ThinkProgress Logo

Politics

Rep. Rohrabacher Suggests White People Will ‘Lose Our Freedom’ If The DREAM Act Passes

By Alex Seitz-Wald on Dec 10, 2010 at 6:50 pm

In their efforts to bring down the DREAM Act, which would give children of undocumented immigrants who complete college or volunteer for the military a path to citizenship, conservatives have been smearing the bill as “backdoor amnesty” for undocumented immigrants and claiming it creates a loophole for terrorists. Unfortunately, many of their attacks have also taken on racial undertones. Yesterday, Fox News host Glenn Beck told a caller on his radio show that the bill would disenfranchise white people, saying, “if you’re white or you’re an American citizen or a white American citizen, you’re pretty much toast.” Beck suggested his caller steal a Mexican ID card in to receive the supposedly preferential treatment minorities will receive under DREAM.

While clearly bigoted, Beck’s comments appeared to have the joking tone of a self-described “rodeo clown.” But Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) was not joking when he took to the House floor Wednesday to warn that voting for “the Affirmative Action Amnesty Act,” as he dubbed DREAM, will “relegate the position of non-minority American citizens to behind those who are now in this country illegally.”

Appearing on Radio America with Greg Corombus yesterday, Rohrabacher expanded on the dangers to white people of DREAM, explaining that the “real zinger” is that it puts minorities “ahead of every American child who’s not a minority.” “[T]hey can get into college before our kids,” Rohrabacher said on behalf of white people everywhere, warning ominously at the end of the interview that “if Americans aren’t alerted to this, we’re going to lose our freedom”:

ROHRABACHER: And one thing that people don’t talk, and this is the real zinger. … So they go to college, they finish, they get their legal status. Well, if that person happens to be a minority, which many, as we know, illegal aliens are Hispanic in background and other minorities, they then are immediately eligible to all the preferences we have written into our laws.

So we’re not only putting them in the line, so to speak, but we’re putting them ahead of every American child who’s not a minority. You put them at the front of the line for government education program, for jobs, for all the other preferences that we’ve written into our law. This is outrageous! Not only are we paying them money, that should be going to our kids education, but we’re making it so they can get accepted to college before our kids can get into. [...]

Please alert the people, if Americans aren’t alerted to this, we’re going to lose our freedom and we know it’s in jeopardy right now.

Listen here:

Of course, the DREAM Act is not amnesty, nor is it affirmative action, and it is certainly not a measure to oppress white people. The bill extends conditional legal status for five years to young people who are upstanding citizens and in this country illegally by not fault of their own. It will also help enforce immigration laws, reduce the deficit, and strengthen the military, but that doesn’t seem to matter to Rohrabacher or Beck.

Health

CEOs Receiving Gold-Plated Health Packages As Most Workers Struggle With Rising Premiums

By Igor Volsky on Dec 10, 2010 at 6:30 pm

From Gary Strauss at USA Today comes this quite shocking story about how some employers are preserving gold-plated health insurance plans for top CEOs just as millions of workers “face rising health insurance costs and dwindling benefits“:

Though millions of workers face rising health insurance costs and dwindling benefits in 2011, many CEOs will retain employer-paid medical plans and health benefits worth thousands of dollars.

Hundreds of top corporate managers get medical benefits and supplemental coverage far beyond what’s offered to rank-and-file employees. Benefits include “executive” physicals and reimbursements for out-of-pocket costs, deductibles and co-payments, according to corporate filings.

As one source told Strauss, “[t]he great hypocrisy is this is going to the people best able to pay for this stuff.” “Executives should pay for this on their own or be covered by the same plan as everyone else at the company,” Nell Minow of The Corporate Library said. Fortunately, the Affordable Care Act would do just that, prohibiting employers that provide health coverage from limiting eligibility for coverage to highly compensated individuals. (Sec. 2716 of the law or pages 38-39 in this version.) Group plans will not be able to limit eligibility to highly compensated individuals or discriminate through the benefits offered.

All of these bloated packages and perks only increase health care costs and by 2018 they will face the new excise tax and will likely be far less numerous. But for now, companies seem content on offering the policies while most of the workforce is struggling with risking costs.

Yglesias

Hate to Say I Told You So

By Matthew Yglesias on Dec 10, 2010 at 5:41 pm

Jamelle Bouie calls the Democrats’ handling of the “nuclear option” debate in 2005 “the strategic mistake of the decade”, observing “I’m sure there are plenty of Senate Democrats who look back and wish that they would have let Frist go nuclear.”

Since this is something I managed to be right about at the time, it’s worth rehashing the issue in some detail.

For one thing, note that what the Republicans were actually trying to do at the time was nuts. They wanted to use Calvinball mid-session methods to establish a new rule holding that supermajority voting would be used for everything except judicial nominations. That’s a bit odd. If you were designing a legislature from scratch, I’d say that judicial confirmations are, along with constitutional amendments, one of the relatively few areas where it might make sense to require a supermajority. So it was perfectly fine that Democrats didn’t want to simply “give in” on the point.

But this would have been a natural time to propose a broader reform of congressional procedure. It’s possible that doing so would have produced broad congressional reform. It’s also possible that doing so would have led the GOP to defend the status quo, and let Democrats continue obstructing the nominees in question. But instead the “gang of 12″ got us the worst of both worlds—Bush’s nominees were put on the bench (bad) but the “principle” of minority obstructionism was upheld. It was a disaster and the disastrous nature of the deal was foreseeable at the time.

Security

Outgoing Sen. Bennett Says Some Republicans Would Like To Introduce The DREAM Act Next Year

By Andrea Nill Sanchez on Dec 10, 2010 at 5:20 pm

Yesterday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) pushed a vote to postpone consideration of the DREAM Act, giving the Senate a chance to take up the House version of the bill next week and hopefully pick up a few Republican votes in the meantime. Without the support of at least a handful of Republicans, the DREAM Act doesn’t stand a chance. Sen. Bob Bennett (R-UT) is one Republican who has supported the DREAM Act in the past and has indicated he will continue to do so up until the end of the lame duck session when he will leave the Senate after being stripped of his party’s nomination earlier this year.

In his final conference call with Utah reporters today, Bennett suggested that not all hope is lost if the DREAM Act doesn’t make it to President Obama’s desk at the end of the year. According to Bennett, at least some Republicans are talking about proposing a modified DREAM Act themselves “early” next year:

I know a lot of my colleagues are not happy to vote for it and I don’t think the votes are there to pass it in this Congress. As I talk particularly to my Republican friends, I’ve said, “we really need to do this.”

Their reaction has been to me privately, “You’re right. we do really need to do it. We don’t like the specifics of the bill that’s come out of the House. [...] But we agree that once the Republicans control the House, the Republicans have the responsibility to write a bill that we would vote and send it over and we — at least the Republican senators I’ve talked to — we think if we get a DREAM Act worded the way we like, we would vote for it and we want to do it early next year.”

It’s my hope, I don’t expect it, but it’s my hope that we can do it this year. If we can’t, it’s my hope — perhaps a little bit stronger — that we can take care of it next year.

Listen:

If what Bennett says is true, the logic behind the Republican thought process doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Several Republicans have voted in favor of the DREAM Act in the past but have turned their backs on it this year — regardless of the fact that the wording has been pretty consistent for several years. (Actually, Reid introduced an even more conservative bill last week that addressed Republican concerns).

GOP opposition to the DREAM Act doesn’t seem to be about wording. My suspicion is that it’s driven by a few concurrent motivations. First of all, most Republican obstruction has more to do with a commitment to blocking anything that’s perceived as being part of the “Obama agenda” — even if it was supported in the past. Secondly, many conservatives are facing nativist pressure at home and are being pulled by right-wing factions of the Republican party.

Lastly, even if a few Republicans reach across the aisle and help pass the DREAM Act in 2010, it will be a victory for the Democrats in terms of the Latino vote. In fact, I suspect that’s a big reason why Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) dragged his feet on immigration reform all year until he completely flip-flopped on the issue this past summer. If this is the case, it makes sense that GOP senators who supported the DREAM Act under a Republican President would feel more comfortable about a bill coming from a House controlled by their own party.

However, the problem is it probably won’t. With Reps. Lamar Smith (R-TX) and Steve King (R-IA) in control of the House Judiciary Committee and Immigration Subcommittee — where any immigration bill would have to start — it’s hard to imagine any legislation that even resembles the DREAM Act starting in the House within the foreseeable future.

In the meantime, Bennett’s colleagues don’t seem to realize how much damage they’re doing to the party by not following his lead in the upcoming vote. Republicans won’t just go down in history for blocking the Obama agenda. They’ll also be remembered for obstructing the dreams of millions undocumented immigrants — something which the Latino community will not soon forget.

Politics

Author Of Arizona’s SB-1070 Law Will Introduce More Immigration Bills To ‘Ratchet Up’ Pressure

By Scott Keyes on Dec 10, 2010 at 5:15 pm

On Wednesday, Arizona state senator Russell Pearce (R), who authored his state’s controversial immigration bill SB-1070, was in Washington D.C. to attend a Supreme Court case challenging Arizona’s law that compels employers to participate in an employment verification system. After the hearing, ThinkProgress caught up with the state senator to see what his plans were for next year. Pearce told us that he plans to introduce more bills in Arizona’s next legislative session that will go even further than SB-1070. “Until the problem is solved,” Pearce declared, he will do “whatever it takes.” When asked to clarify, Pearce told ThinkProgress, “we’re going to go as far as we can to enforce the law”:

TP: In terms of the next legislative session though, for instance, would you like to see more bills introduced that would maybe go further than SB-1070?

PEARCE: Of course I would! Until the problem is solved. You know, I don’t know what illegal means to some folks. Arizona didn’t make illegal illegal. It was actually already illegal. And illegal is not a race, it’s a crime. We’re going to enforce the law. Whatever it takes, we’re going to ratchet up until the laws are complied with. The purpose for law is compliance. I’d just as soon not arrest anybody, but I’m going to go as far as I have to to get compliance.

TP: So you think you’ll probably be introducing more bills next session?

PEARCE: I suspect there will be some tweaks to make sure there’s no free stuff, they can’t take advantage of our system, the laws are totally enforced, there’s accountability in our educational system. We’re going to go as far as we can go to enforce the law, protect the Arizona taxpayer, and protect the Arizona citizen.

Watch it:

Meanwhile, Republicans in a host of other states are looking to copycat Arizona’s SB-1070 law, including Tennessee, Texas, California, and Florida.

Alyssa

Cryptonomicon Book Club, Part I: The Plausibility of Satire

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Dec 10, 2010 at 4:58 pm

Welcome to the first installment of the Cryptonomicon book club! I’m thrilled to be discussing this novel with you. The usual rules apply: the post and discussion below the jump will contain spoilers up to, but not beyond, the section entitled “Nightmares.” Please don’t spoil beyond that for your fellow readers, or for that matter, me!

There are a lot of things I like about this novel so far—the sense of history converging on a moment and on a group of people, the gentle treatment of Alan Turing, the virtuosic, Aspergerian description of the Pearl Harbor attack which captures the disorientation of that moment better than any account than I’ve ever read, the various ways masculinity are working in the book so far. And I’m sure I’ll write about all of those things at some point. But I think the thing that’s striking me most strongly about Cryptonomicon so far is how effective the satire is.

Let me back up for a moment. When I went through my big discovery of Don DeLillo a while back, I tore through Underworld and Libra, and then got to White Noise and hated it. I thought it was just too broad, too nonsensical. I got where DeLillo was going with the absurd academic department, the absurd panic. But the strokes were too broad to reveal any additional truth about the things DeLillo wanted to make fun of. I tend to feel the same way about much of Christopher Buckley’s writing: there’s a contempt and broadness in his look at politics that ignores the fact that there are emotional realities attached to institutions and events.

But I think one of the things Stephenson is doing beautifully in the book so far is keeping that emotional core at the center of his exaggerations, his overly-saturated scenes. For example, Charlene’s research into beards and privilege is exactly the kind of thing that DeLillo does with Hitler Studies in White Noise. But in that novel, where the concept stands on its own as something that DeLillo seems sort of proud of himself for inventing because of its cleverness, there’s a point to Charlene’s absurdity:

Randy does not want to move to the East Coast. Worse yet, he has a full beard, which makes him feel dreadfully incorrect whenever he ventures out with her. He proposed to Charlene that perhaps he should issue a press release stating that he shaves the rest of his body every day. She did not think it was very funny. He realized, when he was halfway over the Pacific Ocean, that all of her work was basically an elaborate prophecy of the doom of their relationship.

That injection of intense melancholy, the end-stage of a relationship where you don’t love each other any more and maybe even are beginning to hate each other but can’t imagine the process of separation, makes the satire meaningful. Charlene is doing something ridiculous not just because academia is ridiculous, but because she can’t find a rational way to break up with Randy, to signal her disgust, the difference between them. It’s genuinely meaningful.

Alan’s sexual propositioning of Lawrence works the same way:

One day a couple of weeks later, as the two of them sat by a running stream in the woods above the Delaware Water Gap, Alan made some kind of an outlandish proposal to Lawrence involving penises. It required a great deal of methodical explanation, which Alan delivered with lots of blushing and stuttering. He was ever so polite, and several times emphasized that he was acutely aware that not everyone in the world was interested in this sort of thing.

Lawrence decided he was probably one of those people.

Alan seemed vastly impressed that Lawrence had paused to think about it at all and apologized for putting him out. They went directly back to a discussion of computing machines, and their friendship continued unchanged.

This is gentler, without the real sniping at academia, but it’s a light satire of social mores and Lawrence as well. But ultimately the message is that Lawrence, because of his lack of experience and social skills, actually behaves in a more compassionate, progressive way that other people Alan has encountered. It’s a satire on past attitudes more than the people involved.

I think it’s easy in a book of this scope for the humanity of the main characters to shift out of the focus, or to fall out of the picture in a meaningful way. But for all that it’s a book about war, and code, and science, it seems that this is fundamentally a novel about understanding.

Health

Why Sarah Palin Is Still Wrong About ‘Death Panels’

By Igor Volsky on Dec 10, 2010 at 4:40 pm

It’s worth considering Sarah Palin’s new claim that the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB) — one of the few cost control mechanisms in the Affordable Care Act — will lead to “death panel”-like rationing, if only to bury it once and for all for the absurdity that it is. First, look at how Palin described the IPAB in today’s Wall Street Journal editorial:

[The deficit commission] also implicitly endorses the use of “death panel”-like rationing by way of the new Independent Payments Advisory Board—making bureaucrats, not medical professionals, the ultimate arbiters of what types of treatment will (and especially will not) be reimbursed under Medicare.

In actuality, the board is something different. Beginning in 2014 the 15-member board that will offer Congress a comprehensive proposal to reduce excess cost growth in Medicare. As Section 3403 (page 409) of the law stipulates, the proposal cannot “include any recommendation to ration health care, raise revenues or Medicare beneficiary premiums…increase Medicare beneficiary cost- sharing (including deductibles, coinsurance, and co- payments), or otherwise restrict benefits or modify eligibility criteria.” When Medicare costs are projected to be unsustainable, the proposal will take effect unless Congress passes an alternative measure that achieves the same level of savings. The deficit commission expands IPAB by allowing it to “make recommendations for cost-sharing and benefit design and to look beyond Medicare.”

But what’s ironic about Palin’s claim is that she makes it in the course of endorsing Rep. Paul Ryan’s ‘Roadmap’. By Palin’s standards, that proposal would have a far more significant effect on denying seniors access to care than anything in the health law. Briefly, under the Roadmap individuals who are age 65 or older in 2020 would continue in the current Medicare program, while those who will become eligible for Medicare after 2020 would be given a voucher with which to purchase private health insurance. Here is how the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) describes the consequences of that policy (pg. 10):

Under the Roadmap, the value of the voucher would be less than expected Medicare spending per enrollee in 2021, when the voucher program would begin. In addition, Medicare’s current payment rates for providers are lower than those paid by commercial insurers, and the program’s administrative costs are lower than those for individually purchased insurance. Beneficiaries would therefore face higher premiums in the private market for a package of benefits similar to that currently provided by Medicare. Moreover, the value of the voucher would grow significantly more slowly than CBO expects that Medicare spending per enrollee would grow under current law. Beneficiaries would therefore be likely to purchase less comprehensive health plans or plans more heavily managed than traditional Medicare, resulting in some combination of less use of health care services and less use of technologically advanced treatments than under current law. Beneficiaries would also bear the financial risk for the cost of buying insurance policies or the cost of obtaining health care services beyond what would be covered by their insurance.

Politics

Kasich: ‘I Don’t Favor The Right To Strike Of Any Public Employee’

By Tanya Somanader on Dec 10, 2010 at 4:10 pm

After securing electoral victory this November, Ohio Gov.-elect John Kasich quickly cast off many campaign-friendly principles to suit his preferred governing style. But his penchant for power consolidation took a remarkable turn yesterday when he unveiled his “personal philosophy” of contempt for worker’s rights at a press conference. Incensed over police and firefighter unions’ ability to call in a neutral arbiter to resolve any labor disputes, Kasich told the Youngstown Vindicator’s Marc Kovak that he’d love to eliminate that policy, known as binding arbitration, and fire any police or firefighter who wants to strike:

KASICH: You think these local governments want to be stuck with binding arbitration? I’m serious…Our local governments don’t want that, it drives up the cost. So we’re looking for ways to mitigate any of the reductions in dollars that people get, you know, how do we make it easier for them to be able to cope with it?

QUESTION: On that last point, wasn’t binding arbitration adopted as a way to eliminate the possibility of public safety forces striking?

KASICH: Right, if they want to strike, they should be fired. You should not allow, look, you should have a change in the law…there are ways to say that you are not going to strike, and we’re going to continue negotiations without a binding arbitrator…Binding arbitration is not acceptable.[...]

QUESTION: Just to make sure I’m clear, you do not think police and fire emergency services should have the right to strike?

KASICH: I don’t favor the right to strike of any public employee, ok? That’s my personal philosophy. How practical that is to implement, uh you know, but my personal philosophy is I don’t like public employees striking. I mean, they’ve got good jobs, high pay, good benefits, a great retirement, what are they striking for?

Watch it:

Kasich’s “personal philosophy” displays a remarkable dismissal of both freedom and fact. Workers strike as a last resort to eliminate inequalities in bargaining power and address problems including unsafe working conditions, unfair wages, and benefits. Ohio safety forces, however, are prohibited from doing so. Because “unstable” labor relations between safety workers and the city spurred “constant strikes,” Ohio passed a collective bargaining law in 1983 that prohibited public safety workers from striking. But, to ensure workers still had an option, Ohio replaced the right to strike with a binding arbitration policy. So, not only would Kasich like to fire any police officer or firefighter for a right they are not given, he wants to eliminate the only remaining tool they have as a viable alternative.

In defending his dictatorial philosophy, Kasich flags the “cost” such contractually-obligated rights level on local governments. A peculiar defense given that Kasich is hell-bent on dismantling Ohio’s economy before he even takes office. In pledging to kill Ohio’s high-speed rail project, he single-handedly drove away $400 million in federal funds from the state. His plan to scrap an education funding formula for Ohio’s school may also very well cost Ohio another narrowly-won $400 million in “Race to the Top” federal funds. If that’s not enough, Kasich’s plan to eliminate both Ohio’s income tax — nearly half the state’s revenue — would cost about $8.3 billion next year alone. Add another $288.5 million for his apparent plans to eliminate Ohio’s estate tax and Kasich is looking to more than double Ohio’s $8 billion deficit.

But still, according to Kasich’s personal philosophy, it’s the unions that are the problem. (HT: Plunderbund)

Health

Three Federal Judges Unethically Serve On Board of Group That Opposes The Affordable Care Act

By Ian Millhiser on Dec 10, 2010 at 3:49 pm

U.S. Court of Appeals Judges and FREE Board Members Edith Clement, Alice Batchelder and Danny Boggs

Yesterday, ThinkProgress reported that three U.S. Court of Appeals judges serve on the board of the Foundation for Research on Economics & the Environment (FREE), an organization that “routinely hosts free junkets for federal judges where they can ride horses, bunk with industry attorneys, and learn how to decide environmental cases in ways that benefit FREE’s corporate funders.” Moreover, these three judges, Edith Clement of the Fifth Circuit and Alice Batchelder and Danny Boggs, both of the Sixth Circuit, have remained on the board despite an ethics opinion from a committee of federal judges which unequivocally states that belonging to this board violates these judges’ ethically obligations under federal law.  As the opinion explains, by serving on the board the judges “personally advocate FREE’s values and positions” and thus could create the impression that their “impartiality may be impaired as to certain issues likely to arise in federal court.”

Although FREE’s name suggest that its primary interest is in environmental law, the organization has hosted junkets and published a number of articles on other topics that are likely to arise in pending litigation.  Indeed, some of the views which Judges Batchelder, Boggs and Clement “personally advocate” by serving on FREE’s board raise serious questions about whether their “impartiality may be impaired” in the highest-profile cases in decades — the many lawsuits challenging the Affordable Care Act.

In addition to hosting at least one junket on health reform, FREE has published a number of articles questioning the wisdom of the Affordable Care Act — often telling stories more suited to Glenn Beck’s show than to an organization targeting federal judges.  One of these articles, for example, consists largely of FREE’s board chair reminiscing about the time when “[Saul] Alinsky and his acolyte, Bill Ayers, were mobilizing Chicago through ACORN, the Woodlawn and Gamaliel Foundations, the Weather Underground.”

But what FREE’s articles on the Affordable Care Act lack in coherence they make up for in disdain for “Obama Care.”  One article parrots the claims of Ken Cuccinelli and other anti-health reform plaintiffs who warn that upholding the Affordable Care Act could lead to an unlimited expansion of the federal government — in FREE’s words “[t]hose with an unconstrained vision of the good that government can do see health care reform as an opportunity to increase government’s scope and power.”  Another article mocked the Affordable Care Act’s supporters as “naïve”:

I have intelligent, generally well-informed friends who initially favored various versions of Obama Care. They put hopes and expectations in the same basket. I am hopeful that our impending experiences will change their naïve beliefs in centralized approaches to such complex social systems as health care.

Presently, a Michigan judge’s decision upholding the Affordable Care Act is pending in Judges Batchelder and Boggs’ court, and a similar case could easily arise in Judge Clement’s Fifth Circuit.  If these three judges insist upon remaining on FREE’s board, they should think very hard about the impression of partiality they would create if they are selected to hear these cases.

Older

Switch to Mobile
ThinkProgress Signup Overlay Skip and Continue to ThinkProgress Skip and Continue to ThinkProgress

Sign Up