“Crafting Bills Designed To Fail”: The House Republican Tantrum That Knows No End
The New York Times published a helpful chart the other day, which highlighted a nine-step process Congress would have to follow this week to avoid a government shutdown. As it happens, steps one through eight were completed with relative ease.
It was that ninth step that gave lawmakers trouble.
House Republicans not only gathered on a weekend to take a vote that moves the government even closer to a shutdown, they did it in the dead of night.
The Republican-controlled House voted around midnight on Saturday to keep the government open for a few more months in exchange for punting the rollout of Obamacare for a year — the kind of shot at the health care law conservatives had wanted for weeks, even if it’s sure to be rejected by the Democratic-controlled Senate.
By all appearances, House Republicans are now actively seeking a government shutdown, specifically aiming for their goal rather than making any effort to avoid it. Indeed, the unhinged House majority appears to have gone out of its way to craft a spending bill designed to fail.
The bill approved after midnight would deny health care benefits to millions of American families for a year, add to the deficit by repealing a medical-device tax industry lobbyists urged Republicans to scrap, and in a fascinating twist, make it harder for Americans to get birth control. As the New York Times report noted, “The delay included a provision favored by social conservatives that would allow employers and health care providers to opt out of mandatory contraception coverage.”
Yes, in the midst of a budget crisis, the House GOP decided it was time to go after birth control again. Wow.
Senate leaders and the White House patiently tried to explain to radicalized House Republicans that voting for this would all but guarantee a government shutdown — so House Republicans voted for it en masse.
In fact, take a look at the roll call. Jonathan Bernstein asked on Friday, “Where are the sane House Republicans?” That question was answered quite clearly last night: literally every GOP lawmaker in the chamber voted for their government-shutdown plan. There were zero defections.
This was not, in other words, an isolated tantrum thrown by an extremist faction of a once-great political party. This was rather an organized tantrum thrown by the entirety of the House Republican caucus.
Keep in mind, I use the word “tantrum” largely because Republicans told me to. Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.), a close ally of House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) said in July, “Shutting down the government to get your way over an unrelated piece of legislation is the political equivalent of throwing a temper tantrum. It is just not helpful.”
Last night, Cole linked arms with his fellow conservatives and joined them as they jumped off the cliff together. Apparently, he discovered his affinity for tantrums over the last couple of months.
Also note, we know with certainty Speaker Boehner didn’t want this scenario. It was just earlier this month that he presented a proposal that would have avoided all of this, precisely because he didn’t want to end up where we are now. But the Speaker, who has little influence or control over what happens in his own chamber, simply lacked the courage and the strength to govern responsibly.
What happens now is less clear. The Senate could reconvene today, reject the House bill, and urge House Republicans to act like grown-ups tomorrow — the last day before Monday night’s shutdown deadline. Or more likely, the upper chamber will gather in the morning, try to pass the same bill senators passed on Friday, and leave the House with just hours to keep the government’s lights on.
Either way, House Republicans continue to fail at completing even the most basic of tasks. The public doesn’t expect much of Congress anymore, but most seem to believe lawmakers should be able to keep the government’s doors open.
As things stand, that now appears unlikely.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, September 29, 2013
“Hurting Real People Who Have Real Needs”: Republicans Are Suppressing Obamacare Enrollment
Republicans have done everything they could think of to repeal, defund, undermine and otherwise disrupt Obamacare. But they’ve failed, and that’s why they’ve turned to a last-ditch strategy to stop the law and take away the rights of millions of Americans to get the health care they need.
Governors and state legislators are adopting state laws and regulations to sabotage the work of “navigators,” the community organizations that will help consumers sign up for care. We are witnessing navigator suppression, and the Republicans’ objective is simple: the harder they make it for navigators to do their jobs, the harder it will be for people to benefit from Obamacare.
Republican governors in 21 states are already denying more than 5 million people health care by refusing to expand Medicaid. Navigator suppression is another way for the Obamacare haters to pile on and limit the reach of the law.
In a new report, Health Care for America Now conducted a detailed review of the most egregious laws and regulations found in 13 selected states: Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Maine, Missouri, Montana, Ohio, Tennessee, Texas and Wisconsin. These states are home to 17 million people without health insurance who are eligible for coverage under the health care reform law–fully 41 percent of the nation’s uninsured.
The excessive requirements we found include such things as residency rules, extra fees, additional and unnecessary training requirements, superfluous certification exams, and prohibitions against navigators talking with consumers about the benefits offered by different plans. These measures constitute direct interference in the enrollment process.
For example, in Missouri, state and local officials are barred from providing any assistance to an exchange. In Florida, the Department of Health released a directive prohibiting navigators from conducting outreach at any of the county’s 67 health departments. Fortunately, two big counties, Broward and Pinellas, are ignoring the order.
And just this month, Texas Gov. Rick Perry ordered the Insurance Commissioner to write new navigator regulations that require, among other things, that navigators complete 40 hours of training in addition to the 20 hours required by the ACA and then pass a “rigorous” state exam. Perry is even trying to limit the hours of navigator operations to 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. None of these rules is going to help get people covered in Texas, which has the nation’s highest percentage of uninsured residents.
These roadblocks and restrictions have caused groups to withdraw from the program and return their navigator grants. This is why President Obama in Maryland today criticized the Republicans for creating these sorts of “roadblocks” for the “churches and charities” working as navigators to educate the public about enrollment.
The Republicans claim these laws are about protecting consumers. But Georgia’s commissioner of insurance cleared that up when he boasted on video that he was doing everything he could to be “an obstructionist” to Obamacare.
Some of the Obamacare opponents may think they’re attacking the President or the law, but mostly they’re hurting real people with real health care needs. They’re making it harder for people to buy health care. This isn’t just an abstract political debate. For people without health insurance, this is about whether or not they can get medical care and get it without going bankrupt.
In a growing number of states, navigators are turning back their grants to help consumers because of navigator suppression policies.
Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, for example, which was planning to enroll people at three hospitals, turned back $124,000 in federal grant money because of state restrictions that went into effect this past July.
Cardon Outreach was going to educate people in Florida, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, and Utah. It returned its $833,000 grant.
In West Virginia, the Attorney General, Patrick Morrisey, a vocal opponent of the ACA, launched a harassment campaign against one of his state’s navigators, West Virginia Parent Training and Information. Morrisey posed dozens of questions to the group about its navigator program and gave them only 14 business days to respond. Instead, the organization decided to send back its $366,000 enrollment grant.
The Lower Rio Grande Valley Development Council along the Texas border with Mexico just returned $288,000 in navigator grant funds this week in response to Perry’s attack, and four other Texas navigator groups reportedly may follow suit.
These state officials have taken their cues from members of Congress. Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee sent letters to 51 groups in 11 states, including food banks, legal aid societies, and United Way organizations. The committee demanded that these groups produce reams of paperwork about their operations and schedule a briefing of the committee by Sept. 13. The only purpose of the inquiry was to interfere with the ability of these groups to prepare for enrollment. That’s sabotage, and it’s a politically motivated abuse of power.
Many of the states now going after navigators are also passing laws to suppress voter registration and make it harder for minority, low-income and elderly residents to participate in elections. Just like voter suppression, enrollment suppression is an attack on people’s right to be healthy and free from financial hardship and bankruptcy.
That’s why navigator suppression shocks the conscience: it perpetuates the systematic denial of affordable health care to huge numbers of the most vulnerable individuals in our society, especially those in minority and lower-income populations.
Thanks to Obamacare, Americans no longer have to worry about getting the health care they need. They only have to worry about the Republicans taking it away.
By: Ethan Rome, Executive Director, Health Care for America Now; Health Care for America Now Blog, September 26, 2013
“Being Crazy Isn’t Enough”: The Greedy Once-Ler Gets All The Way To The End Of “Green Eggs And Ham”
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who’s still talking to hear himself talk, raised a few eyebrows last night by reading, among other things, from Dr. Seuss. Watch on YouTube
For those who can’t watch clips online, the far-right Texan read “Green Eggs and Ham” with great earnestness from the Senate floor. (He can’t hold a candle to the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s version, but let’s put that aside for now.) Cruz continued to reference the book after having put it down, insisting it “has some applicability, as curious as it may sound, to the Obamacare debate.”
He added, “The difference with green eggs and ham — when Americans tried it, they discovered they did not like green eggs and ham, and they did not like Obamacare, either. They did not like Obamacare in a box, with a fox, in a house, or with a mouse.”
There is, however, a small problem with Cruz’s choice of literary references: he apparently didn’t understand the story.
In “Green Eggs and Ham,” our protagonist thinks he dislikes food he hasn’t tried. By the end, the character discovers green eggs and ham really aren’t so bad after all. Indeed, he comes to regret criticizing something he didn’t fully understand, and ends up celebrating the very thing he’d complained about so bitterly.
Cruz thinks this “has some applicability, as curious as it may sound, to the Obamacare debate”? What a coincidence; I think it has some applicability, too.
Indeed, the larger point helps underscore why the right is fighting so furiously to defund, delay, sabotage, impair, malign, and otherwise undermine the federal health care law right now, before it’s too late. Unhinged Republicans aren’t worried Obamacare will fail; they’re worried it will work and Americans will discover they quite like green eggs and ham after all.
Eugene Robinson had a good piece on this yesterday, published well ahead of the theatrics on the Senate floor.
Republicans scream that Obamacare is sure to fail. But what they really fear is that it will succeed.
That’s the reason for all the desperation. Republicans are afraid that Obamacare will not prove to be a bureaucratic nightmare — that Americans, in fact, will find they actually like it.
Similarly, Josh Marshall referenced one of my favorite health care stories yesterday. Bill Kristol wrote a strategy memo as the Clinton-era health care fight was getting underway, urging Republicans to destroy reform at all costs. The conservative pundit said at the time that if Clinton succeeded, Democrats would be seen as the “protector of middle-class interests,” and it would be politically impossible to take away the health care benefits once they were in place.
What the GOP had to do, Kristol said, was put the party’s interests over the country’s needs, stopping the reform effort before Americans discovered they like it. Republicans, of course, agreed.
Nearly two decades later, the script hasn’t changed much, except now the green eggs and ham are on the plate and the public is poised to discover how much they like the very thing they’ve been told to complain about.
Why Ted Cruz thinks this story is helpful to his cause is a bit of a mystery, but maybe later today, one of his friends from Harvard or Princeton can have a chat with him about literary interpretation and the potency of metaphors.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, September 25, 2013
“Making The Law Look Better”: How Not To Argue Against Obamacare
One of the more talked about pieces in conservative media yesterday came by way of Forbes, and it caused quite a stir. If you missed it, the article, based on American Enterprise Institute research, said the typical American family of four should expect $7,450 in additional health care costs, all because of the Affordable Care Act.
If true, that certainly sounds problematic. With a weak economy and stagnant wages, an average household would struggle to afford those increased costs.
The problem, as Igor Volsky explained, is that the Forbes piece is entirely wrong.
To translate that number to a “typical American family,” [the AEI’s Chris Conover] took “the latest year-by-year projections, divided by the projected U.S. population to determine the added amount per person,” multiplied that result by four and voila: Obamacare will add $7,450 to average health spending for a family of four between 2014 and 2022!
One economist interviewed by ThinkProgress, the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities’ Paul Van de Water, described this calculation as one of the stupidest things he’s read in a long time and likened it to arguing that college costs will increase for a “typical” family if the federal government adopts policies that help lower-income Americans afford college educations. Yes, the nation will spend more on education if more students enroll in colleges and universities, but the “typical” student already attending college won’t; she or he will continuing paying tuition at more or less the same rate, while the newly-enrolled student will presumably benefit from some sort of subsidized tuition rate.
The same is true here. The so-called “typical” family that Conover describes already receives health care insurance through their employer. The existence of 30 million newly-insured people — many of whom will receive tax credits if they purchase insurance in the law’s exchanges — won’t do much to move their premiums in one way or another.
MIT’s Jonathan Gruber went on to Volsky, “This is a typically misleading use of data by opponents of Obamacare.”
I no longer find myself surprised by developments like these. Conservative opponents of the Affordable Care Act have been pushing easily discredited attacks for quite a while, in some cases because conservative wonks just aren’t very good, and in other cases because the right feels justified in making claims they know to be untrue.
But I’m always left with the same question: if “Obamacare” were really so awful, shouldn’t conservative criticism be a lot easier?
Much to the chagrin of the right (and to Politico), most of the news surrounding the Affordable Care Act has been pretty encouraging of late. That said, if the law’s critics want to focus on areas of concern, there are legitimate criticisms they can point to.
We’re already seeing, for example, some glitches in the Obamacare exchanges. As Jonathan Cohn explained, they’re not worth freaking out over, but if you’re a Republican desperate to shine a light on implementation problems, you can seize on something like this to advance a partisan cause.
There are also legitimate concerns about the law pushing private insurers to restrict provider options for those who get coverage through exchanges. If conservatives wanted to jump up and down about this, too, they’d at least be dealing with reality. Does it mean the law is a fiasco, doomed to failure? No. Is it a real problem worthy of attention? Sure.
But our discourse has become so stunted and unproductive that we’re instead stuck with nonsense such as the Forbes piece, which had been thoroughly debunked before close of business. (Of course, if recent history is any guide, the fact that the claims have been discredited won’t stop Republican members of Congress from repeating them on national television every day for the foreseeable future.)
Note to Obamacare’s detractors: when you cling to evidence that’s wrong, you make the law look better, not worse. If the law was as bad as you claim, you’d have real defects to point to, not made-up stuff.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, September 24, 2013
“Caught Between Arithmetic And Ideology”: Can Republicans Afford To Buck The Tea Party?
Since the Tea Party emerged following President Barack Obama’s victory in 2008, Republican governors have frequently been the faces of some of the most extreme policies in recent political memory. Even before her infamous “finger point” at the president, Arizona’s Jan Brewer was signing and defending her state’s racial-profiling bill, SB 1070. In Ohio, John Kasich championed a law—later repealed by voters—to strip public employees of bargaining rights. In Florida, Rick Scott has pushed a plethora of hard-right policies, from drug screening of welfare recipients and government employees to reductions in early voting. Michigan’s Rick Snyder, who has a moderate streak, went to the extreme last December when he approved “right to work” legislation in a state built largely by union labor.
Yet Brewer, Kasich, Snyder, and Scott are among the nine GOP governors who have staked considerable political capital on Medicaid expansion, a key piece of the Affordable Care Act. They haven’t been quiet about it, either. Brewer made good on a threat to veto every piece of legislation that came before her until lawmakers sent her a bill to expand Medicaid. Snyder rankled his party when he told recalcitrant Republican state senators to “take a vote, not a vacation.” Scott was among the first Republicans to announce his support for expansion. Kasich, struggling to win support from his party’s lawmakers, has vowed to find a way to expand Medicaid even if they won’t.
All this, while in Congress, the Tea Party Republicans have worked tirelessly to shut down the government rather than see the Affordable Care Act continue, marking it as the emblem of Obama’s big-government liberalism.
By championing Medicaid expansion, these governors are defying the Tea Party, which was instrumental in their elections. Such defiance has been exceedingly rare from Republican officeholders on any level since the Tea Party revolution of 2010. That election transformed state legislatures and governors’ mansions—in many cases overnight—into ideological strongholds. Increasingly, the policy priorities of national right-wing groups like ALEC and Americans United for Life began to take precedence over state-specific agendas, and bipartisanship disappeared from state capitols almost as thoroughly as it has Congress. “The broader pathologies of our politics have clearly moved to the state level,” says Norman Ornstein, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and co-author with Thomas Mann of It’s Even Worse Than It Looks, which made the case that Republican extremism and hyper-partisanship has crippled Congress.
But Kasich, Snyder, and Scott govern states that Obama has won twice. They have all struggled with low approval ratings and polarized the electorate with their far-right policies. They all face tough battles for re-election in 2014. By backing Medicaid, they were guaranteed to inspire Tea Party wrath. By opposing it, they would deny health coverage to huge numbers of low-income residents, shut the door on billions in federal funding, and risk further alienating voters.
“Republican governors are caught in a tug-of-war between arithmetic and ideology,” says William Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “For some of them, ideology wins, and for others, who are looking to their self-interest and the interests of their state at least in the short to medium term, they have done a very simple calculation and that is that the Medicaid expansion is a good deal for their states.”
There’s little denying that Medicaid expansion to cover many more adults, is a good deal for every state. For the first three years, the federal government will pick up 100 percent of the cost for new recipients. After that, states will never pay more than 10 percent of the costs of expanded coverage; the rest of the bill goes to Washington. In Ohio alone, more than 500,000 people would gain access to coverage. With more people covered, of course, the costs to states of uncompensated care will drop. In June, a report from the Rand Corporation found that the first 14 states that opted out of expanding Medicaid will have 3.6 million more uninsured residents, lose $8.4 billion a year in federal payments, and pay an additional $1 billion in uncompensated care in 2016.
The arithmetic hasn’t been enough to convince most Republican governors to back Medicaid. Sixteen of the 30 oppose expansion, including the chief executive of another state Obama won twice, Wisconsin’s Scott Walker. Three other GOP governors had yet to venture a position.
Then there’s Pennsylvania’s Tom Corbett, a governor emblematic of the dilemma facing unpopular Republicans in swing states. Obama won Pennsylvania by 11 points in 2008 and by 5 points in 2012. But Corbett, who won in the 2010 wave, has stuck to the Tea Party agenda on everything from voter ID to welfare cuts. He was quick to announce that his state would reject federal funds for Medicaid expansion.
Under enormous pressure, however, he changed his mind, and last week announced he would support Medicaid expansion if the federal government agreed to a slew of concessions. Unlike Walker, a strong favorite in 2014 thanks to weak and divided opposition following a failed recall attempt, Corbett is among the most vulnerable incumbents in the country. Corbett is now trying desperately find some political path to moderation—though it’s likely to be too little too late and it stands in contrast to those like Snyder and Kasich, who actually took the lead on the issue.
That a minority of Republican governors has backed Medicaid expansion does not add up to a major shift in the political dynamic. But it could be significant, depending on the outcome of the 2014 elections. If a governor like Scott or Kasich can manage to win re-election even after infuriating his right-wing base on a key issue, it will send a couple of important messages to other Republicans, at least those in purple states: Yes, the Tea Party can be bucked. And no, making policy based on the needs of your state does not amount to certain political death. It might even save you from it.
By: Abby Rapoport, The American Prospect, September 23, 2013
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