In a statement published Monday morning, Texas Governor Rick Perry (R) “proudly” declared that he will decline to implement key tenets of the Affordable Care Act — a move that will see his state forgo an estimated $164 billion dollars in federal aid and leave over 1.2 million low-income Texans, who would have finally been eligible for health care, helpless and uninsured.
“This is a fiscally stupid decision on the part of Rick Perry,” Texas Democratic Party spokesperson Rebecca Acuña told Raw Story. “Texas would be one of the states that gets the most money from the federal government and the Medicaid expansion would have provided health care to more than a million Texans. It’s… It’s very sad that Rick Perry is willing to play politics with the health of Texans, and that’s exactly what this decision is.”
With his announcement, Perry becomes the sixth governor to refuse implementing a key aspect of the Affordable Care Act: the Medicaid expansion and the state-based health care exchanges. Republican governors in Florida, South Carolina, Mississippi, Louisiana and Wisconsin have made similar decisions, but Texas is by far the biggest.
Perry would seem to be inviting a political free-for-all thanks to the relative size and power of the Texas hospital industry, which absorbed more than $4.6 billion in unpaid emergency medical costs in 2010. While not seeing it as a cure-all, Texas hospitals largely praised the Affordable Care Act for dramatically expanding health care options for poor people, who are ultimately paid for by others who carry their own insurance. Nearly 25 percent of Texans — 6.5 million people — do not have health insurance, including more than 1.2 million children, and the state’s health care system ranks last in the nation overall.
In a letter to Health and Human Services Director Kathleen Sebelius (PDF), Perry opined that giving poor people health care and setting up exchanges that make health insurance cheaper are both “brazen intrusions into the sovereignty of our state.”
The state of Texas has the most restrictive Medicaid program in the country, requiring that a family of three make no more than $188 per month to qualify. Under federal rules administered by the Affordable Care Act, Medicaid would be expanded to 133 percent of the poverty level, covering an additional 1.2 million Texans under the program. That would cause a 46 percent increase in Medicaid enrollment which the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation (PDF) estimated would cost the state 3 percent more in 2019 than it currently pays, and the federal government would have picked up the rest
In Robert Caro's new LBJ biography, he tells this story of John F. Kennedy: Kennedy faced considerable opposition within the Boston Democratic organization when he first ran for Congress in 1946. He made an early public appearance at an event organized by the local leadership. One after another, contenders for the nomination took to the stage to tell party members how they "came up the hard way." At last it was JFK's turn. He opened his speech, "I see I'm the only person here tonight who didn't come up the hard way." Caro tells us that the quip turned the whole room around, confirming the old saying that in politics you get a lot further with a joke and a lot of bribes than you do with a joke alone.
Still, I thought of that story as I read Josh Green today:
Mitt Romney’s fundraising events in the Hamptons yesterday wouldn’t have looked much different if the Obama campaign had organized them on his behalf. From the ostentatious mega-mansions, to the Bentleys and Ferraris, to the guests’ crass boasting about their yachts and condescending putdowns of the poor and middle class, the whole scene seemed designed to reinforce Team Obama’s preferred image of Romney as an out-of-touch plutocrat concerned only for those with a comparable net worth.For Romney, just back from a jet-skiing vacation at his lakeside manse in New Hampshire, the events will raise lots of money and put further distance between himself and the president. In June, he and the Republican National Committee out-raised President Obama and the Democratic National Committee $106 million to $71 million. But every time Romney draws attention to the unseemly aspects of his wealth (or when his supporters do, like the Hamptons crowd), he undercuts that fundraising advantage and hurts his candidacy. He does this a lot: bragging about his multiple Cadillacs, proposing a $10,000 bet during a GOP debate, boasting of his friendship with NFL owners. Romney’s problem is that while he was very good at getting rich, he isn’t any good at *being* rich. In fact, he’s downright terrible at it.
A New York City donor a few cars back, who also would not give her name, said Romney needed to do a better job connecting. "I don't think the common person is getting it," she said from the passenger seat of a Range Rover stamped with East Hampton beach permits. "Nobody understands why Obama is hurting them.
"We've got the message," she added. "But my college kid, the baby sitters, the nails ladies -- everybody who's got the right to vote -- they don't understand what's going on. I just think if you're lower income -- one, you're not as educated, two, they don't understand how it works, they don't understand how the systems work, they don't understand the impact."
The price to hobnob with Mitt Romney in the Hamptons was steep. At Romney's luncheon with House Majority Leader Eric Cantor at the Creeks, supporters were asked to contribute or raise $25,000 per person for a VIP photo reception. (Among the co-hosts were lobbyist Wayne Berman, a former bundler for George W. Bush, as well as financiers Lew Eisenberg and Daniel Loeb).
At the evening fundraiser at the estate of Julia and David Koch on Meadow Lane in Southampton, the suggested contribution was $75,000 per couple — with funds going to Romney's campaign, the Republican National Committee, the National Republican Senatorial Committee and the National Republican Congressional Committee.
The legalization of “gay marriage” in America, even on a civil level, is unjust to children and poses a threat to religious liberty, warned Bishop Salvatore J. Cordileone of Oakland, Calif. . . . . In a June interview with CNA, Bishop Cordileone, who leads the U.S. bishops’ Subcommittee for the Promotion and Defense of Marriage, explained that Church teaching against the redefinition of marriage on a civil level as well as a sacramental level is a matter of justice. “Marriage is about fundamental justice for children,” he said. “Children do best with a mother and a father.”
The Roman Catholic Church in Scotland will “meet any cost” to fight marriage equality, declared Cardinal Keith O’Brien in the Sunday Times.
O’Brien, the most senior Catholic in Scotland, is pledging to spend another £100,000 (about $154,000) to campaign against same-sex marriage in the country, including bus ads, billboards and commercials. That’s on top of the £50,000 it’s already spent.
“Marriage is under threat and politicians need to know the Catholic Church will bear any burden and meet any cost in its defense,” fumed O’Brien, who once called marriage equality a “grotesque subversion.” He further claimed the Scottish government would face an “unprecedented backlash” for backing the measure. More than 70 members of Scottish Parliament have said they’ll vote for equal marriage, compared to 9 are against it.
In the past, O’Brien called same-sex relationships “demonstrably harmful” and claimed introducing gay marriage is akin to legalizing slavery.
Often the first question the lawyers Ted Olson and David Boies get when they talk about their effort to overturn California’s anti-gay Proposition 8 is this: Are there five votes on the Supreme Court for their case?
After the customary and cautionary language about never being able to predict the Supreme Court’s result, Olson and Boies often answer the question by going a step further. They say that they are not giving up on any of the Justices. Boies then tells a joke—he says that he and Olson have a deal: Olson will be responsible for getting the votes he got in Bush v. Gore, and Boies will be responsible for the ones he got. Everybody laughs. (One example is here.) So does the Supreme Court’s health-care ruling make the joke more or less funny for conservatives?
There are two big gay-rights cases heading for the Court. (I’ve posted about them.) In addition to the Olson-Boies Proposition 8 case, there is the Massachusetts case known as Gill v. Office of Personnel Management, which challenges the constitutionality of the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). . . . the Justice Department also asked the Court to consider the Gill case and another DOMA case, Golinski v. O.P.M., even before it was decided by the Ninth Circuit. The Court will certainly take the Marriage Act case and decide it during its next term. But I also think they will not resist the temptation to take the Proposition 8 case, even though they may later agree to handle it narrowly.
The Court will not have much flexibility in the DOMA cases. There is only one question presented: Is DOMA constitutional? It will have to be answered yes or no. In the Proposition 8 case, there are more options. The Court might restore same-sex marriage rights in California without finding a nationwide constitutionally based right to marriage equality. Even some advocates think that would be the best and most politically sustainable result. But there is little doubt that if the Court rules in favor of gay rights the decision will be significant, perhaps even historic. Most people assume that the fifth and deciding vote belongs to Justice Anthony Kennedy, who wrote the Court’s majority opinions in its two most recent big gay-rights rulings, Romer v. Evans (1996) and Lawrence v. Texas (2003).
Chief Justice John Roberts joined the Court in 2005, two years after Lawrence was decided, after only a short stint on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. None of the gay-rights-related cases that have come before him as a judge give any significant clues as to how he might rule on the weighty constitutional issues he will face next term. Interestingly, as the Los Angeles Times reported in 2005, before he was on the bench he “worked behind the scenes for gay rights activists” in the Romer case who were represented at the time by his law firm, Hogan and Hartson.
But now, in these marquee gay-rights cases facing the Court next term—as American public opinion, especially among young people, shifts rapidly towards greater equality—Roberts may find the very kind of “legacy” issues around which he has shown a willingness to break with his more conservatives colleagues. Put another way, these cases will help define what freedom and equality look like in America, perhaps for decades. Will Roberts want to be on the losing side of history?
Olson, writing in Time about the health-care ruling . . . . has been hypothesizing for some time that the influences on Chief Justice Roberts in the health-care case might also lead him to rule in favor of the rights of gay Americans to full equality, including marriage.
Fundamentally, we see that Roberts thinks of himself not just as another Justice of the Court but as its Chief Justice and, as such, as the primary keeper of its legacy. . . . If they decide against the rights of gay people next term, within a decade or so this issue is going to be right back before the Court and Justice Roberts will likely still be Chief. . . . . If he rules against gay rights now, how is Roberts going to feel about the overturning of this precedent later—or having it overturned while he is still on the Court as Chief? That’s not to say public opinion is the only factor here. But the Supreme Court has previously held that marriage is a fundamental right, and sexual orientation, especially when viewed from today’s perspective, meets all the requirements for heightened constitutional scrutiny.
It’s never an issue of the Court looking to public opinion for the result—but they do look to the direction the country is headed, and at its normative values, to see if the result will be accepted by the governed. This is the gay-rights moment, just as the sixties was the civil-rights moment (although there are places, like the South, where public opinion is contrary, as it was in those landmark civil-rights cases).
The question is whether a decade or more from now Chief Justice Roberts really wants to be leading a Court that embodies the last vestiges of anti-gay discrimination in the country, even as fewer and fewer Americans oppose equality. A ruling in favor of gay equality is possible, perhaps even likely, with or without the swing vote of Justice Kennedy. After the health-care decision, Ted Olson’s belief that he can get John Roberts’s vote for same-sex marriage is no joke.
The Obama administration has been facing a difficult fiscal choice: Does it anger its base and muddle its message by working with Republicans to put off the fiscal cliff — and extend all the Bush tax cuts — until 2013? Or does it stand and fight on fiscal policy, even if that means increasing the chance that markets begin to panic in the most crucial months for the president’s reelection?
With today’s announcement, the administration has made its preference clear: Stand and fight, and hope the economy — and President Obama’s reelection hopes — survive the fallout.
Technically, we won’t hit the fiscal cliff — which is Washington’s preferred term for the near-simultaneous expiration of the Bush tax cuts, the payroll tax cut and the expanded unemployment benefits; the beginning of the sequester’s spending cuts; and the predicted point at which we hit the debt ceiling — until after the election. But the effects could be felt long before.
In 2011, the recovery seemed to be proceeding smoothly. In February, the economy added 220,00 jobs. In March, it added 246,000 jobs. In April, it added 251,000 jobs. But as the summer approached, and as markets began to panic over the Republican threat to breach the debt ceiling, the economy slowed. Between May and August, we never added more than 100,000 jobs a month. And then, in September, the month after the debt ceiling was resolved, we added more than 200,000 jobs.
Payrolls weren’t the only evidence that the debt ceiling fight damaged the economy. “High-frequency data on consumer confidence from the research company Gallup, based on surveys of 500 Americans daily, provide a good picture of the debt-ceiling debate’s impact,” observed economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers in a column for Bloomberg View. “Confidence began falling right around May 11, when [House Speaker John] Boehner first announced he would not support increasing the debt limit. It went into freefall as the political stalemate worsened through July.
But the fiscal cliff has the potential to be much worse than the 2011 debt ceiling fight. After all, the cliff begins with $607 billion in scheduled tax increases and spending cuts in 2013 alone and then we hit the debt ceiling. The Congressional Budget Office projects that if Congress does nothing, then even before taking the debt ceiling into account, the U.S. economy will be thrown back into recession.
In theory, the Obama administration could head this off by agreeing with Republicans to extend current policy into 2013 . . . Some economists, however, think the economy can survive the uncertainty — at least through to the election. ”It’s July now, and early November is soon,” says Wolfers, who is currently a visiting professor at Princeton. “While I can see the fiscal cliff having an effect on financial markets and on confidence fairly quickly, it’s hard to see that effect having much of an effect on the real economy prior to the election.
Others question whether simply putting off the hard decisions would actually comfort the markets. “Few believe there will be any kind of progress on this or any other major fiscal issue prior to the election, [so] standing his ground through the election should do no economic harm,” says Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s.
The administration’s view is that they are trying to defuse the economic uncertainty by simply moving forward on the policies that everyone supports. After all, they say, both Republicans and Democrats agree that we should extend the middle-class tax cuts, so why not do it? . . . The White House’s hope is that that [the GOP's] answer won’t be very convincing to voters. The GOP’s bet is that it also won’t be very comforting to the markets.
