Last night, the Daily Show’s Jon Stewart skewered Republicans for killing deficit neutral legislation to provide health care to the 9/11 first responders and emergency workers who suffered illnesses from working at Ground Zero. He also mocked the celebrity-obsessed media that has completely ignored the story. Republicans, like Sen. John Thune (R-SD), filibustered the bill because they said tax cuts for the richest 2 percent were a higher priority for Congress. While Republicans quietly snuffed out efforts to compensate 9/11 heroes, they were aided by a quiet lobbying campaign by the powerful lobbying front — the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
The Chamber fought to help kill the 9/11 compensation bill because it was funded by ending a special tax loophole exploited by foreign corporations doing business in the United States.
The “U.S.” part of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is a misnomer. As ThinkProgress reported, the Chamber represents dozens of foreign businesses in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Russia, Bahrain, India, Brazil, and other countries. An investigation of the Chamber turned up recent fundraising documents from the Chamber soliciting foreign contributions to the Chamber’s 501(c)(6), the tax entity the Chamber used to run nasty campaign ads against Democrats earlier this year.
In September, the Chamber sent a letter officially opposing the 9/11 first responders bill, called the “James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act of 2010.” The Chamber warned that ending the tax loophole would “damage U.S. relationships with major trading partners” and “aggravate already unsettled financial markets.” A lobbying disclosure filed with the Senate confirms the Chamber contacted lawmakers to help kill the bill.
In typical fashion, the Chamber has not revealed which of its foreign members had asked them to kill the 9/11 bill. As the Chamber CEO explained to the Washington Monthly’s James Verini, the entire purpose of the Chamber is to provide “deniability” to corporations that want to affect the outcomes of elections or of public policy. In 2009, the Chamber secretly used a $86 million donation from the health insurance industry to fight health reform. At the time, the Chamber lied and claimed to the public that they were simply acting on behalf of the entire “business community.”
Republicans are continuing to protest any renewed attempts to pass the 9/11 first responders bill because of the tax issue raised by the Chamber. Yesterday, Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) sent out a statement that mirrored the Chamber’s opposition to ending the foreign corporate tax loophole.
It’s expected that Judge Roger Vinson of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida will rule in favor of the plaintiffs in the multi-state lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act, marking a second win for repeal advocates. During yesterday’s hearing, Vinson sounded increasingly skeptical of the government’s contention that the power to compel individuals to purchase health insurance fell within the purview of the commerce clause:
“In the broadest sense every decision we make is economic. The decision to marry. The decision to keep a job or not has an economic effect,” he said. “If [the federal government] decided everybody needs to eat broccoli because broccoli makes us healthy, they could mandate that everybody has to eat broccoli each week?”
Vinson also questioned the notion that a person who chooses not to buy insurance will necessarily be unable to pay for his or her health care. He himself was uninsured, Vinson said, when one of his children was born, and he paid the entire bill.
“I think it worked out to be $100 a pound,” he said.
But compelling people to purchase health insurance is very different than forcing them to eat broccoli. While a young person may choose to forgo coverage in their 20s, eventually she or he will become sick and will need medical attention. Without the mandate, that individual will either be denied coverage because she or he is too sick (remember, if you lose the mandate, the insurance regulations go with it ) or they’ll be priced out of the market. A recent national survey estimated that 12.6 million adults — or 36 percent of those who applied for coverage in the individual market — were denied insurance “because of a pre-existing condition in the previous three years.” Left uninsured, those 12 million Americans will skip critical doctor visits or avoid treatment, allowing a small medical problem to become a chronic medical condition in need of medical attention. If she or he doesn’t have health insurance, the costs of care are shifted throughout the system – picked up by the government and private premium payers.
One can be respectful of the fact that Vinson was able to afford to pay out-of-pocket for the birth of his child. But I strongly suspect that if there had been complications with that birth, Vinson would have had to go through his savings, or declare bankruptcy. Ultimately any care he couldn’t afford would have been paid by all of us.
Eating broccoli will presumably improve health and eventually lower health care costs, but requiring individuals to do so is fairly coercive and doesn’t present the kind of direct and immediate connection to commerce as encouraging people to purchase health insurance. Brocolli also doesn’t create any kind of cost-shift and is also not something we finance through insurance because food is a predictable expense that is paid in relatively small installments. Health care costs, on the other hand, come at you out of the blue and can be enormous.
You can argue that broccoli and insurance follow the same logical pathway (buying both would lower health care costs), but that doesn’t mean that both would make for logical policy. We can and should distinguish between and make different judgments about the two requirements. That’s why we elect policy makers and listen to judges.
I once made a French diplomat really angry by suggesting that the persistence of the modest-sized British and French nuclear arsenals sent a really bad message about nuclear proliferation to regional powers all around the world. This interesting WikiLeaked cable from London about British thinking on the Trident and the French reaction to it offers some evidence in this regard.
The French reaction is very interesting indeed; the French appear to have understood a decision to reduce or eliminate the UK’s nuclear force as a danger to France’s own nuclear capabilities. Presumably, the threat would come from activists and political actors within France, who would leverage British de-nuclearization in arguments against the maintenance of France’s own deterrent.
This suggests that France and the UK, even prior to their recent defense agreement, understood their nuclear deterrents to be symbiotic rather than competitive, even in a symbolic sense. The British and French nuclear arsenals have never threatened each other in anything other than a symbolic sense; the sole possession of nuclear weapons could conceivably suggest military and political leadership of Europe. I had long believed that the persistence of the French nuclear arsenal was the most important reason that Britain would not de-nuclearize, but I had assumed that this was because giving up Britain’s nukes might be perceived as a concession of French military and political predominance. What I didn’t expect was that the French would put direct (if discreet) diplomatic pressure on the United Kingdom out of fear that they might lose the rationale for their own arsenal.
This suggests that British nuclear disarmament might indeed send a powerful diplomatic message. Of course, France and the UK are the most similar of the nuclear powers, and it would be a reach to suggest that India, China, etc. would feel the same pressure to disarm as France. Nevertheless, that the French take the symbolic power of the message so seriously is very interesting indeed.
I would say that the issue here isn’t so much the Indias and Chinas of the world as the Brazils and South Africas. Whether public opinion in non-nuclear third world democracies is more inclined to believe “responsible liberal democracies are moving toward disarmament” or else “important countries each need an independent nuclear deterrent” is relevant to the long-run trajectory of policies in these countries. And the posture of the British and French governments is a big boost to option number two, in a way that’s bad for the world.
Last week, Muhammad Ali Hasan, a lifelong Republican and the founder of Muslims for Bush, announced he was switching parties because he is disgusted with the GOP’s tolerance of bigotry and adoption of thinly-veiled Islamophobia. Hasan and his family have raised money for Republican candidates in their home state of Colorado, helped GOP campaigns, and Hasan has run for public office on the GOP ticket. But after months of watching conservatives fan the flames of intolerance for political gain, Hasan had had enough, and wrote an open letter to the GOP published last Friday in the Huffington Post:
In watching this summer, with the promotion of Arizona’s SB 1070, calls to revoke the 14th Amendment, anger at the overturn of California’s Proposition 8, and lastly, aggressive protest against a mosque in New York City, I came to question how much the GOP values the vision of our American Saints, the Founding Fathers. Quite frankly, we are no longer the party of Constitutionalists.
Indeed, a ThinkProgress analysis found that 130 GOP members of the current Congress want to end birthright citizenship protected by the 14th Amendment, as do 39 percent of the incoming freshmen class. And most Republican politicians have supported SB 1070, while opposing marriage equality is, of course, a plank in the Republican Party platform.
In an interview with ThinkProgress, Hasan said that “there’s obviously some bigotry in the Republican party,” but he does not believe that its leaders are bigoted. They instead see electoral opportunity in “the bigoted part of America,” Hasan said. For example, on the manufactured hysteria surrounding the non-existent threat of Sharia Law, Hasan said conservative politicians realize there are few Muslim Americans, so they say to themselves, “it doesn’t matter whether I win [Muslim] votes, but I’m going win the votes of the bigots.”
Hasan said the Tea Party movement, which he called “an American tragedy,” has provided an “umbrella” for bigoted Americans. “It started out as a fiscal conservative movement,” but was “hijacked by a movement of bigots.” Hasan believes that “this is the first time in a long that [bigots] have all been united under one umbrella, and that’s why they’re pushing all this power.” Republican leaders have co-opted this xenophobia for political gain, Hasan said, by advocating what he calls a “pro-security agenda”:
HASAN: I really do believe that Republican leaders and their activists are so hellbent on this pro-security agenda of protecting what America is to the point of kicking out Muslims, kicking out illegal immigrants, ostracizing gays. … There’s a lot of fear amongst them, and they’re completely running away from what Ronald Reagan stood for, and a lot of what George W. Bush stood for, in my opinion. [...]
This pro-security agenda appeals just as well to a bigot as a bigoted agenda does, and that’s been the uniting force. To me, a lot of bigots have come under the tea party wing. And then when married with the Republican Party, they all agree on a pro-security agenda.
Asked if he thought this “marriage” between mainstream conservatism and xenophobes would become a central element of the Republican Party going forward, Hasan replied, “that’s why I left. I would have stayed in the Republican Party if I thought it was going to get better.” Hasan — who is socially liberal and started a group called Constitutionalists For Gays & Immigrants to advocate for minority rights — said while Bush was “never going to be perfect on social issues,” he appreciated Bush’s strong public defense of Islam after the September 11th attacks. A fiscal conservative, Hasan hoped and expected that the GOP would move in a more tolerant direction on social issues, and has been disappointed when the party instead moved in the opposite direction.
Hasan said if Reagan were alive today, he would look at his party’s tolerance of intolerance and would say to them, “I’m very disappointed in you.”
Listen to the complete interview with Hasan here:
Asked for comment on Hasan’s defection, Suhail Khan, who conducted outreach to Muslims and other faith communities in the Bush White House, told ThinkProgress that he remains loyal to the GOP and does not believe the party nor the Tea Party movement harbor bigotry. Still, Khan acknowledged that “there are some fringe voices within the party who have very recently been attempting to shamelessly exploit some fears of the American public for partisan gain.” Most of the voices have “not been successful,” Khan said, pointing to failed GOP Senate candidates like Sharron Angle and Rick Lazio.
And asked about the conservative uproar surrounding the proposed Islamic community center in New York, Khan agreed that “the comments of both Sarah Palin and former speaker Newt Gingrich were very disappointing, very unfortunate.” He also condemned the “very reprehensible” and “racist” comments of former Tea Party Express chairman Mark Williams, who called Allah a “terrorists’ monkey-god.” Khan, who now works for the Institute for Global Engagement, went on to chide Fox News host Glenn Beck for saying that 10 percent of Muslims of terrorists, saying “blanket statements” like that have “no basis in fact.”
Moreover, Khan lambasted conservative leaders who promote hysteria about Sharia law, saying, “there’s a threat of Sharia in this country like, I would say, a threat of alien cat abduction or grizzly bear attacks in downtown D.C.” Khan praised “brave” Republicans like Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie who publicly defended the rights of Muslims to build the New York center, and said most conservatives held the same views. Still, he acknowledged that conservatives who spoke publicly in defense of the center were in the minority, and Khan believes the looming election may have led many others to hold their tongue. Khan added that it “would have been great” for Bush to take a stronger stand this summer during the New York mosque debate.
Even before Gov.-elect Rick Scott (R-FL) officially grabs the reins in his troubled state, he is making it abundantly clear that he plans to push for radical changes to the education system. Chief among his plans is a cockamamie scheme to give school vouchers to essentially any student whose parents want one, rich and poor, advantaged and disadvantaged alike. The idea strikes at the very heart of public education, and as The Answer Sheet’s Valerie Strauss put it, “is more likely to destroy the public school system than accomplish anything else.”
Scott has also suggested undermining the funding mechanism for public schools in his state, which even Republican officials worry “would be devastating” to the education system. In a final blow, Scott’s also hinted that he’ll turn down the $700 million that Florida won in the Obama administration’s Race to the Top program.
So is there any bright light when it comes to education reform in Florida? Maybe, as the Florida News Service noted that “a push for struggling schools to lengthen the school day may become part of a larger education reform debate that lawmakers have hinted will be a major part of the spring 2011 legislative agenda”:
Newly elected state Sen. David Simmons, R-Altamonte Springs, who previously served in the House, has told fellow lawmakers, including Senate Prek-12 Chairman Sen. Steve Wise, R-Jacksonville, that he intends to file a bill extending the school day, and Wise said he is interested in taking it up in committee.
America’s 180-day school year is based on an agricultural economy that no longer exists. In Finland, Japan, and Korea — three countries that consistently trounce the U.S. on international education assessments — teachers average 197 days of instruction. Expanded the school year not only addresses this disparity, but gives schools more of an opportunity to partner with local organizations and increase parental involvement.
And this right here is the social cost of restrictions on construction. In a world where the cost of housing is primarily determined by construction costs, then rising incomes should lead to housing costs falling as a share of income. But that’s not what’s been happening in DC or other successful American cities. Instead, the price of housing is being determined in large part by the implicit price of regulatory permission to build. That means rents rise as a share of income, and wealth is transferred to incumbent homeowners. This is a regressive transfer that also happens to be bad for the environment and bad for overall economic growth.
This afternoon, as momentum began to build for repealing Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN) threatened that if Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) brings up a vote to repeal the ban, Republicans would not support ratification of the New START treaty. Referring to DADT a “partisan” and “political” issue, Corker accused Reid of poisoning the well with Democratic “campaign promises” to “accommodate activist groups”:
CORKER: What’s happened is it’s poisoning the well on this debate, on something that’s very, very important. … I’m just hoping that saner minds will prevail and that these issues that have been brought forth that are absolutely partisan, political, issues, brought forth to basically accommodate activist groups around this country. I’m hoping that those will be taken down or else I don’t think the future of the START treaty over the next several days is going to be successful, based on what I’m watching.
Watch it:
Last night, Reid filed cloture on DADT and DREAM and promised to hold cloture votes on both measures on Saturday, before returning to the START treaty. Reid has also promised that he would accommodate six or seven days of debate on the measure. The Wonk Room explains why Corker’s description of DADT as “partisan” is surprising in light of the increasing Republican support for the measure.
Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) and Jon Kyl (R-AZ) appeared to distance themselves from Corker’s suggestion that passage for the treaty would hinge on Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell repeal. Both insisted that the treaty must stand or fall on its own merits.
Watch it:
Meanwhile, Greg Sargent has Corker doubling down on the threat. “That being thrown into the middle of this debate is causing many Republicans to want to see START pushed back and candidly is causing them to oppose it,” Corker said in an interview. “This is hardening them against passage of this treaty.”
This afternoon, as momentum began to build for repealing Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN) threatened that if Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) brings up a vote to repeal the ban, Republicans would not support ratification of the New START treaty. Referring to DADT a “partisan” and “political” issue, Corker accused Reid of poisoning the well with Democratic “campaign promises” to “accommodate activist groups”:
CORKER: What’s happened is it’s poisoning the well on this debate, on something that’s very, very important….I’m just hoping that saner minds will prevail and that these issues that have been brought forth that are absolutely partisan, political, issues, brought forth to basically accommodate activist groups around this country. I’m hoping that those will be taken down or else I don’t think the future of the START treaty over the next several days is going to be successful, based on what I’m watching.
Watch it:
Other Republican Senators — including McCain and Graham — have privately hinted that they would oppose ratifying the treaty if the Senate voted on DADT, but Corker is the first lawmaker to publicly threaten to walk away from the measure. Last night, Reid filed cloture on DADT and DREAM and promised to hold cloture votes on both measures on Saturday, before returning to the START treaty. Reid has also promised that he would accommodate six or seven days of debate on the measure.
Corker’s description of DADT as “partisan” is surprising in light of the increasing Republican support for the measure. Republican Senators Susan Collins (ME), Olympia Snowe (ME), Scott Brown (MA) and Lisa Murkowski (AK) have pledged to vote for the stand-alone repeal bill. The measure is also supported by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and the overwhelming majority of the American people. A new Washington Post/ABC News poll released earlier this week found that 77% of Americans support ending DADT, the highest level of support since the poll began asking the question.
Earlier today, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs sounded optimistic about repeal, but “tried to temper his enthusiasm during an off-camera press gaggle with reporters.” “I think it’s clear that there are enough votes to withstand a filibuster on repeal of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell,’” Gibbs said, adding he would “not necessarily use the term ‘in the bag.’” The administration considers START a top priority. (H/T: @OKnox)
Update
Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) and Jon Kyl (R-AZ) appeared to distance themselves from Corker’s suggestion that passage for the treaty would hinge on Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell repeal. Both insisted that the treaty must stand or fall on its own merits. Watch it:
Meanwhile, Greg Sargent has Corker doubling down. “That being thrown into the middle of this debate is causing many Republicans to want to see START pushed back and candidly is causing them to oppose it,” Corker said in an interview. “This is hardening them against passage of this treaty.”
Update
,Corker clarifies to Sargent: “I just want to make sure it’s clear they’re not going to oppose the treaty permanently,” he said. “But it’s hardening them against doing it right now.”
Update
,Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) tells Politico’s Manu Raju that he may vote against START because of DADT:
Sen. Graham may vote against START, saying DREAM/DADT push has “poisoned the well.” “The lame-duck is beginning to smell up the place.”
But it should be possible to strengthen the safety net while modernizing some of the Great Society structures. Paul Ryan, a Republican, and Alice Rivlin, a Democrat, have come up with a Medicare reform plan in which new enrollees would receive a fixed contribution from the government, growing a bit faster than inflation. They would apply that money against the cost of health insurance. This would make Medicare a defined contribution program and save hundreds of billions. If Obama said he was open to thinking about this sort of fundamental reform, he’d generate tremendous excitement on the right.
I think this is a dubious use of the term “save.” If I went to CVS, bought a box of Diet Cokes, and kept them in the fridge in the CAP kitchen I’d save a substantial amount of money relative to my current practice of constantly going to the soda machine. That is to say, I’d have the same amount of Diet Coke but I’d be spending less money. Alternatively, I could reduce expenditures by not buying as much Diet Coke.
What Ryan-Rivlin does is buy less Diet Coke. It sets a hard cap on Medicare expenditures, thus reducing government outlays. Then in an unrelated move, it dismantles the publicly administered single risk pool of Medicare and replaces it with multiple privately administered for-profit risk pools. The combination of these two moves is a sleight of hand designed to make you think that the structural shift is “saving money” when in fact it does nothing of the sort. Creating multiple privately administered risk pools doesn’t offer any efficiency gains. It simply creates an adverse selection problem and ensures that the rationing decisions made necessary by the hard cap will be made by employees of for-profit firms rather than government employees. It also makes the political economy of restraining Medicare spending worse, since in addition to senior citizens and health care providers you’ll add insurance companies as a new constituency ready to demand that Medicare account for an ever-larger share of national output.
As best I can tell, the privatization idea is in here essentially as an ideological tic. The conservative establishment in America is very hostile to “spending” and “entitlements” but the reality is that conservatives don’t actually want to cut Medicare. They don’t want senior citizens’ health care rationed and they don’t want health care providers’ incomes to decline. So there’s an enormous market for concepts that will paper this dissonance over. But the fact of the matter is that Medicare is extremely efficient at transforming tax revenues into purchases of health care services; if you want to spend less money, you need to buy fewer services. There’s almost no administrative efficiencies to be found.
Update
Jon Walker over Twitter observes that the other way to cut Medicare costs is price controls. Deploy monopsony power to demand lower prices closer to the marginal cost of production, and hope this doesn’t result in too much quality deterioration. This is a key element of most countries’ lower health care costs.
Last night, the Daily Show’s Jon Stewart 
Even before Gov.-elect Rick Scott (R-FL) officially grabs the reins 
