Today House Republicans pulled a bill from the floor that was intended to embarrass Democrats and undermine the Affordable Care Act. Majority Leader Eric Cantor had sponsored the “Helping Sick Americans Now Act,” which —

… would siphon $3.6 billion from the Affordable Care Act’s $10 billion prevention and public health fund, aimed at combating disease and promoting wellness, into an underfunded short-term plan to cover people with preexisting conditions until 2014, when the law will begin to ban insurers from denying coverage based on health status.

But the legislation doesn’t reflect a serious long-term effort to address the problem of sick Americans lacking access to health care or getting thrown off their insurance plan. It would shore up a costly and temporary high-risk pool under Obamacare — called the Pre-Existing Condition Insurance Plan — which expires at the end of 2013. Beyond that, Republicans continue to support repealing the rest of the Affordable Care Act, and lack economically feasible plans to address preexisting conditions.

Note that for years Republicans have promoted the idea of dumping people who need lots of medical care into high-risk insurance pools, so that people in the “normal” pool didn’t have to pay so much for insurance. The Affordable Care Act provided for something like that as a temporary fix until 2014, after which insurers can no longer refuse to insure people with pre-existing conditions. The problem is that the high-risk pools sucked up money the way a black hole sucks up matter, so that plan wasn’t really working. Naturally, that was the plan some Republicans decided to like.

However, other Republicans believed the bill would actually strengthen “Obamacare,” and who cares about sick people anyway? So it was scrapped.

The larger point is that the bill had absolutely no purpose except to give Republicans a bogus talking point to use against the President. Even if the Senate were to pass such a bill, the President would veto it. And then the GOP could say he vetoed a bill to help people with preexisting conditions, never mind that Obamacare actually does help people with preexisting conditions.

In other legislative theater news — Republicans have whined for some time that Democrats have not submitted a budget. Evan Soltas writes for Wonkblog,

For the last two years, congressional Republicans have argued that the real problem in the budget debate is that Democrats have abandoned “regular order.” By regular order, Republicans mean — well, I’ll let Sen. Jeff Sessions, the ranking Republican on the Budget Committee, explain it.

“Secret deals have not worked and are an affront to popular democracy,” he argued in January. “The right process is the regular order. The House produces its budget–as it has–and the Senate passes its budget, all in accordance with the Budget Act of 1974. Under that law, the Senate Budget Committee must approve a budget resolution by April 1st. From there, the law requires the budget to be considered on the Senate floor where it must receive 50 hours of open amendment and debate. A budget cannot be filibustered and is adopted by a simple majority in both committee and the full Senate. Then, once the issues and differences are clarified by this open process, the work of conferencing must begin.”

Soltas writes that “regular order” became a sacred totem among congressional Republicans. Well, until the Senate Democrats passed a budget. Now Republicans want to scuttle “regular order” in favor of backroom deals.

Eugene Robinson writes,

Since the 9/11 attacks, we have demonstrated that when alienated young men who are foreign-born and Muslim kill innocents, we will do anything in our power to keep such atrocities from happening again.

Shamefully, however, we have also shown that when alienated young men who are not foreign-born or Muslim do the same, we are powerless.

Robinson was talking about the failure of the Senate to pass a gun purchase background check law, but it goes further than that. The Texas plant explosion that killed 14 people and injured about 200 is fading from memory even as media are obsessing over every detail of the Boston bomb case. Mike Elk writes,

On Friday, as cable news networks sought desperately to fill airtime while waiting for the latest news in the aftermath of the Boston bombings, a friend asked me, “How come there’s no manhunt for the owner of the Texas factory, which did far more damage than the Boston bombers?” He was right to wonder. …

…After all, while it remains difficult to deduce what may have been the motives of the alleged Boston bombers, it is not so difficult to postulate what was behind the explosion at the West Fertilizer Company’s plant: the failure to follow the science of workplace safety. The plant had 1,350 times the legally allowed amount of highly explosive ammonium nitrate, yet hadn’t informed the Department of Homeland Security of the danger. Likewise, the fertilizer plant did not have sprinklers, shut-off valves, fire alarms or legally required blast walls, all of which could have prevented the catastrophic damage done. And there was little chance regulators would learn about the problems without the company reporting them: Not only had the Occupation Safety and Health Administration not inspected the plant since 1985, but also, due to underfunding, OSHA can only inspect plants like the one in West on average once every 129 years.

One suspects the factory owner is a native Texas white guy, so no, nobody cares. Had he been an immigrant from the Middle East or Latin America, however, he’d be a public enemy now.

Getting back to alienated young men … there does seem to be something that drives some young men to do damnfool things, whether shooting up a movie theater or becoming freelance jihadists. Maybe radical ideology is not the cause of the murderous impulses but just the package the murderous impulses crawl into, to give them some shape. Charles Pierce writes of the younger Tsarnaev,

What are they all going to do if this guy just turns out of be a pathetic, murderous follower of an unhinged older brother? What are they going to do if there’s no “cell,” and if he doesn’t declare his allegiance to jihad in court? What if he is, as he still appears to be, merely Dylan Klebold with a funny name and a pulse? We are supposed to be seeking justice here, not a public blood sacrifice to the gods we’ve made of our fears. What do we do if the truth denies us that?

Truth? Who needs truth?

I had hoped to find something interesting to write about that is entirely removed from the Boston bombers, but have not succeeded. Michael Tomasky has a must-read piece on the conservative reaction —

As usual, conservatives are rushing to judgment, shredding the Constitution, using the bombing as an pretext for derailing immigration reform, and generally seeking any excuse to reimpose their paranoid and authoritarian worldview, which needs fear like a vampire needs blood, on the rest of us.

That’s scared, so let’s go on to stupid. Power Tool John Hinderacker provides a textbook example of bigotry as a strategy for conserving cognitive resources. He ridicules speculation about the Tsarnaev brothers’ possible motives. All you need to know, he says, is that they were eeeeeevil and Muslim. As if slapping a label on someone is the same thing as understanding. (Clue, Tool. It isn’t.)

But fear does love ignorance, so I can understand why the Tool is eager to short-circuit attempts at knowledge. And fear is what it is all about.

Conor Friedersdorf ties together our themes of scared and stupid by reminding us that war-on-terror hawks have no credibility.

The self-assurance of War on Terror hawks is one of the most peculiar phenomena in our politics. You’d think that the failure to foresee or stop the biggest terrorist attack ever carried out on U.S. soil would’ve caused guys like Dick Cheney to question their own geopolitical prescience. Instead, they immediately began urging the invasion of Iraq they’d long desired, insisting it was necessary to keep Americans safe. They got their war. As efforts to “keep us safe” go, it was a spectacular failure: Almost 4,500 Americans died in Iraq. More than 30,000 were wounded. Despite deaths and casualties far greater than on 9/11, the hawks insist to this day that Iraq was a prudent war. They’re ideologues who can’t see or won’t admit failures, facts be damned.

Don’t forget that.

In the wake of the Boston Marathon, the War on Terror hawks are speaking out with characteristic bluster. An uninformed observer might easily mistake their certainty for wisdom or competence. There is, in fact, no reason to trust their judgment on foreign policy or counterterrorism. Their dearth of self-doubt should be unnerving, not reassuring. And most Americans will recognize as much, so long as they’re reminded of the catastrophic policies the hawks unapologetically advocated, the many times their predictions have proven wrong, and the logical flaws in the arguments that they’ve been making in response to last week’s terrorist attack.

Be grateful we don’t have a Republican president, or we’d have declared war on somebody entirely unrelated to the Tsarnaev brothers by now.

I’ve hardly watched television at all this past week, figuring it would be all Tsarnaevs all the time, bobbleheads frantically filling air time with interviews of the brothers’ cousin’s dog walker and what not. The British tabloid The Mirror is pushing a “sleeper cell” story that doesn’t appear to hold water. There’s also a story floating around that the older brother was killed by the younger one, not by cops. Maybe in a few weeks or months we’ll have a clear idea of what happened. Maybe. In the meantime, I’m not watching this.

Live news coverage of people standing around on the streets of Watertown, pre-empting Grimm. Bummer.

The news stories are saying the likely Boston bombers are/were Chechen brothers (one has been killed). One story says they are ethnic Chechens who lived in Turkey before coming here. The younger one (the one still at large, age 20, give or take) appears to have been in the U.S. for a while.

This means it’s likely they are Sunni Muslims, although giving the mess in Chechnya it may be their motivations, whatever they were, were more political than religious.

Update: See Gawker headline that delicately suggests the New York Post‘s coverage of the bombings has fallen short of professional standards.

In the last post I said I wanted to see the Senate gun bill vote calculated by number of people represented. Well, Jonathan Cohn and Eric Kingsbury have worked it out —

If you assume, for sake of argument, each senator represents half of his or her state’s population, then senators voting for the bill represented about 194 million people, while the senators voting against the bill represented about 118 million people. That’s getting close to a two-thirds majority in favor of the measure.

And this is why we can’t have nice things. Ian Millhiser and Adam Peck write,

… a voter in Wyoming enjoys 66 times as much representation in the Senate as a voter in California.

As the least populous state, Wyoming makes out like bandits when it comes to Senate representation, but they are far from alone in enjoying such a windfall. A voter in Idaho (population 1,595,728) counts as almost 24 Californians. A voter in Nebraska (population 1,845,525) counts as nearly 21 Californians. And a voter in North Dakota (population 699,628) counts as more than 54 Californians. Indeed, if you add up the combined populations of Wyoming, North Dakota, Alaska, Idaho, Nebraska, Utah, Kansas, Arkansas, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Kentucky, South Carolina, and Alabama, that still adds up to over 3 million fewer people than live in the state of California. That also adds up to 26 senators, all of whom opposed background checks.

As I recall, the original idea was that senators represent states, not people. But, functionally, I don’t think that’s been true for a long time. This imbalance in representation is doing serious harm to the nation in many ways beside leaving us more vulnerable to gun violence. Although rural citizens may flatter themselves as being the “real Americans,” it’s urban areas that drive the nation’s economy, not to mention culture and the innovations that will keep us from sliding into Third World territory. Increasingly, it feels to me that the more conservative parts of the country are just so much dead weight.

The best analysis I’ve seen so far about why the gun control vote failed is Ezra Klein’s —

The gun vote failed because of the way the Senate is designed. It failed because the Senate wildly overrepresents small, rural states and, on top of that, requires a 60-vote supermajority to pass most pieces of legislation.

The Manchin-Toomey bill received 54 aye votes and 46 nay votes. That is to say, a solid majority of senators voted for it. In most legislative bodies around the world, that would have been enough. But it wasn’t a sufficient supermajority for the U.S. Senate.

Of the senators from the 25 largest states, the Manchin-Toomey legislation received 33 aye votes and 17 nay votes — a more than 2:1 margin, putting it well beyond the 3/5ths threshold required to break a filibuster. But of the senators from the 25 smallest states, it received only 21 aye votes and 29 nay votes.

I’d like to see this broken down by population — the senators representing X million defeated the senators representing xxx million people. Whatever the numbers, what it tells us is that the legislative branch of the federal government has become utterly dysfunctional and unresponsive to the will of the people.

And it isn’t just the gun bill; it’s everything. It’s appointments to federal agencies and the bench. It’s the future of entitlement programs, and health care, and stimulus spending. Etc., etc. If this can’t be changed, then I see nothing ahead for the U.S. but long, slow (or not so slow) decline.

Professor Krugman made my day by confessing to be a Ulysses Grant admirer. Someday we Grantistas should come out of the woodwork and have a convention.

More important, maybe — there was a study released in 2010 about how government debt caused unemployment, as I understand it. This study, called Reinhart/Rogoff after its authors, was seized upon by conservatives to bolster their argument that the “debt crisis” is our primary economic problem, calling for strict austerity. This study has been enormously influential, apparently. Well, turns out the study is bogus. Krugman writes,

According to the review paper, R-R mysteriously excluded data on some high-debt countries with decent growth immediately after World War II, which would have greatly weakened their result; they used an eccentric weighting scheme in which a single year of bad growth in one high-debt country counts as much as multiple years of good growth in another high-debt country; and they dropped a whole bunch of additional data through a simple coding error.

Fix all that, say Herndon et al., and the result apparently melts away.

Further, the response from R and R to the criticism has been really stupid.

There also appear to be issues with bad Excel coding. See, again, Krugman, and also Rortybomb.

It’s been a whole day since the Boston bombing. The Murdoch/tabloid press is still flogging the story that a Saudi national is behind the bombing, and the usual idiots among rightie bloggers have even posted photographs of a person they say is the bomber. Official sources are not saying any such thing.

My Hero of the Day is a fellow who bought the domain name bostonmarathonconspiracy.com just so the whackjobs couldn’t use it. Thank you, sir.

He said,

Sadly, one of my first thoughts was that it would only be a matter of hours before a certain group of people would begin to say it was a government conspiracy; an act of terror on our own people for political gain. It’s sickening, but take a look at the massive numbers of 9/11 conspiracy nuts…people who think Bush and the gang took down the twin towers and ended the lives of nearly 3000 people so we could go to war. The heartless and sick Sandy Hook conspiracy theorists who think the Obama administration killed kindergartners to bolster the gun control debate. And there are plenty of others. Well, I was wrong. It didn’t take hours…it took minutes.

I wrote some more about the bombing at the other blog.