Dana Goldstein

Is "Constitutionalism" Replacing "Social Issues" for Grassroots Conservatives?

Conor Friedersdorf is working on an interesting project, "The GOP Speaks." He emailed questionnaires about the future of the Republican Party to county party chairs across the country. So far he's received 20 responses, and while a few are thoughtful and sane, a large portion claim Barack Obama is trampling upon the U.S. Constitution and laud Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh as sages.

I'm especially fascinated by this movement toward Constitutional originalism -- not just as a judicial ideology, but as a rhetorical tool to claim that almost any social spending, from health care to the creation of green jobs, is un-American. A few choice responses to Conor's survey, which asks, "What is the most worrisome part of Barack Obama's presidency?" (These are the original responses, typos and all)

Anonymous county chairperson: "The concern is Mr. Obama doesn't seem to have one check or balance put up against him. I realize that the congress and the senate are controlled by the Dem.s, but come on! Where is the outrage at the unconstitutionality of the programs he presents?! Is there anyone in leadership that stands for the Constitution? This is a very real wake-up call. (I see this week that we have some Republicans that are stepping up to the plate, Thank heavens!) This guy is pushing an unconstitutional, socialist agenda and I never see it mentioned."

Larry Toney, Pickens County, GA: "Not one but three. 1) violation of constitution; 2) weakening of national defense and a pandering form of foreign relations; 3) torpedoing the national economy in order to enhance the control by big government.

Gene Edwards: "His plan to fundamentally change the US as we know it and as it was envisioned by our founders. His contempt for the constitution."

Yvonne Dewey, Brazoria County, TX: "What about the Constitution? Czars are unconstitutional, as are government takeover of car manufacturers or other businesses. Obama has tried to intimidate the tea party attendees into silence. We are Nazis (odd choice of words for the Pelosi-Obamas); radicals, terrorists."

As I've written before, this type of thinking is clearly influenced by Ron Paul libertarianism, and represents a real evolution in grassroots conservatism. Remarkably, none of the county chairmen and women so far have mentioned abortion or gay marriage, which were so animating during the Bush and Clinton years.

cross-posted at TAPPED

At G20 Spouses Events, Husbands are No-Shows...Again

During the last G20 meeting, in April, I noted that the husbands of German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Argentine President Cristina Kirchner were no-shows for the big spouse photo-op. Well, they've done it again: According to Sandra McElwaine at The Daily Beast, neither gentleman will be appearing at a two-day "spousal program" hosted by Michelle Obama to coincide with this week's Pittsburgh G20 meeting. (There's no word yet on whether India's First Gentleman, former politician Devisingh Ransingh Shekhawat, will attend the spouse-only festivities.)

Eighteen wives will meet at Rosemount, the country estate of Theresa Heinz Kerry. They'll be entertained there by the Pittsburgh Philharmonic Orchestra’s Jazz Trio, and are expected to dine on organic, locally grown produce. During the trip, the wives will also meet cellist Yo-Yo Ma and visit the Andy Warhol Museum, whose director plans to open one of the artist's famous time capsules in front of the dignitaries.

It sounds like fun! But once again, in their refusal to participate in these events, male political spouses demonstrate just how regressive it is that political wives are expected to spend so much time on ceremonial help meet duties. Not only that, but their interests are assumed to be traditionally feminine: art, music, cuisine. In truth, many of these women, like Michelle Obama, thrive on working alongside their husbands on policy detail and political strategy. Mexican Fist Lady Margarita Zavala is a former legislator. Other spouses have totally separate careers; Chinese President Hu Jintao's wife, Liu Yongqing, is an engineer.

But that's not the face political wives are expected to project to the world. And these expectations won't change until half of all political spouses are male, at which point I doubt we'll expect very much of political spouses at all.

To be fair, Carla Bruni Sarkozy, of France, ditched the last G20 meeting in Madrid, and has traveled internationally this past year promoting her new album. This week, she will be in Pittsburgh, and on Saturday night will entertain at a clambake for the world leaders.

cross-posted at TAPPED

The Baucus Health Plan, on Abortion and Immigration

Max Baucus released his Senate Finance Committee health reform plan today, and there are no huge surprises. As Ezra writes, low subsidies and high premiums mean health care costs will continue to cause personal bankruptcy for many unlucky Americans. The better news is that Baucus expands the health insurance exchanges to large employers; in the House bill, only small companies can participate in the exchanges. And of course, the expansion of Medicaid to childless adults is a major progressive victory.

Abortion and immigration are two issues that divided the bipartisan Gang of Six until the bitter end, so I took a close look at where Baucus came down. On abortion, his mark-up is clear: The basic health care package he envisions does not cover most abortions:

Federal funds continue to be prohibited from being used to pay for abortions unless the pregnancy is due to rape, incest, or if the life of the mother is in danger.

Private insurance companies can choose to offer plans that provide additional, elective abortion coverage -- as 87 percent of employer-provided plans already do -- but they must "segregate" public funds from paying for the procedure. This means that if an insurer wants to cover abortion, it must create a special fund to do so, made up of money garnished from premimums and co-pays. Government-provided affordability credits will not be able to contribute toward the cost of abortions. This is a bureaucratic headache for insurers, and it certainly has the potential to dissuade abortion coverage. The House bill continues to be much more progressive on reproductive health, as it sets up a public plan that would most likely include abortion as part of primary care.

On immigration, Baucus requires a confirmation of legal status before receiving health care subsidies, through a check of Social Security numbers. He also denies affordability credits to anyone whose legal resident status is set to expire in less than a year, which seems unjust -- especially if future immigration reform provides more paths toward legality.

cross-posted at TAPPED

Paulites, Progressives, Health Reform...and the U.S. Constitution

The United States Constitution has taken on major significance in the health reform debate, with grassroots "teabaggers" calling universal health care -- and indeed, much social spending -- unconstitutional. In a piece for the Daily Beast, I reported on how this Constitutional originalism is borrowed from the Ron Paul campaign. (Ironically, many Paulites and teabaggers, while complaining that the Constitution doesn't explicitly provide for a universal health care system, would like to amend it to ban abortion. They can't seem to decide if the document ought to be interpreted strictly or loosely.)

Considering the current foment around Constitutional interpretation, it was poignant to see the House of Representatives pass yesterday, on a voice vote, a bipartisan resolution recommending that every high school in America devote one week each fall to teaching seniors about the Constitution. Resolutions, of course, are non-binding and mostly symbolic. And who doesn't support exposing students to their government's foundational document? What's more surprising is the partnership between the two co-sponsors of the resolution: Ron Paul and freshman Democrat Alan Grayson, a member of the Progressive Caucus who recently hired Netroots blogger Matt Stoller as a senior policy adviser.

Grayson and Paul agree on some issues. Both are staunchly opposed to Obama's policies in Afghanistan and Iraq. Paul told me several weeks ago, "You can’t keep expanding a war in the Middle East and pretend you can come up with a $2 trillion medical-care program." In a Vanity Fair interview last May, Grayson said, "What I care about is our surviving these difficult economic times, and when I’m asked to vote for $100 billion to extend occupations that fundamentally served no purpose that could not be accomplished any other way—in lieu of spending for the things that human beings need...I have to say, 'No, there’s a better use for that money.'”

On health reform though, the two politicians are polar opposites. Grayson's press secretary, Todd Jurkowski, says Grayson has hosted four health reform town halls in his Florida district, and that at each one, the congressman was confronted by health reform opponents waving the Constitution. Like Ron Paul, Grayson carries a copy of the Constitution with him. He is a graduate of Harvard Law School and clerked on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals before going into business.

"The Congressman knows the Constitution," Jurkowski says. "From the Congressman's point of view, the preamble itself is one justification for health reform," since it vows to "promote the general welfare" of the American people. "So is the interstate commerce clause," Jurkowski added, which allows for national markets such as the proposed health insurance exchanges.

If more students read the Constitution in school, perhaps some will come around to Grayson's way of thinking. But in the end, debates over the Constitution and health care are less about logic and the law than about activist attempts to paint the concept of universal health care itself as un-American and "socialist."

cross-posted at TAPPED

Why is the Sky Blue?

If you believe Jewish Americans are single-issue voters, and that issue is support for the Israeli occupation, then it makes sense to ask, as Norman Podhoretz does in a new book and Commentary symposium, "Why are Jews Liberal?"

But this is a fundamental misreading of the political commitments of American Jews, 92 percent of whom describe issues other than Israel as their primary concern. According to one election season poll, the top two issues for American Jews are the economy and the Iraq war.

In his Times Magazine profile of J-Street, a PAC seeking to advance progressive views on Israel, James Traub does a good job of describing the difficulty of representing the political opinions of "the dispassionate many" on Israel, as opposed to the "passionate few" represented by AIPAC. So in one sense, Jewish neo-cons will always have a voice louder than more typical Jews when it comes to Israel, because they simply care much more. That doesn't mean they represent the community.

Why are Jews actually liberal? In the the Commentary forum, only Rabbi David Wolpe states the obvious, attributing Jewish liberalism, as I do, to our deep identification with the marginalized and oppressed:

...I suspect until conservatism convinces most Jews that they have a sympathy and practical program for those who are real or putative outsiders, it will remain, among Jews at least, distinctly the minority movement.

Interestingly, this outlook -- the attachment to the Jewish history of oppression -- is responsible for both the liberal and conservative strands of contemporary Jewish politics. The liberal strand lends support to programs that help the poor, such as universal health care and immigration reform. The conservative strand uses the reality of anti-Semitism to justify Israel's inhumane policies toward Palestinians and Arab-Israeli citizens.

Read more from Sarah Posner and Jack Ross.

cross-posted at TAPPED

In Defense of Shouting at the President

Interrupting the head of state during a prepared speech to call him a liar -- when he isn't even lying -- would be against the rules of decorum in most democratic nations. But in general, I'm all for more frequent, rowdier confrontations between the president and Congress, in part because it gives each party a chance to clarify its agenda while subjecting it to the critiques of the other. At Newsweek, John Barry writes:

The debacles of the past decade surely show how damaging is this inability to require America’s head of government to explain and defend his actions, at the time, to the legislature. Suppose President Bush had been forced to answer tough questions back in spring 2003 about his arguments for invading Iraq? Or his decision to set up Guantanamo and fill it with detainees scarfed up from faraway battlefields? Or his decision to allow the methods of interrogation that he did? The questions he never had seriously to address quickly mount up. ...

The debate over President Obama’s desire to change America’s health-care system would surely have been less beset by angry fantasies, less in thrall to paranoid conspiracy-theories about ‘death panels’, if the head of government had been required, over these past months, to face Congress at intervals and answer questions about what he had in mind ?

Indeed. I'd only add that it's no accident that American presidents are treated with such deference. In post-Revolutionary America, a sizable contingent of the political elite wanted to crown George Washington king. He demurred, but there remained a conscious effort to aggrandize the president, through his clothes, seal of office, security retinue, and even the luxury of the chariot that carried him to and from events. In the eighteenth century, this was crucial for a new country embarking upon what looked like a naive experiment in popular democracy. But surely in 2009, as the most powerful nation on Earth, we can afford a bit more rough and tumble.

cross-posted at TAPPED

Reproductive Health in the Baucus Plan

After heath reform, who will decide what medical services insurance companies must cover? The House and Senate HELP committee bills empower an independent council of medical experts to make coverage recommendations to the Health and Human Services secretary. This is the group that would make controversial decisions about whether abortion, infertility treatments, or certain experimental procedures should be covered in basic health plans.

The White House plan released yesterday stays silent on the question of who decides coverage specifics -- and that is likely because there is now an alternative in town. Sen. Max Baucus' Finance Committee plan articulates broad areas of coverage that must be included, such as preventive care, primary care, hospital stays, and maternity care. But Baucus would allow insurance companies themselves to define what services each of those areas include, without government interference. Insiders say Baucus left the independent council out of his plan because moderate Republicans don't like the idea of restraining the private market in this way.

What does Baucus' compromise mean for reproductive health coverage, which remains a source of debate as Congress discusses reform? Advocates are cautiously optimistic. "Services like contraception, STI testing and treatment, and Pap tests can and certainly would fit into many of the other categories," such as preventive care, says Adam Sonfield, senior public policy associate at the Guttmacher Institute. "Reproductive health services, including contraception, would likely be covered in almost every plan, because that’s the way coverage is today. ... It makes financial sense for insurance companies. Contraception is very clearly cost-effective."

Under the Baucus plan, abortion coverage would likely remain unchanged; there is no public option, and private insurance companies would determine individually whether to cover the procedure, as they do now. Eighty-seven percent of current employer-based insurance plans do provide some abortion coverage.

cross-posted at TAPPED

Health Reform Better for Poor than Middle Class. How Did We Get Here?

Matt Yglesias notes the Wall Street Journal is reporting that in his big speech to Congress tonight, President Obama will reaffirm his commitment to a public option -- a dinky public option. This awesome chart from Nick Beaudrot shows exactly how dinky it is; the pink boxes represent the public option. But it also demonstrates something else about health reform that you won't hear any Democrat say: It does more to help the destitute poor than the working or middle class.

Even Max Baucus' compromise plan, which contains no new public insurance option, expands Medicaid to all Americans below 133 percent of poverty. Currently, Medicaid is open only to pregnant women, children, single mothers, and the disabled. After reform, healthy, single adults will be eligible. That's a major progressive victory, and it's possible because insurance companies aren't interested in this segment of the population, which can't afford to enter the private market. Government can choose to expand here without undue corporate pressure.

But what's going on in this plan for the working and middle classes? At 300 percent of poverty -- $66,150 for a family of four -- Baucus requires a family to spend 13 percent of its income on health care before government subsidies kick in. That's a burdensome $8,600. For sure, this is better than said family going completely bankrupt under the current system, should they get into a catastrophic car accident with insurance that caps hospital expenditures. But middle-class Americans -- voters! -- may not see exactly what is in this plan for them. Politically, this is a very hot potato. There's still time to strengthen protections for the middle class in negotiations between the White House and Congress. But such efforts won't work if the administration is willing to neglect the issue of subsidies in favor of defending the public option.

cross-posted at TAPPED

Beyond the Public Option

For the past two years, New York City has been running an experimental pilot program called OpportunityNYC, in which poor people -- mostly black and Latina single moms and their kids -- are paid for "good behaivor." In the Prospect's current print issue, I report on how that program is faring. While the jury is out on whether cash incentives can improve academic performance or encourage single moms to find part-time work, it seems that monetary rewards work quite well when it comes to encouraging good health: Forty-five percent of all Opportunity NYC payments were for health-related activities, compared to just 18 percent for work-related activities. Families enrolled in the program can earn $600 per adult for maintaining private health insurance, or $40 per month for enrolling in Medicaid. Each child or parent can earn $200 for an annual medical check-up, $100 for a recommended follow-up exam, and $100 for a visit to a dentist.

Opportunity NYC is an interesting lens through which to view the health reform debate. The goal of these health rewards is to incentivize preventive care -- the kind that's cheaper to provide and keeps people from developing more unpleasant health problems later on. This is important for drastically poor children, of course, and for their moms -- the people who are enrolled in Opportunity NYC and who already qualify for public assistance.

But it's also important for young women who might become pregnant, and whose health at conception affects their baby's birth weight and neurological development. It's important for urban gay men of color, the nation's highest risk group for HIV infection. And it's important for immigrant construction workers, who do dangerous jobs that jeopardize their health, but who often don't have employer-provided health insurance.

All these people are costing our health care system a lot of money, because they don't qualify for Medicaid and can't afford to purchase their own private insurance coverage. That's why -- as we feverishly debate the public option -- we can't lose sight of the other elements of health reform. The health reform legislation in front of Congress would expand Medicaid coverage to poor single adults of both genders. It would likely guarantee prenatal and maternity care. It would provide subsidies that help poor people afford decent medical care.

The lesson of Opportunity NYC is that given government support, health care is one of the first things people access. It's important to them, especially if they are parents.The payoff to society is that when we maintain good health through preventive care, we don't have to pay for drastic interventions later on. The long-term savings of a more humane health care system are impossible for the Congressional Budget Office to conclusively score. But in our quest to "bend the cost curve," let's not leave common sense at the door. This isn't really all that difficult to understand.

cross-posted at TAPPED

Who's Who in Health Reform? And Does it Mean Liberals Will Lose?

A blockbuster A1 story from the New York Times this morning, by David Kirkpatrick, gives progressives more heartburn on health care reform. Rahm says:

"We have heard from both chambers that the House sees a public plan as essential for the final product, and the Senate believes it cannot pass it as constructed and a co-op is what they can do. We are cognizant of that fact."

More each day, it sounds as if the White House is willing to give the Finance Committee a free pass on the public option and other progressive goals, such as extending insurance subsidies to those with incomes up to 400 percent of the poverty level -- $88,200 for a family of four. Kirkpatrick reports:

Industry lobbyists and moderate Democrats in both chambers, though, argue that the White House’s actions behind the scenes show a recognition that the finance panel’s anticipated compromise is the most likely template for any final legislation.

Why do Finance and its health industry-funded chairman, Max Baucus, enjoy such privilege, even as one of the committee's key Republican negotiators, Chuck Grassley, tells Americans they "have every right to fear" fictional death panels? To be sure, since the grassroots anti-reform movement hit a fevered, almost violent-pitch last week, the White House -- which is shaken by the development -- is probably more eager than ever for health reform to have a "bipartisan" imprimatur, even if the only Republican who votes for the legislation is a true outlier, such as Olympia Snowe.

But there are other factors. Last year, during the thick of campaign season, Ezra Klein and I wrote a cover story for the Prospect on Barack Obama's vision of Democratic party-building and legislative success. One of the most surprising things about Obama's electrifying campaign, we reported, was that it was led not by insurgents unschooled in the ways of Washington, but by Congressional insiders, many of them "veterans of the party's impotent era" during the mid-1990s. These are men who worked for Dick Gephardt, Tom Daschle, and yes -- Max Baucus -- tempering liberal goals when Republicans held a firm majority. Jim Messina, the White House deputy chief-of-staff known as "Rahm's Rahm" -- in other words, an enforcer -- is Baucus' former chief-of-staff, and is likely to see thing's Baucus' way, extending the Montana senator's influence into the highest levels of the administration.

To be fair, the White House also employs high-level staffers who've worked for Congress' pre-eminent liberals. Melody Barnes, head of the White House Office of Domestic Policy, is a Ted Kennedy alum. Legislative aide Phil Schiliro, who reportedly represented Team Obama in key House negotiations, used to work for Henry Waxman, who is widely trusted by liberals. But at this point in the game, there is little doubt that the Senate is where the action is, and that hard-nosed, realist compromisers, like Messina and Rahm, are likely to be leading the way.

cross-posted at TAPPED