Another day, another reminder that the partisan divides in our politics aren’t some artificial result of dueling political parties, but rather a reflection of our deeply divided electorate:
Increasingly, the 2012 presidential election appears to be dividing along a pair of fault-lines.
The first is demographic: old versus new America.
President Obama’s reelection depends increasingly on a coalition of minorities and younger voters, the same groups that helped put him in office. Their overall numbers are increasing, but the president’s ability to turn them out this year at anywhere close to 2008 levels remains in doubt (at least among Latinos and younger whites; the black vote is virtually certain to be there again for Obama). Their potential explains why Democrats have sought to portray the election as the future against the past.
Mitt Romney, meanwhile, is likely to become president only if he can improve on John McCain’s performance among whites, who represent a declining share of the U.S. population. The GOP candidate’s recent campaign swings have been through areas where whites make up a disproportionate share of the population — including portions of the old Midwest Rust belt and southwest Virginia. A potential key to mobilizing conservative whites: voter drives by Christian organizations to sign up millions of unregistered evangelicals; one of Romney’s biggest advantages over Obama, according to the Gallup Poll, comes from religious whites, who favor the Republican by better than 2-to-1. But Latinos have yet to warm to the GOP candidate, favoring Obama by 2-to-1 in several polls.
The other divide of surpassing importance in this year’s presidential election is geographic: it’s the gulf between a relative handful of “battleground” states, which are already getting pounded by campaign commercials, and the rest of the country, where most of America lives and which has largely been spared.
America isn’t so much a country as an uneasily balanced melange of two very distinct cultural tribes, each with its own norms, entertainment and assumptions about the basic facts of the world. And while many people find that scary, it shouldn’t be. The rising demographic is the one with a better morality and a better sense of objective reality.
What is more disconcerting is that presidential politics increasingly plays out in only a handful of states that don’t truly reflect the national experience. It’s long past time to fix that.
The 2012 Texas Republican Party Platform, adopted June 9 at the state convention in Forth Worth, seems to take a stand against, well, the teaching of critical thinking skills. Read it for yourself:
We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.
As a top commenter on a Reddit thread wrote about the language, “I was absolutely sure this had to be an elaborate fake … .” It’s not.
We at Teacher think this may be a kind of first. While the push for accountability via standardized testing—which the current Democratic administration has stood behind—has frequently been characterized as potentially undermining instruction in critical thinking, blatant opposition to teaching students to think deeply has not often (ever?) been a part of the policy conversation.
But it’s been the implicit goal of authoritarians forever.
JUSTICE SCALIA: All right. The consequence of your proposition, would Congress have enacted it without this provision, okay that’s the consequence.
That would mean that if we struck down nothing in this legislation but the — what you call the corn husker kickback, okay, we find that to violate the constitutional proscription of venality, okay?
The Cornhusker Kickback was supposed to give Nebraska 100% federal funding for Medicaid forever in return for Nelson’s vote. He ended up there when he couldn’t get enough votes for his preferred “opt-in” on the Medicaid expansion. Ironically, Justice Roberts and the majority, by allowing the states to “opt-out” without suffering any penalty, accomplished what Senator Nelson couldn’t.
It probably means nothing, but it makes you wonder what these guys were talking about among themselves doesn’t it?
One of the reasons I resist getting all giddy about every Obamacare victory is because I know it’s never going to end. They will be fighting this long after I am dead. (After all, they’re still trying to end Social Security after 75 years). So everyone should just hunker down and assume that the battle is ongoing. A “win” is never final. In fact, it’s usually the beginning.
But after reading reams of analysis over the past 24 hours I do think it’s worth pointing out again that this case was not joined by any of the Medical Industrial Complex players. They sat it out, quite happy to enjoy a big surge in healthy customers fueled by billions in government subsidies. For that reason, it’s very hard for me to see this mandate being repealed or the subsidies being cut back, even though they will stage a Grand Kabuki pretending that they will. It’s just too good for business.
The Medicaid expansion, on the other hand, was always going to be the real political football.(Sometimes I thought it was meant to be.) This is where the battle will be joined in earnest, at least in the short run. Places like California will try to implement the new scheme and may succeed for a time. But if the deficit hawks have their way and put us on a harsher austerity path and/or the Republicans eventually succeed in changing the ACA Medicaid provisions to a block grant or something else, that part of the reforms will wither. And more immediately, we may see some obstinate zealots in the state houses and governors mansions who will take Justice Roberts up on his offer to reject the funding for the ACA.
I was just on a conference call where Governor Martin O’Malley (D-MD) was asked whether he thought Republican governors might opt out of the Medicaid expansion in light of the Supreme Court’s ACA ruling yesterday. He replied, “I don’t know. Some of our colleagues would like to get out of being members of the Union.” I think that’s the right way to look at it. These are an ideologically extreme set of characters, and they’re not going to go quietly, meekly accepting funds that expands health care for poor people. That goes against their worldview. […] It’s not logical or rational in the short term. But it’s pretty clear that will be their perspective. Especially because those who would be left on the other side of the divide, in the event of rejecting the Medicaid expansion, would so clearly be on the side of the “other”:
For people of color, the impact of the mess that the court just rolled down Pennsylvania Avenue and out into the country cannot be understated. Blacks, Latinos and Asians are up to three times less likely to have insurance than whites. Half of the nation’s uninsured are people of color.
The Center for American Progress estimates that this racial gap in health care coverage costs the country $415 billion a year in lost productivity.
For black and brown America, affordable, quality healthcare is key to closing a wider economic gulf […]
Medicaid is a mitigating force in this lopsided system. Blacks and Latinos are enrolled in Medicaid at twice the rate of whites. Half of those in the program are children. As the Kaiser Family Foundation has bluntly concluded, “Medicaid enables Black and Hispanic Americans to access health care.”
The recession has made this more true than ever. Three out of four people who lose their job, also lose their insurance. As a result, the number of people in Medicaid has soared to 60 million.
60 million people.
During the Health Care negotiations when we were all obsessed with the public option, I recall speaking to a progressive congressman about whether or not they were willing to form a bloc and kill the bill since the PO had been tossed. He said to me that he would love to but he couldn’t walk away from this expansion in Medicaid, it was just too important to the working poor. I supported the bill for the same reasons. I thought we could do a lot better than this crazy set-up for the private insurance market, but the Medicaid expansion was getting through without much controversy, which I thought was a miracle worth taking and running with.
But I never thought the centrists and conservatives wouldn’t try to fuck with it every chance they got. For the reasons Dday outlines above, it will be the new “welfare” with all that that implies.
The Medicaid expansion was the liberal piece of the reforms, government funded health care for the working poor. In my view that’s where progressives should focus their energies and get out ahead of the inevitable conservative onslaught.
Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE) has announced that Senate Democrats would have to allow states to “opt-in” to the Medicaid expansion to secure his vote for the Senate health care bill. In a letter to Nebraska Governor Dave Heineman, who has previously raised concerns about the provision in the Senate bill that would expand Medicaid to 133% of the federal poverty line (FPL), Nelson wrote “In your letter you note that the current Senate bill is not in Nebraska’s best interest. I agree. That is why I continue to work to change it,” Nelson wrote. “Under my proposal, if Nebraska prefers not to opt in to a reformed health care system, it would have that right.”
I’m just saying: don’t count on the Democrats to automatically protect this from the vultures.
Densification: another positive progressive trendline
by David Atkins
To say that demographic trends are against conservatives would be an understatement. From progressive attitudes among the nation’s youth to decreasing religiosity to the rise of Latinos as a percentage of the general population, time is definitely not on the side of the Fox News crowd.
For the first time in a century, most of America’s largest cities are growing at a faster rate than their surrounding suburbs as young adults seeking a foothold in the weak job market shun home-buying and stay put in bustling urban centers.
New 2011 census estimates released Thursday highlight the dramatic switch.
Driving the resurgence are young adults, who are delaying careers, marriage and having children amid persistently high unemployment. Burdened with college debt or toiling in temporary, lower-wage positions, they are spurning homeownership in the suburbs for shorter-term, no-strings-attached apartment living, public transit and proximity to potential jobs in larger cities.
While economists tend to believe the city boom is temporary, that is not stopping many city planning agencies and apartment developers from seeking to boost their appeal to the sizable demographic of 18-to-29-year olds. They make up roughly 1 in 6 Americans, and some sociologists are calling them “generation rent.” The planners and developers are betting on young Americans’ continued interest in urban living, sensing that some longer-term changes such as decreased reliance on cars may be afoot…
“The recession hit suburban markets hard. What we’re seeing now is young adults moving out from their parents’ homes and starting to find jobs,” Shepard said. “There’s a bigger focus on building residences near transportation hubs, such as a train or subway station, because fewer people want to travel by car for an hour and a half for work anymore.”
Katherine Newman, a sociologist and dean of arts and sciences at Johns Hopkins University who chronicled the financial struggles of young adults in a recent book, said they are emerging as a new generation of renters due to stricter mortgage requirements and mounting college debt. From 2009 to 2011, just 9 percent of 29- to 34-year-olds were approved for a first-time mortgage.
“Young adults simply can’t amass the down payments needed and don’t have the earnings,” she said. “They will be renting for a very long time.”
It’s easy to look at this glass half-empty and assume this is all due to lack of economic opportunity. Part of that is no doubt true. But it’s also a cultural phenomenon.
Many younger people today simply don’t want the big yard, the picket fence and the suburban tract home landscape without mixed use walkability. It’s already well-documented that the Millennial generation would rather make a little less money while working fewer hours on more meaningful tasks with shorter commutes. Living in apartments and condos in close proximity to others isn’t such a problem for Millennials as it has been for previous generations. My wife and I are prime examples of this: we work mostly from home and could choose to live almost anywhere. But we choose apartment life in a medium-size city within easy walking distance to public transportation and a downtown full of shops and restaurants. All this because we choose to, not because we’re forced to. The addition of children will change the dynamic somewhat, but not much.
This is a good thing. City life and densification have almost always led to greater progressivism: it’s harder to be a libertarian when the importance of social services is incredibly clear all around you, and it’s harder to be a bigot when there are people of varying races, orientations and lifestyles living all around you mostly without incident.
Short-term trendlines are scary for progressivism in a number of ways right now to be sure. The power of money in politics, the financialization of the economy, and the far-right lurch of the Republican Party are all deeply problematic.
But the playing field is gradually tilting against them. Assuming we don’t allow civilization itself to collapse over the next few decades or fail utterly to slow the process of climate change, the future looks fairly bright over the long term given current trends.
So now John Roberts is a liberal. Ann Coulter has spent the entire day tweeting “I told you so.” Or he is the victim of nefarious Kenyan blackmail. And apparently, he changed his mind (or at least some people are parsing that from wording in the decision) after originally voting to strike down the mandate.
I don’t suppose we’ll ever know what made him vote the way he did. But I personally wouldn’t be surprised if he was worried about the court’s legitimacy — and therefore its power — if they were to strike this down. There’s been an awful lot of talk about the loss of faith in institutions and the destruction of democratic norms in recent times, some of which was perpetrated by the court itself. Bush vs Gore was a blight that cannot be erased and Citizens United was the latest in a series of rulings that are threatening our democracy in a very fundamental way. To strike this down in a 5-4 decision in this political climate (even if it were legally reasonable) could very well have sealed the belief that the Court is a partisan power tool. I would guess Roberts prefers to have his era be thought of as a legitimate conservative juris prudential revolution than as mere hackish devotion to the parochial political concerns of the day. He’s willing to take the time to build that slowly, one precedent at a time.
The ever-powerful US Chamber of Commerce, whose legal eagles are in the midst of one of the most amazing runs of success in Supreme Court history, did not oppose the law. Like the insurance industry, the Chamber did not take a position on the individual mandate or other parts of the law. Instead, it merely urged to court to act quickly to settle the outstanding legal issues. Like AHIP, the Chamber argued that the fate of the mandate should be bound to that of the other insurance reforms—if one went, the other would have to be scrapped, too. Other business groups also avoided the fight or signed up for the other side. The hospital industry supported upholding the law’s Medicaid expansion. The pharmaceutical industry’s lobbying arm, PhRMA, which timidly supported the original bill, didn’t weigh in at all.
So business wasn’t really a part of the anti-Obamacare coalition. Instead, the primary legal challenges to the ACA came from states headed by right-wing (and often unpopular) ideological governors, and the states’ outside support came from equally ideological advocacy organizations, such as the Family Research Council and fringe physicians’ groups. But their lack of support from the business community is notable, and it may be the one reason why Justice John Roberts decided the case the way he did.
Roberts is conservative, but not in the same way as Justices Antonin Scalia or Clarence Thomas. He’s more of a white-shoe law firm kind of guy, which is fitting for someone who was a partner at the corporate law firm Hogan & Hartson (now Hogan Lovells). As such, he’s got some of the pragmatism of a corporate lawyer, and his sympathy for the business community’s arguments has been plain from the time he was first confirmed. (See: Citizens United.) If the US Chamber of Commerce didn’t see fit to argue that the ACA was unconstitutional, it’s not surprising that Roberts didn’t, either.
Unlike his right wing brethren on the Court, it would appear that Roberts is ideological to the extent that ideology serves money. Most of the time that makes a majority with Thomas, Alito, Scalia and Kennedy. In this case, due to the nature of the law and its goals, it swung the other way. But Roberts wasn’t being inconsistent. He delivered.
The Supreme Court is where the real conservative revolution — the corporate revolution — is going to be taking place over the next several years. Today Chief Justice Roberts went a long way toward ensuring that it will have the legitimacy to get that done.
I’ll be very anxious to see how striking down the mandate under the commerce clause plays out — I suspect Roberts is being very clever there. And, as I have always feared, the Medicaid expansion is the weak link. Everyone seems to think that the wingnut Governors won’t be able to resist the free money, but they’ve been pretty willing to forego filthy Planned Parenthood and Unemployment Insurance cash, so I’m not totally convinced. Perhaps more importantly, the mechanism that Roberts came up with (signed on to by 7 justices) is one that could have a very serious effect on the future ability of the federal government to manage national social programs. So we’ll have to see what the reverberations will be down the road.
At this moment, on this day, I’m not inclined to carp too much. It happens to be a law that will extend health insurance to some number of people who wouldn’t have been able to get it before and that’s a big fucking deal. But there’s also no doubt in my mind that it came at a price.
Say what you will about Chief Justice Roberts, but he’s not a liberal in sheep’s clothing — he’s very smart and that he’s playing a very long game. Lifetime appointments are good for that sort of thing. The good news is that in the course of enacting his long term agenda today he has helped some average people. We take what we can get.
Dave Dayen riffs on a strange catch by Brad DeLong today, who noticed that Scalia refers to Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s majority opinion as a “dissent” at least nine times. There’s currently an argument about whether Scalia’s reference to dissent in this case was an error, or if he refers only to Ginsburg’s minority view on the legitimacy of the Commerce Clause to decide the point.
Whether or not Roberts did flip at the last minute, however, there is still the issue of why he separated himself from his fellow conservatives in the first place.
Dayen:
Without that shift – if there was one – the entire Affordable Care Act would have been struck down, based on a reading that the individual mandate was both not a valid regulation of interstate commerce and also essential to regulating health care, such that the entire framework of the law, including Constitutional provisions, would have had to have been struck down. The claim for this is that the act’s other statutes would not have been enacted without the mandate, an effort by the Court’s four dissenters to read the minds of the White House and Congress.
But I’m more interested in what, if anything got to Roberts. Was Scalia’s opinion initially the majority ruling? Why did Roberts flip? It’s worth pointing out that Roberts’ opinion does invalidate the mandate under the Commerce Clause. That is a brand new piece of jurisprudence, and there are widely varying opinions from legal scholars over how much that will matter, i.e. whether it merely confines itself to the peculiar case in health care of “regulating inactivity” or not. So it could be that Roberts is chipping away at progressive governance post-New Deal and setting limits on federal power by inches at a time, or that he just couldn’t contemplate the invalidation of the entire law and opted for judicial restraint, or that he was moved by the impending attack on the legitimacy of the Court in the event of taking down the law, or even that he wanted to preserve a forced market for insurance companies and stave off the only option in the event of a full elimination of the law, a move to publicly-dispensed universal health insurance.
If Scalia did not make an error in calling the majority opinion the “dissent” in this case because he was referring solely to the issue of the commerce clause, then it’s possible that Roberts never did flip.
Regardless, it’s impossible to know what actually went through Roberts’ mind in deciding against his fellow conservatives here. It’s important to remember that people in positions of power are still people in all their glorious complexity, and I have cautioned before against applying the Snidely Whiplash theory of politics to everything under the sun. It could be that he was playing a long game, adding a bulwark to the Court’s legitimacy while giving the Court more power to invalidate federal laws in the future. But that argument is as persuasive to me as other arguments involving eleven-dimensional chess. Besides, if Roberts were sneaky enough to see that angle, why not convince at least Justice Kennedy of the same? Why, if DeLong is right, change his mind at the last minute?
I think it’s likeliest that Roberts’ key concern was for the legitimacy of the Court as an institution. But if that is the case, why (if DeLong is correct) switch at the last minute? The issue of Court’s legitimacy would have been obvious from even before the Court took up the case.
I suspect that many books will be written about how and why this decision came down as it did. But it seems likely that one of two things happened: either last-minute pressure swayed Roberts against his own judgment, or a more complicated and deliberative man than Kennedy and the three conservative firebreathers burnt a lot of midnight oil weighing the competing interests of his conservative ideology and the Court’s legitimacy and ultimately decided in favor of preserving the Court as an institution.
Either way, one thing is undeniable at this point: there is a difference between Roberts and Alito, and Democrats were right to put up more of a fight against the latter than the former. This was a momentous case with high stakes, and the balls and strikes were called correctly at least this once.
There they go again: The sky has been falling for 50 years
by digby
Let’s take a little trip down memory lane, shall we? The socialists have been destroying our freedom by forcing health care on us for half a century. And yet, somehow, we survive:
But hey, even Ronnie (very famously) hedged, years later, in a 1980 presidential debate:
CARTER: Governor Reagan, as a matter of fact, began his political career campaigning around this nation against Medicare. Now, we have an opportunity to move toward national health insurance, with an emphasis on the prevention of disease, an emphasis on out-patient care, not in-patient care; an emphasis on hospital cost containment to hold down the cost of hospital care far those who are ill, an emphasis on catastrophic health insurance, so that if a family is threatened with being wiped out economically because of a very high medical bill, then the insurance would help pay for it. These are the kinds of elements of a national health insurance, important to the American people. Governor Reagan, again, typically is against such a proposal.
MODERATOR: Governor?
REAGAN: There you go again. When I opposed Medicare, there was another piece of legislation meeting the same problem before the Congress. I happened to favor the other piece of legislation and thought that it would be better for the senior citizens and provide better care than the one that was finally passed. I was not opposing the principle of providing care for them. I was opposing one piece of legislation versus another.
