago at an opportune moment to press the issue, thinking that the idea that the reform would be of use to Ukraine might help matters. But as with everything, opposition to Obama is more important than anything else. If he’s for it, they’re against it. If Ukraine gets less money because of that, well, tough cheese for them.
And so it happens that the people who caterwaul about America being weak in the world become the very people who make it weaker. What does the world think as it watches this? Maybe some think merely that Obama is weak. But I’d wager most don’t. I’d wager most Europeans and others reach the right and reasonable conclusion: That American partisan dysfunction, driven far more by Republicans than by Democrats, now weakens not just our ability to carry out domestic politics but our foreign-policy aims as well.
Nothing like this has happened in decades. Yes Democrats—and several moderate Republicans, let’s remember, like John Sherman Cooper and Jacob Javits—blocked funding for the Vietnam War. But at least they were acting in accord with their long-stated principles and goal of ending that war. Today, Republicans are opposing their own stated principle of helping Ukraine as much as possible. Sen. Ted Cruz even went so far as to say that the proposed IMF reforms weakened the U.S. and strengthened Russia (I asked his spokesman to explain why this was so, and he wrote me back but never delivered an answer). In fact, Russia, Reuters has reported, is on record urging the IMF to adopt the reforms without U.S. support, and small wonder: Doing so would mean the end of the U.S. veto. So the Obama administration position of buying into the reforms is clearly something Russia doesn’t want to see.
Except for the very early days of the Cold War, politics never really quite stopped at the water’s edge. But politics did soften at the water’s edge. Not anymore. The Republicans are dug in, and as a result they are causing the very decline in standing and prestige that they are blaming on Obama. This jumps the shark from hurting the president to hurting the country. Hope they’re proud.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, March 26, 2014
“Can Liberals Trust John Roberts To Rescue Obamacare Again?”: A Pro-Hobby Lobby Ruling Would Be His Most Radical Decision
Most Supreme Court watchers are fixated these days on Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby—the important challenge to the Affordable Care Act’s contraception mandate scheduled for argument Tuesday. And why wouldn’t they be? With its potent mix of religion, sex, Obamacare, and prayerful corporations, it’s the blockbuster case of the term. It is also a crucial test of Chief Justice John Roberts’s leadership on the Supreme Court.
Just two years ago, Roberts cast the deciding vote to largely uphold the Affordable Care Act. While the country remains divided over whether he acted like a traitor or a statesman, all would have to agree that, given the level of public scrutiny on the Court and the case’s overall importance (both substantively and to the President’s legacy), Roberts’s ACA vote was the defining moment of his tenure thus far. In a bold move, he broke ranks with his conservative colleagues, joined with the Court’s progressive wing, and preserved the President’s signature achievement. In Hobby Lobby, Roberts meets the ACA yet again, and the stakes for his reputation—and that of his Court—couldn’t be higher.
Chief Justice Roberts has often spoken about how important it is for the justices to maintain the legitimacy of the Court—by limiting divisive rulings, moving the law incrementally, and trying to stay above politics. For instance, in an interview with Jeffrey Rosen early in his tenure as chief justice, Roberts explained that the Court is “ripe for a … refocus on functioning as an institution, because if it doesn’t it’s going to lose its credibility and legitimacy.” Expressing admiration for the great Chief Justice John Marshall, Roberts added that, even as a committed Federalist, Marshall preferred to move the law “in a way that … wasn’t going to alienate people on the Court and turn the Court into another battleground.” While commentators certainly quibble over just how radical an effect John Roberts has had on the law—even Justice Antonin Scalia once attacked the chief justice’s approach in a pre-Citizens United campaign finance case as “faux judicial restraint”—there’s little question that Roberts himself prefers the image of the modest jurist to that of judge-as-hero (think Earl Warren) or judge-as-prophet (think Scalia).
He cultivated this image most dramatically in the first ACA case, joining with his progressive colleagues to uphold a Democratic president’s most important achievement—and in the middle of an election year, no less. Furthermore, just last term, the Roberts Court managed to reach an unlikely compromise in a blockbuster affirmative action case, and Roberts himself preserved the marriage-equality status quo in California with his majority opinion in Hollingsworth v. Perry. However, even in areas where Roberts has pushed the law dramatically to the right (like voting rights), he has tended to prefer a slower-moving, more incremental approach than his more radical colleagues, with seismic shifts (like Shelby County v. Holder) coming only after the political ground has already been prepared with previous, more modest decisions (like NAMUDNO v. Holder)—legal warning shots, if you will. He has also chipped away at progressive laws in a series of low-profile cases—for instance, those on the Court’s business docket. This strategy allows him to move the law to the right, while also preserving the institutional legitimacy of the Court.
Through this lens, Hobby Lobby presents a potential dilemma for the savvy Chief Justice. In the case, Hobby Lobby, a craft-store chain owned by Southern Baptists, is suing the government to seek religious exemption from the ACA’s requirement that it offer insurance plans to employees that cover contraception at no extra cost. On the one hand, Roberts is confronting the ACA for the first time since the conservative firestorm over his decision largely upholding the Act. There’s little doubt that he’ll be tempted to throw conservatives a bone, siding with Hobby Lobby and against the ACA.
On the other hand, a vote in favor of Hobby Lobby requires the chief justice to do at least three things that threaten major disruptive consequences and present serious downstream risks for the Court as an institution. First, he must conclude that corporations have the same rights to religious freedom as living, breathing humans—something that the Supreme Court has never done. Second, he must unsettle centuries of well-established corporate law practice—a move at loggerheads with the Roberts Court’s (and John Roberts’s own) pro-corporate leanings. And, third, he must extend unprecedented protections to a secular employer, therefore opening the floodgates to new religious freedom challenges to countless other laws. In short, a vote for Hobby Lobby means endorsing a radical departure from well-settled precedent—perhaps nowhere more strikingly than in the realm of religious freedom.
In the decades leading up to the Supreme Court’s 1990 landmark decision in Employment Division v. Smith, courts heard many free exercise challenges. For the most part, they followed a familiar pattern: A law applied to everyone in a given jurisdiction; someone came to court and claimed a religious objection to that law; and the court ultimately rejected that challenger’s claim. This was true in the Supreme Court and, as explained by Professor James Ryan, it was also true in the lower courts. The bottom line—whether you were an Amish employer refusing to pay Social Security taxes or an army doctor wishing to wear a yarmulke while on duty, you were probably going to lose your free exercise claim.
Then along came Smith—a free exercise decision that hit the legal and political world like a thunderbolt. The case involved Native Americans dismissed from their jobs for failing a drug test. (They had smoked peyote during a religious ceremony.) Because of this drug use—religiously motivated or not—Oregon then denied them unemployment benefits. When they challenged this action on free exercise grounds, the Court rejected their claim. However, rather than simply applying the Court’s traditional balancing test (where the Court weighed a given law’s burden on religion against the governmental interest advanced by the law), Justice Scalia struck a radical pose, shelving it for a bright-line rule that was even less protective of religious objectors—and hence the controversy.
Of course, under the pre-Smith test, religious objectors were already losing these cases. Following Smith, they were only slightly more likely to do so. Nevertheless, Congress responded to Scalia’s decision by enacting a new law explicitly overturning Smith and restoring the pre-Smith status quo, but all that really did was reestablish an environment where free exercise claims rarely succeeded.
Given this legal backdrop, the key question for Roberts leading up to the Hobby Lobby argument is whether he’ll stick with this traditional approach or adopt a new, more stringent test—one even stricter than anything that existed in the pre-Smith world. If the chief justice takes the more radical path—and, more importantly, if he convinces at least four of his colleagues to go along with him—Hobby Lobby could, indeed, live up to the hype and become a truly revolutionary case.
For instance, such a ruling would entangle lower courts and the Roberts Court itself in knotty free exercise challenges (and a lot of them)—challenges that would potentially require judges to define what counts as “religious belief,” assess the sincerity of those beliefs that pass muster, and apply the traditional balancing test with serious bite. Courts have balked at going down this path in the past—and for good reason. Furthermore, the Supreme Court has never granted a religious accommodation to a secular business that comes at the expense of its employees—an unprecedented move that would allow secular employers to effectively impose their own religious views on the employees, even in the face of contrary laws.
In the end, however tempted Chief Justice Roberts may be to strike a blow to Obamacare in this highly publicized, blockbuster case—and however much his conservative colleagues may be pulling him in that direction—Roberts can’t give in to these pressures without tarnishing his carefully cultivated image as a cautious jurist and, in the process, unleashing a wave of unpredictable (and risky) consequences.
By: Tom Donnelly, Counsel at Constitutional Accountability Center; The New Republic, March 24, 2014
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