Health Reform Rises from the Dead
For those of us who questioned how hard the White House and its congressional allies would fight for health care reform, the answer is here. The devil remains in the details, of course, but in the last couple of days Barack Obama has put Republicans and conservative Democrats alike "on notice": Get on board or get left behind.
For those of us who questioned how hard the White House and its congressional allies would fight for health care reform, the answer is here. The devil remains in the details, of course, but in the last couple of days Barack Obama has put Republicans and conservative Democrats alike "on notice": Get on board or get left behind.
This week’s big news is that Sen. Ted Kennedy’s Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee passed its version of a reform bill—including the president’s public plan—on a party line vote. They shrugged and accepted several GOP amendments (I haven’t yet read anything that considers the amendments consequential) and called it a bipartisan effort.
Kennedy’s HELP has been the counterpoint to Sen. Max Baucus’ stalled Finance Committee, where Baucus has thus far failed to convince Republicans and moderate Dems to support some form of a public option to compete against existing private plans. The HELP bill now stands as a tangible threat—if Baucus doesn’t move something soon, this becomes the primary Senate bill.
The bill requires every American be covered—through an employer, through Medicaid/Medicare or by purchasing as an individual. It then provides subsidies to make buying insurance affordable and introduces a public plan as one option inside a regulated marketplace, what’s been called a health insurance exchange. Subsidies go to families making less than four times the poverty level—about $88,000 for a family of four—according to AP. Adds the WASHINGTON POST:
Under the legislation, most businesses would be required to offer insurance to workers or pay a $750 annual fee per full-time employee. Companies with fewer than 25 employees would be exempt from the mandate.
Politically, just as important as the HELP bill is a DNC ad campaign launched today. According to CNN, the 30-second spot will urge viewers in eight states with key senators in both parties to call Capitol Hill. The ad doesn’t name names, but the message is pretty damn clear. (The eight states are Arkansas, Indiana, Florida, Louisiana, Maine, North Dakota, Nebraska and Ohio.) Moreover, both David Axelrod and Rahm Emanuel have said plainly in the last couple of days that the White House is perfectly content with a party line vote. Here’s the TV ad:
Meanwhile, three House committees released a bill yesterday that they’ve drafted in concert. As Ezra Klein points out, this is huge news politically for a couple of reasons. First, the confusing cacophony of proposals that came out of various committees during the 1994 reform effort helped doom it; no such dissention on the House side this time. Second, the committees’ unity greatly strengthens the House’s negotiating hand when it comes time to reconcile its bill with whatever the Senate passes, which will almost certainly be less ambitious.
Already, the House bill appears to take a bigger swing than even the Senate HELP version. Klein’s your best journalistic source for the House bill’s policy weeds (he hadn’t yet posted on the Senate bill’s details at this writing, but look for it). But Igor Volsky in Think Progress’ WONK ROOM also makes an important point. He notes that the House version is less shy about using Medicare’s negotiating advantage with providers than the Senate HELP bill, and it’s thus more likely to truly bring down costs.
—KAI WRIGHT
Swagga Goes International
Is Jay-Z George Bush? Mark Lynch of SLATE sister site FOREIGN POLICY recently compared hip hop to geostrategy. He parses the recent back-and-forth between rapper Jay-Z and less successful (though still famous) MCs like The Game, Nas, and 50 Cent, using Jay-Z's diss tracks, and his responses to those of others, to form a crudish theory of American global authority.
Is Jay-Z George Bush? SLATE sister site FOREIGN POLICY recently compared hip hop to geostrategy. Mark Lynch takes on the recent back-and-forth between rapper Jay-Z and less successful (though still famous) MCs like The Game, Nas, and 50 Cent, using Jay-Z's diss tracks, and his responses to those of others, to form a crudish theory of American global authority.
Jay-Z (Shawn Carter) is the closest thing to a hegemon which the rap world has known for a long time. He's #1 on the Forbes list of the top earning rappers. He has an unimpeachable reputation, both artistic and commercial, and has produced some of the all-time best (and best-selling) hip hop albums including standouts Reasonable Doubt, The Blueprint and the Black Album. He spent several successful years as the CEO of Def Jam Records before buying out his contract a few months ago to release his new album on his own label. And he's got Beyonce. Nobody, but nobody, in the hip hop world has his combination of hard power and soft power. If there be hegemony, then this is it. ...
But the limits on his ability to use this power recalls the debates about U.S. primacy. Should he use this power to its fullest extent, as neo-conservatives would advise, imposing his will to reshape the world, forcing others to adapt to his values and leadership? Or should he fear a backlash against the unilateral use of power, as realists such as my colleague Steve Walt or liberals such as John Ikenberry would warn, and instead exercise self-restraint?
Now, by meddling with less-famous rappers—most recently and notably in his hit "Death of Autotune," Jigga is doing both: He uses his respected flow and megastar platform to jump into the conversation about the future of hip hop and pop music. That would be the US winning WWII, using overwhelming force in the first Iraq War, or, perhaps, taking out the rogue pirates in Somalia earlier this year. On the other hand, Jay-Z is diluting his brand somewhat with silly tracks that just react, relying on external reference points he hasn't chosen. That would be getting suckered into Iraq II without realizing it was going to cost, mad cheddar, hard-earned credibility, and now more than 5,000 lives.
For the middling or insurgent power (think Iran, India, Brazil), the calculus is different:
[The Game] would routinely go out of his way to say that he was not dissing Jay-Z even when it sounded like he was ("before you call this a diss, and you make Hova pissed, why would I do that, when I'm just the new cat, that was taught if a n****take shots to shoot back, defending his yard, yeah standing his ground, I'm sayin if you gonna retire then hand me the crown.") Think of him as a rising middle power (#13 on the Forbes list, down there with Young Jeezy, he helpfully explains on I'm So Wavy) eyeing the king, ambitious and a bit resentful, and looking for an opening.
So should Jay-Z (and the US) get mixed up in the affairs of every last wannabe MC? That's the central question facing foreign policy hands today: Why Afghanistan and not Darfur? Why Bosnia and not Burma? Disarmament or democracy? Economic growth or human rights? Matt Yglesias chimed in with the following: "Even when restraint can be identified as the best strategy, it’s often emotionally difficult to choose this path." Indeed; sometimes you just want to give another rapper (or coworker, or acquaintance, or sovereign power) a proper smackdown, but cannot.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton touched on these themes in a speech before the Council on Foreign Relations this week, wherein she discussed the need to ensure "states have clear incentives to cooperate as well as strong disincentives to sit on the sidelines." She critiqued nations that "stand in the way of turning commonality of interest into action," and spoke plainly about American hegemony: "Just as no nation can meet these challenges alone, no challenge can be met without America."
While she offered a vision of change, "away from a multipolar world to a multipartner world," the secretary still offered a call-out to our enemies that would have made diss track authors proud:
Not everybody in the world wishes us well or shares our values and interests, and some will actively seek to undermine our efforts.
In those cases, our partnerships can become power coalitions to constrain or deter those negative actions. And to these foes and would-be foes let me say our focus in diplomacy and development is not an alternative to our national security arsenal. Our willingness to talk is not a sign of weakness to be exploited. We will not hesitate to defend our friends, our interests and above all our people, vigorously and when necessary with the world's strongest military.
Who's going to argue with that?
—DAYO OLOPADE
Double-Edged Steele
RNC Chair Michael Steele’s antics are a lot easier to explain if you consider the possibility that he’s a double agent working for President Barack Obama—ponder this... A few months back, CNN reported that Confederate President Jefferson Davis’ house slave, William Jackson, was an agent for the Union army. Davis spoke with his generals openly in Jackson’s presence—thinking of Jackson as a mere “piece of furniture.” Meanwhile, Jackson absorbed key military information, then escaped in 1861 and delivered what he knew to Union commanders. Maybe Steele is Jackson’s heir apparent.
RNC Chair Michael Steele’s antics are a lot easier to explain if you consider the possibility that he’s a double agent working for President Barack Obama—ponder this...
A few months back, CNN reported that Confederate President Jefferson Davis’ house slave, William Jackson, was an agent for the Union army. Davis spoke with his generals openly in Jackson’s presence—thinking of Jackson as a mere “piece of furniture.” Meanwhile, Jackson absorbed key military information, then escaped in 1861 and delivered what he knew to Union commanders.
Maybe Steele is Jackson’s heir apparent. The Republican National Committee should check him for a hidden earpiece because it sure sounds like he’s being fed sound bites by Rahm Emmanuel from an undisclosed location.
How else do you explain Steele’s now ritually strange behavior? Either he’s locked in a high-stakes battle of “wits” with Gov. Sarah Palin for the GOP Bud Light Real Men of Genius Award, or he’s secretly dismantling the Republican Party from the inside out.
Fresh off of a weekend when the Young Republican Federation elected Audra Shay as its chair, even as she battled charges over racist posts on her Facebook page, Steele, who kept a low profile on the Shay controversy, gave an interview during the YRF weekend in which he joked openly about deploying “fried chicken and potato salad” to bring black people into the Republican fold. He actually fell for “I’ll bring the collard greens!”:
Will there be peach cobbler, too, Mike? Why is he embracing his inner Fuzzy Zoeller?:
Watch the clip and you keep waiting for Steele to say that the GOP is just misunderstood, that they’re all really “one nation under a groove, gettin’ down just for the funk of it.” Steele is literally like a hungry shipwreck victim on an uncharted island who’s digging a pit and covering it up with palm leaves so he can lure black voters into a trap with soul food delicacies as bait. Sorry, Mike, this has already been done and it isn’t going to work:
It’s pretty clear that Republicans had no idea what they were getting into when they tapped Steele as party chair—which shows just how out far out of touch they are with people of color—if they wanted a family-friendly black dude to shake up their garden party, they would have been better off with Coach Fuller from Hang Time as their leader.
Unless...
What if Steele was taken away at birth to a clandestine left-wing paramilitary camp and trained in secret as the perfect foil for the Barack Obama? With Steele’s almost too perfect porn star name, his porn star moustache, his uncomfortable chuckle, and his bottomless well of tasteless quips, maybe it’s worth exploring the possibility that he’s a double agent being bankrolled under the table by the Democratic National Committee.
The GOP tried its best to portray Obama as an unknown, risky milquetoast who was indoctrinated as a youth in neo-Marxist Indonesian madrassas and liked hanging out at Starbucks with Bill Ayers. Wouldn’t it be ironic if Republicans were being led by a progressive Manchurian candidate in the person (cyborg?) of Michael Steele?
He could be the “Steele” who sat by the door. Their first mistake was letting him in:
Sonia Sotomayor's Confirmation Hearing: The Drinking Game
The first session of judge Sonia Sotomayor's confirmation hearing was a meaningless display of platitudes. Some Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee, like Lindsey Graham, saw the writing on the wall: "Unless you have a complete meltdown, you are going to be confirmed," he told her. And with that said, just about everyone else in the room (Democrats included) decided to read their sincere thoughts on Hispanics, distate for foreign law, strip-searches or abortion, and other highfalutin theories of jurispridence into the record...
The first session of judge Sonia Sotomayor's confirmation hearing was a meaningless display of platitudes. Some Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee, like Lindsey Graham, saw the writing on the wall: "Unless you have a complete meltdown, you are going to be confirmed," he told her. And with that said, just about everyone else in the room (Democrats included) decided to read their sincere thoughts on Hispanics, distate for foreign law, strip-searches or abortion, and other highfalutin theories of jurispridence into the record —presumably for future, more contentious confirmation hearings. Mike Madden of SALON reports:
The "opening statements" by the 19 members of the committee began at 10 a.m. sharp and dragged on—albeit interrupted by a few anti-choice kooks and a lengthy break for lunch—until 2:30 p.m. Each lawmaker used the same tired baseball metaphor, droning back and forth about whether judges are more or less like umpires, calling balls and strikes. (Sen. John Cornyn, a Texas Republican, tried to change things up by talking about quarterbacks, but it didn't take.) At various moments, senators read Sotomayor her own résumé, reminisced about previous nominees and lamented the fact that Supreme Court hearings aren't televised.
The senatorial preening sessions will continue all week, but as Graham said, will not likely change the outcome. The upside, however, is that the deliberations make a fantastic drinking game!
I took notes on the frequency with which a few key buzzwords cropped up in the hearing's first session. The accompanying chart above maps out the results. "Experience or Qualifications" was the most frequently used word, at 34 times in roughly 4 hours. A close second and third was "Race," or the euphemistic "Background," at 21 times, and "Constitution" (hooray!) at 19 times. Just missing the bronze, of course, was the dread word "empathy"—as in "Sonia Sotomayor is a deeply, deeply racist person."
For those who watched yesterday (or have paid attention to American politics for the last 8 years), it may be surprising that "Constitution" was used so frequently—mostly by Democrats—and that the tired "umpire" metaphor was only used 8 times.
At any rate, if you're inclined to keep watching the Congressional kabuki, and are in search of an easy drinking game, these 13 buzzwords (no pun intended) are not a bad place to start. In a pinch, add "precedent."
—DAYO OLOPADE
Sotomayor v. Sessions
"There you go again." By that, I mean the GOP. Sen. Jeff Sessions, ranking member of the Judiciary Committee, can’t seem to grasp that American jurisprudence is about more than just the application of the law to the facts, or that our Constitution has proven time and time again to be one of the most pliable, flexible, living, breathing documents ever to be written in the history of man....
"There you go again." By that, I mean the GOP. Sen. Jeff Sessions, ranking member of the Judiciary Committee, can’t seem to grasp that American jurisprudence is about more than just the application of the law to the facts, or that our Constitution has proven time and time again to be one of the most pliable, flexible, living, breathing documents ever to be written in the history of man.
The Republican senators who questioned Sonia Sotomayor, President Obama's Supreme Court nominee, just don’t grasp that the "Plessy v. Ferguson" and Dred Scott decisions (which denied blacks the most basic of human rights—the latter declaring that blacks were only 3/5’s of a human being) were decided by racist judges who sat on our nation’s highest court. These Republican senators do not grasp that without so-called "activist judges" like Earl Warren (the former Republican governor of California), the case of "Brown v. Board of Education" would not have been a 9-0 decision in favor of desegregation.
History tells us that Warren single-handedly lobbied his fellow justices to ensure that they had a unanimous decision on an issue of such national importance. And when it comes to "Loving vs. Virginia," the 1967 case that forbade interracial marriage in America, the same Warren Court rejected the unfair denial of the basic right of humans to marry whom we please.
All this is to say: Senator Sessions' opening salvos against Sotomayor and her record make clear to me that the GOP has once again made a cynical calculation to use “race” as a factor in its political strategy, instead of winning the day on ideals and principles.
As a lifelong Republican and a female attorney of color, this strategy continues to concern me deeply. It was hard to sit and listen today to Senators Sessions, Coburn, Hatch, Graham, Grassley and others (all white, all male, all over 50 years old) lecture this supremely qualified judge on judicial temperament, “fairness”, “equal justice” and other maxims of jurisprudence. In his opening statement, Sessions pounded on Judge Sotomayor for her prior statements on how race and gender most certainly affect one's judgment of the issues at hand, barely masking his contempt for such a worldview.
Interestingly, Justice Samuel Alito made similar comments when he spoke about his Italian immigrant grandparents and how his judicial philosophy has been shaped by the discrimination and poverty that his family once experienced in America.
It is my sincere hope that Judge Sotomayor is confirmed, as I think she brings an important perspective to our nation’s highest court. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg made the best argument for such diversity when speaking of her all male colleagues' reaction to the recent Redding case—in which a 13-year old girl was strip-searched by school officials. “They have never been a 13-year-old girl,” she said. “It’s a very sensitive age for a girl. I don’t think that my colleagues, some of them, quite understood.” Ultimately, court watchers believe that the presence of a single woman helped her male colleagues to appreciate the sensitivity of the issue before the court. Thus diversity, gender, and life experience are all qualities that enhance our judicial systems and the delivery of “equal justice” under law.
—SOPHIA A. NELSON
