Category Archives: Congress

“Lieberman is totally insincere.”

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There’s word today that Senator Lieberman is saying he won’t join a Republican filibuster of the health care bill after all. Harry Reid and Lieberman have reached a “private understanding” on the matter, Alexander Bolton says at The Hill. Steve Benen says that in fact Senate Democrats and the White House never thought he would support the filibuster, even when he was saying he would, because they believe Lieberman to be totally insincere.

So how do they know he’s not lying now?

And what would the “private understanding” be? Nice little chairmanship you’ve got there, Senator. I’d hate to see anything happen to it.

That leaves us with wondering what Senator Lieberman was trying to accomplish by saying he would support the filibuster. The consensus seems to be he was just trying to get attention.

Surgical Bypass

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Rep. Henry Waxman is telling the Blue Dogs that if they don’t stop holding back the health care bill he’s going to let the bill bypass his Energy and Commerce Committee and let it go right to the floor.

By all means.

Ian Swanson and Mike Soraghan write for The Hill:

Waxman is now playing a game of legislative chicken with the Blue Dogs. He’s hoping the inclusion of a study on Medicare reimbursement rates in the healthcare overhaul will be enough to placate the centrist Democrats, who say the government program short-changes hospitals and physicians in their rural districts.

If that’s not, the seven Blue Dogs could join with the committee’s Republicans to “eviscerate” healthcare reform, and that’s something Waxman will not tolerate.

“I won’t allow them to hand over control of our committee to Republicans,” Waxman told reporters.

Matt Yglesias:

Something a lot of progressive legislative leaders seem to have forgotten until this Congress actually got under way is that historically congressional procedure is a challenge to be surmounted when you want big change to happen. It’s not actually a fixed feature of the landscape that people “have to” accommodate themselves to. For years you couldn’t get a decent Civil Rights bill because segregationists controlled the Judiciary Committee that had jurisdiction. This problem was “solved” by just deciding to bypass the Judiciary Committee. When you decide you want to get things done, you find a way to get them done.

Do it, Henry.

Update: Related — H/t to Mahareader David Rickard — conservative columnist Thomas Sowell explains at National Review Online why the system of paying for health care through private health insurance has to end:

Insurance companies are another distraction and a scapegoat, because they do not insure “preexisting conditions.” Stop and think about it: If you could wait until you got sick to take out health insurance, why would you buy that insurance while you are well?

You could avoid paying all those premiums and then — after you got sick — take out health insurance and let the premiums paid by other people pay for your medical treatment. …

…When Obama makes the insurance companies the villains for not insuring preexisting conditions, that gives him another distraction and enables him to be another escape artist, like Houdini.

The fact that Sowell doesn’t see his own argument as an admission that private health insurance simply can’t do the job says something, too.

Sowell’s basic argument is that we’d better keep our health care decisions in the hands of the for-profit insurance industry, because we can’t trust the government.

The Default Norm

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I’ve used the phrase “default norm” a number of times, so it was nice to see Michael Tomasky (or at least, the headline writer at Comment Is Free) pick it up. Maybe somebody’s reading The Mahablog?

Tomasky’s headline is “Because ‘white male’ equal default human ‘normal,’ see?” I regret I didn’t have time to watch the Sotomayor hearings yesterday, but from the commentaries and videos I take it that the Senate Republicans made thorough asses of themselves and might as well have grilled Sotomayor wearing Klan hoods.

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Craig Crawford asks, “Does the Republican senator [Lindsey Graham, in this case] think it is amusing that he and his party’s condescending tone toward the Hispanic woman was costing them ethnic votes with each passing hour of Tuesday’s Judiciary Committee hearing?”

I wrote in an earlier post that the old white guys in the Senate consider white maledom to be the default norm, and that in their view “bias” is deviation from the default norm. You get that doubly from conservative old white men, who whine incessantly about “judicial activism,” which they define as judicial rulings based on the judge’s ideology instead of precedent and statutory law. However, one soon understands by paying attention to to the Right that the real definition of “judicial activism” is “any judicial opinion that doesn’t align with right-wing ideology.” If a judge narrowly applies statutory law and comes to a decision they don’t like, it’s “judicial activism.” However, if an opinion breaks all precedent and sits in an entirely different ball park from statutory law, it isn’t “judicial activism” if they agree with it.

Thus, as Dahlia Lithwick writes,

But even when Sotomayor is being questioned about her judicial record, the focus isn’t on her legal approach or process but on the outcomes. So when she talks about her Ricci decision, Jeff Sessions asks her why she didn’t apply affirmative action precedents that had no bearing in a case that was not an affirmative action case. When she speaks about Didden, her eminent domain case, Republican Chuck Grassley asks why she didn’t analyze the Kelo precedent in a case about timely filing. Nobody wants to hear how she got to a result. They want to know why she didn’t get to their result. Time and again she is hectored for deciding the narrow issues before her. It’s like a judicial-activism pep rally in here.

There’s another interesting dynamic going on here. The Los Angeles Times convened a panel of legal scholars to comment on the hearings. Erwin Chemerinsky, Dean of the UC Irvine School of Law, spoke for the rest of the panel when he said,

She repeated the slogan that “judges apply, not make the law.” Although I understand why this is said, I find it frustrating that nominees find it necessary to say something so clearly incorrect and that gives the public such a misleading picture of what the Supreme Court does. Every first-year law student knows that judges make law. In a common law system, like the United States, most of tort, contract, and property law is judge-made law. Everything the Supreme Court does makes law. To pick an example from a recent Supreme Court case, the Court would have made law whether it allowed or prohibited strip searching of a student suspected of having prescription strength ibuprofen. Whether the Court found a constitutional right to abortion in Roe v. Wade, or rejected such a right, it would have made law.

But, you know, after weeks of hysterical shrieking from the Right about an off-the-cuff comment from Sotomayor on making law, she has to say she won’t make law. Everyone still has to tiptoe around the tender sensibilities of the Right, no matter how ridiculous they are.

Mike Madden writes that Sotomayor said, “I want to state upfront, unequivocally and without doubt, I do not believe that any ethnic, racial or gender group has an advantage in sound judging.”

Nevertheless, barely 10 minutes later, Sessions was asking her this: “Do you think there’s any circumstance in which a judge should allow their prejudices to impact their decision-making?” Sotomayor — who didn’t get to the point where she was virtually assured a seat on the Supreme Court by being born yesterday — knew how to answer that one. “Never their prejudices,” she told Sessions. But he kept at it. “Aren’t you saying there that you expect your background and — and heritage to influence your decision-making?” he asked. “That’s troubling me. That is not impartiality.”

This is rich:

The obvious point — that the background and heritage of old white guys influences their decision-making all the time, too — would not have been the politically sound one to make. So Sotomayor played it cool. “My record shows that at no point or time have I ever permitted my personal views or sympathies to influence an outcome of a case,” she said, and would wind up saying again and again, in more or less the same words, throughout the day. “In every case where I have identified a sympathy, I have articulated it and explained to the litigant why the law requires a different result. I do not permit my sympathies, personal views, or prejudices to influence the outcome of my cases.” A few hours later, Sessions flat-out told reporters he didn’t care what she’d said. “I don’t know — this is the confirmation process, so we got a statement from a day of the confirmation process that contradicts a decade or more of speeches.”

In other words, to Sessions, his biases against Sotomayor speak louder than what she actually said in the hearings. Madden continues,

That was more or less how the whole day went; Republicans hurled increasingly pointed questions at Sotomayor, the nominee calmly parried them, and the Republicans mostly ignored her.

This is old, familiar behavior to me, although not something I’ve had to deal with personally for several years. But I can remember in the 1960s and 1970s, when I was a much younger woman and second-wave feminism was still new, I very often found that men projected opinions and qualities on to me that I did not possess. And it didn’t matter what I said about my opinions or myself. They knew what I thought and who I was because I was female, and those females are all alike. I could say, “I sincerely understand grass is green,” and they’d flash me a condescending smile and continue to lecture me why grass was green and not blue. Their biases overruled what I said. Happened all the time.

As I wrote in an earlier post, we all have biases. Generally being “fair” is not losing one’s biases, but perceiving one’s biases as biases. If you recognize your biases as biases, you are in a position to overrule them as the facts dictate. But if you are so unconscious of yourself that you don’t recognize your biases as biases, then your “thinking” generally amounts to casting around for support for your biases. Then you put the biases and the cobbled-together “support” together and call it “reason.”

The unconscious crew of Senate Republicans who grilled Sotomayor yesterday brought up her “wise Latina” remark several times. It must have struck a nerve. Several of them at various times have said that had they said something like that, it would have been the end of their careers.

We can see plainly from the hearings yesterday that they can put on public displays of flaming racism and still hang on to their jobs, but never mind. As Mo Dowd said, “After all, these guys have never needed to speak inspirational words to others like them, as Sotomayor has done. They’ve had codes, handshakes and clubs to do that.”

Meanwhile, a right-wing group called Committee for Justice has created an ad that ties Sotomayor to Bill Ayers and the support of terrorism. The group is trying to raise money to put the ad on television. If I had any money I’d send it to them. Let the world see the absurdity, I say.

Update: Rush Limbaugh said of Judge Sotomayor, “She doesn’t have any intellectual depth. She’s got a — she’s an angry woman, she’s a bigot. She’s a racist.” That’s got to be an all-time high-water mark of psychological projection.

The Roller Coaster

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I honestly don’t know what’s going on in Congress with health care reform. Here is Ezra Klein’s latest and Brian Beutler’s latest. The sticking point at the moment appears to be financing.

At The Guardian, Rose Ann DeMoro writes that the government sure as hell had better do something. If you want to be thoroughly depressed, however, read the comments to the article, in which American dittoheads tell Europeans how much better the U.S. system is to theirs. It’s embarrassing.

However, see also P.M. Carpenter, “Healthcare Reform and the Lure of Despair.”

I’ve been among the guiltiest of prejudgers of coming health-care legislation, essentially, or even explicitly, on occasion, declaring a robust public option doomed before birth. I now question the wisdom of that prejudgment, although, obviously, it may well prove to have been deadly accurate.

The chief cause of my self-questioning is not some pollyanish, utopian epiphany that has befallen my brain. Rather, it has been the overwhelming totality of like-mindedly negative prejudgments I’ve repeatedly encountered from around the Web.

And they’re downright depressing — premature tossings in of the towels; emotional declarations of it’s all over before it’s actually over; black, foreboding, self-righteous brayings of I told you so, again, before there’s even anything of substance on the Congressional table for us to be told about.

These are the Sarah Palins of online progressivism: the whiners, the quitters, the inactive activists, the incurably discontented voices of departure from Washington’s camp of Valley Forge before the first snowflake descends. And I’m embarrassed and ashamed to confess that too often I have had one foot in the retreating camp.

Normally I’d be with P.M. on this, but right now I’m feeling pretty bleak about it all. I still say if there’s no public option, they might as well not bother. And the public option still seems like an uphill struggle.

The U.S. as a Failed State

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The often-brilliant George Monbiot asks at The Guardian, “Why do we allow the US to act like a failed state on climate change?” Following a useful analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of the Waxman-Markey climate bill, he says,

Even so, I would like to see the bill passed, as it at least provides a framework for future improvements. But why do we expect so little from the US? Why do we treat the world’s most powerful and innovative nation as if it were a failed state, rejoicing at even the faintest suggestion of common sense?

And then he says,

You have only to read the comments that follow this article to find out.

Bravo, Mr. Monbiot! He correctly anticipated that the comments would feature some prime American wingnut apologia.

Thanks to the lobbying work of the coal and oil companies, and the vast army of thinktanks, PR consultants and astroturfers they have sponsored, thanks too to the domination of the airwaves by loony right shock jocks, the debate over issues like this has become so mad that any progress at all is little short of a miracle. The ranking Republican on the House energy and commerce committee is Joe Barton, the man who in 2005 launched a congressional investigation of three US scientists whose work reveals the historical pattern of climate change. Like those of many of his peers, his political career is kept on life support by the fossil fuel and electricity companies. He returns the favour by vociferously denying that manmade climate change exists.

A combination of corporate money and an unregulated corporate media keeps America in the dark ages. This bill is the best we’re going to get for now because the corruption of public life in the United States has not been addressed. Whether he is seeking environmental reforms, health reforms or any other improvement in the life of the American people, this is Obama’s real challenge.

Also at The Guardian, Michael Tomasky writes,

You might wonder, as many American liberals wonder: OK, we’ve elected probably the most progressive president in decades, and Democrats have big majorities in both houses of Congress. In addition, the Republican party is at a historic low point. So why can’t the Democrats get more done? Why is Barack Obama so timid?

I’m not sure I agree with his answer:

The answer has less to do with Obama’s DNA than with our constitution’s. The GOP may be a laughing stock nationally, the last redoubt of high-profile mistress-shaggers and witless pit bulls with lipstick, but that has absolutely no bearing on its level of power in Washington. Congress was designed so that minorities can wield power well out of proportion to their number if they stick together.

We’ve been through times in the fading, distant past in which the federal government accomplished remarkable things done in spite of itself. Speaking as a history nerd, I don’t know when Washington has been more helplessly dysfunctional than it is now, except maybe for the stretch of years just before the Civil War. Not a cheerful thought.

As Tomasky says, the federal government was set up the way it was with the prevention of tyranny in mind.

Our founders were concerned first and foremost with the potential for authoritarian tyranny, since there was a lot of that afoot in those days. So they built a system of divided government, compulsively concerned with checks and balances so that few actions could be taken quickly.

True. But the terrible irony that you will never ever not in a million years get a conservative or libertarian to admit is that this very weakness now is allowing a different sort of tyranny to emerge. We, the People, no longer have anything to say about our own country. It’s all in the hands of corporations and lobbyists. The result is a loss of genuine political liberty, the loss of government by the consent of the governed, as surely as if Congress had been taken over by a military junta.

Tomasky concludes:

Today’s liberals need to give more thought and devote more energy to this problem than they do. When progressive legislation is weakened, as the emissions bill was last week, most people just reflexively chalk it up to a presidential failure of will. And sure, to some extent, Obama is perhaps too quick to seek compromise.

But the more pressing issue — and the hidden one that most big-time pundits don’t write about — is how messed up Congress has become. This is on the brink of becoming a disaster for this country. Reforming Congress, something we call a “process” reform rather than an actual matter of “substance”, is something most liberal interest groups don’t give much thought to. But today, process is substance — or is killing it. Obama and the advocacy groups that support his goals need to grasp this and do something about it, or the whole agenda will sink into the quicksand down the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue.

I think this is exactly right. Although I agree that President Obama is too quick to seek compromise, he’s not the real problem. The real problem is that the U.S. really is on the brink of being a new kind of failed state.

Chicken Littles on Cap and Trade

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The American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES) passed narrowly in the House with the help of eight Republicans, who are being soundly demonized by the Right blogosphere today. This morning I saw a headline about “The Biggest Tax Increase in History.” This was from the Wall Street Journal, so naturally the rest of the Right picked it up and ran with it. Just so you know, the nation will be destroyed.

On the other hand, Joseph Romm writes,

The definitive analysis of ACES by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office found the cost to the average American household in 2020 of ACES would be about a postage stamp a day — despite repeated claims of conservatives using dubious industry-funded research that this bill would devastate the economy.

Also, Romm says,

The GOP arguments against the bill, which included calling global warming a hoax, were so lame that one Democrat, Lloyd Doggett of Texas, who had announced his intention to vote against the bill because it was too weak, switched to supporting the bill after “listening to the flat earth society and the climate deniers, and some of the most inane arguments I have heard against refusing to act on this vital national security challenge.”

Word on the Right is that cap-and-trade was tried in Europe and was a bust. On the other hand, an MIT study says the European cap-and-trade system is working well with little or no effect on the economy.

On the Left, the reaction ranges from general relief that the Dems could get something passed to concern that ACES doesn’t go far enough. For an optimistic view, see Thomas Noyes, “The price of climate change.” He says the Right also is citing an MIT study, possibly the same one:

One source of these spurious numbers, the Heritage Foundation, claims that Waxman-Markey would reduce GDP by a total of $7.4tn and destroy 1.9 million jobs by the year 2035. A family’s electricity bill would climb 90% and natural gas prices would climb 55%, adding $1,500 to the family budget. An even scarier assertion that the bill would cost families $3,100 was purportedly based on an MIT study – a claim that one of the study’s authors, John Reilly, roundly disputed.

Opponents reached these conclusions by exaggerating the downside and ignoring the upside altogether. They have overstated the costs of renewable energy, underestimated the future costs of fossil fuels and left out the cost savings of improving energy efficiency. The Heritage Foundation report projects home energy prices will increase three to four times faster than the Congressional Budget Office or Environmental Protection Agency studies, and doesn’t include any benefits from improvements in energy efficiency or investing in new industries.

As a species, we have to stop relying on fossil fuel sooner or later, if only because the planet isn’t making more of it. This is not a point you can get across to a wingnut, however.

Life as a Preexisting Condition

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The must-read new story today is by Lisa Girion of the Los Angeles Times. In “Health insurers refuse to limit rescission of coverage,” we find the clearest case yet why the private health care industry will never, ever, not in a million years, come even close to solving the health care crisis.

In a nutshell — yesterday three big insurance company executives — WellPoint Inc., UnitedHealth Group and Assurant Inc. — told the House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations that their business models depended on being able to cancel the health insurance policies of customers who cost them too much money. An investigation by the Committee had found that over a five-year period, these companies had canceled the coverage of more than 20,000 people in order to avoid paying more than $300 million in medical claims.

One of the execs claimed the rescissions — industry jargon for canceling coverage — were necessary to protect the companies from fraud. People lie about preexisting conditions on their applications, he said, and this drove up the cost of insurance for everyone else. I’ll come back to this point in a moment.

In practice, this means insurers target people with high-cost conditions such as breast cancer and lymphoma and direct employees to examine patients’ paperwork for any pretense to cancel coverage. People with innocent mistakes and inadvertent omissions; people who were unaware of a preexisting condition at the time they filled out the application because the symptoms hadn’t developed yet; people whose preexisting conditions were minor and had nothing whatsoever to do with the disease costing the insurer money — such people found themselves dumped out of the health care system at their time of greatest need.

A Texas nurse said she lost her coverage, after she was diagnosed with aggressive breast cancer, for failing to disclose a visit to a dermatologist for acne.

The sister of an Illinois man who died of lymphoma said his policy was rescinded for the failure to report a possible aneurysm and gallstones that his physician noted in his chart but did not discuss with him.

Karen Tumulty at Time presents several other heart-breaking, and outrageous, examples.

Of course, you might remember that Michael Moore documented this practice quite nicely in Sicko. We all knew this was going on. Members of the House Committee feigned surprise.

But I want to go back to the part about rejecting people with preexisting conditions. Who above the age of 40 does not have a preexisting condition? For that matter, what percentage of young adults freshly cut loose from their parents’ policies find they cannot obtain insurance because they failed to get through childhood without a preexisting condition?

The insurance companies are saying they can’t make a profit unless they deny coverage to people with preexisting conditions. How is this not an admission the private health insurance industry is a big, fat FAIL?

Righties just love to tell us that the reason health insurance is so expensive in some states, like New York, is that those states have (Cue: “Fortuna, Imperatrix Mundi (O Fortuna)”) regulations. And what are those regulations? Chief among them are provisions that limit the insurers’ abilities to deny coverage to people with preexisting condtions.

So, in many states, a middle-aged person with no serious health problems who was once prescribed Lipitor for high cholesterol would be unable to obtain health insurance at any price. In New York, this person can get insurance. Yes, it’s so expensive most people can’t afford it, but it’s obtainable for those who can pay for it.

What this says to me is that relying on a private insurance industry to pay for health care costs is unworkable. A private insurance industry simply cannot do the job of paying for health care, because the only way a private company can make a profit is to deny coverage to people who are actually sick so that they don’t have to pay those bills.

My next question is, how obvious does this have to get before people see it?

I’m sure some people do lie on their insurance applications in order to obtain coverage. But in most industrialized democracies, this wouldn’t even be an issue. You’re a citizen, you get health care. Whether you once had acne treatments or took Lipitor or had a gallstone or even had a life-threatening disease, you get health care. Because the purpose of the health care system in most countries is delivering health care, not making a profit.

And for those worried about the cost to government of providing health care to sick people, let me present this handy chart:

healthcarecostsbycountry

This chart was adapted from a Canadian site calling for health care reform in Canada. The Canadian system has its problems, but I suspect seeing the mess we’re in persuades many Canadians to leave well enough alone. At least Canadians can get health care.

I believe the only way we’ve got a shot at lowering per-capita cost while delivering health care to everyone is to kick the insurance companies out of the picture altogether and going to a purely public system. At least a public health insurance plan would be a step in that direction.

Regarding the recently released CBO estimate of $100 trillion over ten years — see Extra Klein for why the CBO estimate is deeply flawed. See also “The Bright Side of the CBO Snafu.”

Steve McMahon Is So Wrong

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I caught the segment in the video below on Hardball yesterday. If you don’t want to watch, it’s a discussion among Tweety, Democratic strategist Steve McMahon and Republican strategist Todd Harris. McMahon thinks the Democratic Party should cut the public insurance option from the health care reform package and pass a “compromise” bill without it.

McMahon thinks the health care package won’t pass with the public insurance option but could pass without it. He thinks it’s better for Congress to pass something it can call “health care reform” now rather than have the whole effort defeated because of the public insurance option. We have a window of opportunity to pass a health care reform bill, he says, and if we miss this window and pass nothing there may not be another chance for years.

My thinking is just the opposite. If Congress passes a bill without the public insurance option, it will confirm the darkest beliefs of Americans about government being irrelevant to their lives. I sincerely believe that the rest of the legislation might make some marginal improvements in the system. It might make a tangible difference for a few people. But it would do nothing that will make a big, tangible difference in the lives of most American citizens.

So if they pass this bill without the public insurance option, there will be a big whoop-dee-doo in media about how now everybody’s got health care reform. And the days and weeks and months will go by, and most people won’t notice that anything has changed.

This is, I think, the absolute worst thing that Congress could do. It would be better to let the whole thing be defeated, then go to the American people and say, look, we tried to get you this meaningful reform, but Republicans and Blue Dog Democrats blocked it. And, yeah, that’s a lame excuse. But I think rank and file Dems, and many Independents, are sick to death of these pathetic tweaks that Washington mistakes for accomplishments but which don’t make any real difference in the lives of Americans.

In the long run, whether a bill was passed with bipartisan support or not will mean absolutely nothing. If a bill passes that really does relieve many of our fears of losing our insurance and being dumped out of the health care system altogether, that bill will be very popular. Before long, politicians who didn’t support it will pretend that they did. There’s your bipartisan support.

On the other hand, a “compromise” bill passed with everyone in Congress holding hands and singing “Koom By Ya,” but which does not make a tangible difference in peoples’ lives, won’t mean a bucket of warm spit by the time the next elections roll around.

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