Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Comparing The Crazies

by digby

I have been traveling the past few days, hence the scant attention to the hysteria over Joe Wilson. I confess that this is the kind of thing I have a really hard time getting too upset about because it just isn’t a federal offense to call the president a liar. The problem is when the press and the party fail to correct the record. Indeed, I wish more people had called Bush a liar when he was actually lying.The world would be a better place today.

But Glenn Greenwald writes today of the utter vapidity of the he said/ she said nonsense coming from the media around this Wilson flap and that does make me want to call for the smelling salts. Dear God, these people are daft:

Needless to say, no establishment media outlet is permitted to write an article that includes criticisms of “one side” without emphasizing that the criticisms apply just the same to “the other side” — regardless of whether that’s actually true. That’s what “balance” means. Thus, Politico publishes an article discussing the fact that the Right is dominated by crackpots and it is therefore required to claim that the Left is, too. Here are their examples to provide the balance needed so as to not upset Matt Drudge and Rush Limbaugh:

Nor are Democrats strangers to having their crazy uncles take center stage. During the run-up to the Iraq war, for example, Reps. Jim McDermott (D-Wash.), Mike Thompson (D-Calif.) and David Bonior (D-Mich.) famously flew to Baghdad, where McDermott asserted that he believed the president would “mislead the American public” to justify the war. The trip made it a cakewalk for critics to describe the Democratic Party as chock-a-block with traitorous radicals.

That’s one of the most amazing passages I can recall reading. Even now — when everyone knows that the President did exactly that which Rep. McDermott, in 2002, said he was doing: “misleading the American public to justify the war” — those who pointed out that truth are deemed “crazy.” Here’s what that “crazy traitorous uncle” McDermott actually said, as reported back then by The New York Times

In that one passage they reveal that it’s all about the Miss Manners police to these people, not about the substance of the claims at all. To them it really doesn’t matter at all whether or not the president is lying. It only matters if someone says he’s lying. What kind of journalism is that?

In a political world populated by normal people instead of high school kewl kidz, Wilson’s outburst would have prompted endless stories about whether or not the president was lying. Since he wasn’t that should have been one of those “teachable moments” about how ridiculous the Republican criticisms are, and how health care reform is actually going to work. But no, we are talking about whether it’s appropriate to say that the president is a liar.

The next time a lazy reporter wants to find a “balance” between left and right when it comes to acting crazy, they should look to the obvious: teabaggers like Joe Wilson vs Code Pink. The main difference is that our practitioners of political theatre don’t pack heat and they aren’t members of congress or Democratic candidates for vice president. That certainly doesn’t make the teabagger Reps and Senators any less crazy. The opposite, in fact.

Unfortunately, we can’t even get our own Senate lackeys to put this in the proper perspective since they have decided to further validate Wilson’s ravings. (Why don’t we just bar code ourselves and be done with it? Of course, then the Big Bad Socialists will be able to steal our brains, which in the case of the right wing and Kent Conrad is only petty theft.)

Update:

From Media Matters:

Of course, whenever reporters like Dana Milbank note such boorish behavior by a Republican, they must quickly include something some Democrat did so they seem “balanced,” even if the Democrat’s actions aren’t even remotely comparable. Sure enough, here’s Milbank:

And, in truth, there were provocations from the Democratic side. Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-N.J.), sitting on the Republican side, insisted on making a victory sign with his hand and waving it at Obama.

Yeah. That’s the same. (And “insisted upon”? Really? Was there some effort to prevent Pascrell from doing so?) Milbank, continuing directly:

Rep. Al Green (D-Tex.), also on the GOP side of the aisle, felt the need to pound his fist in the air and make what looked, awkwardly, like a fascist salute.

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Lines

by digby

I have never been particularly sanguine that congressional Democrats would ultimately vote against Obama on health care if it didn’t contain a public option and I’m not even sure how many people in the progressive coalition would want them to. Unless it was a cave of such massive proportions that it was essentially a Republican wet dream (expanding health savings accounts and nothing else, for instance)I figured they would feel they have to vote for a bill that substantially expanded coverage and regulated the excesses of the insurance industry, even if it was less than what they’d wanted. My feeling has been that for progressives, something like a public plan, while important, doesn’t ground itself in principle enough to trump a serious move to universality — and loyalty to a new president of their own party.

This is not to say that I don’t think it was absolutely necessary to push hard for the public plan, as they have done and continue to do. But contrary to conventional wisdom, in in my mind the calculation was to give cover to Obama with the media and among the centrists to do what he (hopefully) already wanted to do. If Obama actually puts his weight behind a real public plan then we won’t have to find out if I’m right.

But that doesn’t mean that they will never vote to defeat their president. In fact, I believe it could happen on at least two important upcoming issues on the agenda: financial reform and the war. The first will take a huge push from the left, and may very well be unsuccessful because it’s an arcane subject and many of those who should be on the right side are either personally compromised or unmoved by the issue. But this one has the possibility at least of having a sort of inverse NAFTA dynamic in which conservative Republicans vote with progressives and it could be very powerful. But regardless, that’s a fight that should be waged and there are some good leaders on the issue, one of whom is Alan Grayson who could emerge as an important progressive figure if this issue gets the play it should:

The issue of the war is even more clear cut. Nancy Pelosi said that the war supplemental bill was a much harder vote than health care and I believe her. And that’s because for progressives, voting against expanding the war isn’t difficult on the merits at all — the only thing that brings them to the table is the president twisting their arm in a very ruthless way. That’s an entirely different dynamic and could make for a very ugly fight, particularly with the war rapidly losing support even among Republicans.

Pelosi said today:

If President Obama asks for more troops to send to Afghanistan, he could be rebuffed by Democrats in Congress.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) signaled Thursday that such a request would not be well received.

“I don’t think there’s much support for sending more troops to Afghanistan in the country or in Congress,” Pelosi said.

On the heels of the deadliest month to date for U.S. troops in Afghanistan, liberals lawmakers are bracing for a report being reviewed by top military commanders that is expected to suggest more resources and troops are needed.

Many of the liberal Democratic lawmakers who led the fight against the Iraq war are now opposing the buildup in Afghanistan, and promising to fight funding for it.

I should hope so. And that’s an issue on which I think we can and should expect them to hold the line all the way to a no vote, no matter how much their president tries to get them to hold the line. Ending this constant war escalation is a fundamental progressive imperative on the merits and on the politics. Obama won the nomination largely because he differentiated himself from Clinton on his Iraq vote — and progressives didn’t expect him to start escalating the Afghanistan war like he’s Robert McNamara Jr. This one is going to be a hairy fight and well it should be.

To be clear, I’m not suggesting that they shouldn’t continue to agitate for the public plan, I’m just setting forth my own opinion that if it comes down to it, they won’t vote against a health care reform bill simply because it doesn’t contain a public plan. It’s dissonant and odd to think they would be the ones to ultimately tank a big expansion of the safety net, no matter how imperfect, and I think the chances of them doing it are virtually nil. But their strong advocacy for it has undoubtedly extracted a better bill than would have already been there and they are learning how to become a real caucus that works together as a bloc. So, it’s been a worthwhile endeavor.

It’s time for all of us to accept that the president holds the cards at this point — and that the progressives are probably already girding for the next big fight. That fight is likely to be something that is much more clear cut and easily defined than a cost control measure called a “public plan” — and I think the current fight has ensured that the caucus is in a much better position to wage it than they were six months ago.

Update: To those who are going into complete hysterics because they obviously cannot tell the difference between analysis and advocacy — calm down and read very slowly and with comprehension.

I’m for the public plan. I’ve written endless posts agitating for it. I believe in it. This piece is merely an analysis of what I see as the end game, which I still believe may very well contain a public plan! My God, you’d think I just ran up the white flag Little Big Horn.

I just believe that passage of a final bill with a public plan rests on President Barack Obama. I still don’t know what he’s willing to go to the mat for (except refusing to add to the deficit.) But I do know that unless he is willing to go to the mat for the public plan, it isn’t happening no matter how much liberals scream and yell. And that leaves us with the unlikely prospect of them voting against the whole enchilada if it doesn’t contain one. I’m sorry that analysis disturbs some of you, but that doesn’t make me Max Baucus, ferchistsake. Maybe Baucus thinks he can make Obama do what he wants him to do, but I think the president has enough to juice to make this happen if he wants it badly enough.

I’m not endorsing liberals voting for the reform without the public plan. I’m analyzing and observing the situation and telling you what I see. Neither the president or the progressive caucus are waiting for instructions from me about what to do next, so everyone can relax about my “capitulation.” I don’t actually get a vote on this bill.

It’s my view that the content of health care reform has always depended upon what Obama himself was willing to fight for. It’s a decades long liberal dream to expand the social safety net that takes Presidential leadership and political capital to pull off. Believing that liberals will walk away from both him and the reform itself on the basis of this one piece of it isn’t very likely. Better hope Obama wants it as much as they (we) do.

The war and financial reform are different issues with different dynamics entirely, based on different principles. I don’t think they play out the same way.

If you don’t like my analysis, fine. But please refrain from calling me a sellout for merely observing what I see around me, particularly when it’s clear that many of you who are doing it didn’t read the post carefully.

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Therapy After Terror

by tristero

One aspect of the 9/11 attacks that has gone quite unremarked for the most part is that it was a city-wide, if not country and world-wide mental health emergency. Karen Seeley, a psychotherapist and professor, has written a terrific book about the experience of therapists on 9/11 and the aftermath called Therapy After Terror: 9/11, Psychotherapists, and Mental Health. This is from a NY Times article about her research and the experience of other therapists (full disclosure: Karen Seeley and her family are good friends of ours):

[M]ost therapists, trained in the main to help people one at a time, were not ready for this “collective catastrophe,” Dr. Seeley said. “For everybody, it was unprecedented. Firefighters weren’t prepared. Police weren’t prepared. Neither were therapists.”

Dr. Seeley spent the better part of two years conducting in-depth interviews with 35 therapists who had worked closely with 9/11 survivors and families…

What she learned was that the pros in her field not only were ill prepared for the disaster but also became overwhelmed by the horrific stories that they heard and by their own terrorism-induced anxieties. Obviously, victims’ families suffered most. But all New Yorkers were traumatized to some degree. Their city had been attacked. As the country entered a constant state of war, they were told by political leaders to be afraid. Many were.

Being human, therapists often succumbed to the same fears. Dr. Seeley called it “simultaneous trauma” — “an extremely rare clinical situation in which therapists were deeply shaken by the same catastrophic events that injured the patients they were treating.”

Illegal Logic

by dday

John Aravosis uncovers an amazing nugget in TIME Magazine. Apparently, there are Democrats who saw Rep. Joe Wilson yell “You Lie!” at the President of the United States and thought, “that guy has a point.” And they happen to be the ones writing the health care bill in the Senate Finance Committee.

The controversy over Republican Rep. Joe Wilson’s shouting out “You Lie!” at the President over his claim that illegal immigrants wouldn’t benefit from health-care reform apparently sparked some reconsideration of the relevant language. “We really thought we’d resolved this question of people who are here illegally, but as we reflected on the President’s speech last night we wanted to go back and drill down again,” said Senator Kent Conrad, one of the Democrats in the talks after a meeting Thursday morning. Baucus later that afternoon said the group would put in a proof of citizenship requirement to participate in the new health exchange — a move likely to inflame the left.

So many things wrong with this, starting with caving to an extremist. But it’s worse than that on the policy end. The exchanges are just health insurance purchasing centers, like a Wal-Mart for insurance. You don’t have to receive a subsidy to buy insurance on the exchanges; in fact, if your family makes over $88,000 a year, you can’t be eligible for a subsidy, though you can still purchase there. What Conrad is saying is that he would make it illegal for a non-citizen to BUY something.

Not only that, but proof of citizenship laws, which we don’t have in most states for voting, are onerous and disproportionately tilted away from the poor and the elderly, as well as potentially restrictive to legal immigrants with green cards, in this case. As the New York Times says today:

Should we take a harder line? Force people to prove citizenship in emergency rooms? That’s illegal, for good reason. Make verification requirements so onerous that not a single illegal immigrant slips through? Very expensive, and not smart. It would be highly likely to snag deserving citizens — like old people who don’t have their original birth certificates. And besides, we’ve tried that: A House oversight committee reviewed six state Medicaid programs in 2007 and found that verification rules had cost the federal government an additional $8.3 million. They caught exactly eight illegal immigrants.

In the case of an epidemic, like swine flu, should illegal immigrants go untreated so they can infect legal residents and American citizens?

Hard-line Republicans insist that they will fight for citizenship verification. They could, in theory, get the country to spend whatever it takes to do that and proudly report back to their voters. But there is a line beyond which antipathy to the undocumented can be damaging to those voters’ health, not to mention the federal budget. Mr. Wilson and his admirers seem to have crossed it.

Not to mention the fact that buckling to these demands will not get one Republican vote on any health care bill.

This is the Senate Finance bill, not the overall bill. But Democrats are so wishy-washy when it comes to, well, anything, that we actually could see this rotten, xenophobic, piss-poor policy in a bill supposedly designed to expand access to health care.

I know a lot of money has been flowing to Joe Wilson’s opponent in 2010, but a far better use of those dollars would be to funnel them toward primary opponents for Kent Conrad and Max Baucus.

UPDATE: Conrad is now clarifying that there would be no federal subsidies, and requiring proof of citizenship would just be used to determine qualification for government assistance. Of course, you end up with the same problem, then; those without proper proof of ID would have trouble getting subsidies that could be available to them. The larger point is that there was no need to react to a teabagger yelling and screaming. This was already implicit in the bill, and allowed for the HHS Secretary to determine a best practice. This blunt instrument is not the way to do it, and makes Democrats look weak (but that’s redundant).

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The Poor, The Adrift, The Uninsured

by dday

We interrupt yesterday, today and tomorrow’s media soccer scrum (“Does Ellen DeGeneres Think Michael Vick Should Agree With Joe Wilson About Health Care?”) to bring you the consequences of a Gilded Age economy:

The U.S. Census Bureau has just announced that the poverty rate for 2008 was 13.2%. This means the number of people in poverty has increased by about 2.5 million, to 39.8 million. To give you some perspective, 2.5 million is more than the number of people who live in Detroit and San Francisco combined.

The Census data is just devastating, particularly when you take into account that the numbers come before the job loss in the first 8 months of this year. In addition to the uptick in the poverty rate, real median household income fell 3.6%, the biggest drop in 40 years. The richest tenth of one percent saw their incomes rise by 35% over the last 10 years while median incomes stayed flat. And the number of Americans lacking health insurance increased by about 700,000 to at least 46.3 million, which does not account for the under-insured. In fact, if it wasn’t for government programs, this number would be far worse.

Things would have been worse but for one thing: continued expansion of government-provided health insurance coverage. Between 2007 and 2008, the proportion of Americans reporting any private coverage fell by 0.8 percentage points, from 67.5 percent to 66.7 percent. Meanwhile, the percentage reporting some form of government coverage rose by 1.2 points, from 27.8 percent to 29.0 percent […]

First, the absolute number of uninsured has increased. Second, employer-based coverage is eroding. Third, adverse trends in private coverage are partly masked in the overall numbers by the rise in public coverage.

Fourth, improved insurance coverage among children–thanks largely to Medicaid and SCHIP–is more than offset by increases in the number and proportion of uninsured working-age adults. As shown in the final column, the number of uninsured adults increased by almost 9 million in nine years. Since working-age adults are much more likely to actually get sick, this is a significant economic and public health concern.

Yes, it’s been government – eeevil, socialist government – which has had to step into the breach and take care of its citizenry amid a failing private market. And that includes your local fire department, increasingly becoming a primary care doctor for millions of Americans.

In 2008, fire departments around the country responded to 15.8 million medicals calls, a 213 percent increase over the 5 million medical runs record in 1980. The combining of cities’ fire and emergency medical services accounts for some of the increase.

But as the logs of a Washington, D.C., fire company show, the lack of health insurance by too many people—especially low-income families—has turned some local fire departments into mobile emergency rooms.

In one 24-hour period this summer, D.C.’s Engine Company No. 10 responded to more than two dozen emergency calls—two fires and the rest were medical emergencies. It is the same throughout the District. The Times reports the D.C. fire department responded to more medical emergency calls per capita than any other in the nation—and most come from poor neighborhoods […] such calls tie up a community’s resources and cost communities more because so many calls for emergency medical care aren’t true medical emergencies. Also, the increasing reliance on first responders and on 911 also comes at a time when firefighters and paramedics all across the country are being laid off, as the nation’s economic woes place a strain on public budgets. The recession is shrinking our resources and reducing manpower while the demand for emergency medical care is skyrocketing.

Best health care system in the history of man.

This is bigger than just health care, though, and it’s driving a lot of the anxiety out there. Recessions are disruptive events, but in previous years quick turnarounds would blunt the pain. More recently, jobless recoveries that last years and years have become the norm, and as a result, people cannot keep up. Inequality has risen to an almost comical degree, while more and more people sit on the other side of a gated community. This breeds anger, unrest, and ultimately enormous amounts of needless suffering.

And as long as government is captive to interests which place their corporate well-being above the well-being of the people, it will remain this way.

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Pollan

Michael Pollan has a superb op-ed in the Times on the relationship between food policy reform and health care reform. They are, basically, one and the same, or at the very least, thoroughly co-dependent:

There’s lots of money to be made selling fast food and then treating the diseases that fast food causes. One of the leading products of the American food industry has become patients for the American health care industry.

For the most part, the food business has kept a very, very low profile – a timid protest that the White House garden doesn’t use pesticides, a farmer cum Republican operative writing an article for the American Enterprise Institute, and a failed attempt to prevent the mainstream media from using the term SWINE flu. After reading Pollan’s essay, I can’t help wondering whether Big Food’s been in serious denial or simply working stealthily out of public view. Probably a little of the first and a lot of the second.

That may change as healthcare reform becomes inevitable; a very ugly foodfight seems imminent. Pollan is a very, very smart guy and certainly knows his way around the media. However, the far right will try to turn his entire life upside down, his apparent friendly relationship with Christian fundamentalist Joel Salatin notwithstanding. In the service of protecting the Smithfields and the Monsantos, Pollan will become the next Bill Ayers. Go and make a Googley of “veggie libel laws” and imagine the possibilities they could be put to silence a critic who urges us to “Eat food, not too much. Mostly plants,” and who, half-jokingly, recommends we “Don’t buy any food that’s advertised.”

Back On Track

by digby

Here’s some good news:

Polls suggest that President Obama’s address to Congress on health care reform had a positive effect on shifting public opinion.

A CNN/Opinion Research Corp. snap poll of people interviewed before and after the speech indicated that the president shifted public opinion in his favor. After the speech, two-thirds said they supported Obama’s health care proposals, compared with 53 percent in a survey days before the president spoke. About one in seven speech-watchers changed their minds on Obama’s proposal, but the audience was more Democratic than the U.S. population as a whole, so the results do not reflect the views of all Americans.

Dial-testing by Democracy Corps, a Democratic polling and strategy firm, found that Obama’s speech moved Americans on both sides of the aisle to support reform.

Democracy Corps conducted dial testing of the speech with 50 independent and weak partisan voters in Denver, Colorado, followed by focus groups with voters whose support for Obama’s health care plan increased after seeing the speech. The dial group participants were evenly divided among those who initially supported and initially opposed the plan, with an almost equal division between Obama and McCain voters.

These swing voters reacted strongly to Obama’s message. Support for Obama’s plan jumped 20 points, from 46 percent before the speech to 66 percent after. Importantly, Obama also achieved one of his principal goals of boosting the intensity of support. Prior to the speech, just 2 percent of these swing voters supported the plan strongly while 26 percent opposed it strongly; by the end of the evening those numbers were virtually reversed, with 28 percent supporting the plan strongly against just 8 percent strongly opposed. The president was also extremely successful in moving the needle on areas where progressives have struggled over the last few months, making great strides in reassuring voters on issues like the deficits and taxes, seniors and Medicare, choice and control, competition and costs, and government intervention.

This should help a little bit to persuade the fatuous gasbags that the momentum has shifted back in favor of reform. The fact is that these people always seem to like big speeches even if the gasbags find them boring, but it’s helpful right now to at least remind recalcitrant Democrats that Obama still has the power to persuade. The question, as always, is which Democrats he wanted to remind of that.

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Hate To Tell You, But Covering The Undocumented Would Be Cheaper

by dday

Rep. Joe Wilson gave a bumbling, stumbling response to his comments last night.

Once again the media has taken one sensationalistic remark and let it overshadow the entire speech last night, which was a political winner for reform. Everyone should grow up. But it’s worth digging down into the substance of the claims and the actual policy behind it, because there are some important points to be made.

Right now, the way things are, undocumented immigrants (there are no illegal people) can go to an emergency room and get treatment. They can purchase their own health insurance. They can go to a free clinic. They can, in a variety of ways, access health care if they need it.

The plans on the table would provide more security for those with insurance, and provide exchanges for those without coverage. The undocumented can access those exchanges, because it would require them to pay for coverage with their own money. The bill would also provide subsidies to people who cannot afford coverage. The undocumented would not be eligible for those subsidies. It says that in every single bill draft. Rush Limbaugh, being a little more honest than usual today, says “It will cover undocumented aliens. Now it may not specifically say so in the bill… “ He’s talking about enforcement and verification statutes, which is a red herring, because some form of ID is typically required at point of service if you have an insurance card. It’s also a total lie, because there is a provision to implement enforcement in the bill.

b) Implementation- To implement the requirement set forth in subsection (a), the Secretary of Health and Human Services shall, not later than 18 months after the date of the enactment of this Act, promulgate such regulations as are necessary or appropriate to insure that all health care and related services (including insurance coverage and public health activities) covered by this Act are provided (whether directly or through contractual, licensing, or other arrangements) without regard to personal characteristics extraneous to the provision of high quality health care or related services.

It’s not even worth arguing about this with known charlatans. I just saw Jim Clyburn put it best on MSNBC. He said, “I was born and raised in an parsonage and I have seen people take the bible and try to justify something as inhumane as slavery from wordings of the bible. So you cannot stop people from applying their own limited intelligence to words, and that’s what we have here.”

That said, I agree with this:

The Baucus plan currently going around, of course, explicitly states that “[no] illegal immigrants will benefit from the health care tax credits” and limits the insurance mandate to U.S. citizens and legal residents. But Dana is right to ask whether undocumented immigrants should be covered in some capacity. Beyond potentially skewing employer hiring incentives, the exclusion of immigrants from the plan will create a financial burden on the system anyway — which seems to be conservatives’ big concern. By law, hospitals are not allowed to refuse care to anyone in an emergency situation, whether the person is insured or not. The cost of the uninsured then falls both on the hospitals and on the government, which provides $250 million annually as reimbursement through Section 1011 of the Medicare Modernization Act, which has been extended through this year.

So, tax dollars are already being spent on care for uninsured and undocumented immigrants. And hospital resources are being strained since the losses aren’t fully accounted for, which can have an effect on the quality of medical care provided to the general population. Regardless of the system in place, coverage of undocumented immigrants is a problem that’s going to need to be dealt with. Given that, shouldn’t we be working toward a solution that’s more transparent and just?

The President talked about the $1,000 hidden tax on everyone with insurance as a result of funding ER care. That would not change if immigrants had to use continue to use the ER as their primary doctor. That status quo is grossly inefficient and we all pay for it; in fact we pay more than if we just offered subsidies and brought everyone under the umbrella of universal care. In addition, having an underclass of people prone to disease without preventive care is a major public health problem.

Not that there’s anything rational about conservative arguments – they simply want to find a scapegoat for everything to take the blame off their shitty policies, and in an economic downturn, that hammer historically falls on immigrants.

In a general sense, this kind of “blame the brown people” argument will be consistently made until we deal fully with the undocumented within our borders, through both workplace enforcement and some legitimate path to citizenship. Until you do that, these political footballs will always surface, and cowardly Democrats will thunder “we will not pay for undocumented workers!” when we already are paying for them, and could lower that payment.

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Cracked

by digby

So, is this about cracking heads or kissing ass?

ABC News has learned that President Obama will be meeting with 16 Democratic senators (and one “Independent Democrat”) this afternoon at the White House.

They are: Senators Mark Pryor and Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas, Mark Warner of Virginia, Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, Evan Bayh of Indiana, Claire McCaskill of Missouri, Tom Carper of Delaware, Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, Mark Begich of Alaska, Mark Udall and Michael Bennet of Colorado, Ben Nelson of Nebraska, Bill Nelson of Florida, Kay Hagan of North Carolina, Herb Kohl of Wisconsin, and Independent Democrat Joe Lieberman of Connecticut.

The meeting is scheduled for 4:15 pm ET, in the Cabinet Room.

Many of these senators have expressed concern about if not downright opposition to key elements of President Obama’s health care proposals, particularly his push for a government-run public health care option to compete with private insurers to drive down costs.

Obviously, nobody knows. But until we do, I will indulge my fantasy that Obama is going to be talking about this:

[T]he time has come–and in fact, it is long overdue–for them to begin forcefully making the case that being a member in good standing of the party’s Senate caucus means supporting cloture motions on key legislation even if a given senator intends to vote against it.

This case was, in fact, briefly made in July by Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin–but it gained little traction. Durbin’s argument should be revived in and outside the Senate. Right now, progressive groups around the country are in the midst of efforts to agitate for a “public option” as an essential feature of health reform, and eventually will devote enormous efforts to support final passage of health reform, if we ever get to that point. Wavering Democrats have been targeted for ads and other communications, with mixed results. A significant fraction of that pressure should be devoted to a very simple message: Democrats should not conspire with Republicans to obstruct a vote in the Senate on the president’s top domestic priority. Vote your conscience, or your understanding of your constituents’ views, Ben Nelson, but don’t prevent a vote.

There are those who would respond to this suggestion by arguing that a senator voting for cloture but against the bill could be accused of flip-flopping or deviousness. Let them provide the evidence that voters understand or care enough about Senate procedures to internalize that charge. When John Kerry got into so much trouble in 2004 by saying that he “actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it,” he was the one trying to explain arcane Senate procedures. “I voted against ObamaCare, but I didn’t try to keep the Senate from voting” should be a pretty easy sell for any Democrat, particularly since the contrary argument requires an explanation of cloture, not exactly a household word.

The harder question is whether public pressure to support one’s party and president on a cloture vote could be supplemented by more tangible sanctions against senators who won’t at least let health reform or other critical legislation get to the floor–such as withholding choice committee assignments or party committee funds. But until Democrats begin to question the right of certain Democratic senators to maintain their tyranny, possible sanctions are beside the point.

It’s bad enough that these so-called Democrats have to be cajoled into supporting health care reform in any way. (If they can’t get behind health care, it’s very hard to see why they consider themselves members of the party they’re in.)But if they can’t even rouse themselves from counting their corporate cash and kissing the rings of Republicans to allow a majority vote, then the country should just give up on this experiment in democracy and allow whoever has the highest net worth to rule the country directly.

All of this depends upon Obama and the congressional leadership having the nerve to do it something which would be unprecedented in the modern era: disciplining the conservatives. We’ll see.

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The Corporatist Five

by dday

The Supremes heard that Citizens United case yesterday, and Dahlia Lithwick sez be very afraid.

When we first met this case, it involved a narrow question about whether a 90-minute documentary attacking Hillary Clinton could be regulated as an “electioneering communication” under McCain-Feingold. The relevant provision bars corporations and unions from using money from their general treasuries for “any broadcast, cable or satellite communications” that feature a candidate for federal election during specified times before a general election. A federal court of appeals agreed with the FEC that the movie could be regulated. Citizens United, the conservative, nonprofit advocacy group that produced the film, appealed. The issue last spring was whether a feature-length documentary movie was core political speech or a Swift Boat ad. But the court surprised everyone when it ordered the case reargued in September, this time tackling the constitutionality of McConnell and Austin.

Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, and Clarence Thomas are already on record wanting to overturn these cases. Justice Samuel Alito and Chief Justice John Roberts have been inclined to wait. The question today is whether we wait no more […]

Solicitor General Kagan stands to defend the FEC, not in a frock coat but a tasteful blue pantsuit, and when Scalia pounces on her, two sentences into her opening, she scolds him as if he were an impudent 2-L: “I will repeat what I said, Justice Scalia: For 100 years this court, faced with many opportunities to do so, left standing the legislation that is at issue in this case.” Kagan is so loose and relaxed, you’d think this was her 100th argument. Which allows Roberts to dispense with the kid gloves and accuse her, respectively of “giving up” an argument she made in her opening brief and “changing positions.” When she is asked, in effect, if she wants to lose this case in a big way or a little way, Kagan is eventually forced to reply, “If you are asking me, Mr. Chief Justice, as to whether the government has a preference as to the way in which it loses if it has to lose, the answer is yes.”

One of the ways the Roberts Court hopes to make all conflicting case law in the campaign finance realm disappear is to blame all prior bad case law on Kagan. When everyone is thoroughly confused about what rationale the government may advance in order to limit corporate spending, Roberts can gleefully conclude that all of Austin “is kind of up for play. …” Poof. And Austin is a problem no more.

As Kennedy bemoans the “ongoing chill” of limiting corporate speech, Scalia recites a lyric ode to the greatness of America’s “single shareholder corporations. … The local hairdresser, the local auto repair shop, the local new car dealer.” Kagan points again to the “100-year-old judgment of Congress that these expenditures would corrupt the federal system,” forcing Scalia to retort that “Congress has a self-interest” and that “I doubt that one can expect a body of incumbents to draw election restrictions that do not favor incumbents.” Kagan corrects him, noting that “in fact, corporate and union money go overwhelmingly to incumbents.” And that this law “may be the single most self-denying thing that Congress has ever done.”

Kagan goes on to distinguish humans from corporations by pointing out that “we have beliefs; we have convictions; we have likes and dislikes.” When she urges that it’s in the corporation’s self-interest to maximize profits and that “individuals are more complicated than that,” Scalia does another verse on “the new auto dealer who has just lost his dealership.” It’s a vision of fluffy corporate bunnies so compelling, it makes you want to give Exxon a great big hug and an African violet for the holidays […]

Olson very effectively uses his five minutes of rebuttal time to taunt Kagan for the government’s changed positions. And while it looks as though there are five votes to fundamentally alter the way American elections will work, we’ve been through enough renditions of the Roberts Court slapping litigants around at oral argument then loving on them in decisions to make such predictions unwise. Of course, as Waxman suggests in his closing, it does take a somewhat “self-starting” institution to be deciding a case about campaign finance laws in which no litigant has directly raised the issues and no factual record even exists.

Aside from how wonderful it is to read Dahlia Lithwick, this severely depressed me. As we already have what amounts to corporate control of government, opening up the meager restrictions on campaign finance through corporate entities may not mean as much as everybody assumes. Corporations currently funnel hundreds of millions to candidates through PACs anyway. But two things stand out upon reading this. First of all, the kind of significant campaign finance reform we need right now – in particular public financing to level the playing field – will never make it through the brick wall of the corporatist Roberts Court, which clearly has a lock on these issues for 20 years at a minimum. Second, if you read through these arguments, and the general set of opinions of the Court over the last term, you can only conclude that George W. Bush was a successful President. With a legacy that far exceeds his lack of accomplishments in domestic or foreign policy. Bush handed the Court to the Federalist Society right for a decade or more, and while the legal system can still put up a fight with respect to civil liberties, on most issues the ultimate answer will fall on the side of the corporation over the people every single time without question. And that’s a frightening prospect.

I think the only path to checking this power lies at the state level and with corporate charters. But state interests can be arguably more corruptible than federal ones.

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