One Signature Closer to a Vote on Obamacare Repeal
This morning, in a column for National Review Online, I criticized a number of Democrats and Republicans who voted against Obamacare but had not signed a discharge petition that would force a floor vote on repealing the new health care law. One of the Republicans I singled out was Rep. Castle of Delaware, who is now seeking the GOP nomination for US Senate. This afternoon, Rep. Castle’s staff informed me that he intends to sign that petition as soon as he returns to Washington after the recess. That leaves five Republicans who have not signed. For the record, they are: Mark Kirk of Illinois, Joseph Cao and Charles Boustany of Louisiana, David Reichert of Washington, and Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia.
Wednesday Links
- Busy with an ambitious domestic agenda, the Obama administration has put trade issues on the back burner. Let’s hope it stays that way.
- A little lesson on how government works. (As opposed to how it’s supposed to work.)
- There has been talk that House Democrats are planning to “deem” the health care bill into law without calling for a vote. If you’re not sure how that process works, read this.
- Contrary to a growing belief in Washington, revaluing China’s currency will not cure the trade deficit.
- Podcast: “ObamaCare Threatens Innovation” featuring Michael F. Cannon.
Will Kucinich’s Vote Help ObamaCare?
Whether Rep. Dennis Kucinich’s (D-OH) “aye” vote will help pass ObamaCare depends on whether he asked for something in return.
Jane Hamsher of FireDogLake reports, “Kucinich told Obama that he wants a full ERISA waver [sic] and a public option in exchange for his vote.” If he gets either of those things in the reconciliation “fixer” bill, then that will trigger a backlash. His “support” could undermine the whole process.
It really depends on what kind of a negotiator Kucinich is. If he’s a good negotiator, it hurts ObamaCare. If he’s a lousy negotiator, it helps.
How Will the Independents Vote?
In a recent Cato study, “The Libertarian Vote in the Age of Obama,” authors David Boaz and David Kirby found that libertarian voters, who make up about 14 percent of the electorate, are a leading indicator of how independents will cast their ballots.
Appearing on Freedom Watch earlier this week, Boaz explained the results of the study, and what it means for the next election. Watch:
Our System of Government Exists to Prevent This Kind of Thing
The Hill‘s Congress Blog asks, “Will the Senate pass a health care reform bill before it adjourns for the year?”
I answer:
It’s not looking good – nor should it.
The Reid bill becomes less popular with each passing day. (So too does President Obama’s handling of health care.)
CBS News is reporting that Reid wants to hold a vote before Christmas because he doesn’t want senators to go home and hear from their constituents.
Reid has been systematically suppressing a complete cost estimate of his bill.
Reid’s manager’s amendment will make unknown, countless, and dramatic changes to that 2,074-page bill – and Reid wants to vote on it before anyone knows what those changes are.
Even Max Baucus admits that not a single senator understands the Reid bill.
Our federalist system, the separation of powers, our bicameral national legislature, six-year terms for Senators, staggered Senate elections, and the Senate’s procedural rules all exist precisely to prevent what Reid is trying to do: ram a sweeping piece of legislation through Congress without due consideration.
Disguised Health Care Costs: The $1.5 Trillion Fraud
If House Democrats hold a vote on their health-care overhaul this weekend, they might as well vote to abolish the Congressional Budget Office too.
It would be no more audacious (and much more honest) than the way they have gamed the CBO’s rules to hide $1.5 trillion of the cost of their legislation — which has to be the biggest fiscal obfuscation in the history of American politics.
C/P Politico
Department of Bias
The Department of Justice just invalidated a move by the residents of Kinston, North Carolina, to have non-partisan local elections. Rationale?
The Justice Department’s ruling, which affects races for City Council and mayor, went so far as to say partisan elections are needed so that black voters can elect their “candidates of choice” – identified by the department as those who are Democrats and almost exclusively black.
The department ruled that white voters in Kinston will vote for blacks only if they are Democrats and that therefore the city cannot get rid of party affiliations for local elections because that would violate black voters’ right to elect the candidates they want.
This, coming from the same Department of Justice officials that wouldn’t know a civil rights violation if it picked up a club and barred them access to a polling place.
Full House to Vote on Lie of a Bill
The Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act (SAFRA) is expected to head to the full House of Representatives for a vote tomorrow, and as it does there is yet another Congressional Budget Office estimate upping its expected cost. The bill that sponsor George Miller (D-CA) shamelessly says will be a taxpayer-money saver continues to be exposed as very much the opposite.
As you might recall, Miller has been touting SAFRA as legislation that would fund all kinds of new or expanded federal programs while allocating $10 billion to deficit reduction. But the CBO has never agreed with that. First, the CBO identified a likely net cost to taxpayers of about $6 billion over ten years, and that was without including any deficit reduction. Then it estimated that SAFRA would cost an additional $33 billion after accounting for lending risk. And now, CBO estimates that the cost of expanding Pell grants could be almost $11 billion greater than originally estimated. If you add all of those things together, the cost of SAFRA has flipped from a promised $10 billion savings to a $50 billion loss.
In fairness, the last estimate comes from a change in the baseline used for Pell outlays, going from March to August 2009. The increased cost estimate could very well reflect a higher-than-usual Pell expense because of the economic downturn, and the additional cost would not materialize if and when things improve. Nonetheless, this just adds to a very clear message about SAFRA: Far from relieving taxpayers, it’s going to deliver yet one more punishing blow.
Deficits, Spending, and Taxes
The White House and the CBO announced this week that:
The nation’s fiscal outlook is even bleaker than the government forecast earlier this year because the recession turned out to be deeper than widely expected, the budget offices of the White House and Congress agreed in separate updates on Tuesday.
The Obama administration’s Office of Management and Budget raised its 10-year tally of deficits expected through 2019 to $9.05 trillion, nearly $2 trillion more than it projected in February. That would represent 5.1 percent of the economy’s estimated gross domestic product for the decade, a higher level than is generally considered healthy.
What is the right response to these deficits?
One view holds that most current expenditure is desirable — indeed, that expenditure should ideally be much higher — so the United States should raise taxes to balance the budget. Taxes are a drag on economic growth, however, and unpopular with many voters, so this view presents politicians with an unhappy tradeoff.
The alternative view holds that a substantial fraction of current expenditure is undesirable and should be eliminated, even if the revenue to pay for it could be manufactured out of thin air. To be concrete:
- Medicare and Medicaid encourage excessive spending on health care.
- The invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan encourage hostility to the U.S. and thereby increase the risk of terrorism.
- Drug prohibition generates crime and corruption.
- Agricultural subsidies distort decisions about which crops to grow, and where.
- And much, much more.
So, under this view, the United States can have its cake and eat it too: improve the economy and reduce the deficit without the need to raise taxes.
This approach is not, of course, politically trivial, since existing expenditure programs have constituencies that will fight their elimination.
But thinking about these two views of the deficits is nevertheless useful: it shows that discussion should really be about which aspects of government are truly beneficial, not just about the deficits per se.
“If You’re Not Having Fun Advocating for Freedom, You’re Doing it Wrong!”
The health care debate has catalyzed a wonderful national clash of cultures centering on freedom versus control. Here’s one example that’s both complex and delightful.
Progressive site TalkingPointsMemo ran a story yesterday about a man named “Chris” who carried a rifle outside an event in Phoenix at which President Obama appeared. “We will forcefully resist people imposing their will on us through the strength of the majority with a vote,” Chris said.
To many TPM readers, this kind of thing is self-evidently shocking and wrong: Carrying a weapon is inherently threatening, Second Amendment notwithstanding. And vowing to resist the properly expressed will of the majority—isn’t that an outrageous denial of our democratic values?
Well, . . . No. Our constitution specifically denies force to democratic outcomes that impinge on freedom of speech and religion, on bearing arms, and on the security of our persons, houses, papers, and effects, to name a few. Our constitution also tightly circumscribed the powers of the federal government. Those restrictions were breached without abiding the supermajority requirements of Article V, alas.
There are many nuances in this clash of cultures, and it’s fascinating to watch the battle for credibility. One ugly issue is preempted rather handily by the fact that Chris is African-American.
Next question, taken up by CNN: Was the interview staged? Hell, yeah! says Chris’ interviewer. And they know each other—big deal.
Finally, they were laughing and having a good time. Isn’t this serious? Yes, it is serious, says Chris’ interviewer, but “If you’re not having fun advocating for freedom, you’re doing it wrong!”
It’s a great line—friendly, in-your-face advocacy that might just succeed in familiarizing more Americans with the idea of living as truly free people.
Today Talking Points Memo is charging that the man who interviewed Chris was a prominent defender of a militia group in the 90s, some members of which were convicted of crimes. I know nothing of the truth or falsity of this charge, and I had never heard of the militia group, the interviewer, or his organization before today.
This struggle over credibility is all part of the battle between freedom and control that is playing itself out right now. It’s an exciting time, and a chance for many more Americans to learn about liberty and the people who live it.
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Sotomayor Doesn’t Deserve a Supreme Court Seat
Having sat through the entire gavel-to-gavel coverage of last week’s confirmation hearings, I still don’t know if I would vote to confirm Sonia Sotomayor if I were a senator, I really don’t. Deciding how to vote on this is more than a simple matter of deciding whether she is “qualified” to sit on the Supreme Court—which is hard enough given there is no fixed qualification standard.
It also has to include how much deference you want to give the president, in general terms but also taking into account that Sotomayor will likely be confirmed and you want to position yourself politically for the next nominee. And it has to include, of course, how your constituents feel; while it’s cowardly to follow opinion polls blindly, you are accountable to those who sent you to Washington. There are many other considerations, both political and legal.
But I’m not a senator—or even a senator’s aide—so I don’t have to make that decision. As a constitutional lawyer, however, I can say that—even as most of Sotomayor’s opinions are uncontroversial—it is impossible to overlook the short thrift the judge gave to the judicial process in Ricci v. DeStefano and Didden v. Port Chester. I am similarly hard-pressed to accept hearing-seat conversions that contradict over 15 years of speeches and articles: most notably against the idea that judges’ ethnic backgrounds—and even “physiological differences”—should affect their rulings.
Given Sotomayor’s repeated past rejection of the idea that law is or should be objective, stable, or discernible from written text, her inability during her testimony to explain her judicial philosophy—or even state her position on important cases and issues beyond an acceptance of precedent (by which she would no longer be bound in her new role)—leaves me with an abiding concern about the damage she could do to the rule of law in this country. Because of the nominee’s evasion, obfuscation, and doubletalk, I like her less now than I did before the hearings.
And so, on second thought, I do know how I would vote. During John Roberts’s confirmation hearings, Sen. Dick Durbin said that “no one has a right to sit on the Supreme Court” and that the “burden of proof for a Supreme Court justice is on the nominee.” I will follow this very apt “burden of proof” paradigm and respect the logic of Sen. Arlen Specter, the Republican-turned-Democrat former judiciary committee chairman who at President Clinton’s impeachment trial curiously evoked Scottish law to vote “not proven.” Given the impropriety of citing foreign law (another issue on which the nominee failed to explain her “conversion” in hearing testimony), I would vote that the case for confirming Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court is “not proven”—under American law.
Broken Promises — to Voters and the New York Times
“[O]nce it is clear that a bill will be coming to the president’s desk, the White House will post the bill online,” White House spokesman Nick Shapiro told New York Times reporter Katherine Seelye for her June 22 story on President Obama’s “Sunlight Before Signing” campaign pledge. “This will give the American people a greater ability to review the bill, often many more than five days before the president signs it into law.”
The story, titled “White House Changes the Terms of a Campaign Pledge About Posting Bills Online,” was about the White House effort to walk back from President Obama’s campaign pledge to post bills he receives for five days before signing them.
When the New York Times published the story, five bills had been presented to the president and were awaiting his signature. Four more were presented to him after the story’s publication. All nine are now law.
And for the life of me, I can’t find where any of them have been posted on Whitehouse.gov. Surely it was clear to the White House that the five bills it had and the four soon to come would reach the president’s desk.
I disagree with arguments for releasing President Obama from his pledge to sign bills only after he has posted them for a full five days after receiving them. It would have the same effects as the 72-hour hold the Sunlight Foundation is seeking from Congress — also a welcome legislative process reform.
And it’s becoming more clear that the five-day promise could be implemented. At this point, only one of 39 bills that the president has signed has been posted for five days in advance. (The DTV Delay Act was actually not held five days after formal presentment, but the White House posted it after the final version had passed Congress.) Twenty-four other bills have been held at the White House five days or more before the President has signed them. They just haven’t been posted.
To repeat, over 60% of the legislation coming out of Congress waits five days for the president’s signature as a matter of course. The only thing preventing implementation of the president’s promise as to these bills is the White House’s inexplicable reluctance to do what it says it will do.
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