Monthly Archives: July 2017

The Path Forward

By tmess2 | Published July 29, 2017

Looking at the Republican debacle over Health Care, I was constantly reminded of two things.

First, I keep on thinking of a classic Saturday Night Live skit from their third season portraying Richard Nixon as a vampire-like figure who keeps coming back.  Like Nixon in that skit, just when we think that the Republican efforts at gutting health care are done, they find a way to resurrect the bill.  Since the Senate never actually voted on the final bill (which was put back on the calendar after the substitute amendment failed), it could be brought back to the floor at any time.

Second, I am reminded of Representative Pelosi’s comments while the Affordable Care Act was pending that we would not know what was in the bill until it finally passed.  While Republicans made a lot of hay out of this comment, she was expressing the reality of the legislative process.  Until the vote on the final version of the bill, it is possible that legislators will add new provisions and delete others.  Normally, however, under ordinary process, there is a core of the bill that stays relatively the same.  With this bill, the Republicans have treated the bill as a placeholder.  The message in the House and the Senate has been just pass this bill whatever its flaws and we can decide on the real terms of the bill later.  The concept that the conference committee would write an entire bill from scratch as opposed to merely reconciling the disagreements between the two houses is mindboggling. Continue Reading...

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Healthcare: What’s Next?

By DocJess | Published July 19, 2017

As you’ve certainly heard, the Senate tax-cut-for-the-wealthy-at-the-expense-of-the-sick has met it’s death. Yes, Mitch will hold a “Repeal Only” bill next week, but that’s not going anywhere either. You may wonder why that vote is being held, and the answer is rather simple: Donald Trump is intellectually impaired. The White House has put a lot of pressure on Mitch to hold said vote because first, while #NotMyCheeto cannot name all 52 GOP senators, he holds out some hope that he can corral people to vote for it, and second, because he views the vote along the lines of a “loyalty” vote. He wants that opportunity to take names on who is “fir ‘im, and agin ‘im”. Also, Mitch would rather be a loser than a quitter.

So what’s left? Basically the option that cost John Boehner the speakership: bipartisanship. The other option would be for #NotMyCheeto to cease the insurance company payments, and dismantle the individual mandate via Executive Order, which would throw 32 million people off the roles of Exchange-based insurance as well as Medicaid as soon as the insurance companies could get new rate levels through the state insurance commissioners. While Trumpkin couldn’t care less, since his criminal family isn’t affected, and there’s no impact on Russians, the House and Senate DO care because the full house and a third of the Senate is up for re-election next year, and voters never forget who took something from them.

At the White House yesterday, Trumpkin said: “We’re not going to own it. I’m not going to own it. I can tell you the Republicans are not going to own it. We’ll let Obamacare fail, and then the Democrats are going to come to us.” Idiot. Continue Reading...

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The Fourth of July and Ancient Greece and Rome

By tmess2 | Published July 4, 2017

One of my personal traditions for the 4th of July is watching 1776.  For those who are unfamiliar with this movie, it is based on the 1970s musical of the same name and starts the recently deceased Ken Howard as Thomas Jefferson.  In part because of the era when this musical was written, it takes a more open-eyed view of the events of the Spring of 1776 leading up to the Declaration of Independence — including the flaws of the founding fathers, the difficulty in getting the resolution on independence passed, and how slavery almost prevented independence.

Aside from its willingness to confront the history mostly head on — it acknowledges the existence of a faction in the Continental Congress that was more interested in compromise than independence but glosses over the large loyalist contingent in the country as a whole — another interesting thing about the musical numbers is that the last musical number — sung by John Adams — includes some allusions to the Roman Republic.  At the time of the framing, Rome and Athens were seen as models of ancient democracies and what could go wrong with them.  This admiration can be seen in Washington identifying himself with Cincinnatus — an early Roman statesman who was called to serve Rome in a time of crisis — receiving emergency powers — who resigned to return to civilian life when the crisis had passed and the three authors of The Federalist Papers using the pseudonym Publius.  Putting aside the fact that, in reality, both Rome and Athens were much less democratic than the United Kingdom, a major interest of the framers (discussed at length in their writings) was why Athenian democracy and Roman democracy ultimately fell and what that meant for the new country that they were building.   In both cases, the problem was that the small country became an empire.

In the case of Athens, Athens sought to use its preeminent position after the Persian Wars for its own benefit at the expense of its supposed allies (who quickly became client states) and its neighbors.  The result of this “Athens First” policy was to encourage revolts in the subject states and an anti-Athens alliance among its neighbors leading to constant warfare until another regional power crushed all of the Greek city-states.  In the end, putting Athens First did not make Athens Great Again. Continue Reading...

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The Supreme Court and Immigration

By tmess2 | Published July 1, 2017

The Statue of Liberty stands as a symbol that this nation was built on immigration.  This past term (and apparently this upcoming term) immigration was a significant part of the Supreme Court docket.  Of the eight cases involving immigration or the border, the Supreme Court issued decisions in five, sent one back to the lower courts (in light of one of the four decisions), and set two for re-argument in the fall (as both were argued before Justice Gorsuch joined the bench, the implication is that there was a 4-4 split or that the majority lacked a consensus on the legal theory for the result).  In addition, the Supreme Court is going to hear argument on the travel ban.

Going in chronological order, at the end of May, the Supreme Court issued a decision on the crimes that trigger deportation — narrowly interpreting the statute to limit the state offenses that trigger deportation.  The decision involved charges of sexual abuse against minors with the court defining minor as under 16 and requiring that the state offense be limited to minors under sixteen.  On the cases that were decided, as discussed in an earlier post, the Supreme Court struck down the law governing birth citizenship when a child is born abroad to parents with split citizenship (i.e. one is a U.S. citizen and the other is not) because the law discriminated based on the gender of the U.S. citizen.

In the next to last week of the term, the Supreme Court issued three more decisions.  The first case — involving a challenge to immigrants arrested after 9/11 — technically was not about immigration but about the right to sue the government and government official for civil rights violations.  While there is a federal statute authorizing individuals to sue state officials, there is no such statute for civil rights violations by federal officials.  While the Supreme Court has authorized such suits in a limited number of circumstances, the Supreme Court has been reluctant to expand that right.  The Supreme Court found that the claim in the most recent case were not similar to the previously recognized claims and decided that it was up to Congress to decide whether to enact a statute authorizing such claims.  That decision also led to the decision to send the second civil rights case (involving a cross-border shooting) back to the lower court to review whether it was the type of claim that could be brought.  (The lower court had originally decided the case on the issue of whether it was a civil rights violation.  In sending the case back, the Supreme Court raised doubts about some of that reasoning.) Continue Reading...

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