American politics
Bringing down ObamaCare
Aug 9th 2010, 17:44 by R.M. | WASHINGTON, DC
AS MY colleague pointed out last week, the battle over health-care reform isn't over. In states such as Missouri, voters are trying to strike down aspects of the law through referendums. And in states such as Virginia, cases have been brought against the law's mandate feature. The battle over health-care reform also continues in Congress, where Republicans are mulling a new tactic to bring down the already-approved measure. In the most recent issue of the American Spectator, Philip Klein reports
Should Republicans regain control of Congress, they could theoretically use their new power of the purse to deny Obama the funding needed to administer his signature accomplishment. This prospect is already gaining steam among opponents of the law. The new group DeFundit.org has gotten more than 90 candidates and current members of Congress to sign a pledge supporting stripping ObamaCare of money.
There are a lot of scenarios for how a defunding push could play out, especially based on whether Republicans gain control of one or both chambers of Congress. But in the end, such a strategy could result in a replay of late 1995, when a budgetary standoff led to a government shutdown... If the Republicans control both chambers of Congress and choose to defund the administration's chief legislative achievement, it would trigger a showdown with President Obama. If they control just one body of Congress, the conflict would still occur, but it would be between the two chambers.
Defund, veto, defund, veto, defund, veto, until someone blinks. That's one way it could go. It is both odd and unsurprising that Newt Gingrich, who was House speaker at the time of the 1995 shutdown, is a big supporter of the defunding idea. Mr Gingrich is a vociferous opponent of ObamaCare, but he also suffered politically as a result of the shutdown (thought that's not how he sees it). And while I can't blame Republicans for wanting to use every possible legislative tactic to stop ObamaCare (after all, that's how Democrats got it passed), the defunding strategy carries large and foreseeable risks.
ObamaCare is unpopular, goes the Republican argument, so voters will support defunding. On the first point they are right: polls consistently show that more people oppose health reform than support it. But during the debate over reform, polls also found a surprising amount of support for individual components of the bill (Nate Silver had a good post on this way back when). Should Republicans try to defund the bill piece by piece, they would have to carefully pick their spots, or hope that concern over the bill's cost trumps everything. Note, though, that dismantling the entire bill would actually add to the deficit in the long run. Aside from the individual mandate (which wasn't in Mr Obama's original reform plan) and, as Mr Klein mentions, private abortion coverage, it is difficult to see what parts of the bill the public would support rescinding. That would leave reform largely intact.
The GOP will also want to take account of another poll, ours, in which Congress receives a 12% approval rating. That is the rating for the Democrat-controlled Congress, but the public consistently shows a bipartisan aversion to America's legislature. And as the talk of congressional dysfunction reaches a new crescendo, will the GOP want to reinforce this meme by fighting to dismantle already-passed legislation and, possibly, shutting the government down altogether? Perhaps it is worth it in order to scuttle reform. (Similarly, Democrats might argue, come November, that it was worth sacrificing the House and/or Senate in order to pass reform.) But this would set an uncomfortable precedent, where measures are only reliably funded for as long as the party that passed them remains in power. Like the expansive use of the filibuster, it is within the rules, but it is an awfully poor way to run a government.
Update: One thing to clear up: if Republicans succeed in doing away with the individual mandate, without substituting any type of alternative, it will actually have severe consequences for reform. In fact, it would have severe consequences for the entire private health-care system, as Micah Weinberg points out.
If insurers can no longer deny people for having an illness but there is no requirement to have coverage, people can simply wait until they fall ill before they buy insurance. This leads to increasingly sicker pools of people according to what is technically (and spookily) named an "adverse selection death spiral." This is what's happened in every state that tried to require insurers to provide policies to everyone who applies without requiring everyone to have coverage.
My assumption, perhaps naive, is that the individual mandate would be replaced with something resembling an opt-out option that would allow people to go without insurance. These people would be locked out of the system for a certain period of time, during which, if they got sick, they would not be guaranteed coverage of pre-existing conditions.
(Photo credit: AFP)
David Boies, man of reason
Aug 9th 2010, 13:50 by R.M. | WASHINGTON, DC
ON THURSDAY I wrote, in reference to the ruling on Proposition 8 in California, that "rational, substantive arguments have defeated unreasonable hysteria." This Sunday they did so again, as David Boies confronted Tony Perkins's bankrupt arguments for marriage inequality on "Face the Nation". This was the trial, writ small. Mr Perkins came at Mr Boies with all the banal falsehoods, misdirection and junk science that have defined the opposition to gay marriage, and Mr Boies forcefully told him what all that's worth in a court of a law. Blathering on TV is one thing, but "a witness stand is a lonely place to lie," said the lawyer. "We put fear and prejudice on trial, and fear and prejudice lost." Mr Perkins, you may step down.
Update: Like Mr Boies, Ted Olson turned in an impressive performance over on Fox News.
Muslim-baiting loses in Tennessee
Aug 7th 2010, 19:58 by J.F. | FANCY FARM
BELATEDLY and from one state over I happily note the demise of three Muslim-baiting politicians in Tennessee in Thursday's primary elections. Ron Ramsey suggested that Muslims may not be entitled to first-amendment protections: he finished third in one of the weirdest primaries of the season, behind Bill Haslam and Zach Wamp (but comfortably ahead of everyone's favourite gold-fringe-hating sideshow). Vijay Kumar paid for a billboard on I-24 just outside Nashville urging Tennesseans to "Defeat Universal Jihad Now" by voting for him: he finished fourth. And Lou Ann Zelenik, running in Murfreesboro, voiced suspicions about a new mosque being built by the rapidly growing Muslim community in that city: she too appears to have lost, though she has not yet conceded.
As it happens, I visited the current mosque in Murfreesboro two Fridays ago. It is a small building tucked behind a surveying company and an off-brand Jiffy Lube. Congregants prayed in the parking lot, and one told me that they had to turn away children from weekend classes for lack of space. I was also told that Ms Zelenik had never responded to several invitations to sit down with congregants to discuss her suspicions (as indeed she failed to return five of my telephone calls), leading one woman to suspect that they were simply a vote-getting ploy, and that the issue would fade after the primary. So one hopes"”and it bears mentioning that every person I spoke to at the Murfreesboro mosque and at another in Nashville said that they enjoyed good relations with their neighbours, they were happy to be raising families in Tennessee, and that flesh-and-blood supporters and friends outnumbered and outweighed the windy and opportunistic rantings of bigots on the airwaves.
It does seem odd, though, that some of the most strident anti-Muslim political rhetoric of the season has come not from Michigan, California, New York or New Jersey (all states with large Muslim communities), but from Tennessee. Nashville may have a fair number of Muslims, and Murfreesboro's population may be outgrowing its mosque, but neither city is Dearborn or Paterson. Yet demagogues ye will always have with you; more troubling than the poison spread by these opportunists was the silence of their rivals. It matters strategically, as my colleague wrote this week, and it matters because the constitution matters. And I can't quite decide whether Mr Ramsey's minimalist interpretation of the first amendment (and Lindsay Graham's desire to chip away at the fourteenth) is tragedy or farce.
The new political correctness
Aug 6th 2010, 18:24 by B.G. | WASHINGTON, DC
GRIEF is greedy. It wants everything you touch, and if you're not careful, you can let it hold on to you forever, secure in the knowledge that everything is about you, and everyone needs to be extra careful around you. I learned this a few years ago, when I finally began to give up the sense of anger and entitlement that September 11th had given me. I had been standing a block away when the South Tower fell, after all. I was covered with ash, and I carried people as they bled on me. I carried this grief and this anger with me for several years, pulling it out as an anecdote, a kind of medal to hang around my neck whenever I got in a fight with someone about politics. (And I got in a lot of them.) My story about September 11th always set my opponents back on their heels a little; it always worked. They never wanted to offend me. And because it worked, I began to feel guilty about using it so often.
I bring it up now because I just spent three days traveling for a story, relatively unaware of the news cycle, and I returned to discover, to my surprise, that the Cordoba mosque near Ground Zero is still an issue. Others have already done a thorough job defending it using the principles America was founded on, and there's no need to repeat their work here. What strikes me, though, reading through essays and tweets against the mosque, is the sense of entitlement the opponents of the mosque have. Since America was hurt, they seem to believe, no one should dare probe at or around that hurt, lest it cause too much pain.
One of the things I love about America is that we probe. We over-share and we over-ask, and at times we can be tremendously offensive. But I think that because of our probing, we're good at forgetting. There are no 900-year-old battles lost to the Ottoman Turks that still animate us as a nation. I can't speak to those who lost loved ones on September 11th, those who feel a personal grief, but I can speak to the rest of us (including myself) who walked away with a sense of national grief: Don't covet your grief like a precious thing, something that justifies your every whim. We don't deserve not to be offended just because we got hurt. And just because we lost something doesn't mean we get everything we want, or even deserve everything we want. Religious freedom is an American value. The freedom to offend is too.
This is something Republicans used to believe in. George Bush senior criticised "a movement [that would] declare certain topics 'off-limits', certain expressions 'off-limits', even certain gestures 'off-limits'." The entire argument against political correctness held that women and minorities didn't have the right not to be offended. But now that its own constituents feel offended, the right is suddenly arguing in favour of sensitivity. Again, people who lost relatives on September 11th feel a personal loss, and society generally agrees on how to protect someone who's lost a loved one. But what about the rest of us? Do all Americans need sensitivity training, on how to deal with other Americans who might feel particularly hurt by September 11th? Should universities come up with a code of how to avoid saying or doing the wrong thing around September 11th? Now that the Republicans have come to embrace this form of political correctness, maybe both parties can have a sensitivity summit, where they can agree on what's off-limits in America. Maybe they can draw up a curriculum.
A triumph of rational arguments
Aug 5th 2010, 17:24 by R.M. | WASHINGTON, DC
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