Harold Pollack is the Helen Ross Professor of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago and a Special Correspondent for The Treatment.
The Will of the People: How Public Opinion Has Influenced the Supreme Court and Shaped the Meaning of the Constitution
By Barry Friedman
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 614 pp., $35)
West Virginia is a heavy coal state. So it's not a shock to see one of its senators, Jay Rockefeller, introducing a bill that would freeze EPA regulations over greenhouse gases for a few years, since those rules could well make it impossible to build new dirty coal plants anywhere in the country.
The way that Republican governors made a fuss last year about accepting stimulus dollars, and their continued uproar about growing deficits, it's worth another reminder that the most Republican states also get the most money from the federal government over what they put in. Here's a chart put together by a reader showing that, since 1981, some of the most conservative states have been the biggest beneficiaries of federal spending.
At last, a little more clarity on what the EPA is planning to do in terms of greenhouse-gas regulations. (Riveting topic, huh?) Last Friday, West Virginia's Jay Rockefeller and seven other Senate Democrats from coal states sent a letter to EPA head Lisa Jackson expressing "serious economic and energy security concerns" about the agency's plans to regulate carbon-dioxide and other heat-trapping gases on its own.
Quick recap: The EPA is moving ahead with its own regulations for greenhouse gases.
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.
As a rule, politicians in West Virginia don't care for environmentalists. This is, after all, a state that supplies 50 percent of U.S. coal exports, a state where the mining industry is responsible for roughly 30,000 jobs—a state that essentially depends on pollution for its survival. And
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:
Exiting a caucus meeting this evening, Democratic Senators said that they were prepared to drop the Medicare buy-in to break the political impasse over the provision--a change that may be enough to win over Joe Lieberman. Jay Rockefeller, one of the health reform's leading liberal advocates, was adamant about describing the merits that the bill would have even without a public option compromise. "There are 500 things, and you take this one out, and you ask…could it have been better? Yeah. But it could have been so much worse if we decided not to do anything about it," Rockefeller said tonight. "We’re not going to get all that we want, but we’re going to get so much more than we have."
The caucus meeting happened hours after news broke that the White House was pressuring Reid and the Senate leadership to reach a deal with Lieberman. While the Connecticut Senator wasn’t among those who spoke during this evening's caucus meeting, Rockefeller defended Lieberman’s recent threat to filibuster a bill with the Medicare buy-in as a exercise of his rights as a legislator. "Anybody has the right to do that--I’m not saying it a good thing…I’ve never done it. Maybe I should have," Rockefeller said. "I don’t attack him, as I wouldn’t attack myself. "
Rockefeller added that there were, in fact, other aspects of the reform bill in which Lieberman was playing a constructive role, including the West Virginia senator’s cherished project to strengthen the independent Medicare payment commission. "I and my staff are working very closely with Lieberman on MedPac on steroids which is the real game-changer in the bill," Rockefeller said, adding that he was also collaborating closely with Ben Nelson on insurance regulatory reform.
No, not that final four. This final four, from the OMB blog:
[E]arlier this year, President Obama launched the SAVE Award — a program that offered every federal employee the chance to submit ideas about how government can save money and perform better. Over the course of three weeks, federal employees submitted more than 38,000 ideas. Staff at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) assessed the submissions and narrowed them down to the final four ideas presented below.
Voting began on Monday and will only remain open until 11:59pm tomorrow [that's Thursday]. Already, we’ve received over 65,000 votes — so don’t miss out on your opportunity to help choose the winner. The person whose idea is voted the best will get to meet the President, present the winning idea directly to him, and have that idea included in the FY2011 Budget.
Suffice it to say, none of the ideas being tossed around here (see below) is going to impress any self-respecting budget hawk. But simply making some high-profile efforts to scrimp and save, even if its budgetary pocket change (or a rounding error on budgetary pocket change), probably sends an important symbolic message to voters worried about out-of-control spending. Particularly at a time when cutting the deficit is basically off the table because the economy is so weak. It's an issue I get into toward the end of my piece on the deficit today.
For what it's worth, this Washington Post piece has details on the four finalists:
Strong words from Montana's Max Baucus on the prospects of climate legislation passing within a year:
Whenever I read the words, "You're not from around here, are you?" I automatically imagine them being said with a serious Southern--or at least rural--twang. This election year in
Ever since 2001, when their successful gubernatorial candidate Mark Warner commissioned a bluegrass campaign song and sponsored a NASCAR team as part of his "rural strategy," Virginia Democrats have been preoccupied with winning over rural voters, especially in
California is a mess, but I love it all the same--especially the Bay Area, where I lived for 15 years. I went to Berkeley in 1962--a refugee from Amherst College, which at that time was dominated by frat boys with high SAT scores. I didn't go to Berkeley to go to school, but to be a bus ride away from North Beach and the Jazz Workshop. In a broader sense, I went to California for the same reason that other émigrés had been going since the 1840s. I was knocking on the Golden Door.
After a weekend of furious activity, Democratic leaders in the Senate think they are close to getting the votes they need in order to pass an "opt-out" version of the public option.
But they feel like President Obama could be doing more to help them, with one senior staffer telling TNR on Sunday that the leadership would like, but has yet to receive, a clear "signal" of support for their effort.
The White House, for its part, says President Obama supports a strong public option, as he always has--and that, as one senior administration official puts it, the president will support the Senate leadership in "whichever way" it chooses to go on this particular question.
Read those statements carefully and you'll see they don't actually contradict each other. Instead, they offer a pretty good picture of where the public option debate is at the beginning of a week that could quite possibly decide its fate.
For those just tuning in, the underlying issue here is whether to create a government-run insurance program into which people could enroll voluntarily and that might, ideally, provide more affordable coverage while providing the private insurance industry with much-needed competition. As recently as two or three weeks ago, many observers (this writer included) thought the idea was more or less dead politically.
Up from History:
The Life of Booker T. Washington
By Robert J. Norrell
(Harvard University Press, 508 pp., $35)
I.
Once the most famous and influential African American in the United States (and probably the world), Booker T. Washington has earned at best mixed reviews in the decades since his death in 1915. Black intellectuals and political activists, from W. E. B. Du Bois to the present day, have generally seen Washington as a conservative racial accommodationist, yielding to the repressive power of Jim Crow and urging American blacks to abandon their political struggles for equality and instead to set their sights on a future of manual labor and petty property ownership.
Over the last few weeks Jay Rockefeller has emerged as the Senate's most visible spokesman for a public insurance option. And, purely from a public relations standpoint, this is something of a mixed blessing. He comes from West Virginia and is pretty popular there, so that certainly helps bring non-coastal credibility to the cause. But Rockefeller speaks in a plodding, rambling style that doesn't always make for great television. He's also pretty stubborn, which makes him a loud advocate but not necessarily an effective one, at least given the way the U.S. Senate works.
But Rockefeller gets something better than almost anybody I've seen--something he's expressed in interviews and, most recently, during this weeks hearings of the Senate Finance Committee. It's how everyday people, particularly those without a lot of money, interact with the health care system. It's easy to treat health care as an abstraction--to make it all about economic theories and Congressional Budget Office projections. (I'm surely guilty of this myself.) Rockefeller sees it through the eyes of West Virginians making $30,000 a year--people who just want to know they can pay their premiums and that, if they do, the insurance they get will protect them when they get sick.
Negotiations over health care reform screeched to a halt late last week when 40 centrist Democrats--members of the House Blue Dog Coalition--signed a letter saying they could not support the House’s emerging legislation without significant changes. Their major complaint? They said the House bill would not do enough to bring down health care costs and, by extension, limit the taxpayers' liabilities. Without more changes to reduce the cost of medical care, they warned, it would be unwise to back massive expansions of insurance coverage.
I am not going to get into the game of saying whom Barack Obama should choose to be his vice-presidential nominee. I am chastened from having argued for John Kerry to pick John Edwards in 2004. And I am not going to say whom he shouldn't choose either. But I want to suggest that there are pitfalls to his endorsing the "dream ticket" of himself and Hillary Clinton, which prominent Clinton supporters like Diane Feinstein are promoting.
First, there was West Virginia. Michael Crowley parsed Hillary's thinking going into the primary, noting that West Virginia is the place Bill belongs.
