I don't usually wring my hands about partisanship, but this, per Luke Russert, is pretty extreme:
WASHINGTON -- In a city where the phrase “bipartisan initiative” is becoming an oxymoron, the urgency of containing the damage the Supreme Court could do to our electoral system creates an opportunity for a rare convergence of interest and principle.
At issue is the court’s astonishingly naive decision in January that allows unlimited corporate spending to influence elections. Its 5-4 ruling in the Citizens United case was a shocking instance of judicial overreach and reflected an utter indifference to how politics actually works.
News on health care reform will increasingly be about individual members, as President Obama and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi try to accumulate the 216--er, now 217--votes House Democrats need to pass the Senate bill. The widely held assumption among insiders is that the Democrats can count upon about 200 "yes" votes right now, or maybe a few more. There are, meanwhile, somewhere between 30 and 40 House Democratic votes up for grabs.
Sunday's New York Times had a terrific investigative story about the Congressional Black Caucus's use of creative fundraising tactics to soak up corporate cash:
Our political debates, our public discourse—on current economic and domestic issues—too often bear little or no relation to the actual problems the United States faces.
What is at stake in our economic decisions today is not some grand warfare of rival ideologies which will sweep the country with passion, but the practical management of a modern economy. What we need is not labels and clichés but more basic discussion of the sophisticated and technical questions involved in keeping a great economic machinery moving ahead.
The national interest lies in high employment and steady expansion of output, in stable prices and a strong dollar. The declaration of such an objective is easy; their attainment in an intricate and interdependent economy and world is a little more difficult. To attain them, we require not some automatic response but hard thought.
--John F. Kennedy, Commencement Address at Yale University, June 11, 1962
We deliberate, not about ends, but about means.
--Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics III. iii
Harvey Mansfield, the well-known conservative professor of political philosophy (and—full disclosure—a longtime friend) has penned a serious and civil critique of what he takes to be the animating impulse of the Obama administration. The nub of his argument is that Obama is a “progressive” whose purported non- (or post-) partisanship is designed to put certain issues “beyond political dispute” so that arguments are about means, not ends. And once the argument is about means, the door is opened wide to “rational administration” and the rule of experts.
Take health care. Mansfield interprets Obama’s statement that "I am not the first president to take up this cause, but I am determined to be the last" as an effort to take the issue out of politics once and for all—to decide, by side-stepping, the fundamental issue of principle. In his view, that issue is: “Should the government take over health care or should it be left to the private sphere?” The question precedes, and trumps, the myriad technical issues that transform the reform impulse into impenetrable, trust-destroying 2,000-page bills. By pursuing reform without dwelling on that question, he writes, Obama's worldview “wants to put an end to politics. It considers its measures to be progressive, and progress to be irreversible.” The problem with progress, so understood, is that it is at war with political liberty, rightly understood. One cannot seek to place matters of principle beyond politics without wanting “an imposed political solution.” Some human beings—and by implication, political parties—love progress more than they love liberty; others reverse the hierarchy. Mansfield stands with the party of liberty, the republican principle, against the party of progress, the party of rational administration, which is “more suited to monarchy than to republics.”
Sunday, February 7, 3:28 p.m. Among the convention’s several last-minute saves—opening the conference to media, replacing one speaker who fell ill and another who dropped last minute—was bringing on Andrew Breitbart.
These days, liberals don’t know whether to feel betrayed by or merely disappointed with Barack Obama. They have gone from decrying his willingness to remove the public option from his health care plan to worrying that, in the wake of Democrat Martha Coakley’s defeat in Massachusetts, he won’t get any plan through Congress. On other subjects, too, from Afghanistan to Wall Street, Obama has thoroughly let down his party’s left flank.
In early December, the White House announced four finalists for the president’s Securing Americans Value and Efficiency (SAVE) Award--a competition that plumbed the depths of the federal bureaucracy for ideas on how the government could save money. One finalist proposed streamlining the way the Forest Service forwards campground fees to the government. Another suggested that the Social Security Administration allow people to book appointments online rather than only by phone.
Last weekend began with Michael Steele, chairman of the Republican National Committee, clinging to his job primarily via implicit racial blackmail. Steele’s tenure has consisted of a string of gaffes and managerial blunders, but Republicans had concluded that his color made him un-fireable. “You’re not going to dump the first African American chairman,” an influential party strategist told Politico, “That’s the only reason.”
Politico has the House GOP plan:
Andy Stern, president of the Service Employees International Union, just put out a statement on health care reform. There are few players in the health care debate whose judgment I respect more than his. And he is not happy with what's transpired in the last week.
I wonder if the White House understands the very serious problem emerging on its left. Keep in mind that insiders won't be able to dismiss Stern the way they do Howard Dean. Stern is seasoned. He is shrewd. And he has serious clout.
I'll have more to say soon. Meantime, here is the letter:
One of the biggest unpleasant climate shocks in recent years has been the discovery that the Himalayas are heating up much faster than the global average—a trend that most climate models had failed to predict, and something that's difficult to explain by pointing to greenhouse gases alone. And it's a critical issue, seeing as how Himalaya's glaciers provide water for more than 500 million people in countries like India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, and they're expected to shrivel away by 2035 or so.
Of all the different industry groups scrambling to shape climate policy in Washington--from electric utilities to Detroit automakers--one stands out as a bit unexpected: Wall Street. Financial giants like Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan have enlisted, all told, more than 100 lobbyists to roam the Capitol and influence the debate over how to curb greenhouse gases. There’s a reason for that: Any cap-and-trade bill that puts a limit on emissions and allows polluters to buy and sell permits will create a vast carbon market.
Frank Sobotka never delivered on his dredging in Season 2 of The Wire, but it appears like Baltimore is finally one step closer to getting a much improved Port of Baltimore.
Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley announced last week that the state signed an agreement with Port America to operate the port for 50 years. The deal is contingent on Port America, the nation’s largest port operator, to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in the facility. This includes an extended berth capable of hosting the larger container shapes set to land on the East Coast when the newly-widened Panama Canal opens in 2014.
There are two key issues here to keep an eye on, one of those local and one far-reaching.
First, what does this deal mean for Baltimore? According to the most recent BLS estimates, the Baltimore-Towson metropolitan area employs almost 18 percent of its workforce in trade, transportation, and utilities. This is below the national average of 19 percent, but still a large share of metro employment. Clearly aimed to increase Baltimore’s role as an Eastern shipping hub, these investments have the real potential to increase employment and send positive externalities throughout the local economy.
After nearly three days of deliberation, the Senate finally cast its first vote to pass the Mikulski amendment to provide for women’s preventative services. The amendment, which passed 61-39, would prohibit insurance companies from charging co-pays for a range of women’s preventative services as decided by an HHS agency.
The most obvious tragedy of the Washington police shootings is the deaths of the four police officers. The fact that the suspected gunman is a convicted felon from Arkansas whose 95-year prison sentence was commuted by then-Governor Mike Huckabee in 2000 is a tragedy for anyone currently in prison in Arkansas who might hope to one day receive executive clemency. Just consider what happened in Massachusetts after Willie Horton.
Multiple sources on and around Capitol Hill say Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is ready to go. At 5 p.m. today, he'll present the his full health care reform bill, complete with a Congrssional Budget Office score, to a meeting of the Democratic caucus. A press conference may follow.
The Democratic message machine is already hard at work. As Emily Pierce, Brian Beutler, and Ezra Klein have reported, leadership is putting out the word that Reid is "very pleased" with the bill and its CBO assessment.
Suffice to say this makes me "a little worried."
Most of Washington seems to think a low CBO score is automatically a good CBO score. But a low CBO score means a bill that doesn't involve a lot of federal outlays. And without a lot of federal outlays, you can't insure as many people or provide them with as much protection.
There has been much talk lately about how politics complicates the 2010 Census. (See this, this, and this.) Politics aside, it’s a daunting task to count each of the nearly 308 million residents of the United States once and only once. Some people are inevitably missed, while others are counted twice.
The 2000 census actually double-counted (about 11.6 million) more than it undercounted (10.2 million). Duplicates included “snowbirds” who spent part of the year in a second home, as well as college students and those in the military or prison. For the 2010 census new efforts are in place to limit double counting, including a printed warning on the form and a scanning procedure to find duplicate names and birth dates on completed questionnaires. While over-counting is a problem, it’s easier to deal with than undercounting.
The Census Bureau would rather weed out duplicates after the fact than risk missing people altogether, and so it conducts national advertising blitzes to convince everyone that “It’s in our Hands,” while investing extra resources in communities with people who are less likely to fill out their forms. State and local governments are making similar efforts, too, including the District of Columbia, Maryland, and Chicagoland.
Who is risk of being missed and where do they live? The Census Bureau has developed a “hard-to-count” score for every neighborhood in the country, based on 12 factors that are typically correlated with low response rates: rental and multi-family housing, overcrowding, unmarried individuals, low education and income levels, public assistance, high unemployment, recent movers, lack of phone service, linguistic isolation, and vacant housing units.
Not murder in the literal sense, of course, though in this case the metaphor is less distant than one would prefer. As noted earlier this month, Texas Governor Perry abruptly fired the chairman and two members of the Texas Forensic Science Commission investigating the execution of Cameron Todd Willingham--a man who was almost certainly innocent--just days before the commission was scheduled to hear expert testimony that the lethal arson for which Willingham was put to death under Perry's watch was no arson at all.
Now the fired chairman, Samuel Bassett, tells the Chicago Tribune that, prior to his firing, he felt "pressure" from the governor's office regarding the Willingham case:
According to Bassett, the governor's attorneys questioned the cost of the inquiry and asked why a fire scientist from Texas could not be hired to examine the case instead of the expert from Maryland that the panel ultimately settled on. Following the meeting, a staffer from the general counsel's office began to attend the commission's meetings, Bassett said...
Well, I had thought the University of Maryland's whole porn saga from this spring--in which piety-minded state Sen. Andrew Harris vowed to withhold funding if the campus allowed the student union to screen the skin flick "Pirates II: Stagnetti's Revenge"--ended when the school announced that the show would indeed go on. How wrong I was.
Well, no, there won't be any Airing of Grievances or Feats of Strength. But for anyone who might be in the vicinity of Easton, Maryland on Sunday night at 7 p.m., I'll be introducing the closing film of the Chesapeake Film Festival, After the Thin Man. The 1936 feature is the second of the Thin Man movies and, in addition to the inimitable chemistry (romantic and mixological) of leads William Powell and Myrna Loy, it offers a memorable early performance by one James Stewart.
Will people with disabilities suffer if health reform becomes reality? Sarah Palin famously made that case in August. And quite a few people seem to believe her. To get a more informed perspective on this, I sat down to speak with Lisa Iezzoni, MD.
Iezzoni is Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Director of the Institute for Health Policy. Among her areas of expertise is “risk adjustment”--an arcane-sounding term which basically entails looking at how much it costs to take care of people in different states of health, and then adjusting payments (to doctors, to hospital, to insurers) based on that.
But it’s her personal expertise that makes her particularly well-suited to talk about health care and disabilities. She is not only a doctor; she’s also a wheelchair user. A book she co-authored, More Than Ramps, provides policymakers and clinicians with nuts-and-bolts advice about how to improve health care quality and access for people with disabilities.
By the way, we hope these interviews will become a regular feature on The Treatment. We’re calling them “Curbside Consults.” For the uninitiated, curbside consults are a venerable medical tradition, whereby a doctor seeks informal but expert advice of a valued colleague in treating a patient with a complex or challenging condition. Health policy is hard, even for those of us who know it well. Hopefully these consults will help clear things up.
Our interview, over the phone, took place last month. If you want to read the full interview, click here. I’ve included a shortened and edited excerpt below.
On Saturday, September 12, America threw a gigantic temper tantrum in Washington D.C. Organizers called it the “largest gathering of fiscal conservatives in history,” and they’re probably right. But for an angry, anti-government fit, the march was remarkably civil. They had come in large bands--14 buses from Morristown, New Jersey; 12 from Harford County, Maryland--prepared with picnic baskets and lawn chairs. They festooned their hats with teabags and dressed in Revolutionary-era finery.
WASHINGTON -- Health care reform is said to be in trouble partly because of those raucous August town hall meetings in which Democratic members of Congress were besieged by shouters opposed to change.
But what if our media-created impression of the meetings is wrong? What if the highly publicized screamers represented only a fraction of public opinion? What if most of the town halls were populated by citizens who respectfully but firmly expressed a mixture of support, concern and doubt?
