As I explained in my last blog, the only realistic way ObamaCare can be enacted into law during this Congress is for the House to pass the Senate Bill un-amended and then for the Senate to “fix” the abortion language in the bill after the fact using Reconciliation to satisfy Stupak Democrats who refuse to be a party to enacting the Senate abortion language into law.
Stupak Cannot Make ObamaCare Safe for the Unborn
As I explained in my last blog, the only realistic way ObamaCare can be enacted into law during this Congress is for the House to pass the Senate Bill un-amended and then for the Senate to “fix” the abortion language in the bill after the fact using Reconciliation to satisfy Stupak Democrats who refuse to be a party to enacting the Senate abortion language into law. The reason the Senate abortion language cannot be fixed before the fact is that altering the Senate Bill in the House would require its being sent back to the Senate where it would require 60 votes to approve the House changes. The election of Massachusetts Republican Scott Brown to Ted Kennedy’s old seat effectively precludes Democrats from getting 60 votes in the Senate.
Hence, the only viable option for enacting ObamaCare during this Congress involves a legislative two-step. First the House must swallow the Senate bill whole, which would send the bill directly on its way to the President to sign into law. Then the Senate would come back after the fact and pass a second measure (a Reconciliation Bill) that would “fix” the abortion language in the recently passed Senate healthcare bill, presumably by replacing the Senate abortion language with the House Stupak language. The House would then have to pass the Reconciliation Bill and send it to the President for signature.
Two obstacles have prevented Democrats from executing this strategy, however. First, Senate precedent holds that abortion riders to bills do not ordinarily have a budgetary effect and hence such riders in the past have fallen to a point of order against them under the Senate rules of Reconciliation. Many Republicans have taken considerable solace in this fact. Respected healthcare analyst Grace-Marie Turner, for example, points out:
“Abortion provisions historically have been barred from the 51-vote Senate reconciliation process as being not germane to the budget, and there are not 60 pro-life votes in the Senate to pass such a bill through regular order.”
Closer examination of the Senate Bill, however, suggests the current situation is different in several respects than the usual “abortion provisions” Turner alludes to (i.e., Hyde amendments), and therefore amending the Senate Bill’s abortion language under Reconciliation may not be covered by Senate precedent. Consider just one of those differences.
“The Senate bill provides $7 billion for the nation's 1,250 Community Health Centers, without any restriction whatever on the use of these federal funds to pay directly for abortion on demand. (These funds are entirely untouched by the "Hyde Amendment" that currently covers Medicaid.)”
Amending the Senate language to, among other things, prohibit community health centers from using federal funds to perform abortions and reducing their $7 billion authorization commensurately would clearly have some impact on the budget.
While the parliamentary outcome of a Reconciliation Two-Step may not be certain, a prudent opponent of ObamaCare would be well advised to devise a stopping strategy that does not rely on a favorable parliamentary outcome. In other words, it would be prudent for Republicans to make the conservative assumption that determined Democrats will find a way to vault the point-of-order hurdle in the Senate. It would be foolish for opponents of ObamaCare to rely on a parliamentary ruling in their favor from the Senate Chair.
Which brings us to the second obstacle confronting congressional Democrats and the President in their Quixotic Quest to enact ObamaCare into law during this Congress: Lack of trust among Democrats.
Everyday brings new reports of dissention within Democratic ranks over ObamaCare. Assuming the Reconciliation parliamentary obstacle can be overcome, one would think determined Democrats could execute the two-step reconciliation strategy laid out above. To date, however, suspicion and paranoia for each other among Democrats is running so high that Stupak Democrats don’t trust the President to follow through on a promise to sign a Reconciliation “fix” into law after House Stupak Democrats expose their soft underbelly by swallowing abortion-corrupted Senate Bill in tact. What a remarkable commentary on the state of the Democratic Party that there doesn’t exist a level of trust sufficient to take their own President at his word when he makes them a promise. Wow!
If one is an opponent of ObamaCare, he would be well advised to ask whether this gift of the political gods might not be too good to be true. One must be concerned that Republicans who rely on the President’s duplicity to protect the nation against his bad ideas might not be projecting their own lack of trust in the President onto their political opponents, his political allies. In politics as with everything else, something that appears to be too good to be true usually is. Hence, again, determined opponents of ObamaCare would be well advised to think carefully before putting all their chips on Democrats’ failing to have sufficient trust in each other to muscle ObamaCare through the Congress and onto the President’s desk before it adjourns sine die to go home and campaign.
The fact of the matter is, ObamaCare is prevented from being enacted into law by the thinnest of thin barriers of Democratic distrust over adopting the Stupak anti-abortion language. The bitter irony is that Stupak itself is a vapor barrier to federally subsidized abortion on demand. There is no way the Stupak language will prevent ObamaCare from turning into a federally subsidized abortion mill.
Republicans must be very careful what they wish for. Say Democrats can agree to a trust-raising means of “fixing” the Senate Bill with Stupak after the fact through Reconciliation by putting Pelosi and Boxer Democrats on record first by having them demonstrate their fealty to a promise to “fix” the bill after the fact by first voting for a separate, free-standing Stupak Bill BEFORE the House votes on the Senate healthcare bill and insisting that the President publicly announce his intention of signing the Separate Stupak Bill. If that happens, it will be point, game, set and match for the White House. Does anyone—even the most cynical Republicans who believe their own press releases—really believe the President could renege on such a promise to fellow Democrats and leave them hanging out to dry?
Of course, Republicans can disagree among themselves on the likelihood of the President behaving in this way but, again, a prudent opponent of ObamaCare would not leave the fate of the nation hanging on the President’s acting in so dastardly a manner if there is the slightest chance that he would abide by his promise.
So, what is to be done? Two things. First, Republicans must stop chasing the Stupak will-a-the-wisp and be careful what they wish for; it may come true.
The simple fact is, there is no way to make either the House Bill nor the Senate Bill Stupak nor some combination of the two safe for the unborn. Stupak is not a silver bullet to kill the abortion monster; it is nourishment for the beast. There is no way to make government-run healthcare safe for the unborn. Stupak is not part of the solution; it is part of the problem.
If Democrats forge even a modicum of trust and enact a Stupak-imprinted version of ObamaCare into law, Republicans and the pro-life groups who have supported the Stupak delusion will have only themselves to blame when transformative judicial and administrative decisions and rulings create a federally subsidized system of abortion on demand.
Republicans and pro-life groups have become too invested in Stupak; they have put themselves into a political corner. They have wished for a vapor barrier to federally subsidized abortion and a vapor barrier is all they are going to get. Republicans and pro-life groups must alter their strategy and announce unequivocally that Stupak won’t work and that the only way to make ObamaCare safe for the unborn is to kill it black-flag dead now; the only safe ObamaCare is a dead ObamaCare.
The key to victory lies with Senate Republicans who must stop relying on the political incompetence of Democrats to protect the nation against a government takeover of healthcare; they must tell the American people they understand this Congress has lost the Mandate of Heaven on healthcare and are prepared to act on that understanding to protect the nation against an illegitimate takeover of the healthcare system. Senate Republicans must pledge to the American people—who have withdrawn their mandate for this Congress to overhaul the national healthcare system—that the GOP will not allow this charade, this waste of congressional time to continue.
If the President and congressional Democrats insist on continuing to tie up the U.S. Congress in their demented obsession to jam ObamaCare down the throat of the American public, Republicans must stand ready to preemptively bring the U.S. Senate to a halt until the Democrats agree to move off healthcare and not return to it until after the 112th Congress is sworn in.
Senate Republicans should use every procedural device at their command during the next couple of weeks to stall the work of the Senate until the Easter recess when Members of Congress must return home and hear the voices of their constituents.
It is clear to anyone who pays attention: The American people demand an election occur and a new Congress convene before healthcare is taken up again. Republicans need to open their eyes and clear their ears and do whatever is necessary to ensure this demand is met.
Large financial players took catastrophic risk; they were encouraged by the promise their failure would be bailed out; the gamble worked; we were the suckers; they got the upside; we got the bill.
Large financial players took catastrophic risk; they were encouraged by the promise their failure would be bailed out; the gamble worked; we were the suckers; they got the upside; we got the bill.
I spent the morning Wednesday at the Time Warner building in New York City, participating in a conference sponsored by the Roosevelt (as in FDR) Institute titled "Make Markets Be Markets." I don't often -- ok, ever -- have the time anymore to go to conferences that I'm not speaking at. But the significance of this subject, and the prominence of the speakers, were too much for me to resist. And so at the crack of dawn, I scrambled to a 6 AM shuttle to make the 8 AM meeting in Midtown.
Everyone recognizes that our nation is in a financial mess. Too few see that this mess is not simply the ordinary downs of a regular business cycle. The American financial system walked the American economy off a cliff. Large players took catastrophic risk. They were allowed to take this risk because of a series of fundamental regulatory mistakes; they were encouraged to take it by the implicit, sometimes explicit promise, that failure would be bailed out. The gamble was obvious and it worked. The suckers were us. They got the upside. We got the bill.
So in coming to this meeting of some of the very best in the field -- from Elizabeth Warren to George Soros -- I was keen to hear just what the strategy was to restore us to some sort of financial sanity. How could we avoid it again? Yet through the course of the morning, I was struck by two very different and very depressing points.
The first is that things are actually much worse than anyone ever talks about. The pivot points of our financial system -- the infrastructure that lets free markets produce real wealth -- have become profoundly corrupted. Balance sheets are "fictions," as Professor Frank Partnoy put it. Trillions of dollars in liability hide behind these fictions. And as expert after expert demonstrated, practically every one of the design flaws that led to the collapse of the past few years remains essentially unchanged within our financial system still. That bubble burst, but we can already see the soaring profits of the same firms that sucked billions in taxpayer funds. The cycle has started again.
But the second point was even worse. Expert after expert spoke as if the problems we faced were simple math errors. As if regulators had just miscalculated, like a pilot who accidentally overshoots the run way, or an engineer who mis-estimates the weight of cargo on a plane. And so, because these were mere errors, people spoke as if these errors could be corrected by a bunch of good ideas. The morning was filled with good ideas. An angry earnestness was the tone of the day.
There were exceptions. The increasingly prominent folk-hero for the middle class, Elizabeth Warren, tied the endless list of problems to the endless power of "the banking lobby." But that framing was rare. Again and again, we were led back to a frame of bad policies that smart souls could correct. At least if "the people" could be educated enough to demand that politicians do something sensible.
This is a profound denial. The gambling on Wall Street was not caused by the equivalent of errors in arithmetic. It was caused by a corruption of the system by which we regulate those markets. No true theorist of free markets -- and certainly none of the heroes of even the libertarian right -- believe that infrastructure markets like financial systems can be left free of any regulation, including the regulation of rules against fraud. Yet that ignorant anarchy was the precise rule that governed a large part of our financial system. And not by accident: An enormous amount of political influence was brought to bear on the regulators of these core institutions of a free market to get them to turn a blind eye to Wall Street's "innovations." People who should have known better yielded to this political pressure. Smart people did stupid things because "the politics" of doing right was impossible.
Why? Why was their no political return from sensible policy? The answer is so obvious that one feels stupid to even remark it. Politicians are addicts. Their dependency is campaign cash. And in their obsessive search for campaign funds, they let these funders convince them that for the first time in capitalism's history, markets didn't need the basic array of trust-producing regulation. They believed this insanity because it made it easier for them -- in good faith -- to accept the money and steer financial policy over the cliff.
Not a single presentation the whole morning focused this part of the problem. There wasn't even speculation about how we could build an alternative to this campaign funding system of pathological dependency, so that policy makers could afford to hear sense rather than obsessively seek campaign dollars. The assembled experts were even willing to brainstorm about how to educate ordinary Americans about the intricacies of financial regulation. But the idea of changing the pathological economy of influence that governs how Washington governs wasn't even a hint.
We need to admit our (democracy's) problem. We need to get beyond this stage of denial. We need to recognize that until we release our leaders from a system that forces them to ignore good sense when there is an opportunity for large campaign cash, we won't have policy that makes sense. Wall Street continues unchanged because the Congress that would change it is already shuttling to Wall Street fundraisers. Both parties are already pandering to this power, so they can find the fix to fund the next cycle of campaigns.
Throughout the morning, expert after expert celebrated the brilliance in Franklin Roosevelt's response to the Nation's last truly great financial collapse. They yearned for a modern version of his system of regulation. But we won't get to Franklin Roosevelt's brilliance till we accept Teddy Roosevelt's insight -- that privately funded public elections tend inevitably towards this kind of corruption. And until we solve that (eminently solvable) problem, we won't make any progress in making America's finances safe again.
FixCongressFirst. Only then will sensible policy be possible.
Politicians preach the politics of envy whilst reaching into the ordinary man's pockets, through the IRS, and handing it over to their favorite rich people and others who make large contributions to their election efforts.
Politicians preach the politics of envy whilst reaching into the ordinary man's pockets, through the IRS, and handing it over to their favorite rich people and others who make large contributions to their election efforts.
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | Bill Gates is the world's richest person, but what kind of power does he have over you? Can he force your kid to go to a school you do not want him to attend? Can he deny you the right to braid hair in your home for a living? It turns out that a local politician, who might deny us the right to earn a living and dictates which school our kid attends, has far greater power over our lives than any rich person. Rich people can gain power over us, but to do so, they must get permission from our elected representatives at the federal, state or local levels. For example, I might wish to purchase sugar from a Caribbean producer, but America's sugar lobby pays congressmen hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions to impose sugar import tariffs and quotas, forcing me and every other American to purchase their more expensive sugar.
Politicians love pitting us against the rich. All by themselves, the rich have absolutely no power over us. To rip us off, they need the might of Congress to rig the economic game. It's a slick political sleight-of-hand where politicians and their allies amongst the intellectuals, talking heads and the news media get us caught up in the politics of envy as part of their agenda for greater control over our lives.
The sugar lobby is just one example among thousands. Just ask yourself: Who were the major recipients of the billions of taxpayer bailout dollars, the so-called Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP)? The top recipients of TARP handouts included companies such as Citibank, AIG, Goldman Sachs and General Motors. Their top management are paid tens of millions dollars to run companies that were on the verge of bankruptcy, were it not for billions of dollars in taxpayer money. Politicians preach the politics of envy whilst reaching into the ordinary man's pockets, through the IRS, and handing it over to their favorite rich people and others who make large contributions to their election efforts.
The bottom line is that it is politicians first and their supporters amongst intellectuals who pose the greatest threat to liberty. Dr. Thomas Sowell amply demonstrates this in his brand-new book, "Intellectuals and Society," in which he points out that: "Scarcely a mass-murdering dictator of the twentieth century was without his intellectual supporters, not simply in his own country, but also in foreign democracies . . . Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Hitler all had their admirers, defenders and apologists among the intelligentsia in Western democratic nations, despite the fact that these dictators each ended up killing people of their own country on a scale unprecedented even by despotic regimes that preceded them."
While American politicians and intellectuals have not reached the depths of tyrants such as Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Hitler, they share a common vision. Tyrants denounce free markets and voluntary exchange. They are the chief supporters of reduced private property rights, reduced rights to profits, and they are anti-competition and pro-monopoly. They are pro-control and coercion, by the state. These Americans who run Washington, and their intellectual supporters, believe they have superior wisdom and greater intelligence than the masses. They believe they have been ordained to forcibly impose that wisdom on the rest of us. Like any other tyrant, they have what they consider good reasons for restricting the freedom of others. A tyrant's primary agenda calls for the elimination or attenuation of the market. Why? Markets imply voluntary exchange and tyrants do trust that people behaving voluntarily will do what the tyrant thinks they should do. Therefore, they seek to replace the market with economic planning and regulation, which is little more than the forcible superseding of other people's plans by the powerful elite.
We Americans have forgotten founder Thomas Paine's warning that "Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one."
The president’s determination to enact his collectivist health-reform agenda at any political cost despite overwhelming public opposition is unprecedented in modern times.
The president’s determination to enact his collectivist health-reform agenda at any political cost despite overwhelming public opposition is unprecedented in modern times.
Today, Mr. Obama is expected to say he will not heed the will of three-quarters of the American people who either want Congress to stop work on health reform altogether or start over, and will instead tell Congress to charge ahead through the minefield of budget reconciliation to pass a bill that will put one-sixth of our economy under government control.
Rational arguments and facts are discarded. When Rep. Paul Ryan (R., Wisc.) detailed at the summit the budget gimmicks in the bills that would put executives of private companies in jail, the president just brushed past his remarks and said he “disagrees.”
That means Mr. Obama disagrees with the Congressional Budget Office and the chief Medicare actuary whose analyses are based upon the facts of his double-counting of Medicare savings, ten years of taxes with six years of spending, creation of new budget-busting entitlements, one-fifth of Medicare providers going out of business and jeopardizing care for seniors, and health-insurance premiums rising even faster if the bill is passed than if not.
The president’s offer to adopt four Republican ornaments, including one very bad idea by Sen. Tom Coburn, is a joke. Senator Coburn’s idea to send federal undercover agents into doctors’ offices to pose as patients is a police-state tactic that will compromise care for every patient and make it even more difficult for new patients — strangers who might be federal plants — to get appointments.
The White House clearly has no new ideas. The president is expected to ask the Senate to twist its rules to force its health-overhaul legislation through a process designed exclusively for budget and spending-related issues. These are desperate, hard-ball political tactics.
In order to move the president’s process forward, House members who fear for their political lives will be forced to vote for a Senate bill that they hate. That means they will have to vote for a bill that contains the Cornhusker Kickback, the Louisiana Purchase, the Union Payback, and liberal abortion language. And then they must trust that the Senate can fix it through a second reconciliation bill that also must pass both houses of Congress, followed by a likely third piece of legislation to address changes that can't pass through reconciliation. That is going to require an unprecedented level of trust that no one has seen on Capitol Hill in a very long time.
The American people are doing everything they can to stop this. If Congress manages to pass this before the Easter Recess as planned, the uprising during Easter recess town-hall meeting will make August look like a children’s tea party.
House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer has telegraphed the strategy House Democrats are considering to shove ObamaCare down the throat of a resistant American public:
• Both Houses pass separate legislation that can be portrayed as sufficiently “anti-abortion” to satisfy Congressman Bart Stupak and his supporters; which will • Mousetrap Republican Members of Congress and pro-life groups into supporting the bills; which in turn will make it possible to • Pass the Senate Bill in the House; with the promise that • The Senate Bill’s abortion language will be struck from the bill in a reconciliation package and justified as reducing federal outlays.
House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer has telegraphed the strategy House Democrats are considering to shove ObamaCare down the throat of a resistant American public:
• Both Houses pass separate legislation that can be portrayed as sufficiently “anti-abortion” to satisfy Congressman Bart Stupak and his supporters; which will • Mousetrap Republican Members of Congress and pro-life groups into supporting the bills; which in turn will make it possible to • Pass the Senate Bill in the House; with the promise that • The Senate Bill’s abortion language will be struck from the bill in a reconciliation package and justified as reducing federal outlays.
The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops already has instant messaged their willingness not just to acquiesce in such shenanigans but also to actually mobilize the faithful to oppose any point of order in the Senate in order to lubricate passage of ObamaCare through the Senate:
“The Roman Catholic bishops signaled Thursday that if agreement is reached with House leaders on anti-abortion language, the church would work to get the votes needed to protect the provisions in the Senate — and thereby advance the shared goal with Democrats of health care reform.”
Now is the time for opponents of ObamaCare to focus, focus, focus on preventing Hoyer from maneuvering them into this corner. The only way for opponents of a government takeover of healthcare to prevent getting mouse trapped by a Separate Stupak is to recognize that the Stupak language and all Stupak lookalikes are a snare and a delusion.
NO legislative language will prevent ObamaCare once enacted into law from transforming very quickly into a federal abortion mill that provides abortion on demand. Given the obscure language inserted into the Senate Bill by Senator Barbara Mikulski (D-MD), which is being totally ignored by anti-abortion groups, even the strongest Stupak-like language will fail to stem a tide of transformative interpretations of bureaucrats and judges, which are sure to produce federally subsidized abortion on demand.
The Mikulski language gives plenary authority to the Secretary of Health and Human Services to require every public and private healthcare plan in the nation to include “preventative services,” which is defined to include “abortion care.” Even without the Mikulski provision, both the House and Senate bills are shot through with provisions that will lead inevitably to federally subsidized abortion on demand.
There is simply no way cleanse the final bill of this authority without starting over. Hence, what anti-abortion Members of Congress and the pro-life groups must understand is that the only route to protecting the unborn from the effects of this bill is to defeat the entire bill. As long as Members of Congress and pro-life groups labor under the delusion that they can make ObamaCare safe for the unborn, they will actually serve as the President’s useful idiots and facilitate federal abortion on demand.
The political problem is there are many libertarians and moderate Republicans who oppose anti-abortion laws. This fact unnerves many Republican Members of Congress who therefore attempt to straddle the abortion issue so as not to offend moderate Republicans who agree with their libertarian constituents on abortion.
Stupak is a perfect straddle, which has the unfortunate by product of removing the last remaining block preventing enactment of ObamaCare into law. Unless Republicans refuse to take a pass on Stupak-like language, i.e., vote present on any Stupak vehicle however it is presented to them in the parliamentary chaos likely to ensue once the legislative bum’s rush begins—they will actually set the stage for enactment of ObamaCare into law.
The reluctance of Republican Members of Congress to help defeat Stupak language on strategic grounds is a huge political miscalculation. This miscalculation results from failing to comprehend the coincidence of interests on ObamaCare among libertarians/moderate Republicans and anti-abortion conservatives. Because of this blind spot, Senate Republicans are poised to make the same fatal mistake they made the first time around when they failed to comprehend the necessity of strategic voting on abortion language.
The vast majority of libertarians and moderate Republicans who oppose anti-abortion laws also oppose laws that force taxpayers to subsidize abortion. Consequently, where it comes to ObamaCare, there is a coincidence of interests between the so-called “social conservatives” who want to outlaw abortion and libertarians and moderate Republicans who want to outlaw forcing those who oppose abortion as a matter of conscience from being forced to subsidize it.
Given the fact that there is no practical way to prevent forced taxpayer subsidization of abortion once the government takeover of healthcare is a reality, the only way to satisfy the interests of all three groups is to prevent a government takeover of healthcare in the first place. And, the only way to prevent President Obama and congressional Democrats from succeeding with a government takeover of healthcare is to prevent a cosmetic “fix” to the abortion problem, i.e., Stupak, which would give sufficient political cover to Stupak Democrats to vote for the Senate Bill. As long as Republican Members of Congress fail to grasp this fact, they will be unable to oppose or at least walk away from any cosmetic “fix” to the abortion problem such as a Separate Stupak would offer. In other words, by voting for a Separate Stupak, Republicans would actually grease the skids for ObamaCare to be enacted into law.
Therefore, the common ground among social conservatives, libertarians and moderate Republicans is to oppose any legislative provision, including a Separate Stupak, that requires or ultimately leads to government subsidization of abortion.
It may sound harsh but the truth often is harsh: If ObamaCare passes into law it will be the fault of Republicans and the pro-life groups who have the power, without even breaking a sweat, to stop this monstrosity in its tracks.
No Separate Stupak, Stupid.
Carter Clews, Bill Shaker, Bill Shaker, …
4
Great commentary. Well stated and right on target. Thank goodness SSI and its able leader are there to set the record straight on the underhanded tactics of the left. If this bill passes, it will be the opening volley in the final ruination of our country by the Welfare Vulture Culture.
Brilliant analysis Larry. Alas, I fear too many of our friends in Congress will not get it.
Brilliant analysis Larry. Alas, I fear too many of our friends in Congress will not get it.
The Democrats' strategy for passing health care reform is taking shape. The House will pass the Senate bill. Then the House will pass (through the budget reconciliation process, under which legislation can't be filibustered) a bill making certain changes to the Senate bill to bring it in line with President Obama's Feb. 22 proposal. For a while it was unclear whether the House or Senate would pass reconciliation first, but House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., cleared the matter up in a Feb. 28 appearance on CBS News' Face the Nation. "The House will have to move first on some sort of corrections or reconciliation bill," Hoyer said.
The Democrats' strategy for passing health care reform is taking shape. The House will pass the Senate bill. Then the House will pass (through the budget reconciliation process, under which legislation can't be filibustered) a bill making certain changes to the Senate bill to bring it in line with President Obama's Feb. 22 proposal. For a while it was unclear whether the House or Senate would pass reconciliation first, but House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., cleared the matter up in a Feb. 28 appearance on CBS News' Face the Nation. "The House will have to move first on some sort of corrections or reconciliation bill," Hoyer said.
But does the House have the votes?
Until now, most attention has been focused on the Senate and whether there's sufficient support to bypass the threat of filibuster through reconciliation. The answer is probably yes. According to a whip count of the Senate's 59-person majority by Chris Bowers of Open Left, 41 Senate Democrats support using reconciliation; an additional six say they may support it; and 11 are undecided. Only one (Sen. Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas) affirmatively opposes it. Of the 17 Democrats in the maybe/undecided column, Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., need only pick up nine. That's eminently doable because it's become increasingly obvious that reconciliation isn't the exotic legislative technique Republicans make it out to be.
The problem lies in the House. That may seem counterintuitive, given that the House passed a bill on Nov. 7 that was more liberal than the Senate bill. Asked to choose between the more conservative Senate bill (with the flat-out unacceptable parts altered in a separate reconciliation bill) and no health reform at all, why wouldn't the House choose the Senate bill?
The answer begins with the fact that since Nov. 7, when the bill passed the House quite narrowly, 220-215, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has lost three votes. John Murtha, D-Pa., died; Robert Wexler, D-Fla., resigned to become president of the Center for Middle East Peace and Economic Cooperation; and Neil Abercrombie, D-Hawaii, resigned to run for governor. Balanced against these yeas is one nay, Nathan Deal, R-Ga., who just resigned effective March 8 to run for governor. That narrows health reform's victory margin from five votes to three (217-214). If President Obama is serious about acting within six weeks, then the final House vote will come before special elections to replace Wexler (April 13), Murtha (May 18), and Abercrombie (May 22), and probably before any elections to replace Deal, too (though no date has yet been set). Even if the Democrats wait till late May, there's a pretty good chance the special elections will keep the victory margin at three votes (219-216), because Murtha's district tilts slightly Republican; McCain eked out a narrow victory there in 2008. (The other seats are unlikely to change party, judging from the Cook Political Report's partisan voting index.)
We will assume, then, that Pelosi starts with a victory margin of three.
Take away from that three Rep. Bart Stupak, D-Mich, and Joseph Cao, R-La. Stupak is the author of a House amendment on abortion that has the imprimatur of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. Both Stupak and the bishops say they won't support the Senate bill's language on abortion. Neither will Cao, the sole House Republican to vote for health reform on the first go-round. Why not resolve the dispute by putting the Stupak amendment into the reconciliation bill? Because Senate rules won't allow it. To be included in a reconciliation bill, a measure must have some impact on the federal budget. If Stupak and the bishops were truthful in their claim that the Stupak amendment merely preserved the Hyde amendment's existing ban on federal funding for abortions, then the Stupak amendment would indeed affect the federal budget by stripping from the Senate bill its supposedly noxious federal funding for abortions. But the Senate bill doesn't fund abortions. According to Nick Baumann of Mother Jones, the Congressional Budget Office affirmed before the Senate vote that its abortion language would have no budgetary effect. Therefore, a Reid spokesman told Baumann, reconciliation can't be used to restore the Stupak amendment to health reform. ("No one thinks you can change the abortion language under reconciliation," George Will said Feb. 28 on ABC News' This Week. Inadvertently, this pro-life commentator was calling the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops a bunch of liars. He's right!)
Take away Stupak and Cao and the House health-reform bill lacks a majority if the vote is held before the special elections (215-216). It also lacks a majority if the vote is held after the special elections and Murtha's seat goes Republican (217-218). Health reform retains a one-vote margin of victory only if Murtha's seat stays Democratic (218-217). But before you whip out your checkbook and give all your money to Pennsylvania's Democratic party, read on, because health reform's troubles don't end here.
Stupak and Cao aren't the only pro-lifers in the House who will change their vote from yea to nay if health reform doesn't include the Stupak amendment. Stupak says he counts 15 to 20 Democrats who will do so. (Previously, he said there were 40.) Most calculate the Stupak bloc at about one dozen. A Feb. 24 memo by House Minority Whip Eric Cantor, R-Va., identifies, in addition to Stupak and Cao, 10 House Democrats who may bolt over abortion. In January Nate Silver of the Web site FiveThirtyEight.com calculated only 10 likely Stupak bloc bolters, but six of Silver's 10 (including three of those he deemed most likely) weren't on Cantor's list at all. So lets call it 12.
Take away a dozen votes and the House health-reform bill fails by a 25-vote margin before the special elections (203-228). If the vote is after the special elections and Murtha's seat goes Republican, it also fails by 25 votes (205-230). If Murtha's seat stays Democratic, it fails by 23 votes (206-229).
Pelosi needs to pick up a baker's dozen votes to pass health reform. Where will she get them? It would make sense to start with Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, and Eric Massa, D-N.Y., who voted against health reform last fall because they thought the bill was too conservative. Kucinich probably knew when he cast his nay that it wouldn't decide its fate. Might he be willing to rescue it now? Apparently not. Kucinich told the Wall Street Journal last week that Obama's proposal "starts with a wholly unacceptable Senate health care bill and, with a few exceptions, continues to make it worse. It's a much better bill for insurance company investors than it is for the American people." Maybe she'll have better luck with Massa, but I wouldn't bet the farm on it; Massa used his nay vote to raise campaign funds among single-payer supporters.
Next there are House Democrats who are retiring. Rep. Bart Gordon, D-Tenn., voted for the bill in the Energy and Commerce committee before he voted against it on the House floor. Also retiring are John Tanner, D-Tenn., and Brian Baird, D-Wash. They voted against health reform, too. The theory goes that if these three no longer have to run for re-election, maybe they'll support health reform as a favor to Pelosi. But if they no longer plan to serve in the House, what practical reason would any of them have to do Pelosi any favors now?
The least promising recruiting pool of all are the conservative Democrats who voted against the bill. Arguably last week's bipartisan meeting at Blair House (morning session, afternoon session) was held entirely for their benefit. But are they grateful? Don't count on it. After the November House vote, the New York Times assembled a very revealing chart that showed no fewer than 31 of the 39 House Democrats who voted nay represented districts that went for John McCain in the 2008 presidential election. Subtract Gordon, Tanner, and Baird, and you're left with five potential targets: Scott Murphy, D-N.Y.; Glenn Nye, D-Va.; Larry Kissell, D-N.C.; John Barrow, D-Ga.; and Artur Davis, D-Ala.
Let's assume Pelosi picks up all five. She's still short by about eight votes. Let's suppose she picks up all five, plus the three retiring members, plus the two dissenting liberals. (That isn't going to happen.) That's 10 votes, which still probably isn't enough.
This is why I wrote the pope to request he give health care reform a papal dispensation. Without one, the bill will almost certainly fail.
Update, 9 p.m.: I may be too optimistic when it comes to Davis, who is running for Alabama governor. The blogger Daniel Nichanian says that makes him a lost cause. Nichanian also thinks that Rep. Marion Berry, D.-Ark., a retiring member who voted yea, may switch to nay because he's pissed off at the White House. I think that's unlikely. In general, Nichanian seems a smidgen more optimistic than me about the bill's prospects. His rundown has a lot of excellent fine-grained detail. Charles Babington of the Associated Press has another helpful rundown identifying as possible yeas 10 of the 39 Democratic nays from November. But to get into that category, all you had to do was decline to state your position (though some affirmatively called themselves, or had their spokespeople call themselves, undecided).
Update, March 2: Hoyer proposed an alternative sequence today. The House would still vote on reconciliation before the Senate (as it's apparently bound to by law). But it would vote on reconciliation first. Then the Senate would pass reconciliation. Then, and only then, would the House vote for the Senate version of health care reform. In effect, it would come pre-amended. This works great from a strategic point of view (the House doesn't have to accept "trust me" assurances from the Senate), but would it pass parliamentary muster?
Update:Plan C: Obama set to introduce “much smaller” health-care bill on Wednesday. If true, we need to stay on top of this and ensure we don’t get railroaded into RINOCare (government backed insurance cartels) or any other unsavory legislation. RINOCare would be the Republican’s Waterloo. Watch your GOP Senator and Representative like a hawk. If you want my advice, visit the Social Security Institute every single day to find out if your GOP Senator or Representative is about to row you down the creek and throw away the paddle. SSI is run by Dr. Larry Hunter, former policy advisor to President Ronald Reagan. Watch for Trojan Horses to single-payer and public option. This is not over yet.
Update:Plan C: Obama set to introduce “much smaller” health-care bill on Wednesday. If true, we need to stay on top of this and ensure we don’t get railroaded into RINOCare (government backed insurance cartels) or any other unsavory legislation. RINOCare would be the Republican’s Waterloo. Watch your GOP Senator and Representative like a hawk. If you want my advice, visit the Social Security Institute every single day to find out if your GOP Senator or Representative is about to row you down the creek and throw away the paddle. SSI is run by Dr. Larry Hunter, former policy advisor to President Ronald Reagan. Watch for Trojan Horses to single-payer and public option. This is not over yet.
Upon further thought, this may be, as Hot Air is reporting, nothing more than Obama’s plan with a few Republican ideas in it. If so, it is still a government takeover of healthcare and the fight will continue to kill the bill. Contact your Representative and Senators and ensure they do not support any bill that does not start over from a clean slate.
—————–Original Post
If ever a narrative needed to make it far and wide, it is the following one. When the main architect of reconciliation comes out against it so strongly, I would consider that quite newsworthy.
The Democrat talking heads have a new talking point – the Republicans have used reconciliation before so we can too. They fail to mention the differences between the use of reconciliation in the past and the intent to use it today to shove an unpopular bill down an unwilling public’s throat, and in the process fundamentally impact over 1/6 of the U.S. economy while inserting monumental government bureaucracies between you and your doctor, in the end creating rationing, higher taxes, killing innovation, and reducing our quality of care. While other solutions exist which avoid destroying the best medical system in the world, the Democratic leadership and the President of United States show little interest in pursuing free market solutions and instead are prepared to play the role of tyrants by simultaneously ignoring the will of the minority in the Senate and the majority in the country.
Senator Byrd best expresses why using Reconciliation to jam ObamaCare down America’s throat degrades the U.S. Senate and violates the spirit of our system of checks and balances. Why is Senator Byrd’s opinion so important in the matter? Because the Senator from West Virginia is one of the authors of the reconciliation process and a current serving U.S. Senator. He is also a Democrat. Let’s see what the Senator says about reconciliation and healthcare:
Using reconciliation to ram through complicated, far-reaching legislation is an abuse of the budget process. The writers of the Budget Act, and I am one, never intended for its reconciliation’s expedited procedures to be used this way. These procedures were narrowly tailored for deficit reduction. They were never intended to be used to pass tax cuts, or to create new Federal regimes. Additionally, reconciliation measures must comply with Section 313 of the Budget Act, known as the Byrd Rule, which means that whatever health legislation is reported from the Finance Committee or legislation from any other Committee that is shoe-horned into reconciliation will sunset after five years. Additionally, numerous other non-budgetary provisions of any such legislation will have to be omitted under reconciliation. This is a very messy way to achieve a goal like health care reform, and one that will make crafting the legislation more difficult…
…It is the one place in all of government where the rights of the numerical minority are protected. As long as the Senate preserves the right to debate and the right to amend we hold true to our role as the Framers envisioned. We were to be the cooling off place where proposals could be examined carefully and debated extensively, so that flaws might be discovered and changes might be made. Remember, Democrats will not always control this chamber, the House of Representatives or the White House. The worm will turn. Some day the other party will again be in the majority, and we will want minority rights to be shielded from the bear trap of the reconciliation process…
…While I support the admirable budget priorities outlined in this resolution, I cannot and will not condone legislation that puts political expediency ahead of the time-honored purpose of this institution.
Newsmax also reports the Senator as stating that using reconciliation in this manner is
an outrage that must be resisted.
Why Republican rebuttals do not include the opinion of the architect of reconciliation is beyond me. I have yet to hear a single talking head speak of the Senator Byrd’s opinion of using reconciliation. Reconciliation has never been used in such an abusive manner for such far reaching legislation. To do so amounts to nothing short of rule by tyranny, and it is the moral responsibility of level-headed leaders to recognize and identify it as such. Obama, Reid, Pelosi, and any legislator who supports the use of such a tactic to expedite unpopular and liberty stealing legislation is acting the tyrant.
During the summit, President Obama stated:
The American people are not all that interested in procedures inside the Senate.
With this statement Obama is either outright lying, completely out of touch with the American people, or believes we lack the necessary intelligence to understand the procedure. None of these options should provide the reader with much comfort. The first is inexcusable, the second shows a lack of competency, and the third is patently insulting. As Michelle Malkin reported:
Oh, really? A new USAToday/Gallup poll reports that 52 percent of Americans oppose using the procedural maneuver to pass the health care bill in the Senate on 51 votes rather than the 60 votes required to end any filibuster.
In the end, it is clear the word tyrant must be used to described anyone who supports using reconciliation in the manner currently under consideration for healthcare. It is also clear the statements and opinion of Senator Robert Byrd be repeated and repeated often. The American people must know the architect of the process is strongly against using it to pass healthcare and that doing so is a tyrannical act. The meme must spread and spread far.
Going farther, passage in the House of the Senate bill is also a tyrannical act. The people of this country have made it very, very, clear, this bill is not wanted, it is not liked, and Congress should start over. No amount of spin by empty Democratic talking heads is going to change this reality.
Pass this bill by reconciliation – or pass it at all – and all bets are off. When the GOP retakes Congress, it will be clear – and expected of them – to invent rules to kill ObamaCare by any means possible. The traditions and comity of the Senate will already be destroyed, the Democrats in the House will have demonstrated both their severe intellectual myopia and ideological clinging, so why not continue the tradition and just de-fund ObamaCare or pull some other bit of trickery. While repealing ObamaCare at the federal level sounds good, I would much rather watch a blanket of ObamaCare nullification legislation fall across this country. If the Democrats feel like opening Pandora’s box, don’t come crying to me when the law of unintended consequences rears its head. The Democrats will have shown the country that you can pretty much do whatever the hell you want.
Let me be clear (my God, I sound like Obama): I still think ObamaCare is dead, reconciliation is a deflective strategy, the votes do not exist in the House, and the current Democratic posturing is to placate the base as the Dem leadership looks for an exit strategy.
However, the fact remains many Democrats were willing to cram a government take over of healthcare legislation through regardless of the consequences. It is the our job to ensure the country does not forget. Obama, Reid, and Pelosi are Socialists at best and Marxists at worse. Their willingness to use every questionable trick possible to achieve their power grab regardless of the wishes of a clear majority in this country is the very definition of rule by tyranny. Many of their colleagues are just as duplicitous and come November they must and will pay very dearly for their condescending and contemptuousness attitude towards America and its people.
The moderate base of the Democratic party must ensure Pelosi and Reid pay for their arrogance and willingness to sacrifice the political careers of their colleagues in pursuit of an ideological goal – a pursuit characterized by the obsessive-compulsive tendencies of the neurotic. Obama, the ideological brother of Reid and Pelosi, is recognized less for his skills as a leader and oratorical genius; his tendency to prevaricate is now legendary as he loses credibility at a pace only a NASCAR driver could appreciate. The shine is off the shoes – and we see the dirt, the obfuscation, and the real intent of this President. The fig leaf is gone and there is no rock to crawl back under.
As the Chines proverb says: May you live in interesting times.
That 56 percent of all Americans "think the federal government’s become so large and powerful that it poses an immediate threat to the rights and freedoms of ordinary citizens" isn’t really all that surprising. After all, ever since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the government’s "right" to read our e-mails, seize our property, hold us as "enemy combatants," and otherwise trample on the Constitution has been expanding at an exponential pace. What’s really shocking, however, is that, according to this CNN-Opinion Research Corporation poll, released on Feb. 28, most of the people who believe this are overwhelmingly …
That 56 percent of all Americans "think the federal government’s become so large and powerful that it poses an immediate threat to the rights and freedoms of ordinary citizens" isn’t really all that surprising. After all, ever since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the government’s "right" to read our e-mails, seize our property, hold us as "enemy combatants," and otherwise trample on the Constitution has been expanding at an exponential pace. What’s really shocking, however, is that, according to this CNN-Opinion Research Corporation poll, released on Feb. 28, most of the people who believe this are overwhelmingly … Republicans. That is, they are self-described supporters of the very same party which impaled the Constitution on the sword of the "war on terrorism." According to the poll, "only 37 percent of Democrats" believe this, as opposed to "63 percent of Independents and nearly 7 in 10 Republicans."
Is it just me, or was it only yesterday that the Democratic base was outraged by "Bushitler," and the "Cheney-PNAC" alleged neo-fascists who were taking over the country and driving dissent underground? How quickly they turn!
Adding to the irony, the poll was taken on the same weekend the extension of the PATRIOT Act passed the Democratic-controlled Congress – without debate, without a peep of protest from the "progressives" in Congress, and disguised as a vote in favor of a Senate amendment to the Medicare Physician Payment Reform Act. Bravery is not something we see much of in Washington, D.C. As one blogger put it:
"So, if you heard the news of a Patriot Act vote, and went looking for the roll call, you wouldn’t find it. You’d see roll call # 67 for this year, but would reasonably conclude that the vote is thoroughly unrelated to the Patriot Act. If you hadn’t heard of the Patriot Act extension, and just wanted to see what legislation had been voted on yesterday, you would come away still ignorant of what the House of Representatives had actually done."
The shamefaced Democrats are too cowardly to openly acknowledge their contribution to the destruction of the Constitution: instead, they’re hoping we don’t notice more Democrats than Republicans voted for the extension of this odious Act. At one point, the Dems were hinting that they might want to "reform" the Act, and put in certain "privacy protections," but they soon gave that up and now their media amen corner is busy demonizing "anti-government zealots" who dare to question the ongoing government takeover of … practically everything.
Keith Olbermann is still going on about how many days it’s been since George W. Bush declared "Mission accomplished!" in Iraq – even as President Barack Obama’s generals warn that we’ll still be stuck in that particular quagmire well beyond the withdrawal date supposedly set by their commander-in-chief. Not only that, but Obama is fighting a secret war in Pakistan, continuing the previous administration’s war on our civil liberties, and extending its tentacles into every aspect of American life – yes, even our health care.
The "PATRIOT" Act, all several hundred pages of it, was passed in the dead of night without being read, without being adequately debated, and with the full official approval of both parties, who unhesitatingly wiped out two-hundred years of constitutional law in a procedure that lasted for less than an hour.
“The president’s reversal on Patriot Act reform is a major travesty,” says Michelle Richardson, the ACLU’s legislative counsel, a bit of phraseology that just about sums up the first year of Obama’s reign. All those liberal hearts, broken by that seductive love-’em-and-leave-’em Chicago smoothie – except no one’s complaining.
The Associated Press reported the vote in terms that can only be described as odd:
"Democrats have retreated from adding new privacy protections to the nation’s primary counterterrorism law, stymied by Senate Republicans who argued the changes would weaken terror investigations. The proposed protections were cast aside when Senate Democrats lacked the necessary 60-vote supermajority to pass them."
The Democrats have … retreated? Since most of them voted for the "PATRIOT" Act to begin with, I wouldn’t exactly phrase it that way.
As the Democratic majority gets ready to ram an immensely unpopular "health-care reform" bill through the Congress without a "super-majority," one can only wonder at their priorities. Is it really more important to force poor Americans to buy insurance they can’t afford than it is to save our constitutional liberties from being crushed underfoot?
Apparently so.
Passed in a time of "emergency," and touted as a temporary measure, the "PATRIOT" Act has, like all such measures, become routine: part and parcel of the legal-political landscape, which no one really questions. The "right" of the government to impound our records, seize our property, jail us, fine us, and haul us before a military tribunal – all of this has now become "normal."
Did you know that a recipient of a "National Security Letter" – say, your Internet provider – must not only hand over all records, documents, and what-have-you to the Feds, but must also refrain from talking about or otherwise revealing the existence of the letter? Just like they can simply take you in the dead of night, throw you in a cell– and, yes, even torture you, if they feel like it – and no one need ever know.
Accepting this as a fait accompli is now "normal" in Washington, D.C. No wonder the majority of Americans consider the federal government a dangerous enemy – and they’re all too right about that.
The question is: what do we do about it? Here’s where the confusion comes in. While there are many indications that Americans are waking up to the main danger to their liberty and livelihoods – a danger that doesn’t reside in a cave somewhere, overseas, but right here in the good ol’ US of A – the political class in this country is deeply ensconced, and won’t be pried out of power with a crowbar. It will take something with a lot more explosive power.
No, I’m not talking about an ordinary bomb – violence would only embolden them. I’m talking about the debt bomb, which is scheduled to go off in the very near future. We won’t have to defeat the army of federal occupation militarily – because they’re about to go bankrupt. Just wait until they can’t pay their SWAT teams, their Homeland Security goons, their multitudinous minions in every snooping federal agency: do they imagine that these people will stay on out of loyalty or ideological fervor? Or out of "patriotism"? Well of course they don’t imagine that, which is why, these days, they’re notably nervous.
This nervousness pervades elite circles in this country, and is expressed in a peevish impatience with any sort of dissidence, on any subject: if you fall out of line, they swat you – and you stay down, if they can help it. The tea-partiers, the antiwar protesters (such as they are), the stray politician who dares speak truth to power – anyone who expresses an opinion deemed outside the very narrow range of the permissible is automatically attacked as a "extremist," a dangerous "radical," and very possibly a potentially violent person whose every move is rightfully being mapped by the authorities.
Intersecting with this skittishness is an impending sense of economic and social crisis. Real fear, such as we haven’t experienced in a mass way since 9/11, pervades the air: an entirely justified fear of an economic collapse. Last year, when the banks trembled on the edge of a very steep precipice, lawmakers were told "in private" that if the bank bailout wasn’t passed, "there would be martial law in America," as Rep. Brad Sherman (D-California) revealed on the House floor. "Now that’s what I call fear-mongering," said Rep. Sherman, but in my view this wasn’t a bluff. In the midst of an economic collapse, an "event" in which the stock market drops by, say, 5,000 points, and there’s a run on the dollar, as Ron Paul predicts, I don’t think there’s any question but that the authorities would immediately impose martial law.
In Ayn Rand’s classic novel of American decline, Atlas Shrugged, a giant oak tree stands on the property of the heroine’s family estate: it had been there as long as she could remember, towering over the landscape like a living monument to stability and continuity. One night during a thunderstorm the tree – an oak – was struck by lightning. When she came out to the charred scene in the morning she saw that the tree had split open, revealing nothing but a hollow shell.
I’m afraid this is precisely what will happen if – or, rather, when – economic lightning hits our brittle society: it is likely to shatter and reveal the vast emptiness that has taken over where the American character once resided. As Rep. Paul points out in this video, rather than resisting martial law, the American people in their majority will probably demand it.
That will mark the end of the American experiment, as we knew it. The vision of the Founders will go down in history as a tragic failure – one that took an awful lot of people down with it.
If this is not to be the future, then where are the mass protests against the reauthorization of a totalitarian Act such as hasn’t been seen in this country since the Alien and Sedition Acts? Where are the liberals? Where are the old-style conservatives? Where is the America I once knew – the America of the Founders, a cantankerous and quarrelsome lot, whom no tyrant could tame? I fear we have become a decadent and fatally corrupted people, for whom the Founders are those guys with funny wigs, slave-owners who wouldn’t let women vote, with a lot of strange, anti-social ideas, like Jefferson’s Tim McVeigh-ish belief that "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants."
A few liberals, like Glenn Greenwald, have spoken out, but their numbers only underscore the underlying silence: a few conservatives of the old school have raised their voices in protest, but they, too, are isolated, and are, in any case, ignored by their fellows on the right, at least those in the GOP, who vehemently support the "PATRIOT" Act and all the rest of the Bush-Cheney era legislation aimed at subverting the Constitution.
"Oh Obama, you silly neocon!" japed Ryan Mauro over at Frontpage, and for once I have to agree with (yikes!) David Horowitz:
"Sometimes partisanship and heated debates makes us forget how little has changed and how little really divides the two parties when it comes to national security. The rhetoric was changed and the policies had to be repackaged, modified a little bit to better fit the administration’s own beliefs and political promises, but what’s actually being done has changed very little. Policies, like celebrities, need to be reinvented to stay with the times.
"Case in point: President Obama has just signed a one-year extension of the Patriot Act.
"The entire legislation wasn’t preserved, though—so surely it was refined to limit its violations of civil liberties, right? Think again. As The Associated Press reports, ‘Thrown away were restrictions and greater scrutiny on the government’s authority to spy on Americans and seize their records.’ Oh, snap!"
I’m unsure as to whether "Oh, snap!" is meant approvingly, but no matter. The point is that this is "change" the neocons can believe in. And while the anti-Obama market is too lucrative for Horowitz to give it up, others are not so "principled." David Frum, whose own security prescriptions go way beyond the "PATRIOT" Act, has lately been urging his fellow conservatives to go a little easier on Obama, and urging compromise on economic matters – because what the neocons really care about is foreign policy and civil liberties questions. As long as we have an all-powerful surveillance state, which is waging war on multiple fronts at all times, the David Frums of this world are happy.
I hope the folks over at the David Horowitz Center for Freedom, or whatever it is his outfit is called these days, are confident that the power they would grant the Obama administration will never be used in a way they would come to regret – say, against them. But don’t worry, David: when they come for you and lock you up in a reeducation camp, we’ll spring you – you know, like your former buddies in the Weather Underground sprang Timothy Leary.
Aside from neocon loons like Horowitz, I think a lot of "progressives" would readily support the imposition of martial law in an "economic emergency" – as Rahm Emanuel would say, "Rule one: never allow a crisis to go to waste." Can’t you just hear certain self-righteous "progressives" (not liberals) justifying censorship, a ban on public gatherings, or other assaults on our constitutional rights, on the grounds that certain speech and nonviolent action is "divisive," "hateful," and a threat to public order? I certainly hope conservatives don’t learn to value civil liberties the hard way, but if that’s what it takes, then so be it.
By then liberals will have already forgotten that particular lesson – and the ideological spectrum will undergo yet another re-polarization, where left becomes right, right becomes left, and the cycle starts all over again….
As someone who has recently been described as "objectively fascist," I hesitate to declare "tomorrow belongs to me," but if Bill Kristol’s disdain for those "kids" at the CPAC conference who handed Ron Paul an impressive victory is any indication, the sclerotic neocon establishment has given up on the youth vote – even the conservative youth vote – and the future belongs to us Paulians.
America's leading champion of liberty has some pretty vicious enemies – inside the libertarian movement
As someone who has recently been described as "objectively fascist," I hesitate to declare "tomorrow belongs to me," but if Bill Kristol’s disdain for those "kids" at the CPAC conference who handed Ron Paul an impressive victory is any indication, the sclerotic neocon establishment has given up on the youth vote – even the conservative youth vote – and the future belongs to us Paulians.
There are several reasons for Kristol’s curious indifference to the future of the movement of which he is alleged to be a leader: he’s not just trying to minimize Paul’s impact – although there’s that, too — but is at least partly sincere. While condescension is part and parcel of the neoconservative style, this "oh they’ll get over it" attitude also reflects the experience of his own intellectual and familial forebears: his father, the late Irving Kristol, was famously a Trotskyist in his youth, an experience he wrote about and saw as nothing but positive. In discounting the radicalism of youth, Kristol is merely reiterating the storied history of his own mini-movement. How many far-leftists of the 1930s — his own father among them — started out as self-described revolutionaries dedicated to the overthrow of American imperialism, and later became vehement cold warriors? Oh, don’t worry, they’ll get over it!
This confession of intellectual and political bankruptcy comes at a time when the American right resembles the left in the 1930s. With the world economy collapsing all around them, and fired up by the inspiration of the Russian Revolution, far-left movements sprang up like mushrooms after a rainstorm, each vying for the role of the American revolutionary "vanguard." There were Stalinists, and Trotskyists, Social Democrats andLovestoneites, Cannonites and Shachtmanites – this latter being the particular strand from which the neocons of today are derived.
Out of the factional turmoil of the Left in the 1930s arose the intellectual and political establishment of the next decades: the outcome of its obscure internal disputes, argued in the arcane lexicon of Marxist theory, were later reflected in the mainstream intellectual trends and politics of much broader sectors of the American public.
Indeed, the neoconservative movement itself arose from this ferment, arriving at the seat of power at the end of a long intellectual and political hegira about which entirely too much has been written – including by myself. In the course of this odyssey, a lot of ideological baggage was thrown overboard, but, in the end, the neocons’ strategy of traveling light enabled them to achieve their goal: power. By the time they moved into their Washington, D.C., offices, riding on the back of the Reaganites, and ensconced themselves in key positions during the Bush years, they had dumped every principle overboard but one: the necessity of exercising American military power on a global scale. They are and always have been the War Party [.pdf]: internationalists, either proletarian or Wilsonian. They’re the type you see at military parades, cheering just a little too loudly: down through the years, the one consistent neocon theme has been the hailing of one army or another as the savior of humanity. Whether the Red Army or the US Army was purely a matter of circumstance and convenience.
A sect whose strategy is to cultivate the elites and whisper in the ear of the king has no real use for any but a certain kind of youth. The sort who, from a very early age, is a master of the main chance, a consummate opportunist, a little Peter Keating type fixated on climbing the ladder all the way to the top without regard for niceties. Neoconservatism, after all, is about power: the exercise of it, and indeed the worship of it, particularly in its military manifestation. It is the young who fight the wars, and the oldsters who send them off to die, and so the War Party is naturally concentrated in an older demographic.
Aside from distrusting and disdaining the younger generation as a matter of preference and principle, however, Kristol and his fellow neocons aren’t interested in the future of the movement they claim to lead because, to them, "movement" conservatism is just a convenient vehicle, one they hitched a ride with in the 1980s. True, it has brought them quite a long way toward their goal – but they can always jump on another bandwagon, one that’s moving faster, and it won’t be long before they’re sitting in the driver’s seat. To heck with the future, they want power now.
The Obama administration had barely arrived in Washington when the latest incarnation of Kristol’s old PNAC organization, now going under the moniker of "The Foreign Policy Initiative," held a joint conference with the two preeminent sources of mid-to-low-level appointees, the Center for a New American Security, and the Center for American Progress. Neocons go where the power is, which is one reason why, as an organized movement, neoconservatism can hardly be said to exist outside of Washington, D.C., and Manhattan’s Upper West Side.
The movement spawned by Ron Paul, however, is a completely different sort of creature: it is, indeed, the exact opposite of neoconservatism in every respect. It is populist, while the neocons are elitists: it is born of the heartland, whilst the neocons are clustered in two of the nation’s biggest cities. The defining difference, however, is that, while the neocons worship power, and dream of attaining "national greatness," the Paulians are the self-described enemies of power, and dream only of taking their old republic back.
Paul’s appeal to the young is generally characterized as unlikely, and he himself emphasizes this, making the point that it’s not about him it’s about the ideas of liberty, non-interventionism, and the decentralization of political authority in America. He’s "boring," he’s not a glamorous "personality," and yet he’s treated like a rock star by the young.
The reason, I think, has to do with his personality, as well as his ideas, insofar as one relates to the other: Dr. Paul is the one politician I’ve seen, the one leader of an ideological trend, who has gotten more radical as he’s gotten older. The Ron Paul of the late seventies and early eighties, while hardly a warmongering neocon, was far from the acerbic critic of American interventionism he is today. What I love about the congressman they call "Dr. No" is how, in his many interviews on television and elsewhere, he invariably manages to bring up the war question – one that previous libertarian presidential wannabes only raised when directly asked. Not only that, but this persistence is rooted in an overarching critique of statism as a system: what his intellectual mentor, Murray Rothbard, dubbed the Welfare-Warfare State. Youth naturally looks for a way to explain the way the world works, and the best of them seek ways to make it work better. To any young person looking for a comprehensive worldview these days, the intellectual landscape is nearly completely barren.
On the right we have the desiccated ideologues of neoconservatism, whose concerns are so far removed from those of any ordinary youth that their leading spokesman has no trouble writing off nearly everyone on the right under thirty, aside from those directly in Rupert Murdoch’s employ or somehow or other on the neocon payroll.
On the left – well, there isn’t really a "left" anymore, at least not one I find recognizable. Gone are the New Lefties who used to "solidarize" with the struggles of the Third World against colonialism: likewise, the Old Lefties who used to quote Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky are nearly vanished. In their place we have a "progressive" movement determined to force poor people to pay for health insurance they can’t afford. As Fafblog put it:
"As disappointed as we might be in Barack Obama – in his little failings, in his petty slights, in his odd betrayals, in his unseemly habit of dancing naked through the streets of Oslo smeared with the blood and entrails of Afghan children – we also know that the alternative would be far worse. Why, with a Republican president, we might be at war with Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and possibly Iran, or facing some hideously draconian corporatist scheme to compel poor people to buy private insurance they can’t afford, with a government that not only excuses the torture regimes of the past but dramatically expands them while giving itself license to murder anyone it likes anywhere on the planet. With Barack Obama, on the other hand, we have all that plus a man who can sparkle wittily on late night television. Now, I think that has to be worth at least a couple thousand dead Muslims, don’t you?"
Faced with the grim choice of Charybdis and Scylla, no wonder young people on the right – and the left – are turning to the Paulian vision of constitutional government and a foreign policy based on the Founders’ warning against entangling alliances and militarism. As the economic and social crisis ramps up, and the intellectual bankruptcy of the Kristols and the regime apologists becomes all too apparent, that the youth of America are rallying to the one pure banner of unreconstructed idealism should hardly come as a surprise. No more of a surprise than the smear campaign unleashed by the anti-Paulistas, and not just the neocons but their "libertarian" enablers.
The Beltway libertarians, especially those at Reason magazine and the Cato Institute, have been overtly hostile to the Ron Paul phenomenon from the beginning. I’ve written about this at length in this space, and I won’t reiterate the dynamics of the debate except to say that the Paulians get under the skin of the Reasonoids and the Cato-ites for many of the same reasons they’re hated by the neoconservatives: principally, their populism. In particular, Paul’s application of the theories advanced by the economist Ludwig von Mises that explain the business cycle as due to central bank credit expansion – and the policy prescription that flows inevitably from that, expressed in the Paulian slogan "End the Fed!" – has them nervously explaining at Washington cocktail parties that they’re not that kind of libertarian.
Reason has become a major vehicle of the most scurrilous sort of anti-Paul propaganda, an effort to smear the Good Doctor as a racist and anti-Semite. The anti-Paul mini-movement was spearheaded, during the presidential primaries, by Jamie Kirchick, Marty Peretz’s Renfield, and Matt Welch, then the newly-minted editor of Reason, who isn’t and never was any kind of libertarian.
Welch’s condescending, disdainful attitude toward the movement he’s marketing his magazine to comes through loud and clear in this Bloggingheads episode, in which the topic is Paul and the apparent success of the Paulian movement.
This is the very same Bloggingheads dialogue during which Eli Lake, his sparring partner, describes me as "objectively fascist." This was said after Welch explained why there would always be "at least an arm’s length" between Reason and Antiwar.com, although both are explicitly libertarian institutions, because we supposedly object to even rhetorical support for "freedom-seeking people around the world." As anyone who has read my articles on events inside Iran, and the former Yugoslavia, would know, this is utter nonsense: I only object to the cooptation of such freedom-seeking movements by the US government, which invariably uses them as an instrument of its interventionist foreign policy – and promptly dumps them when they are no longer useful.
Lake, a former "reporter" for the New York Sun – a newspaper that once called for banning an antiwar march in New York City on the grounds that the marchers were engaged in sedition – has since graduated to the Moonie-owned Washington Times, where he’s survived the recent purges and is now, as he himself puts it, a "credible reporter" on national security issues.
So how did I earn the "f"-word designation? Am I a follower of the doctrines espoused by Benito Mussolini? Am I an advocate of organizing industry into government-controlled "syndicates," a system in which the individual is subordinated to the all-powerful State?
Well, no, not exactly: according to the oh-so-"credible" Lake, I’m "objectively fascist" because I have written – "with great glee" — that Israeli intelligence had some foreknowledge of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and because I think that there was an Israeli cell working inside the Pentagon during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq.
Here is my answer to the first allegation, which he dismisses as an "anti-Jewish" canard. Until Carl Cameron repudiates his four-part series broadcast by Fox News in December, 2001, which made the very same claim, and which, furthermore, disclosed crucial evidence pointing to that conclusion, I will continue to raise this question without apology. I challenge Lake to deny the veracity of this report: if I’m "anti-Semitic" for citing Cameron’s work, then what about Fox News and Cameron – are they "anti-Semites," too? Or is it just little old me?
As to the second allegation, that an Israel-loyal cabal infiltrated the Pentagon, I own up to that one, too: has our "credible" security expert ever heard of a man named Larry Franklin? One can engage in a technical and legal argument over whether Franklin and his handlers – AIPAC honchos Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman – committed espionage in pilfering sensitive and closely-held national security secrets, and handing them over to Israeli government employees, but surely they constituted a cell that operated inside the Pentagon’s policymaking component. The cabal was centered in the department overseen by Douglas Feith – whose resignation, under mysterious circumstances, was preceded by a full-bore FBI counterintelligence investigation into the neocon network of which Franklin was a part.
Welch, for his part, didn’t disagree with Lake: instead, he said he wouldn’t agree with him "more out of politeness than anything else." The best response to that bit of snarky cowardice was posted in the comments by a reader, who wrote:
"Hey, Welch, how come you didn’t call bullshit on your pal when he started in with the "objectively pro-fascist" crap? Didn’t you used to think that was stupid? And here was your chance to repudiate the whole concept, but you passed. Why?"
"Hitchens’ biggest new fans are especially fond of extrapolating from George Orwell’s old saw about pacifism being "objectively pro-fascist," sometimes as headlines on links to Hitch’s latest. But as Eric Blair’s modern popularizer knows too well, Orwell — whose original essay, it should be mentioned, was referring to British pacifists during Hitler’s bombing siege of London – repudiated his ‘objectively pro-fascist’ line before the War was even over, in an essay about propaganda that’s well worth your time.
When it comes to Antiwar.com, and Ron Paul, however, the normal rules don’t apply. It’s only natural that Welch, who started out his career as a "war-blogger" along the lines of Charles Johnson, would fear and loathe not only Antiwar.com, but also Rep. Paul, whom Reason has also kept "at arm’s length." No sooner had the "objectively fascist" post appeared on "Hit and Run," the Reason blog, then it was time to post, the very next day, a remarkably ignorant hit piece aimed at Paul by David Harsanyi, a third-rate neocon columnist for the Denver Post and author of the forgettable book, Nanny State, a hackish reiteration of material plenty of libertarian authors have covered more comprehensively elsewhere. Senor Harsanyi doesn’t like the Nanny State, except when it’s slaughtering those naughty Afghans and Pakistanis, in which case it ceases being a Nanny State and starts becoming his State.
In any case, the Harsanyi hit piece was the usual neocon smear-job: really just name-calling wrapped in a penumbra of disdain for the "crazy old uncle" and his "delusional" "conspiracy theorist" followers. In a follow-up, he claims Cato Institute president and founder Ed Crane had a conversation with Paul in which the latter supposedly said that the mailing list of The Spotlight – a now defunct weekly newspaper run by professional anti-Semite and nutball of renown Willis Carto – always brought in the best results in his direct mail campaigns. As to whether Crane will step forward and claim this smear as his own, only time will tell. But this, I think, settles the question of where the impetus for the anti-Paul smear campaign is coming from: it is emanating from the Beltway "libertarians" of Crane’s ilk, who envy Paul and revile the hardcore libertarian tradition he represents.
Yet these are minor bumps in the road, more instructive than substantial: when the history of the libertarian movement in this era is written, it is Paul and his supporters who will be honored as pioneers, and the Ed Cranes and Matt Welches who will be reduced to a footnote. The intellectual emptiness of their "libertarianism" is all too apparent: they have reduced the freedom philosophy to an affectation. Paul, on the other hand, has expanded it into a mass movement, one that is reaching more people every day with its unabashedly radical message.
Conservative legal scholars disagree with Mark Hall's contention that Congress has the authority to enforce mandatory ownership of health insurance through its power to tax income granted by the 16th Amendment to the Constitution.1 Instead, they argue that the individual mandate would qualify as a direct, or capitation, tax and would therefore be unconstitutional2 in the context of the proposed legislation.
The Left Says:
"An insurance mandate would be enforced through income tax laws, so even if a simple mandate were not a valid 'regulation,' it still could fall easily within Congress's plenary power to tax or not tax income."
Source: Mark Hall, "Is it Unconstitutional to Mandate Health Insurance?" Health Reform Watch, August 25, 2009, downloaded from http://www.healthreformwatch.com/2009/08/25/is-it-unconstitutional-to-mandate-health-insurance/ on February 2, 2010.
What Conservatives Think:
Conservative legal scholars disagree with Mark Hall's contention that Congress has the authority to enforce mandatory ownership of health insurance through its power to tax income granted by the 16th Amendment to the Constitution.1 Instead, they argue that the individual mandate would qualify as a direct, or capitation, tax and would therefore be unconstitutional2 in the context of the proposed legislation.
Both the House and Senate versions of ObamaCare contain provisions to punish Americans who do not have government-accepted health insurance, the so-called "individual mandate."3 The House bill explains in Sec. 59B, titled "Tax On Individuals Without Acceptable Health Care Coverage":
In the case of any individual who does not meet the requirements of subsection (d) at any time during the taxable year, there is hereby imposed a tax equal to 2.5 percent of the excess of— ''(1) the taxpayer's modified adjusted gross income for the taxable year, over ''(2) the amount of gross income specified in section 6012(a)(1) with respect to the taxpayer.4
The Senate bill in Sec. 500A, titled "Requirement To Maintain Minimum Essential Coverage,"5 warns that failure to comply with government regulations to obtain health insurance will result in the imposition of a phased in "penalty tax" eventually amounting to $750 or 2 percent of income, adjusted for inflation.6
But Article I, Sec. 9, Clause 4 of the U.S. Constitution reads, "No Capitation, or other direct, Tax shall be laid, unless in Proportion to the Census or Enumeration herein before directed to be taken."7 A direct, or capitation, tax is a tax on existence, as opposed to a tax on activity, such as excise or income taxes. Conservative legal scholars argue that the individual mandate would operate in precisely this manner.8 Indeed, the House version explicitly states that the penalty tax would be a "tax on individuals."9 Far from being only a possible constitutional limitation to the individual mandate, Article I, Sec. 9, Clause 4 places strict restrictions on such taxes, restrictions reaffirmed by the Supreme Court in Eisner v. Macomber10 and elsewhere.
Specifically, states must pay such a tax in proportion to its population as determined by the census.11 For example, in 2008 New York State had an estimated 19.5 million people out of a total U.S. population of 304 million,12 or some 6.4 percent of the total. Therefore, New York would have to pay 6.4 percent of any direct tax, regardless of the relative wealth of New Yorkers compared with citizens of other states.13
In light of this explicit constitutional injunction, exemptions for some individuals built into the language of the ObamaCare penalty tax as proposed by the Senate could seriously compromise its constitutionality. As Randy Barnett of the Georgetown University Law Center has written:
In order to be constitutional, the health care mandate tax must be assessed evenly based upon population, and not vary based upon factors such as the financial condition of the state's residents… This requirement will be impossible to meet based upon the variety of exceptions provided for in the mandate. For example, the mandate exempts individuals who are not lawfully present in the United States… The mandate also excludes taxpayers with income under 100 percent of the poverty line, individuals for whom the required contribution would exceed 8 percent of their income, religious objectors, incarcerated individuals, and anyone determined to have suffered a hardship regarding their capability to obtain coverage, as determined in the discretion of the Secretary of Health and Human Services.14
Despite what Mark Hall and others argue, the income taxation powers of Congress do not give it the authority to compel Americans to own health insurance – or anything else.
Issue Date: March 1, 2010 Author: Matt Patterson is a policy analyst for the National Center For Public Policy Research. His email is mpatterson@nationalcenter.org.
If the goal of the President’s proposal was to drive doctors into hospital based practices or community health centers, or if it was to break the spirit of providers and bend them to the will of the government that holds the threat of criminal prosecution over their heads if they are found to be Medicare cheats, or if the goal was to dumb down the practice of medicine by ramping up the power of the HHS secretary and the evidence-based medicine posse, then the President’s proposal for health care reform was successful.
If the goal of the President’s proposal was to drive doctors into hospital based practices or community health centers, or if it was to break the spirit of providers and bend them to the will of the government that holds the threat of criminal prosecution over their heads if they are found to be Medicare cheats, or if the goal was to dumb down the practice of medicine by ramping up the power of the HHS secretary and the evidence-based medicine posse, then the President’s proposal for health care reform was successful.
However, we as physicians are individuals. There are approximately 890,000 doctors currently practicing in the US. Those of us who want the autonomy to practice medicine the way we were trained, those of us who run a private practice who are entrepreneurs at heart, those who are tired of being pitted against our patients and other physicians (the specialist vs. primary care physician meme), and those who are just sick and tired are NOT going to take this. Those of us who can will retire or leave medicine all together. Those within the system will simply opt out.
The President’s summit on Thursday amounts to nothing more than six hours of theater. Not one physician in Congress has been invited to attend. The physicians for single payer have also not been invited. It is his chance to hear from the people on the front line, and it is obvious this bill is NOT about the health of our people. It is about raising revenue, controlling the medical industrial complex completely. How else can you explain the proposal for the government to a) take over control of the cost of insurance premiums; b) limit provider medical decisions based on cost, and c) control what is medically covered for the patient. Under the proposed health care reformed, the government will control how much an insurance company can charge, decide what is covered medically, and sanction the provider for deviating from the norm.
These are some of the proposal highlights that concerned me the most:
Delay and Reform the High-Cost Plan Excise Tax.
Part of the reason for high and rising insurance costs is that insurers have little incentive to lower their premiums. The Senate bill includes a tax on high-cost health insurance plans. CBO has estimated that this policy will reduce premiums as well as contribute to long-run deficit reduction. The President’s Proposal changes the effective date of the Senate policy from 2013 to 2018 to provide additional transition time for high-cost plans to become more efficient. It also raises the amount of premiums that are exempt from the assessment from $8,500 for singles to $10,200 and from $23,000 for families to $27,500 and indexes these amounts for subsequent years at general inflation plus 1 percent. To the degree that health costs rise unexpectedly quickly between now and 2018, the initial threshold would be adjusted upwards automatically. To ensure that the tax affects firms equitably, the President’s Proposal reforms it by including an adjustment for firms whose health costs are higher due to the age or gender of their workers, and by no longer counting dental and vision benefits as potentially taxable benefits. The President’s Proposal maintains the Senate bill’s permanent adjustment in favor of high-risk occupations such as “first responders.”
Unintended consequence, this can have an adverse affect on people with chronic illnesses who often have expensive policies because the insurance companies deem that they are very expensive to underwrite. It is adding insult to injury to have to pay 40% more for an insurance policy that is a lifeline. Those who can’t afford the premiums will be forced to choose lower cost premiums on policies with less coverage and restricted services with resultant restriction of access to care.
Comprehensive Sanctions Database
The President’s Proposal establishes a comprehensive Medicare and Medicaid sanctions database, overseen by the HHS Inspector General. This database will provide a central storage location, allowing for law enforcement access to information related to past sanctions on health care providers, suppliers and related entities. (Source: H.R. 3400, “Empowering Patients First Act” (Republican Study Committee bill))
This has a chilling effect on doctors and other healthcare providers who run afoul of government. There is no mention of what steps exist for the appeals process before you are put on the hit list. Moreover, allowing ‘law enforcement to have access to information’ will have the intended effect of making providers obey the system without deviation because of the threat of criminal prosecution.
Modify Certain Medicare Medical Review Limitations
The Medicare Modernization Act of 2003 placed certain limitations on the type of review that could be conducted by Medicare Administrative Contractors prior to the payment of Medicare Part A and B claims. The President’s Proposal modifies these statutory provisions that currently limit random medical review and place statutory limitations on the application of Medicare prepayment review. Modifying certain medical review limitations will give Medicare contractors better and more efficient access to medical records and claims, which helps to reduce waste, fraud and abuse. (Source: President’s FY 2011 Budget)
Providers will be subject to more random reviews at the pleasure of the government. This has the potential to waste productivity and adds to the stress that providers already experience in dealing with Medicare. Providers are already subject to a 10,000 fine per occurrence for committing fraud (Fraud extends to overbilling AND under billing Medicare). Providers will be looking over their shoulder even more then they do now. With audits and criminal prosecution looming, it will only drive more providers out of Medicare further decreasing the Medicare patient’s access to care.
Broaden the Medicare Hospital Insurance (HI) Tax Base for High-Income Taxpayers
Under current law, people who earn a salary pay the Medicare HI tax on their earned income, but those who have substantial unearned income do not, raising issues of fairness. The House bill includes a 5.4% surcharge on high-income households to improve the fairness of the tax system and to support health reform. The Senate bill includes an increase in the HI tax for high-income households for similar reasons, an increase of 0.9% on earnings above a specific threshold for a total employee assessment of 2.35% on these amounts. The President’s Proposal adopts the Senate bill approach and adds a 2.9 percent assessment (equal to the combined employer and employee share of the existing HI tax) on income from interest, dividends, annuities, royalties and rents, other than such income which is derived in the ordinary course of a trade or business which is not a passive activity (e.g., income from active participation in S corporations) on taxpayers with respect to income above $200,000 for singles and $250,000 for married couples filing jointly. The additional revenues from the tax on earned income would be credited to the HI trust fund and the revenues from the tax on unearned income would be credited to the Supplemental Medical Insurance (SMI) trust fund.
Increases and extends taxes
Medicaid for Working Families
Beginning in April of this year, States will be allowed to expand Medicaid eligibility to more individuals. Starting on January 1, 2014, all low-income, non-elderly and non-disabled individuals will be eligible for Medicaid. This includes unemployed adults and working families – all people with income below $29,000 for a family of four (133% of poverty).
The Federal Government will support States by providing 100% of the cost of newly eligible people between 2014 and 2017, 95% of the costs between 2018 and 2019, and 90 percent matching for subsequent years.
All states will be treated equally and will not receive any special matching rates under this provision.
Great, except it does not address the problem of access to physicians who take Medicaid. The number of providers has been dropping every year and those that still take it are stretched beyond their capacity.
Investing in Primary Care
The Act invests in grant programs that support the training of primary care providers, including family medicine, pediatrics, general internal medicine, and physician assistantship. It also provides payment bonuses to primary care physicians.
In fact there is a shortage of doctors in general – both primary care and specialists. Good medical care dictates that a patient has access to both for comprehensive care. There are times that the primary care physician must refer a case to the specialist. If this system is implemented, it will be harder to find one who 1) will not have an available appointment for months, or 2) one who will be within the system. The reform effort has made specialists superfluous, and because of that a two level system will likely result. Those who have the means will leave the system to get specialty care, and/or individualized patient centered care (concierge, fee for service).
It is clear why there is an emphasis on training and expanding the workforce by adding additional, health care providers like the physician assistants and nurses. There will be an exodus of physicians from this system and they will have to have someone to replace them.
Senator Conrad, the Chairman of the Senate Budget Committee said yesterday that reconciliation can only be used if the House passes the Senate bill first. As Sen. Conrad declared, “I don’t know of any way, I don’t know of any way where you can have a reconciliation bill pass before the bill that it is meant to reconcile passes.” Neither do I.
Senator Conrad, the Chairman of the Senate Budget Committee said yesterday that reconciliation can only be used if the House passes the Senate bill first. As Sen. Conrad declared, “I don’t know of any way, I don’t know of any way where you can have a reconciliation bill pass before the bill that it is meant to reconcile passes.” Neither do I.
Then, the kicker: “When reminded that House Democrats don’t want to do health care in that order, Conrad said bluntly: ‘Fine, then it’s dead.‘”
Now, the Speaker finds herself in the position of having to pass a bill she says she does not have the votes to pass.
Without passing the Senate bill she can’t pass, the Speaker can’t do reconciliation. (See Sen. Conrad, above.)
OK. Now, this next part is really, really important.
The Speaker and the White House find themselves in this position because of Senator DeMint (R-SC). He insisted that Senator McConnell object to the appointment of the House-Senate Conferees, thus preventing a Conference on the bill.
The inability of the Dems to have a House-Senate Conference then forced the Speaker to have a House floor vote on the Senate bill, which she can’t pass. And there the process has been stuck. Has not moved an inch since Sen. DeMint’s objection. It can’t, she does not have the votes.
The Speaker could fix the Senate bill on the House floor by amendment, then pass the Senate bill amended and fixed, but then it would have to go back to the Senate, where it would have to get 60 yes votes, or die. Since it will not get 60 votes ever again in the Senate, it will die — if the Speaker tries the amend the Senate bill on the House floor and send it back to the Senate route.
When Senator DeMint (R-SC) denied the Speaker the ability to fix the bill in Conference, he put the Speaker and the White House in their current box. If there had been a House-Senate Conference, then the House could have fixed the bill without a floor vote and the bill could have changed, without having to send it back to the Senate to face 60 vote margins.
But now, they can’t have a conference, and the Speaker and the White House must pass the unpassable Senate bill, in order to even try reconciliation.
When the Democrats finally admit ObamaCare is dead, historians should note, this is the single act that killed it. And it was such an artistic assassination of the bill.
Even with a city full of people watching the process, and who all saw the House and Senate Conference be denied, all the chattering heads and analysts did not understand what it meant, until it was too late.
On Monday, President Barack Obama finally unveiled his proposed legislation to reform health insurance. More than a year in the making, the plan comes just days ahead of a bipartisan Blair House this Thursday. Yet the proposal shows a lack of good faith.
On Monday, President Barack Obama finally unveiled his proposed legislation to reform health insurance. More than a year in the making, the plan comes just days ahead of a bipartisan Blair House this Thursday. Yet the proposal shows a lack of good faith.
The President’s plan is drafted in a way that envisions the use of a highly partisan parliamentary tactic, reconciliation, to pass the bill. Reconciliation could allow liberals in Congress to ignore the concerns of Republicans, moderate Democrats and the American people during the legislative process. The President’s plan to use reconciliation to ram ObamaCare through Congress is not consistent with the idea of conducting a good-faith negotiation on comprehensive health care reform between reasonable minded Republicans and Democrats.
This abuse of the reconciliation process has been called the Health Care Nuclear Option by conservatives, because it’s a way to avoid the regular legislative process and prevent a filibuster in the Senate.
Reconciliation was created by the 1974 Budget Act to pass tax cuts, deficit reductions and debt-limit modifications. This is supposed to be a tool that Congress uses to balance the budget, yet the Obama administration wants to use this as a means of last resort when the regular rules have failed it. Reconciliation is a fast track procedure that wouldn’t allow members to fully debate this measure, and there is no expectation that this new reconciliation measure will be the subject of transparent hearings in the House and Senate.
This new proposal also shows disrespect for the request of Republicans invited to the negotiation. On February 8, John Boehner (R-OH) and Eric Cantor (R-VA) wrote a letter to White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel which asked, “assuming the President is sincere about moving forward on health care in a bipartisan way, does that mean he will agree to start over so that we can develop a bill that is truly worthy of the support and confidence of the American people?” The President has taken actions that show he will not agree to start over. The President’s new proposal is merely a warmed over version of ObamaCare that passed the Senate on Christmas Eve, therefore the first condition of the negotiation has been rejected by the President.
The President seems to have taken such an extreme position in this negotiation that he is banking on Republicans not agreeing to his terms, and then he can blame Republicans for the supposed “breakdown” of bipartisanship. The Washington Post quoted White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer saying, “this is an opening bid for the health meeting.” It will be very interesting to see what concessions, if any, the White House makes at the summit.
The new ObamaCare proposal contains 10 sections described on the White House web site. This new proposal is expected to put the cost of ObamaCare at well over $1 trillion over 10 years, even using estimates favorable to the Obama Administration. The highlights of the new proposal are a delay on the Senate’s excise tax on high-end insurance plans, as requested by Big Labor, until 2018. Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) has been lobbying to get the Cornhusker Kickback out of the bill and the administration has a provision to remove it. The President’s proposal appears to leave intact the Senate provisions that allow the federal funding of abortion through ObamaCare. There is a new federal bureaucracy created, the Health Insurance Rate Board, that would have the power to control private health care insurance rates. The White House claims this updated version of ObamaCare was drafted as a starting point for negotiations, and it’s calling on Republicans to roll out an alternative proposal.
Considering the American people’s strong opposition to ObamaCare, the fact that the President is still trying to pass a version of his bill defies logic and shows contempt for voters. The people of Massachusetts elected Scott Brown to the Senate after he campaigned on the promise to block the President’s health care bill. Numerous polls indicate that indicate that Americans dislike ObamaCare by wide margins. A recent Rasmussen poll indicates that 35 percent want Congress to pass ObamaCare versus 54 percent who want to wait for a new Congress. This administration shouldn’t come to the negotiating table with an extreme plan that has been soundly rejected by the American people.
President Barack Obama failed in his brazen effort to have the government takeover healthcare. The American people rejected every variant of ObamaCare run up the flagpole. A man of integrity and common sense would have accepted the will of the people and moved on. A Congress worthy of the American people it represents would have recognized it lost the Mandate of Heaven when the people rejected every bill Congress concocted, and Members of Congress would have submitted the fate of healthcare reform to the will of the people in the upcoming November elections.
President Barack Obama failed in his brazen effort to have the government takeover healthcare. The American people rejected every variant of ObamaCare run up the flagpole. A man of integrity and common sense would have accepted the will of the people and moved on. A Congress worthy of the American people it represents would have recognized it lost the Mandate of Heaven when the people rejected every bill Congress concocted, and Members of Congress would have submitted the fate of healthcare reform to the will of the people in the upcoming November elections.
But Nooo. The President and his acolytes in the Congress are doubling down on a bad hand. They are redoubling their efforts to jam a government takeover of healthcare down the throats of the American people.
The president has come out with a retread health plan that is sloppily conceived—the Congressional Budget Office says the “plan” lacks so many details it can’t even estimate how much the thing will cost—and stealthily designed to pull the wool over the American people’s eyes.
The Congress is contemplating ways to sidestep and circumvent the regular legislative order to railroad Obama’s latest plan for a government takeover of healthcare through the Congress despite overwhelming opposition among the people—using a tricky legislative maneuver called reconciliation that restricts debate, limits amendments and runs roughshod over the rights of minorities.
This government is out of control, and rather than negotiationg with the president and congressional Democrats, as Republicans propose to do in Obama’s TV extravaganza Thursday, Republicans should be objecting, obstructing and delaying with every means at their disposal. Now is not the time for TV posturing and backroom negotiating; now is the time for the American people to vote on the fate of healthcare. It’s called an election.
President Obama is sticking his thumb in the eye of the American people—disrespecting them—by proposing a slipshod, ill-conceived heath proposal that takes the healthcare debate from the ludicrous to the preposterous. The president is acting out as a willful child who doesn’t know when to shut up, take his medicine and listen to his elders. Like delinquent children, the president and Democrats in the Congress recognize no higher authority than their own egos. We used to call that sinful; today it’s considered SOP—standard operating politics.
The American people have rejected every variant of a government takeover of healthcare the President and his fellow congressional liberals have come up with. But like a Night-of-the-Living-Dead zombie, ObamaCare just keeps on bearing down on Americans, especially senior citizens, intent on devouring them in the name of the greater good.
A recent Wall Street Journal analysis of the President’s warmed-over healthcare takeover proposal exposes the deceit and deception at its core:
“This new ObamaCare bargain would for the first time apply the 2.9% Medicare payroll tax to "interest, dividends, annuities, royalties and rents," so-called passive income that we are told includes capital gains, though the latter wasn't explicitly mentioned in the proposal.”
Obama's new taxes will destroy any semblance of an economic recovery, and the damage these new taxes will do to Medicare and the rationing his healthcare takeover they pay for will usher in will put old people out in the cold and into an early grave.
This year, Social Security begins to pay out more than it takes in; the Raid on Social Security is complete; Social Security is in deficit; Congress has drained it dry.
NOW, the president wants to start a Raid on Medicare.
Medicare already is insolvent. It has an $89 trillion (with a “t”) unfunded liability, which is five times bigger than Social Security’s unfunded liability ($17.5 trillion). Obama wants to run a version of the same scam on Medicare that Congress and past presidents ran on Social Security, namely jack up the earmarked taxes, raid the revenues, leave behind paper IOUs in the Trust Fund and use Bernie Madoff accounting to make it appear this round-trip embezzlement actually strengthened the program’s finances.
President Obama wants to levy a stealth tax on work, saving and investment under the guise of "strengthening" Medicare. All the new revenue from Obama’s new taxes will show up on the books as new Medicare revenue, which will immediately be "borrowed" by the Treasury to help pay for the new healthcare takeover. Then, just as it did for 25 years with Social Security, the federal Treasury will paper over this embezzlement—there is no other word for it—with IOUs it writes to itself; pretending those IOUs represent Medicare assets that strengthen the program’s bottom line.
If the American people swallow this Kool-Aid, it will prove Abraham Lincoln wrong once and for all: politicians really can fool all the people all the time—or at least enough of them enough of the time to work their dastardly deeds without fear of reprisal.
The latest Obama proposal to takeover healthcare is his version of the Raid on Social Security, and it must be stopped before it gets off the ground. The simple fact is, President Obama intends to raid Medicare, not fix it. He plans to use Medicare as a cash cow to fund his grandiose government takeover of healthcare at the expense of old people. This attack on Medicare and America’s senior citizens is outrageous; it borders on the criminal; it certainly is immoral.
Seniors of the nation, rise up; throw off Obama's chains—chains we can live without—you have nothing to lose but your chains.
My instant reaction when I heard about the meeting was that it is a stunt, that the White House felt that they had "won" the battle with the GOP at the House Republican retreat, and so why not do a sequel? The public loves sequels! Transformers 2, The Dark Knight, Superman IV: The Quest for Peace, Led Zeppelin II, and so on. Plus, it's not as if an obvious legislative strategy for passing health care has presented itself. As Hollywood has clearly demonstrated, the sequel is the best way to grab attention when you're genuinely out of good ideas!
The bipartisan health care summit is either:
(a) An honest endeavor to build a bipartisan coalition in support of health care reform.
(b) A political stunt intended to win the White House a news cycle or two.
My instant reaction when I heard about the meeting was that it is a stunt, that the White House felt that they had "won" the battle with the GOP at the House Republican retreat, and so why not do a sequel? The public loves sequels! Transformers 2, The Dark Knight, Superman IV: The Quest for Peace, Led Zeppelin II, and so on. Plus, it's not as if an obvious legislative strategy for passing health care has presented itself. As Hollywood has clearly demonstrated, the sequel is the best way to grab attention when you're genuinely out of good ideas!
There are three notable facts about this meeting at Blair House that indicate that it's a stunt:
(1) It's televised. The White House was dinged by the press corps for breaking the campaign promise of televising every meeting on C-SPAN, but the reason the White House broke that promise was because it was a stupid one that had to be broken. C'mon - you can't get stuff done when the cameras are rolling! The cameras completely alter the incentive structures for the attendees. Thanks to the cameras, the participants won't be worried about finding common ground on a bill, or debating the merits of this idea or that idea. Instead, they'll be thinking about their constituents back home, or undecided voters across the country who may swing in November, or whomever. They transform from legislators hammering out a deal to politicians preening for the "benefit" of the voters. Televising these proceedings means that we'll get little more than recitation of talking points, which is what we see every Sunday on the news shows. "Meet the Republicans. With your host, Barack Obama."
(2) The invitation was extended to the party leaders. Just as strong an indication that this is a stunt. If I were a Democrat looking to build a bipartisan coalition, there are about 15 or so Senate Republicans I'd look to before Mitch McConnell. In fact, the whole idea of bipartisanship - at least on a controversial issue like health care reform - is one where the President should not be looking to win over a majority of the opposition. I do not think there is any comprehensive health care reform bill that President Obama could sign and Mitch McConnell could vote for. So why is he coming the meeting? A truly bipartisan legislative strategy would be one where you separate the moderates like Olympia Snowe from the party leadership. So, it's a less-than-great idea to invite the leadership to the bipartisanship meeting! Unless, of course, your goal is to make yourself look good and the congressional GOP leadership look bad. In that case, you'd want McConnell there.
(3) It's in February, 2010. This is just nine months from a midterm election where the GOP is expected to do well. Why in the world would the Republican leadership want to risk that by helping the President bail out his massively unpopular health care reform initiative? The time for bipartisanship was last year, and (as I noted in a previous article) the legislative scope where bipartisanship is possible is much smaller than comprehensive reform of 1/6th of the United States economy. No matter how nice Blair House is, it won't be enough to get Eric Cantor and Barack Obama to agree on such a sweeping legislative program.
This is a PR stunt from a West Wing staff whose major experience prior to entering the White House was the electoral campaign, which is really just an accumulation of PR stunts. They're going with what they know. The White House believes that the President bested the congressional Republicans at the retreat, and they want to try the same thing again.
I think the White House did best the GOP at the retreat, that Obama did get some nice press, and that the Republicans were made to look weaker. So, from a certain perspective, I understand the logic here. But, from another perspective, it is mind-numbingly ridiculous. What is the ultimate purpose of this? Memo to the West Wing: your guy is the President now. It doesn't matter whether he can out-debate the congressional GOP. He gets the credit or the blame for policy output. That is all that matters. This Blair House meeting is just noise that Politico, The Hill and Roll Call will write about for a few days - and that's all it is. This President will be judged on whether the government under his tenure has solved problems, not whether he can out-talk the congressional GOP in some silly debate. In a word, it's not about campaigning - it's about governing.
You'd think that they would have figured that out by now!
To: Editor, Wall Street Journal From: Dr. David McKalip
President Clinton goes to his cardiologist at 11:30 a.m. Thursday with several days of chest pressure. He is admitted to the hospital and has two stents placed. He leaves the hospital for home at 6 am the next day ready to return to his busy lifestyle free of chest pain.
To: Editor, Wall Street Journal From: Dr. David McKalip
President Clinton goes to his cardiologist at 11:30 a.m. Thursday with several days of chest pressure. He is admitted to the hospital and has two stents placed. He leaves the hospital for home at 6 am the next day ready to return to his busy lifestyle free of chest pain. The bureaucrats quoted in the Journal’s “simple health care fix” the same day assert he should have had a 12 week waiting period, an unnecessary stress test and money wasted on medication that would likely not have worked. In the 2/9 Journal piece “Insurer Plays Judge on Cancer Care” insurance companies express their desire to withhold payment from doctors who don’t follow guidelines like these set by technocrats operating under political pressure to cut spending in any way. There are better ways to control costs – put money into the hands of patients for routine annual medical care through health savings accounts and coupled by low-cost, minimally regulated catastrophic insurance for rare and expensive medical problems. The debate on health system reform is really one about who makes medical spending decisions – bureaucrats or patients informed by their doctors. Every citizen should have an insurance and medical market that allows them to be in charge and get rapid, high value, lower cost care that restores function. The Comparative Effectiveness and Pay for Performance models will allow that privilege only for former presidents.
The soaring, middle-class rage against government catastrophes, terrorism, and corruptions of all forms is in part due to the immense catastrophes they have seen government and Big Corporations working with government produce in front of their startled eyes over and over again. The Great Financial Crisis is certainly a colossal catastrophe they have seen crashing all around them...
The soaring, middle-class rage against government catastrophes, terrorism, and corruptions of all forms is in part due to the immense catastrophes they have seen government and Big Corporations working with government produce in front of their startled eyes over and over again. The Great Financial Crisis is certainly a colossal catastrophe they have seen crashing all around them, Government officials deny everything and try to blame it all on the local real estate guy or gal who worked with you to get a mortgage for your home, But even the terminally ignorant and dumb see that government did not prevent it and intelligent people are perfectly aware the government not only was the prime mover of it all by getting interest rates below zero in real terms and the government is now giving vast piles of their money to the Big Bank Perps, rewarding the corporate perps for the catastrophe they helped to create.
But they are also seeing the government catastrophes erupting ever more frequently everywhere, from Iraq and Afghanistan and Pakistan to Katrina in New Orleans and even to police terrorism in our homes and FDA catastrophes across the board endangering all of us. You can see this in many ways. One of the simplest and quickest is to read America's biggest magazine aimed at the middle class, general readers – Reader's Digest. It's one of the many middle class pulse-checkers and movers I check out all the time to get clear signs that we are passing the tipping points of public opinion on major issue. Other pulse checkers and movers I check all the time are AARP Magazine, newspapers and TV-news from Fox to PBS, Time and Newsweek, and magazines like Harvard and Princeton and the New Yorker and Atlantic and popular movie and TV reviews – which I normally do not have time for myself. I find the Digest about the best indicator of mass, middle class, general opinion tipping points. (AARP is a bit bigger and better for older people.)
The April 2008 issue of The Digest has a good article on "Can We Trust The FDA?" The answer is a 100 Decibel NO! The article even points out that many drug problems do not show signs of injury until they've been used for years – hormone replacement used by millions of women for decades is an extreme example, but they note there are many millions of people routinely endangered by Big Pharma drugs not tested for long runs and not followed once approved.
The March, 2010, issue of The Digest has a good summary article about police terrorism entitled "Terror In The House" in a standard section called OUTRAGEOUS, very appropriately. The article has not only the incredible REAL AMERICAN HORROR STORIES but also notes that the SWAT Team Terrors are soaring because the police use these heavily armed, trigger-happy cops for all kinds of nonviolent suspects these days. They quote Norm Stamper, a decent cop who moved from San Diego to Seattle to become chief there, saying that these cops forget this is a democracy with a Constitution – no excuses boys and girls!
There are lots of these now in these mass circulation, middle class Media. Only hermits can fail to get the messages and there is lots of evidence that people are convinced, from call-ins, changes in behavior on food and drugs, to political movements. We have just been through a massive campaign by Big Government, Big Pharma, Big Medicine, Big Media and all their allies to pass a huge central plan for healthcare in America. The middle classes watched and listened and in the end decided they don't trust them and revolted against it. No one can know what the details are or what they mean in this vast pile of rules and regulations which are not even finalized. But the people know whatever is there the planners cannot be trusted. This has already spawned a huge new Tea Party movement and radically changed Party politics at the top, The AARP tried to straddle the issue but went along with the Party on it. I think The Digest is a better indicator of middle class opinion even on health care.
Outrage against the government at the top is breaking out all over.
What happens when the military is used in a police capacity? You get a "war on terrorism," one in which people think that the laws of war now apply to the situation. But in actuality, nothing could be further from the truth. What you actually get is a criminal-justice problem that inevitably goes horribly awry, causing the problem to escalate into a deadly and destructive horror story.
What happens when the military is used in a police capacity? You get a "war on terrorism," one in which people think that the laws of war now apply to the situation. But in actuality, nothing could be further from the truth. What you actually get is a criminal-justice problem that inevitably goes horribly awry, causing the problem to escalate into a deadly and destructive horror story.
Consider the war on drugs. Most everyone concedes that drug dealing and drug possession are federal criminal offenses. Drug offenses are listed as crimes in the U.S. Code. People who are caught violating them are arrested, indicted by a federal grand jury, and prosecuted in U.S. District Court. The Bill of Rights requires the government to accord drug defendants all the rights and guarantees of the Bill of Rights, including trial by jury and due process of law. Incompetent, irrelevant, and illegally acquired evidence is excluded from the trial. The defendant is presumed innocent and must be found not guilty unless the government provides sufficient evidence to convince the jury that the defendant is guilty. Cruel and unusual punishments are prohibited. The defendant has the right to remain completely silent, before, during, and after the proceeding.
Now, consider the following scenario. In a concerted effort, a couple thousand members of powerful Latin American drug cartels cross the Mexican border into the United States. Employing automatic weapons, bombs, and grenades, they begin killing DEA agents, federal judges, and local cops and blowing up federal buildings in retaliation for U.S. military actions against drug cartels in Colombia and DEA actions in Mexico. The drug gangsters slip back into the populace, only to engage in more assaults in the following weeks.
The local cops take on the drug gangs, but they are clearly outgunned. The state governors ask the president to send the U.S. military to help them out. The president persuades Congress to suspend the posse comitatus law, and he reassigns U.S. military forces fighting the drug war in Colombia to the U.S. southern border.
Question: Does the military's participation in the drug war automatically change the drug war into a real war, like World Wars I and II and the Vietnam War?
Answer: No. The matter continues to remain one of criminal-justice. The gangsters are violating laws against murder, mayhem, drug dealing, illegal entry, and no doubt dozens of other criminal laws on the books. But the fact that the military is being employed to assist the police doesn't mean that the matter is now governed by the laws of war. The gangsters do not become enemy combatants. They remain criminal suspects.
The military is simply being used in a police capacity, albeit one employing much more force than the cops employ. But in principle the situation remains the same: when the military is used in a police capacity, it is still subject to all the rules and processes that govern the police. When the military takes one of the drug suspects into custody, the suspect is entitled to all the rights and guarantees that drug suspects are entitled to when the police take them into custody.
Why don't we use the military to enforce the drug war and other federal crimes here in the United States? Why is there a policy against it? After all, the U.S. military is used to wage the drug war in Colombia, and the Mexican government employs its military to fight the drug war in Mexico. Why don't we do the same thing here?
The reason is that the mindset of a law-enforcement officer is completely different from that of a soldier.
The mindset of policeman is: apprehend the suspect and bring him to justice, which means a trial to determine whether he's guilty, and, in the process, do your best to ensure that innocent bystanders are not hurt.
The mindset of soldier is: kill the enemy and win the war. The killing of innocent bystanders is acceptable as collateral damage, especially if the action results in the killing of the enemy and protection of U.S. troops.
That brings us to the subject of terrorism. Like drug dealing, terrorism is a federal criminal offense. No one can deny that. It has long been listed in the U.S. Code as a crime. That's why terrorists are indicted in U.S. District Court and accorded all the rights and guarantees in the Bill of Rights, just like drug defendants. It's why such famous terrorists as Ramzi Yousef, Zacharias Moussaoui, Jose Padilla, and Timothy McVeigh, to name only a few, were indicted, tried, and convicted in federal court.
In fact, the Yousef case provides a good example for analysis. He's the man who committed the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in 1993, an attack which, in principle, was no different from the subsequent attack on the same building 8 years later, on September 11.
After attacking the WTC, Yousef, a foreign citizen, escaped from the United States. In 1995, Pakistani law enforcement agents learned that he was holed up in Pakistan, arrested him, and extradited him to the United States, where he stood trial for terrorism in U.S. District Court and convicted. He is now serving a life sentence without possibility of parole in a federal penitentiary.
Was Yousef's attack on the WTC an act of war? No. It was a federal criminal offense. When he was taken into custody, he wasn't taken to a prisoner of war camp. He was instead turned over to U.S. law-enforcement agents.
Let's suppose that Yousef had been located in an area of Pakistan in which he was protected by 3,000 compatriots who had conspired with him to commit the terrorist attack. Would the large size of co-conspirators convert the attack into an act of war? Again, the answer is no. It doesn't make any difference whether a criminal act has 2 co-conspirators or a thousand. It still remains a criminal act, albeit one involving a larger conspiracy.
Suppose that Yousef and his gang were armed with automatic weapons and that the Pakistani police and military were unable to take him into custody. Let's say that the Pakistani government invites the U.S. government to send in its military forces to take Yousef into custody. The U.S. military enters the country, attacks Yousef and his cohorts, and takes him into custody.
Has the matter now been converted into a war, like World Wars I and II and the Vietnam War, simply because the U.S. military is involved and doing the apprehending?
Again, the answer is no. The issue of war does not turn on whether a nation's military branch is used to subdue and apprehend a suspected criminal. Once the military took Yousef into custody, it would be required to do what the police did -- turn him over to the authorities for trial. By subduing and apprehending Yousef, the military has simply functioned in a police capacity, albeit one with overwhelming force.
Consider Al Capone and his gang during Prohibition. They used machine guns against local cops and federal agent Elliot Ness and his "untouchables." Did that constitute war? Of course not. But what if it had been necessary to bring the military into the situation to overcome Capone's massive firepower? Again, the military would simply have been operating in a police capacity and, thus, subject to the rules that govern the police.
The problem though, as I mentioned earlier, is that the military, because it has a different mindset than the police, will inevitably treat the matter differently than the police. For example, the police will stake out a building for days where they suspect that a criminal suspect is holed up. That's not what the military would do. If they are reasonably certain that the suspect is in the building, they would simply drop a bomb on it. And if it turned out that the suspect was killed in the blast, the military would consider the operation to be a success, even if a several innocent bystanders were killed in the process.
All this brings us to Osama bin Laden and the military invasion of Afghanistan.
The attack on the World Trade Center on 9/11 was, in principle, no different from the attack on that same building in 1993. Again, terrorism is a federal criminal offense. As the suspected planner of the 9/11 attacks, bin Laden was in no different position from people who conspired with Ramzi Yousef to commit the 1993 attacks.
After the 9/11 attacks, President Bush demanded that the Afghan government turn over bin Laden to U.S. officials, just as Pakistan had turned over Ramzi Yousef to U.S. officials. If the Afghan government had complied with Bush's request, then U.S. law dictated that bin Laden be treated the same way as Yousef and, for that matter, 9/11 conspirator Moussaoui, were treated -- that is, indicted in U.S. District Court and prosecuted for conspiring to commit a terrorist attack on the World Trade Center.
However, the Afghan government refused to unconditionally comply with Bush's demand. For one thing, there was no extradition agreement between the United States and Afghanistan. Nonetheless, the Afghan government expressed a willingness to deliver bin Laden to an independent third party for trial if the U.S. government provided evidence establishing bin Laden's complicity in the attacks, the type of evidence that would have been required in an extradition hearing.
Bush refused those conditions and emphasized that his demand for bin Laden was unconditional. The Afghan government refused. At that point, the United States attacked Afghanistan. Thus, that involved the U.S. military in two separate actions: a war against the Afghan government for refusing to comply with Bush's extradition demand and a police action to apprehend Osama bin Laden.
The action against the Afghan government constituted war, like World Wars I and II. It was a conflict between two nation states. Clearly it was an illegal war, given that it was waged without the congressional declaration of war required by the Constitution but it was a genuine war nonetheless.
Not so, however, with respect to the military action intended to apprehend bin Laden. Like our examples regarding Ramzi Yousef, Al Capone, and the Latin American drug gangs, that action remained a police action, one in which the military was being used in a foreign country to employ its overwhelming force to bring a suspected criminal to justice.
The problem arose when the U.S. government made no attempt to distinguish between legitimate prisoners of war and suspected terrorist criminals. Instead, it intentionally conflated the two and then defaulted into making all them -- Afghan soldiers and al-Qaeda members alike as "illegal enemy combatants."
At the same time, of course, was the massive war-on-terrorism propaganda that the Bush administration issued after the 9/11 attacks. In the fear-laden environment of post 9/11, federal officials embarked on a big hype campaign in which they convinced people that this particular criminal offense was either a criminal offense (which is precisely why they indicted and prosecuted 9/11 co-conspirator Moussasoui in federal court) or an act of war, at the option of U.S. officials. At the same time, by conflating the prisoners of war taken captive in the war against Afghanistan with suspected members of al-Qaeda taken captive, U.S. officials succeeded in confusing the separate issues of war and criminal justice in people's minds.
Thus, we have the horribly muddled situation today, one in which some people are saying that some suspected terrorists should be treated as criminal defendants, while others are saying they should be treated as illegal warriors, while others are saying that the government should continue to have the option of treating them either way. Perhaps the most bizarre suggestion came from those who said that the Detroit bomb suspect should have been turned over to the military for torture and then returned to the Justice Department for criminal prosecution in federal court.
We now also have a warped dual-track judicial system with respect to suspected terrorists. One track involves criminal prosecution in the federal judicial system established by the Constitution, where people are presumed innocent and the Bill of Rights applies. The other track involves criminal prosecution in an alternative, competing military tribunal system established by the Pentagon, one in which people are presumed guilty of terrorism, subjected to torture and abuse, and tried in kangaroo proceedings where the Bill of Rights does not apply. The government has the arbitrary, ad hoc power to decide which track people are going to be subjected to.
I would be remiss if I didn't mention the horrific consequences of the Bush administration's decision to employ the military to apprehend bin Laden, unlike the case with Ramzi Yousef several years before.
In Yousef's case, no bombs were dropped on Pakistan. U.S. officials waited patiently for two years before he finally turned up and was taken captive, with no loss of life to innocent bystanders.
Contrast that with the horrific mess in Afghanistan. In the midst of all the anger and hatred that people all over the world now have for the United States, it's easy to forget the outpouring of sympathy and friendship that came from all over the world after 9/11, including from the Muslim community. If U.S. officials had simply waited out the situation, as they had with Yousef, bin Laden would have been isolated. That is, he could never have travelled freely and there were countless people all over the world sympathetic to the United States who would have been willing to turn him, especially for a sizable reward. His recruiting efforts would have been limited to people who were angry with U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East (e.g., unconditional support of Israel, the sanctions against Iraq, etc.)
Instead, the Bush administration sent in the military -- the people with the mindset of "kill the enemy even if it kills innocent bystanders," which produced massive death and destruction in Afghanistan, which in turn converted all that sympathy and friendship for the United States into widespread anger, hatred, and rage, which in turn greatly fueled bin Laden's recruiting efforts. And, oh, by the way, even after 8 long years of death and destruction in Afghanistan, they still haven't apprehended bin Laden.
Finally, I should also point out that the terrorism-is-war crowd has never answered a critically important question: How is the war on terrorism expected to end? That is, how do we know when all the terrorists in the world have been killed? Or, better yet, how do the terrorists surrender? Does the president of the TAW (the Terrorist Association of the World) sit down on a U.S. ship and sign the surrender papers, just like Japanese military officials did at the conclusion of World War II? Yes, that is ridiculous, but it goes to show what the terrorism-is-war paradigm has led us to -- perpetual military conflict, along with perpetual death and destruction, along with ever-increasing military expenditures, along with ever-growing infringements on civil liberties.
It's time to bring the military home and end its role as domestic and international cop.
Republicans already counting the seats they will pick up this fall should keep in mind Obama has a big card yet to play.
Republicans already counting the seats they will pick up this fall should keep in mind Obama has a big card yet to play.
Should the president declare he has gone the last mile for a negotiated end to Iran's nuclear program and impose the "crippling" sanctions he promised in 2008, America would be on an escalator to confrontation that could lead straight to war.
And should war come, that would be the end of GOP dreams of adding three-dozen seats in the House and half a dozen in the Senate.
Harry Reid is surely aware a U.S. clash with Iran, with him at the president's side, could assure his re-election. Last week, Reid whistled through the Senate, by voice vote, a bill to put us on that escalator.
Senate bill 2799 would punish any company exporting gasoline to Iran. Though swimming in oil, Iran has a limited refining capacity and must import 40 percent of the gas to operate its cars and trucks and heat its homes.
And cutting off a country's oil or gas is a proven path to war.
In 1941, the United States froze Japan's assets, denying her the funds to pay for the U.S. oil on which she relied, forcing Tokyo either to retreat from her empire or seize the only oil in reach, in the Dutch East Indies.
The only force able to interfere with a Japanese drive into the East Indies? The U.S. Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor.
Egypt's Gamel Abdel Nasser in 1967 threatened to close the Straits of Tiran between the Red Sea and Gulf of Aqaba to ships going to the Israeli port of Elath. That would have cut off 95 percent of Israel's oil.
Israel response: a pre-emptive war that destroyed Egypt's air force and put Israeli troops at Sharm el-Sheikh on the Straits of Tiran.
Were Reid and colleagues seeking to strengthen Obama's negotiating hand?
The opposite is true. The Senate is trying to force Obama's hand, box him in, restrict his freedom of action, by making him impose sanctions that would cut off the negotiating track and put us on a track to war -- a war to deny Iran weapons that the U.S. Intelligence community said in December 2007 Iran gave up trying to acquire in 2003.
Sound familiar?
Republican leader Mitch McConnell has made clear the Senate is seizing control of the Iran portfolio. "If the Obama administration will not take action against this regime, then Congress must."
U.S. interests would seem to dictate supporting those elements in Iran who wish to be rid of the regime and re-engage the West. But if that is our goal, the Senate bill, and a House version that passed 412 to 12, seem almost diabolically perverse.
For a cutoff in gas would hammer Iran's middle class. The Revolutionary Guard and Basij militia on their motorbikes would get all they need. Thus the leaders of the Green Movement who have stood up to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the Ayatollah oppose sanctions that inflict suffering on their own people.
Cutting off gas to Iran would cause many deaths. And the families of the sick, the old, the weak, the women and the children who die are unlikely to feel gratitude toward those who killed them.
And despite the hysteria about Iran's imminent testing of a bomb, the U.S. intelligence community still has not changed its finding that Tehran is not seeking a bomb.
The low-enriched uranium at Natanz, enough for one test, has neither been moved nor enriched to weapons grade. Ahmadinejad this week offered to take the West's deal and trade it for fuel for its reactor. Iran's known nuclear facilities are under U.N. watch. The number of centrifuges operating at Natanz has fallen below 4,000. There is speculation they are breaking down or have been sabotaged.
And if Iran is hell-bent on a bomb, why has Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair not revised the 2007 finding and given us the hard evidence?
U.S. anti-missile ships are moving into the Gulf. Anti-missile batteries are being deployed on the Arab shore. Yet, Gen. David Petraeus warned yesterday that a strike on Iran could stir nationalist sentiment behind the regime.
Nevertheless, the war drums have again begun to beat.
Daniel Pipes in a National Review Online piece featured by the Jerusalem Post -- "How to Save the Obama Presidency: Bomb Iran" -- urges Obama to make a "dramatic gesture to change the public perception of him as a lightweight, bumbling ideologue" by ordering the U.S. military to attack Iran's nuclear facilities.
Citing six polls, Pipes says Americans support an attack today and will "presumably rally around the flag" when the bombs fall.
Will Obama cynically yield to temptation, play the war card and make "conservatives swoon," in Pipes' phrase, to save himself and his party? We shall see.
This afternoon, on my radio show, I had a modest proposal for my Republican friends on Capitol Hill, which I've fleshed out a little more here:
The President is reaching out to Republicans...
This afternoon, on my radio show, I had a modest proposal for my Republican friends on Capitol Hill, which I've fleshed out a little more here:
The President is reaching out to Republicans; he says he wants to hear their best ideas on health care, and he wants them to help him get his health care agenda back on track. But boy, the American people sure aren't clamoring for that. I've got a message for them. Mr. President, the latest poll numbers show that 47 percent of the people say start over on health care. Another 23 percent say do nothing. In other words, a full 70 percent of Americans say do nothing or start over. So with that in mind, "do nothing or start over" is the beginning of your negotiating situation, not your position. Mr. President, it's over. And the Republicans better realize that, too. If they go into a high profile, televised meeting in one of the President's houses, Blair House, in this case, to talk about how they are going to work to achieve the details of his agenda, they are crazy.
Republicans, just take a deep breath, here. Consider this: basically, what President Obama is asking you, is this: "Save me. Come up with a plan. Come up with a plan to reach my goals."
Republicans should be saying: "Mr. President, how are you going to come up with a plan to fulfill your promise of no individual mandates? How are you going to fulfill your promise to have enough doctors to attend to people when you are sticking it to them left and right and they are getting out of the profession because of the rates you are forcing them to take?"
Also, let's be realistic. If the President and Republicans are really going to talk about the details of health care, as though two parties are negotiating, coming to the middle, a half-day wouldn't be enough time to determine the size of the conference table and who's going to sit around and what the procedures are going to be. This proposal is nothing more than a press conference. The president liked the press he got from the last time he surrounded himself with Republicans, calling them liars and accusing them of being disingenuous, though some of the Republicans weren't smart enough to know what he was saying to them. It worked out great for Obama, not so great for Republicans.
So if I were a Republican in Congress, I'd counter with this: Okay Mr. President, if we are going to do this at all, we have a proposal for you. We are a co-equal branch of government. Congress is in the first article of the Constitution. The Executive branch doesn't make it until the second. So our suggestion is that you come over and visit us. We'll decide who stands at the podium, and when and how you share the time. We'll decide the agenda and who the cameras are on, and how we divide the time, and so on. We'll do one under your set of suggestions and then we'll do one under ours.
Fred Thompson is the former U.S. senator from Tennessee.
(NaturalNews) It's being called the largest research fraud in medical history. Dr. Scott Reuben, a former member of Pfizer's speakers' bureau, has agreed to plead guilty to faking dozens of research studies that were published in medical journals.
Read Full Story
Recession is nutrient for bureaucrats, elixir for government growth
These salary figures do not include the value of health, pension and other benefits, which averaged $40,785 per federal employee in 2008 vs. $9,882 per private worker, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis.
Without record levels of welfare, unemployment and other government benefits as well as tax cuts last year, the income of U.S. households would have plunged by an astonishing $723 billion — more than four times the record $167 billion drop reported last month by the Commerce Department.
The Obama administration is planning to use the government’s enormous buying power to prod private companies to improve wages and benefits for millions of workers, according to White House officials and several interest groups briefed on the plan.
Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) today asked the Obama administration to investigate what he called “the greatest scientific scandal of our generation” — the actions of climate scientists revealed by the Climategate files, and the subsequent admissions by the editors of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report (AR4).
A suicidal pilot's attack on an Internal Revenue Service building in Austin, Texas, last week was the worst but hardly the lone example of threats against the tax agency, according to the U.S. government.
The number of threats against the tax-collection agency has increased significantly in recent years, Treasury Department officials said.
