Monthly Archives: July 2013

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.

Independence Day

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I posted this last year; it bears repeating.

On this day 236 years ago, a group of Americans got together and, pledging their Lives, their Fortunes and their sacred Honor to each other while relying on the protection of divine Providence, took our country free from tyranny and set us on a new, wholly experimental course.

These men openly acknowledged both our right and our duty to throw off any government that too badly violates its moral obligations to us sovereign citizens, that for too long abuses our liberties and our individual responsibilities.  At the same time, though, they acknowledged that routinely rebelling at every small offense was equally wrong: Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes.  Yet those light and transient offenses want correction along with those abuses and moral failures.

And so, while fighting (and some dying) for our newly born nation and during the immediately ensuing years of a troubled peace, these men, with others from the newly independent and united States joining them, in a second phase of our experiment invented a wholly new form of government.  They created a government that would recognize the essential sovereignty of the members of a voluntarily formed social compact over our compact’s government, and they gave that government a structure and a strictly limited set of authorities designed to maximize our control of government and our ability to maintain that control.

They also invented a wholly new mechanism for throwing off an abusive government and replacing it with one more suited to our needs and to our control: a set of elections that would let us turn all the rascals out of one house of our legislative body every two years, that would let us depose the whole of the other house of our legislative body in sequential one-third increments every two years, and that would let us fire the chief executive of this government every four years— any and all whom we found wanting during their time in office.  This invention was accompanied by another invention of these men: a judiciary that sat, neither above nor below our executive and legislative, but equal to and separate from them—a third powerful check that granted stability to the whole.

We are here today arguing amongst ourselves, usually with great passion, over the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the Environmental Protection Agency, climate change, and a host of other things, too, both momentous and trivial.  And we could not be without the genius and the sacrifice of those men those 236 years ago.

As you sit around by your barbecue, or at the beach, or wherever you may be, hamburgers and hotdogs in hand, beer nearby, children screaming and yelling in their own happinesses, take a moment to think about that.

Social Engineering with the Tax Code

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Senators Max Baucus (D, MT) and Orrin Hatch (R, UT), Senate Finance Committee Chairman and Ranking Republican, respectively, had a thought, as described in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed.  In a letter to their fellow Committee members, they suggested,

To make sure that we clear out all the unproductive provisions we plan to operate from an assumption that all special provisions are out unless there is clear evidence that they: (1) help grow the economy, (2) make the tax code fairer, or (3) effectively promote other important policy objectives.

In other words, they want to zero out all deductions, loopholes, subsidies, credits, carve-outs, and so on in the Federal tax code and start over, including only those that are explicitly defended and defended successfully.

Right idea; flawed execution.  Items 2) and 3) are mutually exclusive.  “Important policy objectives” can only come at the expense of this or that group.

Moreover, “policy objectives” through taxing is inherently ineffective and immoral.  If Congress can’t achieve the policy objective through legislation, it’s because the legislators and their bosses, the sovereign people, don’t want that objective, and so that objective is illegitimate.

Further, the circumscription created on this or that group by taxing for that or this objective limits arbitrarily the victimized groups, and it thereby immorally eliminates those groups’ equality of opportunity—which is supposed to be equal to the opportunities of other groups (vis., the opportunities of the tax-favored groups)—and their ability to exercise such opportunities as are left to them according to their own imperatives, not those dictated by government.

We’ll see how far even this idea gets, though, first in the Progressive-controlled Senate Finance Committee, and then in the Progressive-controlled Senate.

On the other hand, what’s happening along these lines in the Republican- (as opposed to Conservative-) controlled House?  Not much, mostly this year-old chit-chat.  Even on the matter of social engineering through the tax code, the Ways and Means letter and attachment merely identify the existence of damage done by social engineering, but they do not offer anything concrete to do about that damage or about the measures themselves.  At least the two Senators had that much.

What He Said

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The following, via The Weekly Standard, is excerpted from Justice Antonin Scalia’s dissent in US v Windsor.

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Let the People Decide

By ANTONIN SCALIA, FOR THE EDITORS

This case is about power in several respects. It is about the power of our people to govern themselves, and the power of this Court to pronounce the law. Today’s opinion aggrandizes the latter, with the predictable consequence of diminishing the former….

[In its holding, the Court] accuses the Congress that enacted this law and the President who signed it of something much worse than, for example, having acted in excess of enumerated federal powers—or even having drawn distinctions that prove to be irrational. Those legal errors may be made in good faith, errors though they are. But the 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.

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. In the majority’s judgment, any resistance to its holding is beyond the pale of reasoned disagreement. To question its high-handed invalidation of a presumptively valid statute is to act (the majority is sure) with the purpose to “disparage,” “injure,” “degrade,” “demean,” and “humiliate” our fellow human beings, our fellow citizens, who are homosexual. All that, simply for supporting an Act that did no more than codify an aspect of marriage that had been unquestioned in our society for most of its existence—indeed, had been unquestioned in virtually all societies for virtually all of human history. It is one thing for a society to elect change; it is another for a court of law to impose change by adjudging those who oppose it hostes humani generis, enemies of the human race….

By formally declaring anyone opposed to same-sex marriage an enemy of human decency, the majority arms well every challenger to a state law restricting marriage to its traditional definition. Henceforth those challengers will lead with this Court’s declaration that there is “no legitimate purpose” served by such a law, and will claim that the traditional definition has “the purpose and effect to disparage and to injure” the “personhood and dignity” of same-sex couples. The majority’s limiting assurance will be meaningless in the face of language like that, as the majority well knows. That is why the language is there. The result will be a judicial distortion of our society’s debate over marriage—a debate that can seem in need of our clumsy “help” only to a member of this institution.

As to that debate: Few public controversies touch an institution so central to the lives of so many, and few inspire such attendant passion by good people on all sides. Few public controversies will ever demonstrate so vividly the beauty of what our Framers gave us, a gift the Court pawns today to buy its stolen moment in the spotlight: a system of government that permits us to rule ourselves. Since DOMA’s passage, citizens on all sides of the question have seen victories and they have seen defeats. There have been plebiscites, legislation, persuasion, and loud voices—in other words, democracy.

Victories in one place for some, see North Carolina Const., Amdt. 1 (providing that “[m]arriage between one man and one woman is the only domestic legal union that shall be valid or recognized in this State,” approved by a popular vote, 61% to 39% on May 8, 2012, are offset by victories in other places for others, see Maryland Question 6 (establishing “that Maryland’s civil marriage laws allow gay and lesbian couples to obtain a civil marriage license,” approved by a popular vote, 52% to 48%, on November 6, 2012). Even in a single State, the question has come out differently on different occasions. Compare Maine Question 1 (permitting “the State of Maine to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples,” approved by a popular vote, 53% to 47%, on November 6, 2012) with Maine Question 1 (rejecting “the new law that lets same-sex couples marry,” approved by a popular vote, 53% to 47%, on November 3, 2009).

In the majority’s telling, this story is black-and-white: Hate your neighbor or come along with us. The truth is more complicated. It is hard to admit that one’s political opponents are not monsters, especially in a struggle like this one, and the challenge in the end proves more than today’s Court can handle. Too bad. A reminder that disagreement over something so fundamental as marriage can still be politically legitimate would have been a fit task for what in earlier times was called the judicial temperament. We might have covered ourselves with honor today, by promising all sides of this debate that it was theirs to settle and that we would respect their resolution. We might have let the People decide.

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What he said.

Government and Privacy

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Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal (R) signed a bill last week penalizing those who publish the names of individuals who own or have applied for a concealed handgun permit with potential jail sentences of six months and fines of $10,000.

An identity may only be released if a concealed handgun carrier is charged with a felony offense involving the use of a firearm.

The Advocate Editor Peter Kovacs doesn’t get it.   He insists there’s no place for such legislation; his protest is typical of the NLMSM.  Indeed, the NLMSM’s general condoning of The Journal News‘ publication of the names and addresses of New York area gun owners—mostly plainly demonstrated by NLMSM silence on the matter—demonstrates that the press generally cannot be trusted to respect individual privacy.

Jindal was clear in his defense of the law:

In the face of an administration in Washington that wants to take away the rights of law-abiding gun owners, we are standing up for the Second Amendment and the Constitution of the United States here in Louisiana.

We are building on the work we’ve done to protect the rights of Louisianians while also implementing common-sense gun safety measures[.]

The principle is plain and simple: nor government nor the press get to invade citizens’ privacy just because they’re curious or want to sell newspapers.  Only the self-serving and self-important have a problem here.