Tag Archives: Republicans

GOP vs. Health insurance lobby? Good luck.

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Health-and-Human-ServicesSo now that 2 million Americans are about to be getting private health insurance under the auspices of the Affordable Care Act private plan exchange of next week — with another couple million already getting covered through their parents’ plans — anti-ACA Republicans in Congress are hitting up against the very hard, cold reality that the “repeal” of the law (which wouldn’t be possible for at least another three years) would suddenly take away a lot of people’s insurance coverage. And that would make people super mad at Republicans.

While some Republicans still won’t go quietly into the night, whether due to dogmatic delusion or excessive pandering, the result of this realization is largely another round of trying to say that there’s still a way to repeal-and-replace the legislation, leaving the “good” parts (and the now-immovable exchange) while abandoning the “bad” parts.

These “good” parts are the extremely popular sections of the “Patient Protection” side of the law, which do things like compel insurance companies to cover people with pre-existing conditions and not drop chronically ill patients or cap their coverage, etc. etc. The “bad” parts seem to have been reduced down to the individual purchase mandate (and I guess probably some lesser things like the popular but more controversial contraception coverage requirements).

The one good thing about the crushing strength of the American private health insurance industry’s Washington lobby is that they will never allow through these idiotic Republican proposals to replace the Affordable Care Act. That lobby understands two key truths:
1. this law benefits their industry as currently written by providing lots of healthy new customers and,
2. the replacement proposals keep the most popular but most expensive parts in place, while stripping out the money-making purchase mandate that makes it financially feasible to keep the costly parts going.

The law is — and always has been — a big giveaway to the private health insurance companies. The Republican proposals to “fix” it would take that part away and make it financially unsustainable for the insurance firms (edit: as has already been demonstrated in U.S. overseas territories that lack the mandate).

Those firms benefiting from this law donate a lot of political money. If you’re a Republican in Congress right now, you don’t want to get into a political gunfight with the health insurance lobby, unless you’re a self-funding candidate.

Even the tea party wing is still dependent upon big business. They can’t afford to cross private health insurers at the moment. Plus, what kind of terrible, socialistic legislation would that be, to force private companies to provide many expensive services without subsidies, while taking away their revenue? No good tea partier in Congress worth his or her salt could vote for that.

NH State Rep: Scott Brown *is* Tyranny

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Francis-SmithA state legislator to the north of former Senator Brown’s former state believes that Scott Brown is tyranny incarnate and that a second American Revolution may be necessary to halt his evil, semi-moderate ways (i.e. his support for an assault-weapons ban).

Or at least a lot of standing around shouting about Scott Brown, while waving guns and ammunition, may be necessary. Followed by an armed insurrection against the dictatorship that is a social policy agenda fifty plus years behind every other advanced economy.

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Is Thailand facing tea party-style obstruction?

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To expand further upon my much longer essay on recent protests in Thailand and Ukraine, Thailand needs to get itself together. This is such a mess. In sum: One party coalition (TRT or PPP) has won every democratic election since 2001, the first after its creation. The main opposition party has lost every election since 1992. Instead of figuring out how to broaden their appeal and campaign in new areas of the country, that party is throwing yet another tantrum in the streets and literally demanding the ruling party leadership leave the country (to join the members they have already forced out previously).

Instead of changing their electoral approach to try to win for a change, they are simply saying that voters have been duped. And now that early elections have been called, they are still protesting because of course they realize they’re going to lose yet another election. Sore-loserism like this is not a good look and it’s bad for democracy.

Because of the deep affection that the governing party has in the north and northeast of the country, scholars say, it would be very difficult for the Democrat Party to reverse its two-decade losing streak in national elections. In the last elections, held in July 2011, the governing party received 15.7 million votes, compared with 11.4 million for the Democrats.

Mr. Suthep, the protest leader, said that low-income Thais, many of whom support Mr. Thaksin, “had been completely fooled for 10 years.”

Although the opposition has repeatedly said that Mr. Thaksin has maintained his power by buying votes, two of Thailand’s leading political researchers wrote in an article last week that the allegation was “dangerous nonsense” because it was policies, not vote buying, that had cemented the loyalty of many voters in the provinces to Mr. Thaksin. Mr. Thaksin instituted universal health care and microloans to farmers that were very popular among rural voters.

Yes, it’s quite shocking that voters might vote with a party that speaks to their needs and provides key programs to support them in their hour of need … and against a party that serves much narrower interests from a different region and which has supported a military coup against their preferred party (after boycotting an election no less). Voters “must” be sheep simply because they have a different ideological position!

Of course whenever the Thai opposition has been brought to power by non-electoral means, such as the military coup or the banning of the first iteration of the ruling party, they have been driven out again by voters at the very next election. Why? Because even when given the opportunity to enact policy on which to campaign, they have failed to sway the majority.

It brings to mind the recent attitude of U.S. Republicans (particularly those aligned with the tea party types) who are increasingly restricted to a single geographic region and find themselves unable to win back full control of the government. Their response has been to try to shut down the government and block any policymaking whatsoever. The Republican base consistently also expresses aloud the same view as Thai opposition leaders — that the voters are only voting for the majority party because they’ve been hoodwinked and paid for.

Listen to the echoes from Thailand:

“I understand that democracy means being governed by a majority,” said Chaiwat Chairoongrueng, a 36-year-old civil servant protesting last week. “But you cannot use the majority to rule over everything.”

Protesters did little to hide their sense of superiority, echoing the leaders of the demonstration who repeatedly described the demonstrators as “good people” fighting evil.

“We are the middle class, we are educated and we know best,” said Saowanee Usanakornkul, 43, from southern Thailand who took part in the protest. “We know what is right and wrong,” she said. “But the poor don’t know anything. They elect the people who give them money.”

Rather than developing an alternative policy program that will achieve similar goals — which they may not in fact be interested in achieving anyway — upon which they could campaign, they have chosen to blame the voters, throw a tantrum, and bring everything to a screeching halt.

That’s not how a functioning democracy works. If you lose repeatedly at the ballot box (in free elections!), you’re doing something wrong. So you change course and find new ways to appeal to voters and target new groups of voters. You don’t boycott, you don’t throw tantrums, you don’t take to the streets, you don’t shut the government down, and you don’t overthrow the government.

Senate Republican protest is counterproductive

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The Senate Republican response to the Senate rules change is that they will all join together to slow everything down to a crawl, to punish Democrats for the reforms. New York Times:

The Senate slowly began working its way through a backlog of presidential nominees on Tuesday now that Republicans are virtually powerless to block confirmations, approving a once-stalled judge to a powerful appeals court and a new director for the agency that oversees federal home lending.

But Republicans, still seething over a power play last month by Democrats to curtail the filibuster significantly, have settled on a strategy for retribution: make the confirmation process as time-consuming and procedurally painful as possible for Democrats.

“There’s a price that has to be paid when people abuse the rules,” said Senator Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah. “And let’s face it. These guys have completely obliterated the rules.”

Setting aside the irony of Senate Republicans saying the rules are being abused — and setting aside my view that it’s probably barely possible at this point to make it go any slower than it was — let’s accept the premise for the sake of debate. My question: do they really think this is going to be a persuasive argument to American voters, to convince them that the rules change was the wrong move?

U.S. voters, broadly speaking, love bold, fast action from government if it’s going to act at all. Senate Democrats saw a logjam, got fed up with it, and finally broke it. Republicans think forming a new one will win them voters. How? It’s just going to make Senate Democrats and voters even more likely to support changing even more of the Senate’s rules.

Slowing down operations to punish the majority for trying to speed up operations is only going to harden the majority’s determination to expand efforts to speed things up. Many Senate Dems are still skeptical of further changes and held out as long as possible against this limited reform. I’m sure a lot of them wouldn’t go along with more changes if they believed it had resolved the problem.

Being conciliatory and cooperative, instead of belligerent, makes way more sense as a long-term strategy to persuade people to stop taking options away from you. If you think everyone has characterized you incorrectly, you don’t go trying to prove them right by doing the thing they accuse you of, as a means of responding. That’s just poor strategy.

On the upside, Democrats aren’t taking the new abuses of the rules lying down:

“It’s retaliatory,” said Senator Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa. “It’s revenge,” he added, noting that Democrats had a way of making things unpleasant themselves: by forcing Republicans to be physically present on the Senate floor while they draw things out.

“They’re going to have to keep speaking for four hours or eight hours at a time,” Mr. Harkin said. “And I don’t think they’ll have the stomach to do that on Fridays and Saturdays.”

How to Talk to Voters (Badly)

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TPM Livewire today:

Iowa Republican Senate candidate Mark Jacobs said the best way to connect with women is on an “emotional level.”

Jacobs made the comments during an interview with Iowa’s WHO-TV in Des Moines on Sunday.

“I think you have to connect with women on an emotional level,” Jacobs said. “And with a wife of 25 years and an 18-year-old daughter, I’ve had a lot of coaching on that.”

Because if we know anything at all about American politics, it’s that our male voters are uniformly stone-cold machines of hyper-rational logic who totally don’t freak out over any perceived threat to their status in the social, economic, and gender hierarchies, resulting in their surrender to factually incorrect emotional appeals and poorly conceived policy ideas.

In contrast, who can understand the mystery of women voting exactly in line with their financial, health, safety, and bodily autonomy interests time and again? Must be an emotional decision.

*eyeroll*

Republican Confusion on Mandela

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Most of the world has united to mourn the passing of South Africa’s former president and anti-apartheid leader, Nelson Mandela. Global opinion is pretty consistently sure about how to come down on this one person’s legacy, and that’s favorably.

But one pocket of confusion remains. Lots of Republicans right now seem to be unsure whether to praise Nelson Mandela or call him a commie terrorist. On that latter point, I was shocked to see former Speaker Newt Gingrich not only praising Mandela but actually on CNN defending his ties to communist activists (who were partners in the fight against apartheid when the U.S. was too busy calling the regime a Cold War ally). In general, regardless of many of their past views, GOP leaders have been saying the right things, even if their base is furious about it.

I guess Mandela was always confusing for Republicans. If you’re a Republican, there have always been two schools of thought. You could go with the Republican Senators in 1986 who voted in favor of sanctions on the apartheid government. Or you could go with the Republican intellectuals and Saint Reagan who not only vetoed the sanctions (which was overridden by the Republican Senate majority and Democratic House) but recruited the South African Foreign Minister from the all-white Nationalist government to call U.S. Senators to urge them not to override his veto.

I can’t even fathom what would make Reagan think that idea was a brilliant plan. I suspect we would be seeing impeachment proceedings under way if the U.S. President right now tried to enlist (for comparison) Iran’s foreign minister to make personal calls to members of Congress on not raising nuclear sanctions. It would nonsensical at minimum.

One almost wonders if Reagan thought “South Africa” was a vital part of the “Southern Strategy.” Appeal to one bunch of racist institutional segregationists as defenders-of-freedom, might as well appeal to them everywhere?

Don’t miss, by the way, that great time capsule of a New York Times article from October 1986 (also linked above). Tells you a lot about what specifically was going on at the time of the veto override, the surrounding Cold War politics that warped our policies toward so many regimes, and Reagan’s very bad decision-making on this issue. And it also has some great quotations from past and present Senate bigwigs, like then-freshman Senator Mitch McConnell from Kentucky, who is now the Republican Minority Leader.

 

In any case, it’s certainly quite “curious” how Republican internet commenters are always ready to complain when anyone seeks to introduce nuance to discussion of famous white historical figures and leaders, who held problematic views in addition to some of their better positions/records for which we hail them today. And yet as soon as the discussion turns to someone like Nelson Mandela (or Barack Obama, particularly during both presidential campaigns), these same commenters are eager to make sure “the truth” about these figures — past associations or problematic views — is brought to light and even emphasized against the good.

The reality is that most historical figures are indeed complex figures, and they often make mistakes or hang out with the “wrong” people at some point in their lives. But it’s absurd and racist to try to hold everyone to a standard where White figures are revered and can’t be discussed accurately, while Black figures must be torn down and cannot be celebrated for even a moment without complaints.

Obamacarthyism

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Even people at AEI (a prominent conservative think tank) think the total rage is a bit out of control:

“I’ve not seen anything like this before,” said Norm Ornstein, a congressional scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. “It is just such an interesting phenomenon — call it anthropological or sociological or pathological. An obsessive hatred with all things Obamacare that has infected everybody on the Republican side. They can’t say anything positive about any element of a law that is based on their own fundamental ideas. It means that when anybody says something that could in any way be construed as positive regarding Obamacare it becomes fodder for attacks. … Conservatives are eating their own.”

In a way, the phenomenon is reminiscent of McCarthyism, named after Sen. Joe McCarthy, who in the 1950s accused U.S. government officials and others of secretly sympathizing with communism. But Obamacare McCarthyism takes that to a new level, Ornstein argued.

“Even then it was pretty clear that you had a lot of Republicans — it was very clear that President [Dwight D.] Eisenhower viewed what McCarthy was doing as appalling,” he said. “We call it McCarthyism when you’re basically slimed for something you said or did. But even that was different because you had a party that was divided — not on the issue of communism, but on whether it was fair to [attack people as communist sympathizers].”

Ornstein summed it up this way: “These are the talking points and if you don’t apply them, then you’re a traitor.” He confessed that he’s “never seen anything like that before. I mean, you can certainly find party litmus tests,” he said, mentioning support for abortion rights and opposition to the Vietnam war for Democrats in the 1970s. “But this has been taken to a level that I think is almost bizarre.”

 
You can hear my own — fairly extensive — thoughts on this topic in Episode 62 – Role of Government.