John McCormack at the Weekly Standard has a splashy headline today: "Obama Now Selling Judgeships For Health Care Votes?" The story turns out to be that Obama is nominating Scott Matheson, Jr. to the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit.
WASHINGTON -- For those who feared that Barack Obama did not have any Lyndon Johnson in him, the president's determination to press ahead and get health care reform done in the face of Republican intransigence came as something of a relief.
Obama's critics have regularly accused him of not being as tough or wily or forceful as LBJ was in pushing through civil rights and the social programs of his Great Society. Obama seemed willing to let Congress go its own way and was so anxious to look bipartisan that he wouldn't even take his own side in arguments with Republicans.
All across the country, Republicans are fantasizing about a gigantic electoral tide that will sweep out deeply entrenched Democratic incumbents this November. In their telling, this deep-red surge will be so forceful as to dislodge even legislators who don’t look vulnerable now, securing GOP control of both houses of Congress.
But could this scenario really come to pass? That will depend, in part, on what type of Republican Party the Democrats are running against in the fall.
All across the country, Republicans are fantasizing about a gigantic electoral tide that will sweep out deeply entrenched Democratic incumbents this November. In their telling, this deep-red surge will be so forceful as to dislodge even legislators who don’t look vulnerable now, securing GOP control of both houses of Congress.
But could this scenario really come to pass? That will depend, in part, on what type of Republican Party the Democrats are running against in the fall.
Harold Pollack is the Helen Ross Professor of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago and a Special Correspondent for The Treatment.
Regionalism is too often thought to require government initiative. As a result, progress is associated with full-on structural reform--and so the controversy (and usually frustration) begins.
Look to the Intermountain West, however, and it becomes immediately clear that regionalism need not require top-down government overhaul, and especially need not require it at the “super-regional” scale of the “megapolitan” spaces described by the Metro Program’s 2008 report “Mountain Megas.”
In the Mountain region, after all, a distinctive style of cooperative and voluntary “governance” has begun to gain force that simultaneously embraces regional and super-regional perspectives while affirming strong local decisionmaking prerogatives.
No less than 32 Front Range mayors backed the extensive FasTracks light and commuter rail system in the last decade. How did that happen? They worked steadily through the Denver area’s Metro Mayors Caucus, an informal “non-confrontational arena for the discussion of common issues and multi-jurisdictional challenges.”
The president’s proposed budget for FY2011 contains a few key provisions that will mean good news for low-income working families at tax time, even after the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA/stimulus bill) runs its course. It also proposes to terminate an ineffective program for these families, but stops short of advancing a much-needed replacement.
Top 10 States and Metro Areas for Increases in EITC Dollars due to ARRA Changes in Eligibility
First, ARRA temporarily expanded two important tax credits for working families that the Administration now proposes to make permanent. It expanded the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC)--a refundable federal tax credit for workers with low-incomes--by:
ARRA also expanded the refundable Child Tax Credit (CTC) for lower-income workers by dropping the earnings “floor.” In 2008, only families with incomes above $8,500 could receive the credit through their refunds, but ARRA lowered that threshold to $3,000.
Bill Clinton didn’t know he was in big trouble until the eve of the November 1994 election. Barack Obama knows now, barely a year into his presidency. While party loyalists might blame Martha Coakley’s defeat on her ignorance of Red Sox baseball, it was clearly a message to the president and his party. A less inept candidate might have beaten Scott Brown, but, if Obama’s program and presidency were more popular in Massachusetts, even Coakley could have won--and maybe by double digits.
Bill Clinton didn’t know he was in big trouble until the very eve of the November 1994 election. Barack Obama knows now, barely a year into his presidency. While the party loyalists can blame Martha Coakley’s defeat on her ignorance of Red Sox baseball, it was clearly a message to the president and his party. Yes, a less inept candidate might have beaten Scott Brown, but if Obama and his program had been more popular in Massachusetts, even Coakley could have won--and by ten points or more.
On the assumption that a good idea—even one that’s 15 years old—can never be replicated enough, Washington conservatives are hard at work designing knockoffs of Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America. Three of them, in fact.
The options so far:
My favorite moment from last month’s White House jobs summit came when the president asked if Washington had been doing something to discourage hiring. At this point, a man named Fred Lampropoulos, the CEO of a Utah-based medical device manufacturer, chimed in that yes, in fact, it had. “[T]here’s such an aggressive legislative agenda that businesspeople don’t really know what they ought to do,” Mr. Lampropoulos told the president, according to The New York Times. Political uncertainty, he said, “is really what’s holding back the jobs.”
WASHINGTON--For progressives, the question on the health care battle going forward is not whether they have a right to be angry but whether they can direct their fury toward constructive ends. The alternative is to pursue a temporarily satisfying and ultimately self-defeating politics of protest.
Of course what has happened on the health care bill is enraging. It's quite clear that substantial majorities in both houses of Congress favored either a public option or a Medicare buy-in.
My colleague Noam Scheiber has parsed Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke’s testimony about the power of the Federal Reserve, but Bernanke also commented in hearings yesterday about government fiscal policy; and what he had to say was, to say the least, disturbing. Echoing the charges of economic conservatives and Wall Streeters like investment banker Peter Peterson, Bernanke took aim against what these folks call “entitlements,” but which are known popularly to be social security and Medicare. Republicans can be expected to cite his comments in the current debate over the Democratic health care reform bill.
How a society cares for those too young, too old, or too sick to work is a test of its maturity, and level of civilization. Social security and Medicare are among the foremost achievements of American government in the twentieth century. If the government needs more money to fund social security, which it presently does not, there are a host of remedies besides cutting benefits. For instance, it can always raise the limit on how much income is subject to a social security tax.
Medicare is the most penurious and least wasteful of health insurance programs. If anything, a dispassionate policy-maker concerned about healthcare costs might have insisted that the private sector insurance emulate, or perhaps be folded into, Medicare. But in discussing “entitlements,” Bernanke insisted that what would have to altered is how much these programs spend. He even threw open the question of whether these programs should be mandatory.
When asked whether the deficits that he saw these programs as creating could be met by higher taxes, Bernanke refused to make any comments on taxes. “I have done my best to leave that authority where it belongs, with the Congress,” he said. Yes, sure, raising or cutting taxes is Congress’s job. But so is spending money on social programs, about which Bernanke, eager to plant his flag on the side of the anti-entitlement camp, was not loath to comment.
When I read a few of Bernanke’s comments yesterday, I thought, well, maybe they were taken out of context. Why would someone seeking to be confirmed by a Democratic majority go out of his way to promote starkly Republican concerns?
Here are the relevant exchanges, the first between Bernanke and Utah Senate Robert Bennett and the second between Bernanke and Rhode Island Senator Jack Reed:
Sarah Palin isn’t the only person cashing in on her ill-fated bid for the vice-presidency. A whole slew of authors, fashion designers, movie producers, pornographers, cartoonists, and opticians are riding the Palin gravy train. So I was not surprised when a press release landed in my inbox plugging what seemed to be the latest category of Palin profiteer: Academics.
The University of Alaska Southeast is now touting one of their political science professors, Clive Thomas, as a one-stop Sarah Palin expert. He has been hitting the speaking circuit, with recent stops ranging from Utah to Brazil, and upcoming gigs in San Francisco and Chicago. His talks, according to the university, touch on numerous aspects of the "Palin Phenomenon," including "the enigmatic fascination with Palin, the contrast between those who like her and those who do not, and what she tells us about American politics." He also "introduces audiences to 'Alaska in myth and reality' including some Alaska political traits-populism, anti-tax and anti-government, especially anti-federal government and how Palin fits in Alaska." At least happy customer, Oregon State Political Science Chair Bill Lunch, reports: "I will now watch her future career moves with an insight I didn't have before this lecture." Is Thomas the world's first professional Palinologist?
Not if he has anything to do with it. “I study Sarah Palin by default,” says the affable, British-accented professor who has been teaching for nearly three decades. Despite the apparent publicity-mongering of his university, Thomas, who has a Ph.D. in political science from the London School of Economics and has been awarded four Fulbright fellowships, seems to be standing in the limelight very reluctantly. He explains to me, with a sigh, that while he has written several books on Alaska politics and has taught the subject for decades, he actually specializes in Latin America. (His recent trip to Brazil, Uruguay, and Chile was for research, not just lecturing.) And--surprise, surprise--he seems to be just as sick of Palin as we are.
Watching CSPAN-2 over the weekend, I was mesmerized by a succession of Senators lambasting the Senate's health reform bill--especially its reliance on Medicaid.
One says that the program is too stingy. He recounts a heartrending tale of seriously-ill Texas children going without needed care because pediatric specialists would not take low Medicaid reimbursement rates. Another notes disparities in neonatal mortality between Medicaid and private insurance patients. "Care delayed is care denied," he intoned to great effect. A third laments that poor people will be consigned to the "medical Gulag" of Medicaid. A fourth suggests that the only reason poor people are made eligible for Medicaid rather than for private coverage is to make the CBO numbers look better. A fifth--worried about the impact on state budgets--notes that Utah Medicaid covers nonworking parents only up to 48 percent of the poverty line. (He didn't seem to notice that such painful state policies are really arguments in favor of the Senate bill.) A sixth drew liberally from an unflattering Washington Post account of the Mayo Clinic's low proportion of Medicaid patients, and its reticence to serve Medicare primary care patients.
Many of these charges are standard fare from single-payer advocates and other progressives unhappy with the Senate bill. It’s a little odd coming from a succession of pasty white guy conservatives. It's odder when one considers what is left unsaid. For all the talk of the perils and indignities of Medicaid expansion, not much is said about the third tier of American medical care: that provided to the uninsured.
Conservatives have already begun stoking fears that the new mammography recommendations that screenings should begin at 50 years instead of 40 will inevitably lead to “rationing,” particularly if Obama’s health-care reform bill passes. “I absolutely believe this could be a form of rationing," Representative Phil Gingrey told Fox News yesterday. “It scares me.” A private physician quoted in the story said the guidelines issued by the federal task force were “at the top of a slippery slope toward rationing,” claiming that “the government-run insurance companies are definitely going to be using these federal guidelines.”
But to what extent will recommendations from the U.S. Preventative Services Task Force actually dictate what’s covered under the new reform bill? Over at FireDogLake, Daniel Dayen flags the White House’s attempt to push back against the “rationing” meme. On the White House blog yesterday, Dan Pfeiffer explained why the government and insurers weren’t automatically going to adopt the task force’s findings:
The USPTF would have no power to deny insurance coverage in any way…They are an independent scientific body that makes recommendations based on scientific evidence; however they do not set official policy for the federal government. Under health reform, their recommendations would be used to identify preventive services that must be provided for little or no cost.
To clarify: in its effort to regulate the insurance market and expand preventative coverage, the health-care legislation would require insurance companies to provide a certain set of preventative services for free or at little cost, according to a minimum benefits package determined by the Department of Health and Human Services. Medical treatments outside of this prescribed set of preventative services could be subject to cost-sharing--i.e. a co-pay that the patient has to contribute--but would hardly be automatically excluded from coverage. As Dayen concludes, findings by the USPTF--an independent group compromised of medical authorities and primary-care experts--would serve as a guide for HHS to determine which treatments should be part of preventative services and which are subject to co-pays, but coverage is by no means limited to what the task force recommends.
Yesterday, in a straight party-line vote, the Senate voted 60-39 to approve cloture on H.R. 2847, the Commerce-Justice-Science appropriations bill. This action effectively blocks consideration of Sens. David Vitter (R-La.) and Robert Bennett’s (R-Utah) controversial amendment to bar implementation of the 2010 Census unless it collected data on citizenship and immigration status for each respondent.
So, like a lot of people on the left and center-left (and, presumably, a fairly overwhelming majority of Americans), I’m pretty disappointed that the Senate Finance Committee took an axe to the public option yesterday.
Paradise Found: Nature in America at the Time of Discovery
By Steve Nicholls
(University of Chicago Press, 524 pp., $30)
American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau
Edited by Bill McKibben
(Library of America, 1,047 pp., $40)
Defending The Master Race: Conservation, Eugenics, And The Legacy Of Madison Grant
By Jonathan Peter Spiro
(University of Vermont Press, 462 pp., $39.95)
A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir
By Donald Worster
(Oxford University Press, 535 pp., $34.99)
A Reenchanted World: The Quest for A New Kinship With Nature
By James William Gibson
(Metropolitan Books, 306 pp., $27)
Eco Barons: The Dreamers, Schemers, and Millionaires Who Are Saving Our Planet
By Edward Humes
(Ecco Books, 367 pp., $25.99)
I.
In contemporary public discourse, concern for "the environment" is a mile wide and an inch deep. Even free-market fundamentalists strain to display their ecological credentials, while corporations that sell fossil fuels genuflect at the altar of sustainability. Everyone has discovered how nice it is to be green. Will popular sentiment translate into public policy? There is reason to be skeptical.
The best part of Michael Jordan's oddly vindictive but revealing induction speech at the Basketball Hall of Fame was his story about Utah Jazz guard Bryon Russell:
My last TRB column was about the prevailing mode of centrist thought in American politics, which is mostly a way of lashing your own opinions to those of others rather than make any independent judgment. I wish I had written it for the next issue, because this last weekend offered up some especially comical examples.
Even before Ted Kennedy lost his battle with brain cancer late last month, Republicans were suggesting that health care reform had suffered in his absence--not because Kennedy was so devoted to the cause, but because he would have cut a deal with the Republicans. “In every case, he fought as hard as he could . . .
Interesting. The Wall Street Journal was the first media outlet to sit down with the new China ambassador, former Utah Governor Jon Huntsman. And the interview offered a glimpse of the White House's top priorities: "Before setting out for China, Mr. Huntsman said, Mr. Obama told him to focus on a few big-picture issues: global economy, energy and climate change."
Some more disappointing news from the Senate: it looks like the right-wing attack on Bob Bennett is working.
Salt Lake City, Utah
