At today’s Senate Finance Committee hearing, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) announced that there are “serious outstanding issues that have yet to be resolved” in Sen. Max Baucus’ (D-MT) bill, particularly when it comes to “the enforcement against subsidies for illegal aliens.” Grassley claimed that the Baucus bill “fails the test in at least three ways”:

First, although the mark appears to require the new exchanges to verify Social Security Numbers [SSNs] and citizenship or legal status, it does not include blocking of Social Security numbers, REAL IDs, verification of address and prior year income, or any other mechanism that verifies identity to prevent identity theft.

Second, it appears to contain privacy protections limiting the use of data collected by exchanges, but it does not allow information sharing with the Internal Revenue Service [IRS] and the Social Security Administration [SSA] to detect and preclude the multiple uses of same Social Security Numbers.

And finally, I would also note that that the designation of Indian tribes as “Express Lane Agency” would allow them to enroll anyone under the age of 22 in Medicaid and CHIP and anyone of any age in an exchange without verification of citizenship. And we have discussed so often in this committee, in the past, the role of Indian tribes in verifying citizenship has been questionable.

Watch it:

Grassley’s first point of criticism is a transparent attempt to derail the health care debate by pivoting to a contentious discussion on the use of REAL ID-compliant licenses and identifications cards. Full compliance with the REAL ID Act is not required until 2017 and most states aren’t anywhere near meeting the deadline. At least 15 states have passed legislation blocking the implementation of REAL ID, others have passed resolutions denouncing it, and there’s currently pending legislation in both the House and Senate that would repeal the REAL ID Act’s driver’s license and identification card provisions. Ultimately, a REAL ID provision would affect US citizens more than immigrants as every single American would be required to obtain a compliant form of national identification and pay for the infrastructure necessary to implement an expensive national ID system.

Grassley isn’t alone in his call for the sharing of information between the SSA and IRS as expressed by his second comment. Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) has put together an amendment that would require open-ended “real-time information sharing” between the two agencies and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Yet, there are good reasons why the three agencies operate, for the most part, independently of one another. The Tax Reform Act of 1976 established basic confidentiality protections that require that tax returns and tax return information be held in strictest confidence, with exceptions only being made for criminal cases and instances that involve determining criminal or civil liability. Nina Olson, the National Taxpayer Advocate of the IRS, has described the confidentiality protections as a right that the IRS must “zealously protect” in order to make “the determination of the correct amount of tax that each U.S. taxpayer must pay.” Tax collection and immigration enforcement efforts are conducted separately “in order to make sure that everyone who earns income within our borders pays the proper amount of taxes,” regardless of their immigration status.

Grassley’s last critique is illogical. He may as well openly suggest that there are young undocumented immigrants who have infiltrated tightly-knit Indian tribes and are posing as Native Americans in order to apply for public benefits. Ultimately, Grassley’s concerns aren’t grounded in reality. Undocumented immigrants use phony and stolen SSNs to work, not to collect benefits. It’s highly unlikely that they’ll put their livelihood at risk to receive health care coverage. It’s far more reasonable to suggest that the agencies administering the exchange track and share information amongst themselves so they can investigate any instances in which the exchanges receive multiple applications under a single SSN.

Grassley also named “tax-payer funded abortions” as another “unresolved issue.”

To add a little to Yglesias’ post on Irving Kristol’s support for subverting facts to politics, I think there’s a real irony in the way that neoconservatives have warned ominously of Iranian “taqiya” — dissimulation in service of a higher religious goal — as if Shiite clerics invented the phenomenon of lying in politics. This is, after all, precisely the sort of thing that Irving Kristol advocated in a political context — the sacrifice of truth to Republican political imperatives:

Among the core social scientists around The Public Interest there were no economists…. This explains my own rather cavalier attitude toward the budget deficit and other monetary or fiscal problems. The task, as I saw it, was to create a new majority, which evidently would mean a conservative majority, which came to mean, in turn, a Republican majority — so political effectiveness was the priority, not the accounting deficiencies of government…

You don’t need to look hard to see that this approach is alive and well in the conservative movement. Just look to David Horowitz’s response to David Frum on Glenn Beck’s hysteria, in which Horowitz concedes that Beck’s attacks on Cass Sunstein are “over the top,” but insists that the threat from The Left is so dire that it justifies Beck’s dishonesty. (I’m curious whether Frum — whose website is titled New Majority, in reference to Kristol — recognizes Kristol as a promulgator of the sort of tactics Frum now condemns?)

Or look at NRO’s Andrew McCarthy’s defense of the “death panels” lie, justified, McCarthy wrote, by the fact that “Obama is not a normal politician. He’s a visionary, and using health care to radically expand the scope of government happens to be central to his vision.” The “stakes here couldn’t be higher,” McCarthy wrote, “time is short, and ‘death panel’ cuts to the chase.”

Irving Kristol didn’t invent this practice, of course, but he did develop and sharpen it as an American conservative political doctrine. In that respect, I think Michael Lind lets Kristol off too easily when he writes, in regard to the wilderness into which Irving’s son Bill Kristol has helped lead the conservative movement, that “the sins of the sons should not be visited upon the fathers.” There’s a clear straight through-line from Irving’s support for elites lying to the ignorant rubes to Bill’s recruiting a genuine ignorant rube to tell those lies on elites’ behalf.

Of all the panels at the neoconservative Foreign Policy Initiative‘s forum on Advancing and Defending Democracy, this morning’s on Iran was the most interesting, both in terms of substance and political orientation of the panelists. Moderator Barbara Slavin is the Assistant Managing Editor for World and National Security at The Washington Times, and has written a good book on Iran, Bitter Friends, Bosom Enemies. Ray Takeyh recently returned to the Council on Foreign Relations after a brief stint in the Obama administration as an adviser to special envoy Dennis Ross. Karim Sadjadpour is an Iran analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. All three can be fairly described as center-left supporters of greater U.S.-Iran engagement. The fourth panelist, Reuel Gerecht of the right-wing Foundation for Defense of Democracies, was the only conservative on the stage.

In her introductory remarks, Slavin said that Friday’s Al Quds Day demonstrations were “definitive proof” that the Green Wave “is by no means dissipated …this movement is spreading.” She noted that “the Iranian diaspora is linking up with Iranians against” the regime in a way that has not happened before, and predicted that President Ahmadinejad would be met with even larger demonstrations in New York than during his previous visit to the United Nations.

Takeyh said that Iran “has to be viewed as a country in transition, [but] where it will end up is hard to say.” For the moment, Takayh said, “the regime has succeeded in suppressing popular unrest,” but “far more serious in terms of immediate problems,” is the “unbridgeable elite fragmentation,” with leaders like Mehdi Karoubi and Mohammed Khatami increasingly explicitly separating themselves from the regime. Takeyh described the current situation as a kind of stalemate, with Supreme Leader Khamenei unsure whether to go forward with a more “serious suppression of political dissidents, and serious purge” of the regime as took place in the 1980′s. Ahmadinejad’s faction is “eager for this purge to happen,” Takeyh said. Among the opposition, Takey said, there is still no consensus on whether the system should be reformed or overthrown.

As for what Iran may be expected to do in the near future, Takeyh said that “I think he [Ahmadinejad] does recognize… that he has a problem.” He can deal with this either by trying to deliver foreign policy success, “in which we should expect more accommodation,” to international demands, or by greater “externalization of domestic problems,” in which case we would see greater defiance, harder suppression, more accusations of foreign enemies interfering in Iranian politics. Given past behavior, Takeyh believes it’s more likely that the regime will take the latter course. As for whether sanctions could change Iranian behavior, Takeyh said that “Iran has subordinated economics to strategy — sanctions are simply not going to work.”

Representing the neocons, Gerecht played his part well, asserting that U.S.-Iran “engagement is toast — it was always toast.” Insisting that that the “odds continue to go up” on an Israeli strike on Iran, Gerecht said that such a strike “will be a clarifying moment” for the region in terms of revealing Iran’s actual ability to retaliate against the U.S. and Israel. Gerecht was alone among the panelists in calling on the administration to begin designing a crippling sanctions regime immediately.

Sadjadpour said that, after witnessing the last three months, he was “more cynical about the regime, but more optimistic about prospects for change than I was before elections.” Saying that the “underlying problem has to do with character of the [Iranian] regime, not with the nuclear program,” Sadjadpour said that while he didn’t think there was any “deal in the works” that would satisfy current international demands, he was also skeptical that sanctions could bring about the effectiveness of the sanctions currently being considered, saying that this “regime never placed high priority on its peoples’ economic well-being.” Sadjadpour said that President Obama’s outreach to Iran had convinced many Iranian elites “that problem was in Tehran, not Washington,” and thus was partly responsible for the current fissures in the Iranian system. As to the probable future behavior of Iran, Sadjadpour said that the regime “is odious, but not suicidal.” Calling it “messianic and irrational” is wrong, he said.