Following Saturday’s tragic shooting in Tucson, Arizona, some Republicans have argued that 22-year old assassin Jared Lee Loughner was more affected by his mental illness than the nation’s lax gun control laws or Washington’s divisive and often times violent political rhetoric. “What will solve this problem is removing the politics from it and getting after the crux of this problem and that is somebody who needed mental health services and or legal intervention much earlier in his cycle toward violence,” Rep. Mike Rogers (R-MI) said this afternoon on MSNBC:

ROGERS: If we want to solve this kind of thing from happening, we have to intervene with somebody who has expressed tendencies toward violence, who has a pretty strong history of mental illness. And right now, we’re not talking about that at all. Everybody is talking about ‘oh, this is about people having guns, this is about political speech.’ None of that had a factor here. When you look at the evidence that has been collected up, this wasn’t about politics…If we want to solve this from happening in the future, you can talk about all the gun laws you want — that’s not going to do it. A bad guy is going to get a gun. What we have to do is intervene earlier in that cycle of violence when they have this kind of mental disability.

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Newly-elected Rep. Allen West (R-FL) struck a similar note on his Facebook page, saying “The shooter was a very disturbed individual and it appears there were so many warning signs that he was going to do something horrible. We should be focusing on the mental health crisis in our country, not politics.” Indeed, as Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) pointed out this morning, the Tuscon shooting highlights the poor state of the nation’s mental health safety net, which often falls victim to state budget cuts during periods of economic hardship. Congress did not address the issue until 1996, and has been increasing access to mental services ever since — despite Republican opposition.

Fourteen years ago, the late Sen. Paul Wellstone (D-MN) secured passage of a “partial parity” law that “stopped insurance plans from being allowed to pay less to treat mental ailments as opposed to physical ones.” But the industry soon gamed the law by “limiting the number of mental health visits or days in the hospital.” On June 17, 2008, President Bush extended MHPA through the end of 2008, but didn’t sign full parity legislation until later that year as part of the TARP measure. At the time, 146 Republicans voted against full mental health parity, including now House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH), and Rogers.

President Obama’s health reform law — which all Republicans now want to repeal — would go even further in helping Americans with mental illness. By 2014, families and individuals will be able to enroll in insurance through an expanded Medicaid program or the exchanges, where private companies will have to offer mental health and substance use disorder services as part of the essential package of benefits. The law also expands parity to a much wider pool, “making it possible for millions more people to get the same coverage for substance abuse and illnesses like bipolar disorder, major depression and schizophrenia as they would for, say, diabetes or cancer.” As Michael J. Fitzpatrick, executive director of the National Alliance on Mental Illness, or NAMI, told the New York Times shortly after reform was signed into law, reform “can change the mental health system in America and really give families and individuals an opportunity to get a level of access to care we could only fantasize about before this became law.”

Sam Stein is reporting that Chamber of Commerce President Tom Donohue is now calling for the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, despite previous statements that the organization wouldn’t dedicate any resources to the effort. From today’s speech:

DONOHUE: For example, the new health care law creates 159 new agencies, commissions, panels, and other bodies. It grants extraordinary powers to the Department of Health and Human Services to redefine health care as we know it. [...]

By mid-December, HHS had already granted 222 waivers to the law—a revealing acknowledgement that the law is unworkable. And, with key provisions under challenge in the courts by states and others, it’s time to go back to the drawing board.

Last year, while strongly advocating health care reform, the Chamber was a leader in the fight against this particular bill—and thus we support legislation in the House to repeal it. We see the upcoming House vote as an opportunity for everyone to take a fresh look at health care reform—and to replace unworkable approaches with more effective measures that will lower costs, expand access, and improve quality.

But the Chamber’s position on the law is more malleable than Donohue’s remarks suggest. For instance, this morning, for instance, during an appearance on CSPAN’s Washington Journal, Commerce Vice President and Chief Operating Officer David Chavern reverted to the organization’s earlier position on repeal when asked about reform:

CHAVERN: Overall, the House Republicans are proposing a bill on repeal of the health care bill, we oppose that bill. We’ll support that repeal effort, but understanding that that’s unlikely to become law law….We really need to focus on the more important thing, which is how can we fix what is passed and what may we be able to add to it to improve it.

Later in the program, Chavern stressed that while the organization is looking to lower the penalties on employers who don’t offer coverage, it supports the individual mandate, a position shared by the health insurance industry, which the Chamber represents. In fact, the “revealing acknowledgment,” to barrow Donohue’s phrase, is that the organization is split on the issue — politically interested in defeating a major Democratic accomplishment, but also encountering some push back from its own members (like health insurance companies) who argue that the law may not be the “job killer” that Republicans claim. After all, businesses are already taking advantage of the law’s early retiree grants, tax credits, and looking forward to the exchanges. They may certainly want to amend the measure, but they may be less inclined to lobby for something as impractical as outright repeal.

This morning during an appearance on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) argued that the Tucson tragedy highlighted the the poor state of the nation’s mental health safety net and said that the shooter, Jared Lee Loughner, “should have been identified at the community college when he was thrown out”:

BROWN: It’s only going to get worse because of state budget cuts. That’s a pretty easy place for people to go after, let’s cut some of the mental health outreach. Might mean some more homelessness but most people that dress like this in politics don’t see them, don’t talk to them, don’t ‘know them. We passed mental health parity, with the health care bill that should help, but most of this is state level mental health programs and we really got to guide against shredding them more than they’ve been shredded.

Q: You’d really put more money into mental health?… Over what though because then you have to cut something on the other end?

BROWN: Well, I’d say over the war in Afghanistan, we should withdraw troops sooner, I mean if you want to go into that kind of sort of macro discussion. But mental health services and issue are just as important as physical issues.

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The The National Alliance on Mental Illness has put Arizona at the top of the list of states that are “considered to have made the deepest cuts in mental health care.” In 2010, the state reduced funding to the Department of Health Services by $36 million (37% of total budget), meaning that residents with mental illnesses who don’t qualify for the state Medicaid program are receiving “only basic doctor visits and generic medicine. People contemplating suicide will be directed to a crisis hotline, but the state will no longer pay for them to be hospitalized.”

Since July 1, 2010, 3,800 people with mental illness were “no longer eligible for case management, counseling, employment preparation and support, inpatient treatment or other services.”