Tag Archives: GOP

It’s a Penalty! It’s a Tax! It’s Unprecedented!

I have been bemused–and occasionally amused–by all the posturing over the provision in the Affordable Care Act requiring people to purchase health insurance.

How dare they!!

If you listen to the right-wing blogs and talking heads, you’ll come away believing that such a mandate is unprecedented. The government has never required us to do something, or penalized us for failing to do something.It’s unAmerican to penalize inaction. That evil Obama  is introducing an entirely foreign element into American law. (The fact that Romney did exactly the same thing in Massachusetts is obviously different….)

Of course, this line of attack is entirely fanciful.

As a legal scholar recently noted, the very same week it upheld the ACA, the Supreme Court affirmed a law requiring sex offenders to register their whereabouts, employment and appearance with local authorities. If they fail to do so, the law in question imposes a penalty of ten years in prison–a bit more draconian than the ACA’s fine. The Court made it clear that this mandatory registration was not punishment for a crime –the individuals subject to the requirement have already paid their debt to society for those transgressions (a contrary construction would run afoul of the Ex Post Facto prohibition).

Courts upholding this particular type of mandate–and there have been several–have explicitly said that the only conduct being punished was the “inactivity” of failing to register.

There are many other examples–so many that a Professor at John Marshall Law School has actually written an essay on “The Incredible Ordinariness of Federal Penalties for Inactivity.”

As I have repeatedly noted, there is nothing wrong with faulting provisions of this particular approach to healthcare reform. What I find absolutely astonishing, however, are the  logical contortions opponents will go through in order to attack the legitimacy of any attempt to  extend access to healthcare. I have been absolutely stunned by opponents’ self-righteous denunciations of such efforts, and by their evident willingness to simply let the uninsured suffer and die.

A recent editorial in the Journal of the American Medical Association is worth quoting.

That editorial began “Physicians and hospitals have a moral duty to provide acute care and emergency care to those who need it.” Proceeding from that expressly moral premise, the editorial concluded that individuals “have an enforceable moral duty to buy sufficient health insurance to cover the costs of acute and emergency care…requiring individuals to buy health insurance is consistent with respect for  individual liberty because individuals have a duty to mitigate the burdens they impose on others.”

We don’t talk much about the morality of policy. We should.

Yesterday, every single House Republican voted to take away health coverage for young adults staying on their family plans, raise prescription drug prices for seniors, end protections for those with pre-existing conditions, reinstate lifetime insurance caps, scrap tax breaks for small businesses, raise the deficit, and take benefits away from 30 million Americans. Pundits reporting the vote generally noted that it was one of a series of such votes, and that it stood no chance of ultimate passage. They spent a lot of time analyzing the politics of the GOPs message and speculating on its electoral effect.

To the best of my knowledge, none of them pointed out how utterly immoral it was.

Comments

Looking Backward

In 1980, I won the Republican primary for what was then Indiana’s Eleventh Congressional District, defeating three opponents. I was pro-choice and on record supporting equal rights for gays and lesbians (same-sex marriage was not yet an issue), positions that were consistent with the generally libertarian Republicanism of the day. Indeed, my loss to Andy Jacobs, Jr. in the general election was widely attributed to the belief that as a “Goldwater Republican,” I was simply too conservative.

My political philosophy has not changed in the intervening 32 years, but now I’m routinely accused of being a leftist or socialist.

How far the political pendulum has swung! A pro-choice, pro-gay rights candidate winning a Republican primary almost anywhere in the country would be inconceivable today.

In Indiana, even Richard Lugar—who had become steadily more conservative as the party’s center shifted more and more to the right—was deemed insufficiently pure by the rigid party base that now controls the GOP.  Governor Daniels’ argument that Richard Mourdock is in the mainstream of the party is actually true, because the party today is more radical than at any point in my lifetime. The people I worked with on past Lugar campaigns and in the Hudnut Administration are dispirited and dismayed; more and more often, they’re voting Democrat or simply staying home.

That brings me to the new slogan unveiled by the Obama campaign a few weeks ago: Forward. That slogan has generated a lot of derision from Republicans, but they may find their scorn is misplaced. In a very real sense, the 2012 general election will be a choice between going forward and going backward.

The President’s recent statement supporting same-sex marriage is just one example. The principle (which used to be a Republican principle) is that government should treat all citizens equally. Acceptance of the application of that principle to gays and lesbians is clearly the way forward.

The Administration’s support for equal marriage rights is only one example. Yes, my students overwhelmingly endorse equal civil recognition for same-sex couples. But they also support Administration proposals–vehemently opposed by Republicans–to ameliorate climate change, including government support for renewable energy and conservation. While the subject of abortion remains a thorny moral issue for many of them, they are repelled by efforts to humiliate women by mandating vaginal ultrasounds and similarly invasive procedures. And they are appalled by efforts to go backward by denying women access to contraception.

Whatever their opinions of much-maligned and poorly understood “Obamacare,” surveys confirm that most Americans agree with the proposition that our healthcare system is both economically and morally deficient, and that those deficiencies must be addressed.

Surveys also show huge majorities of Americans favor cutting the deficit by raising tax rates on the wealthy, and favor reducing expenditures on defense. (In defiance, the House GOP recently voted to restore proposed defense cuts and to pay for that restoration not with taxes but by cutting services to poor women and children.)

In November, voters will have a choice between an administration that—while often clumsy and ham-handed—is on the right side on most of these issues, and a party that stubbornly rejects dealing with any of them.

At a time when America desperately needs two substantive political parties offering competing solutions to the problems we face, one of them—the one I supported for 35 years—has simply gone off the rails. I miss that party. America misses that party.

Today’s GOP has come to be known as the “Party of No,” and it isn’t just Obama the party is rejecting. It’s rejecting modernity.

Comments

Doubling Down

The Chair of the National Republican Party pooh-poohs the notion that his party is waging a war on women–next, he says, the Democrats will accuse the GOP of a war on caterpillars. How silly, how over-the-top! Just another one of those politically-motivated charges that are thrown around during a campaign season.

At virtually the same time Priebus (or whatever his name is) was comparing women to caterpillars (okay–maybe that wasn’t his intent), Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker (yes, that Scott Walker) was signing a new law –passed on a straight party-line vote–repealing his state’s 2009 Equal Pay Enforcement Act.

The Equal Pay Enforcement Act  made it easier for victims of wage discrimination to have their day in court, by allowing plaintiffs to bring suit in state courts. Without it, federal courts are the only proper venue for such complaints. State courts, as lawyers all know, are less costly and more accessible, and typically resolve cases more quickly.

This little skirmish is typical of the tactics being used to circumscribe women’s rights. There was no outright reversal of a right–just a measure making it much more difficult to assert that right. This is the same approach being used by most of the anti-abortion measures that have sprouted like dandelions since the 2010 elections swept Republicans into office: the Supreme Court may say they can’t impose an outright ban, but they can bury clinics in a blizzard of medically unnecessary regulations that make it impossible to operate. They can “protect” poor women who clearly don’t know what they want by enacting “informed consent” provisions more burdensome than those required for major, life-threatening surgeries.

Contraception? Well, God’s Own Party has tried to permit your employer to decide whether your insurance should cover birth control, and the party has made it very clear that given the power, it would get rid of Planned Parenthood.

No war?

The troops are marching down the Trans-vaginal Highway as we speak…..

Fifty-One Percent

In a recent New York Times column, Gail Collins observed “the thing that makes our current politics particularly awful isn’t procedural. It’s that the Republican Party has become over-the-top extreme.”

She left out “mean-spirited and patriarchal.”

I was an active Republican for 35 years, but the party I belonged to no longer exists. There is no more striking evidence of that fact than the poisonous brew of policies that have been collectively dubbed the “war on women.”

The party I belonged to made at least some room for good-faith disagreements about abortion. Today’s GOP not only uses opposition to reproductive rights as an absolute litmus test, it proposes to deny thousands of poor women access to basic health services provided by Planned Parenthood, because that organization spends 3% of its own money on abortions.

Sorry you’re dying of breast cancer, sister, but hey—we’re “pro-life.”

Recently, the extremists have ventured well beyond attacks on reproductive choice. The recent fight over access to contraception was a wake-up call. The fact that Rick Santorum has been taken seriously as a Presidential candidate by a major political party, despite criticizing both birth control and women who work outside the home, is simply chilling.

It’s not just the unremitting attack on women’s right to control our own bodies.  A larger message is that women and children (at least those no longer in utero) are simply unimportant.

In Washington, the GOP defends subsidies for big oil while it proposes deep cuts to social programs that primarily serve women and children.

Speaking of sending a message: in several states, Republicans have championed deeply offensive bills requiring women to submit to demeaning trans-vaginal ultrasounds before terminating a pregnancy, and they have proposed “personhood” amendments that would redefine most widely used birth control methods as abortion, and outlaw their use.

These and literally hundreds of other efforts—silly and serious—convey a breathtaking condescension to those who comprise 51% of the voting population. That condescension was perfectly captured by Rush Limbaugh—he of the “if you want birth control you’re a slut” rant—when he dismissed the idea of a war on women by protesting that Republican men simply want to “protect” us.

When I first went to law school in 1971, I encountered this sort of patronizing, belittling attitude everywhere. But I have news for today’s smug lawmakers: women are no longer willing to smile sweetly and seethe internally.

Pundits talk a lot about the gender gap. It is going to grow.

Here in Indiana, a group of Democratic women did some electoral research, and discovered that over 400,000 Hoosier women who had voted in the 2008 Democratic primary failed to vote in 2010. Had they done so, a number of results would have changed.

There is always a fall-off in voting in non-Presidential years, and a significant number of those women will probably return to the polls in 2012, but this group isn’t taking that for granted. They have formed a “51% Club,” with the express purpose of making sure women vote in May and November. The 51% Club held its first event last week.

I go to lots of fundraisers, but I have rarely been to one as well attended as this one. There are a lot of angry women—and men—right now.

Gail Collins was right. “You can try to fix that [GOP extremism] by working from within to groom a more sensible pack of future candidates, or from without by voting against the Republicans’ nominees until they agree to shape up.”

Those are the choices. A lot of us have made ours.

Comments

Speaking of Gushers….

American taxpayers subsidize the giant oil companies to the tune of 4 billion dollars a year.

The American tax code contains a variety of provisions that make oil production one of the most heavily subsidized businesses in the country, with tax breaks available at virtually every stage of the exploration and extraction process.

According to the most recent study by the Congressional Budget Office, released in 2005, returns on capital investments like oil field leases and drilling equipment are taxed at an effective rate of 9 percent, significantly lower than the overall rate of 25 percent for businesses in general and lower than virtually any other industry.

For many of the smaller oil companies, the tax on capital investment returns is so low that it is more than eliminated by various deductions and credits. Incredible as it may seem, some companies’ returns on investment are higher after taxes than before.

In fact, oil profits are gushing. According to the organization Public Citizen, from the time George Bush became President in 2001 through the first quarter of 2007, the top five oil companies in the United States recorded profits of $464 billion. By 2011, those numbers were beginning to look like small change: in the second quarter of 2011 alone, the big five oil companies made 36 billion in profit.

That’s profit, not total revenues.

Meanwhile, you and I–together with other American taxpayers–continue to provide the industry with subsidies that have been estimated at between 4 and 8 billion dollars a year.

The various tax breaks enjoyed by big oil probably made sense when the industry was in its infancy. They make no sense at all when the industry is not just profitable, but obscenely so. Nevertheless, a move to eliminate those subsidies failed yesterday in the Senate, despite strong support from President Obama. While the proposal received support from a majority of the Senate, it failed to garner the filibuster-proof 60 votes that are required in order to get anything done in this era of Republican intransigence.

I suppose there is something admirable in the GOP’s loyalty to the 1%–those George W. Bush once called “his base.”   They refuse to tax the rich (and by “tax,” I mean raising the top marginal tax rate by 3% to the still historically low levels of the Clinton administration). They refuse to eliminate or reduce subsidies for obscenely profitable oil companies–indeed, Paul Ryan’s budget proposal would visit a world of hurt on people who depend on Medicaid, Medicare or other social programs, but it reportedly increases subsidies to big oil.

So much for the GOP’s purported concern about deficits.

From a fiscal policy perspective, these positions are simply unfathomable. And it is really difficult to believe they are politically palatable. Maybe the theory is that if they raise enough of a fuss about transvaginal probes and contraception, no one will notice.

Comments