This Friday encomium to Clarence Thomas, is it Steven Calabresi’s or The Volokh Conspiracy’s idea of a joke?
Justice Thomas’s brilliance, and commitment to originalism shine through in all of his opinions. He is more consistent, steady, and reliable than any other justice on the Supreme Court. He almost never follows precedent, but he always follows the original public meaning of the text of the Constitution. He is the very best justice out of 116 to have ever served on the U.S. Supreme Court better even than my old boss Justice Antonin Scalia. Justice Thomas not only talks about the importance of being an originalist; he practices originalism in every majority opinion, concurrence, or dissent that he writes.
Left wing bias, and a disinclination to read Justice Thomas’s opinions, has so skewed our public perception of him that no-one realizes what former Second Circuit Chief Judge Ralph Winter once told me is true: “Clarence Thomas is quite simply a genius.” Moreover, Justice Thomas has such a clear body of rules, which he consistently follows in case after case over 32 years on the bench that it is as obvious as the day is long that he is incorruptible in every sense of that word. Justice Thomas would never “bend” the law to please Justice Scalia, his closest friend; his wife Ginni Thomas, who is active as she has every right to be in politics, or his good and close friend; the Koch brothers; Texas billionaire Harlan Crow; or anyone else. Clarence Thomas cannot be “bought.” He is completely and utterly incorruptible as anyone who takes the time to read the opinions, which he produces prolifically can plainly see.
Why shouldn’t Clarence Thomas accept (and not declare) expensive gifts and luxury vacations from billionaires?
If Congress had adjusted for inflation the salary that Supreme Court justices made in 1969 at the end of the Warren Court, Justice Thomas would be being paid $500,000 a year, and he would not need to rely as much as he has on gifts from wealthy friends.
When was the last time Reason argued for cost-of-living adjustments? No matter. Thomas the Destitute is due what’s his.
“I thought the quotes from here were sarcastic paraphrases but here is one of the most important figures in the conservative legal movement articulating its fundamental principle: the rules do not apply to us because we are special” — Adam Serwer
Clarence Thomas grew up dirt poor as is made clear in his superb autobiography My Grandfather’s Son. He has devoted his entire professional life as a lawyer to serving in government jobs in which he has been grossly underpaid. Under these circumstances, Thomas, who again is incorruptible, as his 32 years of judicial opinions all show, has every right to accept gifts from wealthy friends.
It’s his friggin’ right, dammit! Like women’s right to bodily autonomy … except not.
So was this post by Calabresi (8/10/2023) a joke too?
“Let me be clear,” Akhil Reed Amar, a law professor at Yale, said [in September] on his podcast. “This is a genuinely stupid argument.”
But self-serving, so what of it? (There’s more than rum in that eggnog, ya think?)
“the crudeness of that column was something else. it’s not even really an argument so much as an assertion that clarence thomas deserves to have whatever he wants because he’s clarence thomas, which is a weird thing for a libertarian magazine to publish.” —GOLIKEHELLMACHINE
Oh, what goodies will Justice Thomas and the the Federalist Society find under their trees tomorrow morning? A little coke … I mean Koch?
I wrote about this the other day but it’s nice that the NY Times is putting this information into wider circulation. I hope they don’t just leave it at that. It’s evidence of Trump’s naturally fascistic personality and more people should know about it. It informs all his recent Nazi rhetoric:
In 2020, President Donald J. Trump gave a campaign speech in Minnesota railing against refugees and criticizing protests for racial justice. Toward the end, he wrapped up with standard lines from his stump speech and praise for the state’s pioneer lineage.
Then, Mr. Trump stopped to address his crowd of Minnesota supporters with an aside seeming to invoke a theory of genetic superiority.
“You have good genes, you know that, right? You have good genes. A lot of it is about the genes, isn’t it, don’t you believe?” Mr. Trump told the audience. “The racehorse theory, you think we’re so different? You have good genes in Minnesota.”
Mr. Trump’s mention of the racehorse theory — the idea adapted from horse breeding that good bloodlines produce superior offspring — reflected a focus on bloodlines and genetics that Mr. Trump has had for decades, and one that has received renewed attention and scrutiny in his third bid for president.
In recent months, Mr. Trump has drawn widespread criticism for asserting that undocumented immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” a phrase that he said first in a right-wing media interview and has in the last week repeated on the campaign trail.
As with the speech in 2020, Mr. Trump’s remarks have been criticized by historians, Jewish groups and liberals, who said his language recalled the ideology of eugenics promulgated by Nazis in Germany and white supremacists in America.
In a radio interview on Friday, Mr. Trump again defended his use of the phrase “poisoning the blood.” He dismissed criticism that his language echoed Nazi ideology by saying he was “not a student of Hitler” and that his statement used “blood” in crucially different ways, though he did not elaborate.
But much as news articles, biographers and books about his presidency have documented Mr. Trump’s long interest in Adolf Hitler, they have also shown that Mr. Trump has frequently turned to the language of genetics as he discusses the superiority of himself and others.
Mr. Trump was talking publicly about his belief that genetics determined a person’s success in life as early as 1988, when he told Oprah Winfrey that a person had “to have the right genes” in order to achieve great fortune.
“You can absolutely be taught things. Absolutely. You can get a lot better,” Mr. Trump told Mr. King. “But there is something. You know, the racehorse theory, there is something to the genes. And I mean, when I say something, I mean a lot.”
Three years later, he would tell CNN that he was a “gene believer,” explaining that “when you connect two racehorses, you usually end up with a fast horse” and likening his “gene pool” to that of successful thoroughbreds.
Michael D’Antonio, who wrote a biography of Mr. Trump in 2015, has credited this view to Mr. Trump’s father. Mr. D’Antonio told PBS’s “Frontline” in a 2017 documentary that members of the Trump family believed that “there are superior people, and that if you put together the genes of a superior woman and a superior man, you get a superior offspring.”
In 2019, Mr. D’Antonio told The New York Times that Mr. Trump had said that a person’s genes at birth were a determining factor in their future, more so than anything they learned later.
In Friday’s radio interview, the conservative commentator Hugh Hewitt asked Mr. Trump to explain his use of the phrase, pressing him multiple times to respond to those who were outraged that the phrase resembled statements made by Hitler in his hate-filled manifesto, “Mein Kampf.”
The former president said he had no racist intentions behind the statement. Then, he added, “I know nothing about Hitler. I’m not a student of Hitler. I never read his works.”
Mr. Trump has long had a documented interest in Hitler. A table by his bed once had a copy of Hitler speeches called “My New Order,” a gift from a friend that Ivana Trump, his first wife, said she had seen him occasionally leafing through.
He once asked his White House chief of staff why he lacked generals like those who reported to Hitler, calling those military leaders “totally loyal” to the Nazi dictator, according to a book on the Trump presidency by Peter Baker, a New York Times reporter, and Susan Glasser.
On another occasion, he told the same aide that “well, Hitler did a lot of good things,” according to Michael C. Bender, a journalist who is now a New York Times reporter, in a 2021 book about Mr. Trump.
The former president has denied making both comments. On Friday, he continued his defense by pointing out that his phrase — “poisoning the blood” — differed from passages in “Mein Kampf” in which Hitler uses “poison” and “blood” to lay out his views on how outsiders were ruining Aryan racial purity.
“They say that he said something about blood,” Mr. Trump said. “He didn’t say it the way I said it, either. By the way, it’s a very different kind of a statement.” He did not explain the distinction.
As Sam Seder quipped yesterday on Majority Report (in Trump’s voice) “I didn’t copy Hitler, he copied me!”
Trump is an admirer of Hitler. of course he is. He admires all tyrants and dictators.All the way back in the 1980s he said this about the fall of the Soviet Union:
“What you will see there soon is a revolution; the signs are all there with the demonstrations and picketing. Russia is out of control and the leadership knows it. That’s my problem with [former Soviet President Mikhail] Gorbachev. Not a firm enough hand.”
Tiananmen Square:
“When the students poured into Tiananmen Square, the Chinese government almost blew it. Then they were vicious, they were horrible, but they put it down with strength. That shows you the power of strength. Our country is right now perceived as weak…as being spit on by the rest of the world.”
You think the guy who takes pride in his “good German blood” doesn’t admire Hitler? Please.
Happy Hollandaise, folks. If things go right, we may be rid of this monster in our political lives in less than a year.
Three Republican lawmakers from battleground states are trying to kick President Biden off their states’ ballots to “showcase the absurdity” of the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision to ban former President Donald Trump from the state’s ballot.
The Colorado Supreme Court ruled this week that former President Donald Trump engaged in “insurrection” and is ineligible to appear on the state ballot.
“The absurdity of radical Democrat judges removing Donald Trump from the ballot in Colorado will be a stain on the American political system for decades,” state Reps. Aaron Bernstine of Pennsylvania, Charlice Byrd of Georgia and Cory McGarr of Arizona said in a press release. “By their very own interpretation of the law Joe Biden is 100% not eligible to run for political office.”
“Democrats’ insane justification to remove Trump can just as easily be applied to Joe Biden for ‘insurrection’ at the southern border and has alleged corrupt family business dealings with China,” they said.
No. Children, listen up. There is a specific definition of “insurrection” and those examples do not fit. That’s very stupid. You can attempt to impeach Joe Biden for those things, but that’s not an insurrection, which is what’s required in order to deny a candidate a place on the ballot. You are big cry babies and you should be embarrassed.
Maybe they need a time out. Or better yet, give them a bottle and put them to bed. Let them cry it out.
Laura Ingraham has a new theory. She thinks “the left” is torturing Dear leader with all this nasty “accountability” in order to get his followers so darned mad that they start to riot, giving “us” the excuse to declare martial law and crack down on them.
“Given what we are seeing in the courts, at the DOJ, and even in state AG offices, and given Democrats’ ‘Trump is Hitler’ rhetoric—is it not logical, at least to consider, maybe even to assume, that some on the left are hoping to spark some type of civil unrest here?” Ingraham said.
“Which would be followed, of course, by a mass crackdown on civil liberties, or the declaration of maybe a nationwide emergency?
This isn’t a novel idea, of course. It’s exactly what Trump wanted to do during the George Floyd protests and what they planned to do if their fake elector scheme worked and the supporters of people who actually won the election took to the streets.
Basically, Ingraham is saying, “nice little country you have here, be a shame if anything happened to it.” If people stop demanding accountability for their leader’s multiple crimes, the trashing of the country doesn’t have to happen. Remember that.
Donald Trump told Hugh Hewitt that he would observe the peaceful transfer of power next time. Just as he did before.
“Of course,” Trump responded to Hewitt when asked if he would hand over power peacefully if reelected. “And I did that this time. And I’ll tell you what. The election was rigged, and we have plenty of evidence of it. But I did it anyway.”
Uhm, no he didn’t. Just look at that video above.
I happened upon a piece in Just Security from February 2021 about the fascist parallels with Trump’s coup and the fascist themes in that film they showed at the ellipse to gin up the crowd. It seems newly …. relevant:
Fascist thought
Chapter 2 of Mein Kampf, Hitler’s first and most famous book, is entitled “Years of Study and Suffering in Vienna.” In it, he documents what he describes as his gradual realization that behind the various institutions of power were the Jews. His enlightenment supposedly begins with the entertainment industry, where he remarks that “[t]he fact that nine tenths of all literary filth, artistic trash, and theatrical idiocy can be set to the account of a people, constituting hardly one hundredth of all the country’s inhabitants, could simply not be talked away; it was plain truth.” But it was, Hitler writes, when he “recognized the Jew as the leader of the Social Democracy” that “the scales fell from [his] eyes.” Hitler describes a growing sense, foundational to the ideology the book delineates, the ideology of Nazism, that Jews were controlling the apparatus of the state, both as important party politicians in the Social Democratic Party, and as operators behind the scenes of the press and other institutions.
In Nazi ideology, Jews are represented by an unholy alliance between Jewish capitalists and Jewish communists. The goal of the Jewish plot is to destroy national states, replacing them by a world government run by Jews. This diabolical Jewish plot involves destroying the character of individual nations, by flooding them with immigrants, and empowering minority populations. Hitler describes the German loss in World War I as part of this plan, a “stab in the back” of the German people by Jewish traitors seeking the ruin of the nation. In Nazi ideology, liberal democracy is represented as a corruption, a mask for this takeover by a global elite. Hitler reveals his true attitude toward liberalism in Mein Kampf, when he writes (in the characteristically sexist terms of Nazi ideology):
Like the woman, whose psychic state is determined less by grounds of abstract reason than by an identifiable emotional longing for a force which will complement her nature, and who, consequently, would rather bow to a strong man than dominate a weakling, likewise the masses love a commander more than a petitioner…
Fascism is a patriarchal cult of the leader, who promises national restoration in the face of supposed humiliation by a treacherous and power-hungry global elite, who have encouraged minorities to destabilize the social order as part of their plan to dominate the “true nation,” and fold them into a global world government. The fascist leader is the father of his nation, in a very real sense like the father in a traditional patriarchal family. He mobilizes the masses by reminding them of what they supposedly have lost, and who it is that is responsible for that loss – the figures who control democracy itself, the elite; Nazi ideology is a species of fascism in which this global elite are Jews.
The future promised by the fascist leader is one in which there are plentiful blue collar jobs, reflecting the manly ideals of hard work and strength. In Nazi propaganda, many white collar jobs, the domain of Jews – running department stores, banking – were for the idle. And the fascist nation’s heart and soul is the military – as Hitler writes, “[w]hat the German people owes to the army can be briefly summed up in a single word, to wit: everything.” The fascist future is a kind of restoration of a glorious past, but a modern version – replete with awesome technology that glorifies the nation to the world. The German V-2 rocket was a characteristic representation of Nazi might. The fascist future is, in the famous description of Jeffrey Herf, a kind of reactionary modernism.
Fascist propaganda
Fascism uses propaganda as a way of mobilizing a population behind the leader. Fascist propaganda creates an awesome sense of loss, and a desire for revenge against those who are responsible. In the face of the supposed betrayal of the nation during World War I by Jewish “vipers,” Hitler describes the proper response to have been to place the “leaders of the whole movement…behind bars.” Hitler writes, “[a]ll the implements of military power should have been ruthlessly used for the extermination of this pestilence. The parties should have been dissolved, the Reichstag brought to its senses, with bayonets if necessary, but, best of all, dissolved at once.” The goal of fascist propaganda is to mobilize a population to violently overthrew multi-party democracy and replace it with the leader…
II. The Movie Shown at the Ellipse
This history, both European and American, illuminates the dangers we face today, laid bare in the video. In it, Trump is repeatedly represented as the nation’s father figure. It is laced through with images of masculinity, and mournful loss at the hands of traitors, clearly justifying a violent restoration of recent glory.
The video begins with Trump’s eyes in the shadow, and its second frame focuses the audience on the Capitol building – America’s Reichstag, where the decisions being denounced by the rally’s organizers were being made that day. The third frame of the video is the Hollywood sign in Los Angeles. This image immediately directs the attention of an audience attuned to an American fascist ideology to the supposedly elite class of Jews who, according to this ideology, control Hollywood. The appearance of the Hollywood sign makes no other sense in the context of a short video about an election. The next two images, of the UN General Assembly and the EU Parliament floor, connect supposed Jewish control of Hollywood to the goal of world government. As we have seen, according to Nazi ideology, Jews seek to use their control of the press and the entertainment industry to destroy individual nations. The beginning of the video focuses our attention on this supposedly “globalist,” but really Jewish, threat.
The next clip lingers on Joe Biden, with a vacant stare in his eyes and the video footage slowed, while Trump’s inauguration speech plays, “For too long, a small group in our nation’s capital has reaped the rewards of government, while the people have borne the cost.” It is clear from the image of Biden that he is not making the decisions. The video shifts to an image of Senator Charles Schumer, reminding the viewer of prominent Jewish leaders of the Democratic party. Schumer is wearing a Kente cloth, an image evocative of Ku Klux Klan ideology — that Jews support Black liberation movements as a way to undermine white rule and destroy the nation. The next frame shows the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, flanked by two Jewish Congressman, Representatives Nadler and Schiff. Pelosi, too, is controlled by Jews.
Who, then, are this “small group in our nation’s capital”? The video suggests it is a group that controls Hollywood and the Democratic Party, and seeks to use Black liberation movements to undermine the nation, and bring about world government. In Nazi ideology, as well as its US counterpart, this group is the Jews. And what are the costs? As the inauguration speech continues, “The establishment protected itself, but not the citizens of this our country;” gunshots are fired and we are shown images of these citizens betrayed by a duplicitous establishment – mournful pictures of coffins of veterans, homeless encampments, and a series of slides varying between nostalgic images of white American families over dinner with rural destitution – a worn down home flying a large American flag with an old pickup truck in front. At the end of these grim scenes of the results of elite betrayal, Trump declares, “This all ends right here, right now.”
As the music surges, what follows is a series of photos taken during Trump’s first term. This phase of the video begins with images of enormous naval ships on the ocean, and moves to images of Trump striding in front of a military guard at a football game, the iconic sport of American masculinity (hence the very particular danger of the Black quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s challenge to white supremacy). It is followed by rally after rally with adoring masses cheering Trump. The images of women overcome with emotion at the sight of the nation’s father figure, and violent anger at his political enemies, are interspersed with heavy machinery in factories, churning out huge new pick-up trucks, fighter jets streaking across the sky, and Trump striding across the screen framed by the powerful American imagery of the Lincoln Memorial. A Black man and a white man are shown in brotherhood at a Trump rally. Trump is shown observing powerful rockets launch, images evocative, for those schooled in history, of the Nazi’s own obsession with this particular technology.
After these scenes of Trump’s glorious leadership, the restoration of American rocket technology dominance, the mood shifts, as we are shown former Attorney General Bill Barr swearing in at what appears to be a deposition, followed by a smirking Joe Biden. Treachery has entered in, stage left.
What follows is scene after scene of immense loss. Empty streets of great American cities, a forlorn white woman peering out of a window, trapped at home. Scrabble pieces spelling “FEAR” appear and disappear within less than a second, empty chairs at a school, a sign reading “closed.” We see an image of the Supreme Court, followed by what appears to be a Black Lives Matter rally on a street emblazoned with “DEFUND THE POLICE.” Joe Biden appears in a forlorn photo in a gym, speaking to a lone man in a chair – Biden is here a petitioner, not a commander. The video switches back to a representation of glorious Trump years – a rising stock market, more fighter planes, a Black man and a white man with a “Jesus Saves” shirt embracing in brotherhood – a reference to the power of a shared Christian identity to bond Americans across racial lines. It ends with the screen filling with a powerful image of Trump’s face, showing steely resolve.
The message of the video is clear. America’s glory has been betrayed by treachery and division sown by politicians seeking to undermine and destroy the nation. To save the nation, one must restore Trump’s rule.
Each of us can decide what moral responsibility Trump personally has for a video to rouse his supporters at the rally. How much of a role the White House or Trump himself may have played in deciding to show the video and sequencing it immediately after Giuliani’s speech, we don’t know. But it is worth noting that the New York Times recently reported that by early January, “the rally would now effectively become a White House production” and, with his eye ever on media production, Trump micromanaged the details. “The president discussed the speaking lineup, as well as the music to be played, according to a person with direct knowledge of the conversations. For Mr. Trump, the rally was to be the percussion line in the symphony of subversion he was composing from the Oval Office,” the Times reported.
Worldwide, there have been many fascist movements. Not all fascist movements focus on a global Jewish conspiracy as the enemy, and not all of them were genocidal. Early on, Italian fascism was not anti-Semitic in its core, though it later turned that way. British fascism was not genocidal (though it also was never given the opportunity to be). The most influential fascist movement that takes a shadowy Jewish conspiracy as its central target is German fascism, Nazism. Nazism did not start out in genocide. It began with militias and violent troops disrupting democracy. In its early years in power, in the 1930s, it was socialists and communists who were targeted for the Concentration Camps, torture, and murder. But it must never be forgotten where Nazism culminated.
I know a lot of people want to ignore this stuff and pretend it doesn’t matter because Trump is such a clown. Well, people thought Hitler was a clown too. It turns out that there are a lot of people who are hungry for a fascist clown to lead them.
People love to denigrate Joe Biden as being senile and incoherent. Here’s Joe Rogan doing just that. Only he makes a little mistake:
Yes, it was Donald Trump who said it. And he is is far more incoherent and weird than Biden has ever been. Here’s my favorite:
But really … tell me that this man is all there:
I wish I understood why he is given a pass while Biden is harassed for his rather normal verbal stumbles. Maybe it’s the make-up and hairspray obscuring how old Trump really is.
They seemed otherwise unstoppable. Then common terrestrial bacteria felled the invading Martians in “War of the Worlds.” Put a pin in that. Could it be important?
A week or so ago, this post from Adam Kinzinger popped up and … whut? Whatever prompted that was unclear or I missed it and dismissed it.
I’m genuinely surprised how people close to Trump haven’t talked about the odor.
It’s truly something to behold. Wear a mask if you can
— Adam Kinzinger (Slava Ukraini) 🇺🇸🇺🇦🇮🇱 (@AdamKinzinger) December 16, 2023
#TrumpSmells Becomes Top Trend in U.S. As Claims of Putrid Odor Go Viral
The hashtag #TrumpSmells quickly skyrocketed to the top trending topic in the United States on X after Donald Trump’s team threw a stink over claims that the ex-president and criminal defendant has an “odor” that is “truly something to behold.”
The story on MeidasTouch includes video “testimony” from former The Apprentice staffer Noel Casler about “Diaper Don”:
“The diapers is not a joke,” Casler began.
“He would often soil himself on The Apprentice set. He’s incontinent from all the speed, all the Adderall he does, all the cocaine that he’s done for decades…His [bowels] are uncontrollable.”
Casler claimed that Trump has been wearing diapers since the 1990s and the he had a chance to witness it firsthand in the late 2000s, while working on the set of The Apprentice.
One hellsite user Xitted, “Wonder why Trump hasn’t sued Noel Casler for defamation yet? Prob cause discovery would be wild”
“It’s true. Many people are saying,” quipped another X user.
“No one realised Bannon meant literally,” Xitted one user.
Team Trump is desperately pushing a narrative about @RonDeSantis supposedly being gross when he eats as a distraction from the growing #TrumpSmells scandal as the Orange Emperor is found to be a putrid diaper-soiling scent machine.
So, hold your nose but not your breath at the prospect of something as primitive as smell stopping Trump’s nascent fascist movement. We’ve held out so many hopes for stopping a second Trump presidency. He faces a raft of criminal charges. He could be convicted before 2024 voting starts. He faces 14th Amendment challenges in court. He could be declared disaqualified.
Or.
“One consistent finding is that conservatives show higher disgust sensitivity than liberals,” finds one of many studies. “To a surprising degree, our political beliefs may derive from a specific aspect of our biological makeup: our propensity to feel physical revulsion,” Kathleen McAuliffe recounted inThe Atlantic.
The ultimate irony would be smell being what lodges in the lizard brains of MAGA cult members and finally stops Diaper Don.
More than 15 million people have signed up for health insurance plans offered on the Affordable Care Act’s federal marketplace, a 33 percent increase compared to the same time last year, according to preliminary data released by the Biden administration on Wednesday.
Federal health officials project that more than 19 million people will enroll in 2024 coverage by the end of the current enrollment period next month. That total would include those who gain coverage through state marketplaces, continuing the record-setting pace.
Despite a recent warning from former President Donald J. Trump, the front-runner in the race for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, that he was “seriously looking at alternatives” to the Affordable Care Act, the latest surge in marketplace enrollment is a testament to the law’s enduring power.
Legislation passed earlier in the Covid-19 pandemic increased federal subsidies for people buying plans, lowering the costs for many Americans. The Biden administration also lengthened the sign-up period and increased advertising for the program and funding for so-called navigators who help people enroll.
[…]
On Dec. 15 — the deadline to sign up for coverage that begins on Jan. 1 — nearly 750,000 people opted for a marketplace plan on HealthCare.gov. It was the largest single-day total yet.
Dr. Benjamin Sommers, a health economist at Harvard who served in the Biden administration, said that improved outreach helped explain the record sign-ups. “I’m pleasantly surprised,” he said.
With years of increased subsidies, he added, “it might be this is the natural growth rate over a few years in a new policy environment.”
Kody Kinsley, the top health official in North Carolina, said that his state had gotten creative by using its efforts expanding Medicaid to also sign people up for marketplace plans.
“We’ve had a very broad educational and outreach campaign — with civic organizations, churches, navigators — built around expansion to educate folks about eligibility,” he said in a text message.
He added: “As part of that, we support folks to get coverage on the marketplace, if they’re not eligible” for Medicaid.
The open-enrollment period on Healthcare.gov runs through mid-January, ending at 5 a.m. Eastern time on Jan. 17. People who enroll by then will have coverage beginning in February.
Biden administration officials said that they were encouraging enrollees who were already covered through HealthCare.gov to continue shopping for plans, in case a new option turns out to be better and more affordable.
The Affordable Care Act’s marketplaces have become particularly valuable to the people losing Medicaid coverage this year after a federal policy that guaranteed coverage earlier in the pandemic lapsed in April.
The millions of people dropping off Medicaid rolls has contributed to the uptick in marketplace enrollment, Ms. Cox said, and to surges during normally sleepier periods outside open enrollment. (Certain life events, such as the sudden loss of other health coverage, allow some Americans to get new plans outside the open enrollment period.)
According to federal health officials, from March to September enrollment in marketplace plans increased by 1.6 million people, or 1.5 million more than during the same period last year.
This is really fantastic news. If all those monstrous red state governments would agree to accept the money to expand Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program, we might actually be getting close to some kind of universal coverage.
Trump will keep saying what he says because other than terrorizing his political enemies and coddling dictators, his only agenda is reversing all progress of the past century, most particularly anything with Obama’s name on it. And it’s going to hurt him. There are just too many people who have benefited from the program. That’s great!
