Daily Archives: 5 July 2013

A Disgusting Court

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A while ago, I wrote about racism on the Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court wrote in its DOMA ruling

What has been explained to this point should more than suffice to establish that the principal purpose and the necessary effect of this law are to demean those persons who are in a lawful same-sex marriage.

And

…no legitimate purpose overcomes the purpose and effect [of DOMA] to disparage and to injure….

And so on.

Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in dissent of this ruling [emphasis in the original],

At least without some more convincing evidence that the Act’s principal purpose was to codify malice, and that it furthered no legitimate government interests, I would not tar the political branches with the brush of bigotry.

Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in his dissent [emphasis in the original, cites omitted],

[T]he majority says that the support­ers of this Act acted with malice—with the “purpose” “to disparage and to injure” same-sex couples.  It says that the motivation for DOMA was to “demean,” to “impose inequality,” to “impose…a stigma,” to deny people “equal dignity,” to brand gay people as “unworthy,” and to “humiliat[e]”their children, (emphasis added).

I am sure these accusations are quite untrue.  To be sure (as the majority points out), the legislation is called the Defense of Marriage Act.  But to defend traditional marriage is not to condemn, demean, or humiliate those who would prefer other arrangements, any more than to defend the Constitution of the United States is to con­demn, demean, or humiliate other constitutions.  To hurl such accusations so casually demeans this institution.

The Supreme Court wrote in its California Proposition 8 ruling that the private group bringing the case to the Court had no standing to do so, even though this is the group that was instrumental in getting Proposition 8 onto the ballot and passed in the first place.  Only State Government officials had standing to defend the proposition in court, and they had refused to mount a defense.

The Court thereby ruled that the people have no standing to defend their own voice, only the State can (not just may) do this.  The Court has thereby ruled that the people no longer are sovereign; Government is sovereign.

This is a disgusting Court, and Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Scalia are justified in their seeming embarrassment.

Now’s the Chance

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President Barack Obama has admitted what Senator Max Baucus said a month ago: that his Obamacare is a train wreck coming down the tracks.  Obama has delayed until 2015—i.e., until after the midterm elections—the implementation of the employer mandate.  With this mandate, large employers would have been required to provide health “insurance” for all of their full-time-equivalent employees or face a fine of $2,000 per employee.  (Note that the existence of that fine puts a floor under the per-employee cost of insurance of some $2,000 per covered employee.)

No one was ready for employer mandate part of the train wreck.  Not the employers, although they have been variously cutting back on employees, employee hours, and/or hiring in order to hold their numbers to a bearable cost.  Not the IRS, which quite apart from the criminal aspects of its operation is wholly unprepared—employees or software—to manage its tracking and enforcement task.  Not HHS, which hasn’t even been able to write draft rules good enough for comment, much less for publication.

This represents a golden opportunity for the Republican Party.  They were handed a gift by the Supreme Court in the summer of 2012 when that body upheld the constitutionality of Obamacare.  Had it been struck, the Republicans would have been caught flat-footed with no viable alternative, and the Democrats would have had a field day beating them about the head and shoulders for being whiners without a solution.

Now’s the chance for the Republicans to recover from that unpreparedness.  In addition to voting to repeal Obamacare one more time, the House has from now through late summer 2014 to pass an actual alternative to Obamacare.  Such an alternative might be three bills: one to take down barriers and allow health insurance to be sold interstate, with no mandates for minimum coverage.  Let the doctors, patients, and market decide what policies (and there will be a lot of them) should be available, and a policy available for sale in New York ought to be saleable in California, also; only the market should make that determination, not any Know Better Government.  Moreover, these policies should be saleable for risk-based premiums, not community premiums.  One group of Americans should not be forced to subsidize another.

Another bill could be a sort of Truth in Advertising bill.  The House should pass a standard, plain English language policy format that mandates that each item to be covered or excluded is to be described in these terms, so that a potential insuree (and his doctor if desired) can compare policies from different insurers and be able to understand the tradeoffs he’s getting when he selects one policy over another.  All without having to talk to an insurance agent for the explanation (or even to view the policy at all), unless the insuree wants to.  This bill might also give the health insurance industry two years (say) to come up with their own standard language, or the House-passed format will go into effect.

A third bill could involve the health provision industry.  This one might center on the publication of performance statistics by hospitals and doctors: admission lengths vs readmission rates vs regional averages, surgery types vs success rates vs regional averages, treatment types vs re-treatment rates vs regional averages, and the like.

Senate Republicans should take up the matter, too, and either work to force a Senate (roll call) vote on their version or work to force a Senate (roll call) vote on the House version when it comes up.  Of course either version will fail in the Senate, and we can anticipate Obama veto threats, too.  But the Republicans will have the Democrats, in the runup to the 2014 midterms, on the record, ideally by name on the failed votes, as opposing serious, material health care reform.  Those Democrats can be called to account for their demonstrated preference for a train wreck that their constituencies—we Americans—have broadly and volubly disliked since before Obamacare was enacted.  We’ll also know who the RINOs were that contributed to blocking these reform bills; they can be dealt with in the primaries.