The Virginia federal judge who ruled against a key component of health care reform on Monday has ties to a Republican consulting firm. Judge Henry Hudson is a co-owner of Campaign Solutions, as Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! reports.
Hudson, a President George W. Bush appointee, has earned as much as $108,000 in royalties from Campaign Solutions since 2003. A cached version of the firm's client roster lists such vocal opponents of health reform as Sens. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), Jim DeMint (R-SC), and Olympia Snowe (R-ME), Rep. Todd Tiahrt (R-KS), the Republican National Committee and the American Medical Association.
In November, Collins and Snowe joined McConnell in signing an amicus brief to challenge the constitutionality of health care reform in a separate suit in Florida. Campaign finance records show that Campaign Solutions has also worked for Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, who is spearheading the lawsuit. Tiahrt added an amicus brief to Cuccinelli's lawsuit.
Today, the mandate. Tomorrow, the regulatory state?
Hudson ruled that the individual mandate of health care reform is unconstitutional. The mandate stipulates that, after 2014, everyone who doesn't already have health insurance will have to buy some or pay a small fine. The judge argues that this requirement exceeds the federal government's power to regulate interstate commerce.
The Commerce Clause gives the federal government the power to regulate commerce between the states and international trade. Suzy Khimm of Mother Jones explains that this clause underpins the power of the federal government to regulate the economy in any way:
But the issues at stake in Cuccinelli v. Sebelius (Ken Cuccinelli is the conservative attorney general of Virginia; Katherine Sebelius is President Barack Obama's Secretary of Health and Human Services, or HHS) are actually far broader. Hudson's ruling doesn't just show how the Supreme Court could gut the health law-it shows how the court could neuter the entire federal government.
Is it constitutional?
Chris Hayes of The Nation interviews Prof. Gillian Metzger, a constitutional law scholar at Columbia University, about the merits of challenges to the constitutionality of health care reform. According to Metzger, "the argument that [the mandate] is outside the commerce power is also pretty specious given the existing precedent."
Steve Benen of the Washington Monthly accuses Judge Hudson of committing an "inexplicable error" in legal reasoning. There is a longstanding precedent that the federal government can regulate economic activity under the Commerce Clause. Hudson acknowledges this, but he maintains that this power doesn't cover regulations of "economic inactivity" (i.e. not buying health insurance). As Benen notes, people who don't buy insurance aren't opting out of the market, they're opting to let society absorb their future medical costs. Everyone who does buy insurance pays more because freeloaders coast without insurance and hope for the best.
Luckily for the Obama administration, the judge did not bar the implementation of health reform while the case works its way through the courts. The Supreme Court will ultimately hear this case. In the meantime, the federal government can continue building the infrastructure that will eventually support health care reform.
This is the third time a federal judge has ruled on the constitutionality of health care reforms and the first victory for the anti-reform contingent.
Mandatory mandate
Paul Waldman reminds TAPPED readers why the mandate is critical to any health care reform based on private insurance. With a single-payer system, you don't need a mandate because everyone is automatically covered. A mandate only comes into play when you have to force people to buy insurance.
Without a mandate, healthy risk-takers who don't buy insurance will starve the system of premiums while they are well and bleed the system for benefits when they get sick. Meanwhile, people who already know they're sick will sign up in droves, and the Affordable Care Act will force insurers to accept them. Without a mandate, the private health insurance industry would collapse and take health care reform down with it.
Is expanding Medicare the answer?
Matthew Rothschild of the Progressive argues that the legal headaches over the individual mandate illustrate why it would have been legally and procedurally easier to achieve universal health care by simply expanding Medicare to cover everyone.
At Truthout, Thom Hartmann argues universal health insurance in the form of "Medicare Part E" would spur economic growth and innovation because entrepreneurs could start businesses without worrying about how to provide health insurance for their employees.
Meanwhile, Brie Cadman reports at Change.Org, Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) is trying to defund health care reform by cutting funds for preventive health care. Coburn is urging his fellow Republicans to vote against a House-passed measure that would allocate $750 million for the 2011 Prevention and Public Health Fund. Cadman notes the irony of a medical doctor like Coburn, who also claims to be a fiscal conservative, trying to scuttle funds to control preventable diseases which would otherwise cost society billions of dollars a year.
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Congressional Republicans and the White House struck an agreement in principle on Monday night to extend all the Bush tax cuts for 2 more years in exchange for extending unemployment benefits. The GOP agreed to the so-called "Lincoln-Kyl compromise" a partial 2-year extension of the Bush estate tax cuts on estates worth over $5 million. If the deal had not been struck, estate taxes on estates over $5 million would have gone back up from 0% to the pre-cut rate of 55%. Instead, the rate will be 35% for the next 2 years.
Weekly Audit: Curbing the Deficit, Cat Food, and You
by Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium blogger
The deficit commission released its much anticipated list of helpful money-saving tips for the federal government last week. These tips include tax cuts for the rich, reducing unnecessary printing costs, and cutting the jobs of federal contractors.
This month, Congress is tasked with deciding how to address the Bush Tax Cuts (passed in 2001) that are due to expire in December. Public opinion seems to be in favor of keeping the tax cuts for the middle class, although there is less consensus around whether high-income households earning more than $250,000 a year should enjoy the same tax cuts. With the economy at top of mind, and deficit reduction hotly debated by pundits, the tax cut debate could shape up to be important for the midterm election.
The polling business is far more of an art than a science, is easily manipulated, and is open to as many interpretations as there are people looking at the polls. I have never known a pollster who didn't walk in the door with a set of assumptions and biases in how to interpret the data. And everyone in the business knows that the way you phrase the questions, the way you sequence the questions, the way you draw the sample of who you are asking, and a bunch of other little tricks those of us in the political biz know can dramatically impact outcomes.
The other huge factor in the polling business is who the client is, and what the purpose of the poll is. If the poll is designed for internal analysis, you get one kind of results (and generally more honest data). If the poll is designed to be released to the public to prove a point (our candidate is winning, our issue is popular, our spin is best being the usual things clients use these kinds of polls for), you want to be really careful about accepting the analysis on its face, because that is where the little (and big) things that can be done to manipulate the findings really come into play.
I say this by way of introduction to my central discussion: the internal debate within the Democratic party for what the central narrative of our party ought to be. Over the short term, that fight centers on how to save us from getting crushed in the 2010 elections, but it is of course a very long term fight that has been going on in our party since the New Deal coalition came unraveled in the late 1960s.
As I said, everyone comes to this debate with certain biases, and I will admit mine upfront. Just in case you haven't read my stuff much, I am - by history, sentiment, ideology, and instinct - naturally drawn to progressive populism: fighting for the "little guy", standing up to wealthy corporate interests. My political role models in history are people like FDR, Truman, and Bobby Kennedy, people who figured out how to appeal to a multi-racial coalition and the idealism of the young while still winning over working class white folks. In the modern era, my favorite political leaders are people like Paul Wellstone, Sherrod Brown, Dave Obey, Tom Perriello, and Brian Schweitzer, candidates who have won in purple or even red states/districts not by becoming more like Republicans but by raising the populist progressive flag unapologetically.
Now, having admitting my biases, I will also say that progressive populism (like every other messaging frame) has some limits as a political strategy. There are some districts it doesn't work in. There have been elections where it hasn't been as salient, or runs into a moment where it is overwhelmed by a certain mood in the electorate or a particular candidate's magic touch (Reagan's Morning in America theme in 1984, combined with Reagan's charm and a surging economy, was a classic example, although Mondale's kind of populism wasn't exactly stirring). Certain candidates can't pull populism off credibly, and probably shouldn't try (John Kerry comes to mind).
I also firmly believe that an angry populism all by itself isn't convincing to a majority of voters, that you have to combine the justifiable anger at the abuses of corporate power with compelling positive policy ideas on how you will deliver jobs and other benefits to voters. I don't think a purely anti-business populism usually works, for example: I think candidates need to show how they support small business and manufacturers and companies that are really contributing jobs and useful products to our country and communities. Finally, I would say this: I would never recommend a purely pro-government kind of populism to candidates. Voters, for very good reasons, are deeply cynical that government is really on their side, and will really deliver for them. Progressives have to make clear that part of our mission is to clean up the corporate corruption of government, and that we understand that government in recent years (outside of old stand-bys like Social Security and Medicare and Head Start and the minimum wage) has not always done a good job in making most people's lives better. We also have to be clear that we do want to cut wasteful government spending, and that most of that wastefulness comes from corporate subsidies and sweetheart deals: contracting practices that overwhelmingly favor the contractors rather than the taxpayers, agribusiness subsidies that have no merit, sweetheart deals in health care reform that don't allow for negotiations with drug manufacturers or public sector competition with insurance companies, tax loopholes that have no rational basis for existing besides a really good lobbying operation.
On the other side of the populist argument are Democrats who argue that it is bad political strategy to be too aggressive in taking on corporate America. Since we're all admitting our biases here, I would urge the pollsters and groups who generally make this argument to admit their own: almost all of them get most of their client or contributor list from the ranks of corporate America. The leading pollster who has been making this argument for the last couple of decades is Mark Penn, who heads a firm that does far, far more work in corporate PR and lobbying than it does for candidates. The leading politicians making this argument have been the Blue Dog and New Democrat caucuses, whose members receive far more corporate money than the rest of the Democratic party. And the leading groups making these arguments are the DLC and Third Way, both of which have as a (probably the, but I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt) leading source of contributions big corporations and their executives.
The latest example is a poll recently released by Third Way. Before I get to criticizing it, let me stop for a minute and say that I thought it had some useful insights for Democrats. The idea of tying Republican policies in congress closer to Bush, for example, is certainly a solid idea (although I fear that it is harder said than done.) The idea that Democrats should speak to the future and be aspirational in their language is something that makes sense to me. I even like the fiscal discipline thing, though I would redirect it to where the real waste in the budget is (corporate sweetheart deals, see above).
Having said that, though, it was really clear that this poll's questions, and the interpretation in the memo they wrote about the poll, were designed to try and talk Democrats out of using populist rhetoric. Let me take you through a couple of examples:
Perhaps the most important lesson I learned in my years in the Clinton White House was that when problems arise, it is up to the White House to solve them. When you are the top dog, you have more levers and tools of power than anyone else, and more glory and reward when things go well. But when there is a problem, no matter whose fault it is, no matter how bad luck it is, the White House either solves the problem or the failure to do so is theirs. The buck stops there, if you can't stand the heat, etc, etc.
It has always been this way, and always will be. James Buchanan didn't cause the problems that led the nation to disintegrate on his watch, but by not solving them he goes down as one of the nation's most failed Presidents. Herbert Hoover didn't cause the Great Depression, but failing to make progress on it similarly casts him as one of history's biggest failures. LBJ's failure to end the Vietnam War destroyed him, in spite of his own amazing record of legislative achievement earlier in his presidency. Conversely, the Presidents like Lincoln and FDR that dealt successfully with major crises are considered our greatest Presidents, even though they made their share of mistakes along the way.
The combination of problems inherited from George W Bush is the biggest protracted crisis this country has faced since those days of FDR. This economy is damaged beyond what many of the conventional economists or commentators are aware, with a sustained situation that looks bleak for at least several years in the future. The war that Bush started and then ignored in Afghanistan is a quagmire that shows no sign of getting better anytime soon. The other long term problems the Bush administration (and other politicians for decades before, for that matter) ignored - our rapidly deteriorating infrastructure, the health care system's dysfunction, college affordability, our long term trade and budget deficits - certainly don't help the country's sense of well being, or our ability to compete in the world economy of the 21st century.
Even problems less monumental are also tests of Presidential leadership. Jimmy Carter's inability to solve the hostage crisis contributed greatly to his failure as President, and Harry Truman's failure to win or end the Korean War made it impossible for him to run for re-election in spite of all his other accomplishments. LBJ, Ford, Carter, and George HW Bush all failed to get along with their party's respective base, and that alone would have doomed their Presidency. (No President with a strong primary challenge from their base has ever won re-election.)
Again, it doesn't matter whether these problems are some one else's fault, or just bad luck: it is up to the President to deal successfully with whatever they are faced with. Period, end of story. [More in the extended entry]
Who can tell me who said this and where they said it?
"I -- like any head of state -- reserve the right to act unilaterally if necessary to defend my nation." -- President Barack Obama, asserting the illegal and unconstitutional power to make war, in a Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech in Oslo, Norway.
What about this one -- who and where?
"There may be a number of people who cannot be prosecuted for past crimes, but who nonetheless pose a threat to the security of the United States. . . . As I said, I am not going to release individuals who endanger the American people. . . . We must have a thorough process of periodic review, so that any prolonged detention is carefully evaluated and justified." -- President Barack Obama standing in front of the U.S. Constitution in the National Archives, a Constitution that reads "The privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended."
So, we elected a president who promised a withdrawal from Iraq that he, or the generals who tell him what to do, is now further delaying. And, of course, the timetable he's now delaying was already a far cry from what he had promised as a candidate.
What are we to think? That may be sad news, but what could we have done differently? Surely it would have been worse to elect a president who did not promise to withdraw, right?
Is it already too late for America? I'm starting to think that the anti-tax, anti-government conservative movement that started in the mid-70s, elected Reagan and led to the terrible Bush Presidency may have effectively destroyed the country, leaving it bankrupt, corrupt,ungovernable, ruled by a wealthy elite -- and we're only now just starting to realize it. To cover tax cuts we stopped maintaining the infrastructure and started borrowing. To satisfy their hatred of government we increasingly stripped away rule of law, regulation, and belief in one-person-one-vote. We are seeing the consequences of all of that coming back to roost now.
Reagan left us with massive debt and ever-increasing interest payments. Bush left us with $1.3 trillion deficits and a destroyed economy that would force further increases in the borrowing for years - to be blamed on Obama. The "free marketers" gave away our manufacturing base that will take decades and massive capital investment to recover. Obama can try, but it may just be too late to do anything about the borrowing. We need massive investment in jobs and infrastructure, and a national economic/industrial plan. But, with their own Reagan/Bush debt as ammunition, conservative ideologues continue to block every effort at investment to get out of the mess we are in.
If a group of dedicated scholars, attorneys, journalists, and activists had tried to generate a comprehensive list of impeachable offenses committed by George W. Bush as president, and only 35 of them had been introduced into Congress, one of the many discarded ones, in rough and overly detailed form, might have read something like this:
In his conduct while President of the United States, George W. Bush, in violation of his constitutional oath to faithfully execute the office of President of the United States and, to the best of his ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, and in violation of his constitutional duty under Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution "to take care that the laws be faithfully executed", has both personally and acting through his agents and subordinates, caused the United States of America to kidnap, imprison, intimidate, coerce, threaten, confine, abduct, and carry away the elected, constitutional President of Haiti, and his wife, a U.S citizen, in violation of United States statutes, to wit:
Obama joined the leaders of Britain and France in accusing the Islamic republic of clandestinely building an underground plant to make nuclear fuel that could be used to build an atomic bomb. Iranian officials acknowledged the facility but insisted it had been reported to nuclear authorities as required.
Obama should try reading intelligence reports, like 2007's National Intelligence Estimate (the combined consensus report by all sixteen known U.S. intelligence agencies), which stated quite clearly that there is no concrete evidence of a weapons program in Iran. In July and August of this year, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) confirmed the lack of evidence although it refuses to state anything definitively. Yet still Obama, the D.C. political establishment, and the corporate media continue to lie to the contrary.
We've already been lied into one failed war, lied into ramping up another failed war, are so hurting for fresh soldiers that the Pentagon is now actively accepting white supremacists, yet still the establishment seeks to lie us into another conflict. And some people have wondered why my signature now has an image of Obama and Bush morphed into one unholy beast. Now you know.
Eight years ago today, two planes flew into the World Trade Center, another crashed into the Pentagon, and a fourth landed in a Pennsylvania field. The raw power of that day came to be symbolized by a date composed of three numbers. Three numbers that evoked the shock of being attacked, the horror of the sounds and images on our television sets, and the heroism of so many men and women. Three numbers that framed the events of the last decade and seemed like they would define my generation.
But eight years ago, many in my generation couldn’t vote. We didn’t choose the President, his wars, or his policies. In fact, young Americans have largely rejected the politics of fear and division that dominated those formative years of our political consciousness—voting 2 to 1 in favor of Barack Obama. Today we remember the victims and honor our heroes, but we also have a new President, new crises, and three new numbers: 3-5-0. 350.
It seems almost trivial to accuse someone who launched an illegal war that has killed over a million people of torture. But if we are going to prosecute the lowest ranked torturers, it makes sense to look up the chain of command.
There is no doubt that George W. Bush conspired to commit torture, cruel and inhuman treatment, and murder. How do I know? He said so.
In his January 28, 2003, State of the Union, Bush said: "All told more than 3,000 suspected terrorists have been arrested in many countries. And many others have met a different fate. Let's put it this way: they are no longer a problem to the United States."
(Please note: This originally posted on http://www.stevesword.com/ and will be cross-posted on MyDD too.)
"All warfare is based on deception. Hence, when able to attack, we must seem unable; when using our forces, we must seem inactive; when we are near, we must make the enemy believe we are far away; when far away, we must make him believe we are near." - SunTzu The Art of War
So those of you who read this site regularly probably know that I like to spout off at length about the linguistics of our political culture. But there are times when actions truly do speak much, much louder than words. Let me begin at the beginning.
I am strongly in favor of an investigaton or prosecution of the Bush/Cheney administration. One resource that I would recommend is www.AfterDowningStreet.org.
The best start would be a bi-partisan truth commission, modelled on the 9/11 commission. As we push for that, let us make every effort to suspend judgment. That is, if we say "Bush is a criminal, but we can't convict until we prosecute, so let's prosecute as a formality", then we sound like this is a partisan witch hunt, such as what Kenneth Starr did to Clinton. If we proceed with that approach, and fail to convict, then there will be a big PR backlash in favor of Bush and against the prosecutors. And even if we do convict, the appearance of partisan bias may still make it look like an unjust conviction.
Instead, let us say: "There have been serious allegations against Bush, Cheney, and others. Let us conduct an independent, bi-partisan investigation. If Bush is innocent, his name will be cleared. If he is guilty, he will face the legal consequences." Of course, no matter how far we bend over backwards to be fair, objective, and bi-partisan, the far right (Rush, Hannity, Beck, and so on) will scream and yell about bias. But it should be possible to do an investigation in a way that about 90% of the American people will agree is fair.
I believe that there are several serious charges to consider. The most serious charge is brought by former prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi, in his book "The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder". Bugliosi alleges that Bush knowingly lied to get us in to war in Iraq, and should therefore be tried for the murder of over 3,000 American troops who died there. Bugliosi also goes to great lengths to distinguish the actions of Bush from the actions of other presidents who have sent American soldiers to die in foreign wars; the main difference is that the other Presidents believed their actions to be justified, and did not lie to the American people about the reasons for war.
Another of the charges against Bush is war crimes. If the acts of torture carried out in Abu Ghraib were not abberations carried out by "a few bad apples", but were ordered by the Bush administration, then the Bush administration has broken various American and international laws. Likewise, it is known that waterboarding and other "enhanced interrogation techniques" have been used in Gitmo, and that these were authorized by the Bush administration. If waterboarding is torture, and if torture is a serious violation of U.S. and international laws, then again the Bush administration deserves prosecution.
Another crime connected to Gitmo is the treatment of prisoners of war and terror suspects. Americans can be held by the government as crime suspects, but they must be charged with a crime, and given a lawyer and a trial. Jose Padilla was held without charge or trial for over three years.
Anyway, the above list should be a good starting place. I am not even a lawyer, and I created the list above from my memory of headlines and with the help of a few minutes of internet research. Each of the alleged crimes listed above deserves investigation, and if supported by the facts, several of them may deserve prosecution. And all of that should be supported by a majority of Americans. If done correctly, an investigaton of the Bush administration is both good policy and good politics.
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