Monthly Archives: October 2013

Jim DeMint: We Won’t Back Down on ObamaCare

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My title is taken from Jim DeMint’s Wall Street Journal op-ed of the same name.  In his piece, he makes the following points.

The reason [the Heritage Foundation, and other conservatives chose this moment to fight] is simple: to protect the American people from the harmful effects of this law.

And

More and more people have had their work hours cut, their jobs eliminated and their coverage taken away as a result of this new law.

Further, research by Drew Gonshorowski of the Center for Data Analysis at the Heritage Foundation indicates that

…the hardest hit by the increases will be young adults.  “A state that exhibits this clearly is Vermont…where the increase for 27-year-olds is 144% and the increase for 50-year-olds is still 60%, but far less.  All states exhibit this relationship.

DeMint has lots more; you get the idea.  However, he’s missing some key factors.  No Conservative, and almost no Republican—not just the Heritage Foundation—will back down on Obamacare, but they need three things in order to do more than “not back down,” in order instead actually to succeed concerning Obamacare:

They need better tactics.

They need better communication skills.

They need better candidates with whom then to win actual elections and thereby gain majorities in both houses of Congress and win the White House.  President Barack Obama was taunting Republicans when he said,

You don’t like a particular policy or a particular president, then argue for your position.  Go out there, and win an election.

But he’s right.

Conservatives’ and Republicans’ current tactic of burning the bridge and then trying to cross the river won’t work.  Until elections are won, what must be done is to clear out some of Obamacare’s more blatant nonsense. This includes things that even Progressives in the Senate agree on, like the job-killing medical device tax; things that even Conservatives should be agreeing on, like the tax on union and big employer “Cadillac” health insurance plans (Conservatives also need to lose their Progressive-like knee-jerk resistance to anything a union might like.  Unions and Conservatives might never be friends, but there’s much about Obamacare on which unions and Conservatives can be allies.)  Conservatives also can push to repeal the administration’s OMB diktat that the law doesn’t apply to Congressmen and their staffers: that mendacious, taxpayer-funded subsidy for buying health insurance, on the Obamacare exchanges or anywhere else, needs to be withdrawn.

Until elections are won (and continuing after), they need actually to talk with their constituents—and with their Democrat neighbors’ constituents—directly, where these Americans, these voters, live.  Further, they need to do so with a unified, coherent message of how Conservative policies will help the individuals they’re directly speaking with.  It’s insufficient to send an occasional email (while then deciding not to respond when recipients email back), or to make speeches on the House or Senate floor, or to give sound-bite interviews on the steps or in the halls of Capitol Hill.

Finally, in order to win those elections, Conservatives and Republicans need to do a better job of selecting candidates in their primaries and then running them in the elections.  Their handling of the Cuccinelli candidacy in Virginia and the Lonegan candidacy in New Jersey is (and was)…poor.

When Republicans and Conservatives come up with a coherent message, when they improve their tactics, when they select better candidates—and support them—then Republicans and Conservatives will be able to answer Obama’s taunt and actually take control of the Congress and the White House.  Then, and not sooner, they’ll be able to replace Obamacare and, oh by the way, get spending and our debt under control.

Naïve?

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Brian Spegele wrote in The Wall Street Journal about an accord between Great Britain and the People’s Republic of China concerning the role of the yuan in the world, or at least in the British economy.

The UK and China unveiled plans to further bolster China’s long-restricted currency on the world stage, amid a number of other deals that signal that the two countries have reset relations following a visit to London by the Dalai Lama last year, which upset Beijing.

The deals unveiled Tuesday—which include allowing British investors to plow up to 80 billion yuan ($13.1 billion) in China’s heavily restricted capital markets—demonstrate how China’s wealth and its desire to go abroad often trump political differences and Beijing’s resentment of criticism over its human-rights record.

The deals are part of a series of steps China has taken with a number of countries to increase the yuan’s role.

And

…state-controlled Industrial & Commercial Bank of China Ltd planned to issue a yuan-denominated bond in London, which would further encourage yuan use there.

This will be all well and good—until the PRC decides to “adjust,” again, the value of its yuan to match its convenience, as it’s done all along.  Keep in mind that the PRC tightly controls the exchange rate for—the value of—its yuan, the government’s rhetoric about “increasing flexibility,” or “setting more flexible exchange rate bands,” or … notwithstanding.

Nuclear Iran and Negotiations

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Iran has convinced the US to hold direct talks concerning Iran’s nuclear weapons program, and the administration put an optimistic face on the proceedings.  State Department spokeswoman Jennifer Psaki said this:

This is certainly…the first substantive step forward.  For the first time, we had…very detailed discussions.

There’s this, also:

Iran has hinted strongly in recent weeks that it is prepared to take significant steps in return for the US. and Europe rolling back expansive sanctions imposed on Tehran over the past decade.

Among these steps, said officials who have talked with Iranian diplomats, are a possible Iranian freeze on the production of near-weapons-grade fuel, which is uranium enriched to 20% purity.

Against this hope, though, we must place this:

The recognition of Israel as illegitimate is one of the principles of Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution, and even today the Islamic Republic believes Israel must be destroyed, a senior Iranian cleric close to the supreme leader said Saturday night.

Ayatollah Sayyid Ahmad Khatami, a member of the Assembly of Experts—the body that chooses the supreme leader—also condemned any effort for improved relations with America and warned that nothing is ruled out against the United States[.]

And

According to a source in the regime’s intelligence ministry—one who cannot be named for security purposes—the regime is unified in this new tactic of showing a moderate face in order to deceive the West into relieving some sanctions.

Crony Obamacare-ism

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The Daily Caller notes that

During a Sept 9, 2008 speech to a crowd in Lebanon, Va., then-presidential candidate Sen Barack Obama praised CGI Federal’s ability to create new jobs for Americans as the result of investment in broadband Internet infrastructure.

Move forward, just a bit.  The Washington Examiner notes that

Federal officials considered only one firm to design the Obamacare health insurance exchange website that has performed abysmally since its Oct 1 debut.

Rather than open the contracting process to a competitive public solicitation with multiple bidders, officials in the Department of Health and Human Services’ Centers for Medicare and Medicaid accepted a sole bidder, CGI Federal

even while knowing that CGI had “uneven record of IT pricing and contract performance.”

A Thought on a Judicial Shutdown

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Somewhat moot, with a bill to reopen the government having been passed and signed into law Wednesday night, but the subject is useful in its own right.  During the shutdown, the courts were at a real risk of running out of funds and having to shut down.

Fed up with the shutdown and sequester budget cuts, judges are mounting a “work-in.”

More than two dozen federal courts have avoided furloughs by designating all of their staff essential….

Those two dozen include the Appellate Court of the 2nd Circuit.

As the WSJ‘s Law Blog asks, what are the ethics of this?  Legally, a judge who participates in this decision or its development must recuse himself from related cases—for instance, should a recalled furloughee, or a declared essential staff member, object and sue.

But what if all the Federal courts designated their entire staffs essential?  After all, the work of the courts must go on, and they’re at minimum staffing in the best of times.  To whom could that “work-in” staffer appeal for redress, should he feel the need for redress?

Even more important, it seems to me, though, are the ethics of allowing the courts to be shut down against the backdrop of the other two branches of the Federal government—of which the Judicial Branch is most definitely the equal—remaining fully open for business, if on slightly reduced staffing.

Moreover, if the Executive Branch is going to continue one of its central duties—enforcing the law—a fully functioning judiciary is an absolute necessity to adjudicate those enforcement actions.  The obligation to enforce and the enforcee’s right to a speedy trial are not subject to shutdown.