Seems like a good reason to support reform. What’s the GOP’s argument against it now? Chairman Michael Steele claims the CBO is lying.
I’m sorry I wasn’t able to post on this earlier. There was huge news this morning as the CBO estimated the final health care bill would cover 95 percent of all Americans and save $130 billion in the first 10 years. In the next 10 years, it would save $1.2 trillion.
A New York Times article Tuesday revealed a couple of shocking things about the Republicans’ unprecedented unity in opposing every single bill offered by the Democrats:
- It didn’t just arise spontaneously as the result of policy differences; it was a calculated political strategy by minority leader Mitch McConnell.
- McConnell decided on the strategy before Obama was ever sworn in.
I find that really outrageous. The die was cast by McConnell before he ever knew what sort of proposals Obama and the Democrats would be making. It never mattered; he and the Republicans would have voted against any proposal en masse. It doesn’t even matter if the Democrats propose policies the Republicans support: They’ll vote against them just to deny the Democrats a legislative victory.
I really don’t know what to say here. Why do the Republicans even bother showing up to the Capitol? If they don’t even care what’s in any of the bills, they may as well just stay home.
The non-partisan Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and Urban Institute have just released a study that simulates the growth of health care costs in the absence of health reform. They found that within ten years, premiums could soar by as much as 79 percent, bringing the ranks of the uninsured from 49.4 million to 67.6 million by 2020.
Let’s compare that with the Congressional Budget Office’s estimates of health care costs under health reform. The CBO estimated health care costs in 2016, so we’ll use the RWJF study’s estimates for 2015, instead of 2020. The RWJF study estimated that without reform, premiums could increase by 34 percent by 2015. The CBO estimated that with reform, they would increase by 10 to 13 percent, and that’s before subsidies that would be extended to millions of recipients.
Opponents of health reform are arguing that the system doesn’t need fixing. Whatever insurance plan they’re on, I want it, because the reality is that health care costs are out of control and nobody is doing anything about it. After more than a year of debate, and after nearly a century of attempts by various presidents, it’s time to finally pass health reform.
Al Franken was one of a number of Senate Democrats that went on the offensive yesterday, criticizing Republicans for their constant use of the filibuster in even the most routine situations. Franken highlighted one judicial nominee who was filibustered despite an eventual unanimous vote — 99 to 0 — to confirm her. He noted that the filibuster has become nothing but a crass stall tactic:
It used to be that the filibuster was reserved for matters of great principle. Today, it has become a way to run out the clock.
I’ll take it a step further than Franken. The filibuster used to be reserved for situations when Senators were strongly in disagreement with a proposed policy. Now, it’s used to stop Congress from enacting policy at all. The endless filibusters are a Republican effort to paralyze our government, so they can then claim that Obama has been ineffective.
Watch Franken’s speech below:
I put my census in the mail today. If you haven’t already done so, please fill out yours today. The form took me maybe five minutes to fill out for my household.
This isn’t a political issue, or at least it shouldn’t be. This is about complying with our constitution and making sure our government has the information it needs to make decisions. It’s particularly important in Minnesota this year; any undercounting could easily lead us to lose a seat in Congress. Please do your civic duty and make sure very Minnesotan is counted.
Ramming it through: To pass a policy that you campaigned on with a majority vote.
You may be a bit confused because the definition has changed. Under Republican rule, it was known as Democracy.
Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) admitted yesterday that Senate Republicans will opt to win political points instead of trying to improve the health reform bill. Once the House passes the Senate’s health reform bill, health reform will become law with or without reconciliation. Reconciliation will simply make a number of small changes, most of which can be agreed on by both sides. The GOP, though, will of course vote against reconciliation en masse. Ezra Klein explains why this is ridiculous:
At that point, they’re not opposing health-care reform and instead opposing small, popular changes that make the bill better. They’re literally obstructing good government that fits with their recent rhetoric.
For instance, Alexander himself has railed against a deal in the Senate health bill made to gain Sen. Ben Nelson’s support, which he likes to refer to as the “Cornhusker Kickback.” Democrats will remove that kickback through reconciliation, but Alexander and his fellow Republicans will oppose reconciliation anyway. When asked to explain, Alexander’s answer was really quite shocking:
…basically, the Senate Republicans are not going to bail the House Democrats out by fixing a bill we all voted against.
Yesterday, I wrote that they would cost around 5,000 jobs, but I also said I’d go into a bit more detail.
Unfortunately, I don’t have access to any raw data to determine how many jobs the bonding bill will create. What I do have is access to a number of estimates by people who do have the data. Here are a few numbers I received from a source at the legislature.
At the beginning of the session, Tim Pawlenty proposed a $685 million bonding bill. In what appeared at the time to be an effort to negotiate in good faith, he said that he wouldn’t sign anything over $725 million. Then, after the Legislature passed a much larger bill, he appeared briefly to be willing to negotiate:
[Budget Commissioner Tom] Hanson replied that a $725 million bonding package is the governor’s “current position,” adding, “To come to an agreement we have to agree on size and scope. I’m not foolish enough to think that in the end it’s going to be $725 million.
So how in the world did it come to pass that Pawlenty cut the bonding bill down to $686 million? Was he simply lying when he appeared to be negotiating? Did something change his mind? Or, worst of all, did he do it because he’s angry with the DFL, and he decided to put our state citizens in the middle?
When Barack Obama proposed a deficit commission to develop a long-range plan for balancing the budget, for some bizarre reason Republicans were against it. I think they simply opposed it because their knee-jerk reaction is to oppose every single thing Obama says. Heck, when the Obama girls got their puppy, I was surprised not to see the GOP attack puppies as anti-American.
But Obama established the commission anyway, because it looks highly unlikely that Congress will be able to put aside its bickering enough to do the work we will desperately need once the economy is righted. Here’s how The Hill describes the work of the commission:
[The commission will] produce a package of proposals aimed at bringing the deficit down to a sustainable level by 2015.
The panel may consider tax increases, spending cuts and entitlement reforms. As Obama has said, “everything is on the table.”
Except now, a whole lot of things aren’t on the table. Republicans have almost exclusively appointed hard-line, reactionary conservatives to serve on the budget panel, suggesting that they are only willing to consider slashing services and not raising revenues. Sounds like the same old story: Democrats want to put everything on the table, with the full understanding that they will have to make major concessions, while Republicans refuse to move an inch.
I hope those of you who had a chance to listen to the Supreme Court unallotment hearing will chime in with your reactions. I thought the justices sounded very suspicious of the Pawlenty administration’s arguments, although you can never be sure how much of that is simply them playing devil’s advocate.
More importantly, listening to Pawlenty’s lawyers dodge questions, tiptoe around the real issues, and just generally try to stretch the fabric of reality, it was pretty clear to me that the administration has a tough case to make.
The case against unallotment is simple, because our constitution is simple. Our Governor is not a legislator. He does not have the power to make law; his power is to enforce the laws passed by the legislature. He was sent a balanced budget, and did not have the right to unbalance it himself and then claim emergency actions were needed to re-balance it.
In contrast, the administration’s argument relies on a lot of clever interpretations of individual words within the statute. If you read the statute a very specific way, ignoring its intent, you could possibly argue that Pawlenty’s unallotment, while inappropriate, was not illegal.
As I predicted, Tim Pawlenty did not compromise with DFL legislators. In fact, he slashed the bonding / jobs bill to even less than his original request — down to $680 million. Estimating the number of jobs that this money would have produced is tricky, but based on estimates made by a variety analysts earlier in the session, I’d estimate that Pawlenty just slashed at least 5,000 jobs — and that’s a fairly conservative estimate. I’ll go into more detail on the numbers later.
Of course, it’s not just the jobs that we’ll lose. As with any infrastructure bill, we don’t just hand out money to people; we use it to build infrastructure the state needs. Pawlenty’s big targets were higher education, public transit, and civic improvements. Rather than build these things when prices are low, we will instead wait until interest rates come up and construction costs rise.
At best, Pawlenty has shown himself to be penny-wise and pound-foolish. At worst, he’s shown himself willing to sacrifice our state’s well being to win over a few voters in the presidential primaries. Whatever his true motivations, Pawlenty continues to dig our state into a hole that will take years, if not decades, to dig ourselves out of.
Today, the Minnesota Supreme Court will hear arguments in the Pawlenty administration’s appeal of the ruling against his illegal unallotment actions. The district court ruled that Pawlenty needs to honor the separation of powers found in our constitution, and that he does not get to unilaterally make law. Pawlenty appealed, bringing an enormously important case to the Supreme Court.
The UpTake will be providing a live stream of the arguments, with their live-blog starting in about 15 minutes.
MPR’s Mid-Morning will also carry the proceedings live in about half an hour. You can listen to the live stream here.
I’ll do my best to have some commentary this afternoon. It can be difficult for me to post during the day, so no promises there, but I’ll give it my best shot.
For months, the White House has been establishing deadlines for the passage of health reform, and for that entire time, Congress has been missing those deadlines. It makes Democrats look weak and ineffectual, which is really not so far from the truth. Which is why I had to groan when Press Secretary Robert Gibbs did it yet again:
“We’ll have the votes when the House votes, I think, within the next week,” Gibbs said on “Fox News Sunday.”
Gibbs added that those on next week’s Sunday talk shows “will be talking about healthcare not as a presidential proposal but I think as the law of the land.”
I’m sure that yet another arbitrary deadline will really help Nancy Pelosi pick up the votes she needs.
Apparently, the Republican nomination to take on Tim Walz in CD1 this year will go to the candidate who says the most outrageous things and does the most damage to civil discourse. Back in January, you’ll recall, Steve Quist made his entry:
“Our country is being destroyed. Every generation has had to fight the fight for freedom… Terrorism? Yes. That’s not the big battle,” he said. “The big battle is in D.C. with the radicals. They aren’t liberals. They are radicals. Obama, Pelosi, Walz: They’re not liberals, they’re radicals. They are destroying our country.”
Now there’s a new contender: Jim Hagedorn, who had a number of incendiary comments prepared for his country convention speech. Here are a couple:
The national liberals are all but carpet bombing the greatness of America – taking dead aim on the United States Constitution, our dynamic Free Enterprise system, and the enduring concepts of personal responsibility, individual opportunity, personal freedom, and traditional cultural values.
Tim Walz’s extreme liberalism represents a plague to our American way of life. Instead of listening to you – the moderate-to-conservative voters of southern Minnesota – Tim Walz follows the commands of President Obama, Nancy Pelosi and the fringe left.
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