Despite Gov. Rick Perry’s (R-TX) strong opposition to the Affordable Care Act and the state’s participation in a lawsuit challenging reform’s constitutionality, the Select Committee on Federal Legislation of the Texas House held a four hour hearing yesterday on state efforts to implement health reform. Witnesses testified that Texas had applied for nine different grants totaling an estimated $50 million and was drafting options for establishing exchanges and taking various other stops (like simplifying the application processes for Medicaid) to comply with the federal legislation.
Insurance Commissioner Mike Geeslin testified that his office was receiving questions about “coverage for dependents and children,” “pre-existing conditions,” “the new federal risk pool or the pre-existing condition insurance plan, and then they want information about the effective days more among the lines of what I need to do and when.” This surprised Rep. Susan King (R), who wanted to know if Texans were complaining about the new law:
KING: On the complaints…what does that mean? There has not been a single complaint?
GEESLIN: That’s not to say you can’t get 10 in the office today.
KING: But you’ve had nobody really calling and being concerned? That’s really amazing. I just didn’t know….
Watch it:
Gleesin promised to check how the agency codes public feedback, but if the Committee’s own hearing is any indication, the state — save its politicians — seems far more interested in learning how ACA can help Texas than devising ways to repeal it. (H/T: Dallas Morning News’ Robert Garrett)
Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT) seems to want his legacy to be the destruction of Montana’s Glacier National Park. Baucus has joined the climate peacock caucus, saying that “climate change is a real issue that has to be addressed” but that “he supports a measure that would ban the Environmental Protection Agency from writing climate change legislation to regulate greenhouse gases linked to climate change.” As CNN’s Jessica Ellis reports, the unwillingness of senators like Baucus to act on global warming pollution is having profound consequences:
As recently as 100 years ago, Montana’s Glacier National Park had more than 150 glaciers throughout its more than one million acres. In 2005 only 27 remained. Today the total is down to a just 25 and those that are left are mere remnants of their former frozen selves. With warmer temperatures and changes to the water cycle, scientists predict Glacier National Park will be glacier-free by 2030.
Daniel Fagre, a U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) ecologist, told CNN he would not be surprised if the remaining glaciers are gone within the decade.
The destruction of the park’s ecosystem by the burning of fossil fuels doesn’t just matter to the mountain goats, bighorn sheep, and grizzly bears that call the remote, once-icy landscape their home. “Many people are directly dependent on the water coming out of mountains and in the arid western United States that figure is much larger, it is about 85 percent,” said Fagre.
This week, Sen. David Vitter (R-LA) released yet another race-baiting anti-immigrant attack ad on his opponent, Rep. Charlie Melancon (D-LA). “Thanks to him, we may as well put out a welcome sign for illegal aliens,” says the narrator of the ad as footage of dirty, goofy looking Latino men slipping through a hole in a fence displaying a neon welcome sign runs across the screen. The men then exuberantly step into a limo with a giant check they defiantly hang out the window as they zoom away. The racial overtones of the ad are so offensive that the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce has called it blatantly “racist”and is demanding not only an apology but that the ad be pulled altogether. WDSU reports:
“We found the ad to be totally abhorrent and shocking, and I’m going to use the ‘R’ word and say racist,” said Darlene Kattan, of the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce of Louisiana.
Kattan said her issue is not with the senator’s position on border security, but rather how he presents his message. “In this ad, he has these Hollywood stereotypes, caricature-types portraying Latino workers,” Kattan said. “First of all, he uses the word ‘illegal’ so many times.” [...]
“To Sen. David Vitter, we are saying you owe us an apology, we are offended, we expect an immediate apology and we expect this ad to be yanked from the airwaves immediately,” Kattan said.
Watch the ad:
Kattan also noted that “No one seems to be objecting to the cute little blond-haired, blue-eyed cocktail waitress with her darling little eastern Europe accents serving cocktails in downtown New Orleans, but everyone has a problem with the workers who have come here to rebuild this city.”
In fact, Latino immigrants — many of them undocumented — have helped Louisiana get itself back on its feet. While half of New Orleans’ residents abandoned their decimated city after Hurricane Katrina hit and rebuilt their lives elsewhere, Latino workers were directly responsible for making 86.9% of households habitable after Hurricane Katrina in six parishes surrounding New Orleans in 2008. Almost 50 percent of the hurricane-repair workers in the New Orleans were Latinos and 54 percent of them undocumented. A study found that that if all unauthorized immigrants were removed from Louisiana, the state would lose $947 million in expenditures, $421 million in economic output, and approximately 6,660 jobs.
Melancon’s campaign denied the allegations in the ad, citing local newspapers that have already called it “distorted,” “misleading,” and “untrue.”
A whole host of Republican congressional candidates and lawmakers — including former Rep. Pat Toomey (R-PA) — have tried to run away from their support for Social Security privatization, denying that they favor such a move (despite continuing to call for the creation of personal Social Security accounts). Last night, Colorado’s Republican Senate candidate Ken Buck became to latest to deny that his privatization plan would actually privatize the system:
“I’ve never said we should privatize Social Security,” [Buck] told [Sen. Michael] Bennet, whose committee has made that accusation against Buck in television ads.
Buck doesn’t seem to have much of a mind for policy specifics, as he thinks extending the Bush tax cuts will help pay down the deficit. But in the course of the same debate, as the Pueblo Chieftan reported, Buck “said he supported redesigning Social Security so that younger workers in the future would have the option of investing in separate retirement accounts.” That is privatization, whether Buck likes the term or not.
And in the past, Buck has been a full-throated supporter of privatized accounts:
We’ve got to peg Social Security to individuals so those individuals have the ability perhaps to invest in various funds that are approved by the government. But those individuals also own that fund.
In fact, Buck has questioned whether the federal government should have any role in a retirement plan at all. “I don’t know whether it’s Constitutional or not,” Buck told the Constitutionalist Today Forum in March. “It should be a plan that certainly once people pay into it, they have the expectation of getting a return and they’re entitled to that, but the idea the federal government should be running health care or retirement or any of those programs is fundamentally against what I believe and that is that the private sector runs programs like that far better.”
Supporters of privatized Social Security accounts, like Buck, contend that only safe investments will be allowed under their plans. Proponents of President Bush’s failed privatization push in 2005 said much the same thing, and held up companies like Lehman Brothers, AIG, and Citigroup — the poster-children of the economic collapse — as fail-safe bets for retirement accounts.
Instead of acknowledging the many flaws in their privatization plan (including the fact that it wouldn’t set the system on a path to solvency), Republicans are just trying to change the terms used in the debate, insisting that privatization is something else that sounds nicer. They’re focused on the semantics, but anyone who would have to live with their riskier system should focus on the specifics.
Shouting erupted at a Christine O’Donnell campaign event Thursday night after a young gay conservative asked the Senate candidate about the her view of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. O’Donnell implied that she hadn’t thought about the policy, but some audience members were angered by the question:
So when Matt Hissey, a junior political science major at West Chester University, asked U.S. Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell about the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy that allows gays to serve in the military as long as they don’t divulge their sexual orientation — it angered one New Castle man in the audience.
Hissey said he is a gay conservative and wanted to know her views.
“Who cares?” the New Castle man shouted.
O’Donnell said some of her campaign workers are gay, and went on to say she was focusing on the nation’s most important issues because “whether you’re from the far left or the far right, we have to get our country back.” [...]
A few moments later, Tim Joines of Christiana spoke up. He was standing along the wall in the standing-room-only banquet room and couldn’t let that “who cares?” hang in the air uncontested.
“He’s still a human being!” Joines shouted at the New Castle man, who stood up, took his belongings and walked out of the room, shouting, “You are why we’re going to lose!” in Joines’ direction. “How can you come to a forum like this and say, ‘I don’t care,” Joines, an independent voter, said later. “Everybody’s got a voice, and nobody should be silenced.”
O’Donnell is dodging the question to move beyond her anti-gay rhetoric, but it’s more likely that she’d support strengthening the ban against open gay and lesbian service than vote for legislation repealing it. After, all how can she allow gay people to serve openly if she believes they suffer from a psychological disorder?
“People are created in God’s image. Homosexuality is an identity adopted through societal factors. It’s an identity disorder,” O’Donnell told the Washington Post four years ago, taking a position that has been universally rejected by science and psychology since the early 1970s. For more on O’Donnell’s anti-gay record, click here.
Welcome to The WonkLine, a daily 9:30 a.m. roundup of the latest news about health care, the economy, national security, immigration and climate policy. This is what we’re reading. Tell us what you found in the comments section below. You can also follow The Wonk Room on Twitter.
“Liu Xiaobo, an impassioned literary critic, political essayist and democracy advocate repeatedly jailed by the Chinese government for his writings, won the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize on Friday.’”
“North Korea appears to be moving forward with a program to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons, a development that would enhance its ability to produce bombs and sell its nuclear weapons technology abroad”
“Afghan private security forces with ties to the Taliban, criminal networks and Iranian intelligence have been hired to guard American military bases in Afghanistan…according to a Senate investigation.”
The latest report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that the unemployment rate was unchanged at 9.6 percent in September, as the private sector added 64,000 jobs and the government shed 159,000.
The FDIC is expected to release its new rules for dismantling a failed bank soon, as “part of a broader effort to end the era when certain institutions were judged ‘too big to fail’.”
“European regulators plan tougher-than-expected restrictions on bankers’ pay, in spite of concerns raised by French, UK and Spanish officials,” the Financial Times reports.
“If Republicans take control of the House of Representatives, they likely would try to stop EPA regulation of carbon by explicitly banning the use of EPA funds to administer such regulations,” Reuters’ Richard Cowen writes.
“Large-scale crop failures like the one that caused the recent Russian wheat crisis are likely to become more common under climate change due to an increased frequency of extreme weather events,” a new study shows.
The “Global Work Party” is “designed to couple grassroots environmental activism with political engagement in communities across the world” to fight global warming on Oct. 10, 2010 — 10/10/10.
“The Department of Health and Human Services quietly changed the web version of a speech in which HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius described how the health care overhaul is going to affect Medicare Advantage plans, a controversial section of the law, after aides to Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) challenged its accuracy.”
“Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) is urging legislation requiring the Obama administration to field public comments on all regulations related to the new healthcare reform law.”
“About 13% of parents with health insurance say they haven’t gotten pediatrician-recommended care for their children due to costs, a new survey in Ohio finds.”
Governor Charlie Crist (I) tried to run away from his support for Florida’s ban against gay adoption during yesterday’s ABC Florida senate debate, portraying himself a social moderate who only supported the ban because it was the law of the state. But during a heated exchange in the last minutes of the three-way debate between Crist, Rep. Kendrick Meek (D-FL) and Marco Rubio (R), Meek likened Crist to former Alabama Governor George Wallace and said that he stood in the way of sensible adoption policies:
CRIST: When I was saying that it wasn’t appropriate to have that adoption, it was because that was the law in the books in our state. I was the Attorney General of Florida. I understand enforcing the law and respecting it….I’m a live and let live kind of guy…I am a fiscal conservative and a social moderate. I really believe in less government and more freedom. I don’t want to impose my will on other people. [...]
MEEK: It’s really mind boggling. It’s beyond an explanation for the governor to stand here and do more than a Potomac two-step. I mean, he is saying that he was the, how do you say, the Governor Wallace when he came down on gay adoptions in the state. For all of the kids in foster care right now that are looking for home, he stood — he said he thought it was inappropriate. When he ran against Jim Davis in ‘96 — I mean, ‘06, he said that Jim Davis didn’t have the values that he possessed. That’s not, that’s not in the state statute. That’s his opinion.
Watch a compilation:
Indeed, before announcing his independent bid for the Senate, Crist had supported Florida’s ban on gay parent adoption because “children are best raised in a traditional family.” As recently as February 2010, Crist told the Palm Beach Post that he had “respect” for the current law. “I don’t advocate for a change,” he said, adding that he hoped it wouldn’t be overturned by the courts.
Our guest blogger is David Halperin of the Israel Policy Forum.
Sen. Sam Brownback (R-KS)
The U.S. Ambassador post in Damascus has been vacant since February 2005, following the assassination of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. In February, the White House nominated Robert Ford, a career diplomat with vast experience in the region, to fill the post.
But Republican senators have since stood in the way, arguing in a letter to Secretary Clinton that “Engagement of hostile regimes in pursuit of U.S. interests is not necessarily bad policy, if it is part of a realistic strategy with measurable goals. But engagement for engagement’s sake is not productive. However well-justified that engagement is the U.S. pays a price for lending even a modicum of international legitimacy to a regime like Syria’s.”
Even without an ambassador in Damascus, the Obama administration has sought to engage Syria in an effort to ameliorate its behavior vis a vis Lebanon and Iraq, as well as advance the prospects for renewed Israel-Syria peace talks. But the obstacles to advancing U.S. interests without an ambassador will be difficult to overcome.
The highest U.S. representation in Syria today is the charge d’affaires, whose access to senior Syrian officials is limited. As Jim Walker wrote in a recent op-ed in The Hill, “while the U.S. chargé d’affaires cannot meet the Syrian foreign minister or president — unless accompanied by a visiting Special Envoy or Congressional delegations — Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad have free access to the ears of President Basher Assad and his government.”
To be sure, the Republicans opposed to the nominee have reason to be concerned about Syria’s behavior. But an ambassador in Damascus will serve to advance US interests, not reward bad deeds.
Unlike with Syria, where Republicans are opposed to the mere concept of an ambassador, when it comes to Turkey, outgoing Senator Sam Brownback (R-KS) is opposed to the specific nominee, Francis J. Ricciardone, Jr. Or at least that is what he claims. More »
Today was a victory for the Affordable Care Act. The first court decision to render a verdict on the constitutionality of the landmark health reform package upheld a key portion of law. Earlier today, Judge George Caram Steeh of the Eastern District of Michigan handed down a twenty page order dismissing a challenge to the Act’s minimum coverage provision on the merits:
“In assessing the scope of Congress’ authority under the Commerce Clause,” the court’s task “is a modest one.” The court need not itself determine whether the regulated activities, “taken in the aggregate, substantially affect interstate commerce in fact, but only whether a ‘rational basis’ exists for so concluding.”
There is a rational basis to conclude that, in the aggregate, decisions to forego insurance coverage in preference to attempting to pay for health care out of pocket drive up the cost of insurance. The costs of caring for the uninsured who prove unable to pay are shifted to health care providers, to the insured population in the form of higher premiums, to governments, and to taxpayers. The decision whether to purchase insurance or to attempt to pay for health care out of pocket, is plainly economic. These decisions, viewed in the aggregate, have clear and direct impacts on health care providers, taxpayers, and the insured population who ultimately pay for the care provided to those who go without insurance. These are the economic effects addressed by Congress in enacting the Act and the minimum coverage provision.
Although Judge Steeh is the second judge to dismiss a challenge to health reform — last August, a George W. Bush appointee dismissed a health care case on procedural grounds — he is the first judge to reach the merits of whether or not the law is constitutional. Interestingly, Steeh sided against the Obama Administration’s three procedural arguments that would have effectively delayed any litigation challenging the ACA until 2014, before completely rejecting the plaintiff’s claim that the law is unconstitutional.
This case is far from over, however. Judge Steeh’s decision will appeal to the notoriously right-wing Sixth Circuit, a Court which tried to manipulate federal election law to benefit the Ohio Republican Party in 2008 before being unanimously smacked down by the Supreme Court just three days later. If the Sixth Circuit reverses Judge Steeh, that decision is almost certain to be reviewed by the Supreme Court.
In the end, however, there is no question that Steeh reached the correct decision. Even ultra-conservative Justice Scalia agrees that Congress has sweeping power to regulate “economic activity,” and there is simply no question that health reform will have an enormous economic impact on the health insurance market. In other words, today’s decision will be the first of many affirming the Affordable Care Act.
Thomas Donohue, the chamber's president and chief executive, said on Thursday the nation's largest business lobby is beefing up its staff so it can fight health care and financial regulation reform in court. "Litigation is one of our most powerful tools for making sure that federal agencies follow the law and are held accountable," Donohue said in remarks prepared to be delivered in Des Moines, Iowa.
Proponents of the health reform are starting to worry that if the Republicans can’t practically repeal the Affordable Care Act, they can do a lot of damage to the law by defunding it. Henry Aaron has a good piece in New England Journal of Medicine about what exactly the GOP can do:
Repeal of the ACA before 2013 is unlikely…A more serious possibility is that ACA opponents could deliver on another pledge: to cut off funding for implementation.3 Here is how such a process could work.
Customarily, substantive legislation “authorizes” spending, but the funds to be spent must be separately “appropriated.” The ACA contains 64 specific authorizations to spend up to $105.6 billion and 51 general authorizations to spend “such sums as are necessary” over the period between 2010 and 2019. None of these funds will flow, however, unless Congress enacts specific appropriation bills. In addition, section 1005 of the ACA appropriated $1 billion to support the cost of implementation in the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS). This sum is a small fraction of the $5 billion to $10 billion that the Congressional Budget Office estimates the federal government will require between 2010 and 2019 to implement the ACA. The ACA appropriated nothing for the Internal Revenue Service, which must collect the information needed to compute subsidies and pay them. The ACA also provides unlimited funding for grants to states to support the creation of health insurance exchanges (section 1311). But states will also incur substantially increased administrative costs to enroll millions of newly eligible Medicaid beneficiaries. Without large additional appropriations, implementation will be crippled. [...]
[Republicans] could bar the use of staff time for designing rules for implementation or for paying subsidies to support the purchase of insurance. They could even bar the DHHS from writing or issuing regulations or engaging in any other federal activity related to the creation of health insurance exchanges, even though the ACA provides funds for the DHHS to make grants to the states to set up those exchanges.
In my interview with him on Tuesday, Tom Daschle suggested that defunding the law may be more difficult than it seems, since “a lot of what we did in health care reform has more of an entitlement than a discretionary funding base. So as an entitlement, they would really have to change the law rather than simply not fund in order for it to be effected. The entitlement sections of the legislation are going to be fairly immune from defunding,” he predicted. Indeed, the CBO estimates that there is “at least $50 billion in specified and estimated authorizations of discretionary spending that might be involved in implementing that legislation” and presumably that’s the spending they can most easily target.
Aaron is probably right about the GOP’s strategy, although I’m struck by the fact that if they successfully defund the law, they could then be blamed for the health care crisis that that creates (perpetuates). Could they not be made to own the status quo?
A few weeks ago, Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) — one of the self-styled GOP “Young Guns” and the lead architect of the House Republicans’ “Pledge to America” — was pressed on MSNBC to name one single program he’d cut from the federal budget to reduce spending. After dodging the questions for a minute, McCarthy finally embarrassingly responded “the line item would be across-the-board.”
Of course, McCarthy is hardly alone in this regard: a plethora of Republicans have been unable to name any programs they would cut to reduce the deficit. In fact, my colleague Alex Seitz-Wald has a video featuring a number of them.
It seems that McCarthy though, has finally wizened up, as last night he came on PBS’ Newshour prepared with some answers. When the host asserted that “it’s hard to imagine a path to [budget] balance” with the policies Republicans have identified, McCarthy said “not really, not really” and named four cuts he would make. Watch it:
McCarthy gets points for trying, I suppose, but here’s what he identified and each program’s budgetary impact:
– Cutting subsidies for Amtrak sleeper cars: $120 million (0.003 percent of the budget)
– Cutting “taxpayer subsidized union activities”: $120 million (0.003 percent)
– Economic aid to foreign nations: $7.9 billion (0.22 percent). Half of this goes to Afghanistan, which presumably Republicans wouldn’t actually cut.
– Child nutrition programs: $8.28 billion (0.23 percent). More than 90 percent of the nutrition funding in the budget is mandatory, which McCarthy has said he won’t cut, and of the $8 billion in discretionary nutrition spending, the vast majority is to fund the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Children and Infants (WIC). This program provides food, education, and health care referrals to more than 9 million low-income women and children.
So there you have it. One minuscule subsidy, something that sounds devious but isn’t at all specific, a highly unlikely cut in foreign aid, and slashing nutrition assistance for needy women, all to reduce the budget by less than one-half of one percent (0.45 percent, to be exact). And to be clear, McCarthy laid out exemptions to the latter two cuts, but I’ve been extremely charitable and scored him as cutting the entire portion of the budget he named. So his savings wouldn’t even be as high as I’ve calculated.
With the Pledge to America, House Republicans are suggesting $11 trillion in deficits over the next decade, and it’s abundantly clear that they have no plan for paying for it. The best they can come up with is some small-ball programs that have no impact on the structural deficit (which is driven by health care spending, defense spending, and massive tax cuts for the wealthy). Not that ineffective programs shouldn’t be cut, but if McCarthy thinks reductions of the magnitude he’s laid out will ever lead to a balanced budget then he simply has no clue what the federal budget looks like.
Last week, Republicans jumped on the news that McDonald’s and other retailers who offer mini-med insurance plans would stop providing health insurance coverage if they were required to spend 80% to 85% of premiums, citing the claims as proof that the law overburdens businesses, undermines existing coverage, and should be repealed. Several days ago, in an effort to prevent these companies from dropping their insurance plans, HHS announced that it would exempt certain firms that offer these plans from meeting the minimum coverage requirements for at least a year (and has promised flexibility with the MLR regulations, once they are finalized). But the GOP is still not satisfied.
During an interview this afternoon with WIBC’S Greg Garrison, Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN) first criticized the law for over-regulating employers, noting that the announcements about businesses dropping coverage are part of “the early shock waves of Obamacare,” but also attacked the administration from loosening the regulations to prevent coverage erosion:
PENCE: Greg, it’s perfectly predictable that you’re going to see [sic] once a government exercises a takeover of any area of the economy, then they get to pick winners and losers on the basis of political decisions of bureaucrats. That’s the exertion of power. I wasn’t surprised at all to see McDonald’s say they were thinking about canceling their health insurance plan. I think you’re going to see millions of American businesses do that in a couple of years if we don’t get this thing repealed. But the carve out also wasn’t surprising, Greg. That’s why you don’t want a government takeover of health care, because all of the sudden you have bureaucrats with political power are going to be deciding, that company…
Listen:
Pence pretends that the government selects companies on the basis of size or political consideration, but in reality businesses apply for waivers if they feel like their plans are structured in such a way as to make it impossible to meet the new requirements. And so far, HHS (aware that these enrollees will really have nowhere to go) has been fairly anxious to avoid unsightly coverage drops. Since employees won’t have new coverage options until the exchanges become operational in 2014, the agency is trying to provide a level of flexibility to employers so that they can gradually meet the requirements of the new reforms and transition from subprime insurance that has low annual limits and all kinds of coverage exemptions and into comprehensive basic coverage. These waivers are good for a year, but could be extended until 2014, if employees continue to face a coverage cliff.
Later in the radio interview, Pence reiterated the GOP’s pledge to repeal reform “lock, stock, and barrel” and said Republicans will “use the power of the purse to prevent implementation of Obamacare.” “We’re going to do our level best to prevent implementation of that so that if we have take it to the American people in 2012 in a referendum on health care, we can.” He also didn’t rule out completely repealing the law in the new Congress. “[If] we send decisive majorities for the Republican party to the House and Senate, there is an outside chance that we might have a veto-proof bipartisan majority.”
Our guest bloggers are Center for American Progress Senior Vice President Araceli Ruano and Green Opportunity Research Associate Jorge Madrid.
The forces behind Proposition 23 are hiding a lot of dirty secrets. Not only are they attempting to effectively repeal California’s iconic environmental protection laws, they are also funding a national campaign against immigrants, and collaborating with anti-immigrant extremist groups:
Koch Industries – One of the biggest polluters in the country and by no coincidence the nation’s biggest spender on dirty energy lobbying. In addition to pushing Prop 23, they are also financing the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) — a powerful front group that helped Arizona lawmakers craft the notorious SB 1070 law. SB 1070 essentially legalizes racial profiling against suspected immigrants, especially against Latinos and other people of color. The Koch-funded group aims to promote Arizona “copy-cat” laws around the country.
Assemblyman Dan Logue (R- Chico) – The California lawmaker who introduced Prop 23 and called climate change “a scam” is also an infamous anti-immigrant voice. Last year, he paid large sums of campaign money to Jim Gilchrist, the founder of the Minuteman Project, an extremist anti-immigrant vigilante group. Also, while campaigning for his assembly seat, he regularly made appearances with Chris Simcox, president of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps – whose hallmark speeches included racially charged rants against immigrants.
It also should be noted that Mr. Logue is in league with the Texas oil companies who are sponsoring prop 23. For the last several years, the Assemblyman accepted large donations from Valero, even though the oil company has no operations in Logue’s northern California district.
The Tea Party – California members of the fringe political group have recently taken up the Prop 23 cause, and are rallying for support. The Tea Party has been a strong supporter of Arizona’s draconian anti-immigrant laws, with one party rally championing Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, known for his extreme approaches to intimidate and humiliate immigrants. It should be no surprise that this radical group supports Prop 23; they are yet another front organization being bankrolled by Koch Industries.
Prop 23 adds insult to injury. Immigrant groups, especially Latinos, are disproportionately harmed by greenhouse gases and toxic emissions. One in six Latinos has been diagnosed with asthma in California, and Latinos also comprise 60 percent of the people living within a half mile of the top 100 emitters of toxic pollutants in places like Los Angeles County. Add to this the increased cases of cancer, birth defects, and hospitalizations – dirty energy is a death trap for these communities.
The recession has hit the construction and manufacturing sectors particularly hard, and many Latinos, including recent immigrants, have historically found work and gained access to wealth building and the middle class in these sectors. Proposition 23 would destroy half a million jobs in California (many in construction and high-tech manufacturing). Conversely, a new study has indicated that from 1995 to 2008, manufacturing employment in core green economy expanded by 19 percent, while there was a nine percent drop in total manufacturing employment.
When we connect the dots, it becomes clear that supporters of Prop 23 care little, if at all, for the environment, immigrants and Latino communities. Even worse, it appears these groups feel they can use immigrants, particularly Latinos, as their political ‘whipping boy’ in order to garner votes from conservatives and opponents of reasonable immigration reform.
This strategy should be great cause for concern. In the fight against climate change, Latinos and immigrants are a strong ally. Latinos make up about 20 percent of the electorate and 37 percent of the population in California. Polls have shown that Latino voters don’t accept the false choice between the economy and the environment. Latinos are the most likely racial/ethnic group to consider regional air pollution a big problem, as well as the most likely group that considers the effects of global warming is already happening.
The supporters of Prop 23 and their dirty money are attacking immigrants and Latinos from all directions — they should be exposed for their unconscionable agendas.
In the 16 days since Senate Republicans (and two Democrats) filibustered the National Defense Authorization Act and the amendment to begin the process of repealing Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Congressional Democrats, mainstream newspapers and progressive organizations have argued that the bill stands a slim chance of passing in the lame duck session of Congress. Instead, they’ve pressured the White House to end the policy by not appealing a California court decision that found the ban unconstitutional or issuing an executive order prohibiting the military from implementing administrative action on the basis of sexual orientation:
- New York Times editorial on appeal: “If the military’s unjust policy is not repealed in the lame-duck session, there is another way out,” the editorial notes. “The Obama administration can choose not to appeal Judge Phillips’s ruling that the policy is unconstitutional, and simply stop ejecting soldiers.” [9/21/2010]
- Palm Center releases appeal analysis: The White House has “a strong foundation for not filing an appeal to the recent case which declared ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ unconstitutional.” DOJ has an obligation to defend existing law, the report notes, “[h]owever, it would be inaccurate to characterize this common practice as a mandatory requirement that DOJ must always defend federal laws in all cases, without exception.” [9/22/2010]
- 69 House Democrats urge DOJ not to appeal: “We hope that you, as the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Services, will take this opportunity to restore integrity to our military and decline to appeal Judge Phillip’s ruling.” [9/24/2010]
- Pelosi predicts Obama will end ban: “That will be gone by executive — that will happen with or without Congress,” she said. “I don’t think it has to depend on whether it passes the Senate,” she continued. “The process will work its way through and the president will make his pronouncement.” [9/29/2010]
-Sen. Udall and Gillibrand circulate appeal letter: So far 16 senators have signed on to the letter that asks DOJ not to appeal the California decision. The Senators have also started a public petition. [10/04/2010]
But despite all this, The Advocate’s Kerry Eleveld is reporting that the White House is still committed to pushing repeal through the legislative process after Congress reconvenes in November:
The President has repeatedly said he wants a lasting and durable solution to DADT, and he continues to believe that the Senate should follow the bipartisan action in the House to repeal the statute. The White House continues to work with the Congressional leadership on a host of issues that need to be addressed when they come back into session, including passage of the National Defense Authorization Act. We are not commenting on contingencies if the Senate does not act because we expect the Senate to act – it is the right and fair thing to do and it is in the national security interest of the country for it to get done.
Congress may have a small window to pass the bill probably after the Pentagon study group releases its report on DADT, but that would require a relatively clean bill of health for repeal and strong Democratic push-back against GOP attempts to prevent Congress from accomplishing anything in its lame duck session.
This week, the National Organization for Marriage is launching a 200,000 Spanish-language television ad campaign that aims to present senatorial candidate Carly Fiorina (R-CA) as the candidate who shares the values of Latino voters. One of the ads makes the point that Boxer “voted against immigration reform to permit our people to come here legally to work.” The narrator then concludes “We’ve had enough of her talk. Carly Fiorina for US Senate. Our values. Our senator.”
Watch it:
Meanwhile, Fiorina says “now is not the time” to deal with the millions of immigrants who are already in the country illegally. Instead, she supports SB-1070 and instituting a temporary worker program.
The National Organization for Marriage doesn’t explain why Boxer voted against immigration reform in 2007. The Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2007 would’ve provided millions of undocumented immigrants with a path to citizenship, but it was also plagued by several troubling provisions.
To begin with, just to regularize their immigration status, undocumented immigrants would’ve had to leave their jobs and families and return to their home countries for a period of time. Many agreed that the “touchback” requirement would likely lead to millions of undocumented immigrants staying underground. At the time, the Democratic Strategist wrote “Democrats are restless about the implications of voting for an increasingly bad bill ‘to keep the process going,’ counting on the House to pass something more acceptable.”
The touchback program wasn’t the only troubling part of the bill. The legislation also introduced a “point system” which would’ve sorted out lower-skilled immigrants from high-skilled ones and prioritized the latter in the allocation of visas with little to no regard for economic demand for workers or family reunification. The provision represented a “radical shift in the philosophy of the U.S. immigration system” and would’ve fundamentally changed the demographics of U.S. immigration in a way that probably would not have favored Latinos and their families. Then Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) called it a “radical experiment in social engineering.”
Finally, the bill included a controversial temporary worker program which Boxer herself claims would’ve amounted to “indentured servitude.” At the time, Boxer denounced the guest worker program, saying it would create a pool of “desperate low-wage workers” whom employers could easily exploit. Many of the nation’s unions agreed.
Boxer did vote in support of the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2006 which did not include a point system and contained a scaled-back touchback requirement and temporary worker program. She continues to support comprehensive immigration reform that includes a practical path to legalization and a “humane” temporary worker program.
The National Organization for Marriage’s ad also hits Boxer for being pro-choice and supporting same sex marriage. However, the California Latino population is itself split in its views on abortion and gay marriage.
California’s Republican Senate nominee, former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, has been promoting herself as the candidate most likely to boost job creation, particularly in California where unemployment is currently at 12.4 percent. “We have two and half million people out of work here in California, many hundreds of thousands for more than six months and many hundreds of thousands more have quit looking for work altogether. The facts are, we’re destroying jobs in this state through bad government policy,” Fiorina has said.
One of the key planks in Fiorina’s job creation plan is allowing corporations that are holding cash overseas to repatriate it (bring it back to the U.S.) at a lower tax rate. At the moment, multi-national corporations are allowed to defer taxation on profits held overseas, then pay the full statutory tax rate when they bring that money back. In an AOL News op-ed yesterday, Fiorina once again called for letting corporations repatriate money at a lower tax rate, writing, “I have also proposed lowering the tax rate on repatriated corporate profits for businesses that reinvest those profits in capital equipment and job creation here in the United States.”
But Fiorina is leaving out a key fact: we already tried this scheme under the Bush administration, with less-than-impressive results. In 2004, Congress passed the Homeland Investment Act, allowing companies to bring back offshore profits in 2005 and pay a tax rate of just 5.25 percent, far below the 35 percent corporate tax rate. As the New York Times Floyd Norris wrote, the bill “was sold to Congress as a way to spur investment in America, building plants, increasing research and development and creating jobs.”
However, according to work done by the National Bureau of Economic Research, 92 percent of the nearly $300 billion that companies brought back went to share buybacks and increased dividend payments, not investments or job creation.
Now, in her plan, Fiorina says that she would limit the repatriation to businesses “that re-invest those profits in capital equipment and job creation here in the United States.” But Kristin Forbes, one of the authors of the NBER study, said that restrictions in the Homeland Investment Act regarding how repatriated money could be spent “seem to have been completely ineffective”:
“Dell was a great example,” she added, referring to Dell Computer. “They lobbied very hard for the tax holiday. They said part of the money would be brought back to build a new plant in Winston-Salem, N.C. They did bring back $4 billion, and spent $100 million on the plant, which they admitted would have been built anyway. About two months after that, they used $2 billion for a share buyback.”
Fiorina’s repatriation scheme, if history is any indication, will be nothing but a boondoggle, losing billions in federal revenue to line the pockets of corporate executives. It’s not a serious job creation proposal.
Virginia Politics’ Rosalind Helderman notes that Gov. Bob McDonnell is still accepting funding from the Affordable Care Act that he claims is unconstitutional. Yesterday, McDonnell announced that the state will receive “$2 million in federal funding to improve care for elderly and disabled residents” — without mentioning that the money is part of a $68 million grant program in the new law:
Gov. Bob McDonnell (R) announced Wednesday that Virginia has snagged $2 million in federal funding to improve care for elderly and disabled residents. [...]
In a statement, McDonnell said the new money would be of “enormous aid in helping Virginians keep their loved ones in their home as long as possible and provide greater options for both aging adults and adults with disabilities.”
What the statement does not mention is that the grant was approved by Congress as part of the new federal health care law. The White House distributed a parallel press release Wednesday announcing the $68 million grant program and touting it as one of the benefits of the new law.
When pressed by the blog about this inconsistency, McDonnell explained that he’s accepting this money because it helps seniors with disabilities in his state and extends an existing program:
This money merely continues existing senior programs in Virginia that have consistently received federal funding. Some, but not all, of the funding in question this time around was included in the larger health care bill that contained the administration’s health care reform provisions. The governor opposed federal health care reform, and still does. But he’s not going to stop funding important programs for seniors and people with disabilities just to prevent Democrats from playing politics. That’s the difference between Richmond and Washington. Down here, we actually are focused on getting things done.
By this logic, McDonnell should expand the existing Medicaid program to cover lower income residents and implement other provisions of the bill which would directly help the one million or so Virginians who are uninsured. After all, Virginia has already accepted planning grants to help establish the exchanges and funds to review insurance premiums — both of which don’t continue existing programs.
Yesterday, the Justice Department announced that it will investigate the foreclosure practices of several financial firms, after widespread reports of foreclosures being approved by bank “robo-signers” (employees who weren’t verifying the necessary documentation to legally okay a foreclosure). One Bank of America official admitted that he approved 7,000 to 8,000 foreclosure filings a month without reading them, while a Wells Fargo executive said that he would only check the date on up to 150 foreclosures he approved daily.
One of the problems with the foreclosure documents has to do with notarizations. Notaries are supposed to be impartial third-parties that verify documents and legal proceedings, but the banks have been using dubious notatizations to justify foreclosures. For instance, “in some cases, the notarizations predated the preparation of the legal documents, suggesting that signatures were not reviewed by a notary. Other notarizations took place in offices far away from where the documents were signed, indicating that the notaries might not have witnessed the signings as the law required.”
And right before it recessed last week, the Senate passed a bill — the Interstate Recognition of Notarizations Act of 2010 — that could make this problem worse:
The bill, passed without public debate in a way that even surprised its main sponsor, Republican Representative Robert Aderholt, requires courts to accept as valid document notarizations made out of state, making it harder to challenge the authenticity of foreclosure and other legal documents.
Forcing any state to immediately accept notarized documents from out of state not only makes it harder for homeowners to challenge the banks, but could also lead to a race to the bottom, as banks will originate all their documents in states that have the most lax standards. It would only take one state significantly lowering its standards (in the face of bank lobbying or the promise of banks moving jobs into the state) and suddenly homeowners would have to accept bank documents with no idea whether the information on them was verified properly by an impartial observer.
Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner said that the law “would weaken protection of homeowners by requiring many states to accept lower standards for notarizations,” adding that it was “’suspicious’ that the law unexpectedly passed just as the mortgage industry is facing possible big costs from having filed false or improperly notarized documents.” “It is troubling to me and curious that it passed so quietly,” added Thomas Cox, a Maine lawyer representing homeowners contesting foreclosures.
The bill, passed by unanimous consent, was shepherded through the Senate at the last minute at the behest of Sens. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and Jeff Sessions (R-AL). Leahy’s staffers cited unnamed “constituents” who had pushed for passage, but wouldn’t say “who these constituents were or if anyone representing the mortgage industry or other interests had pressed for the bill to go through.”
The House has already passed a companion bill to the Senate’s legislation, so it is currently sitting on President Obama’s desk. Obama should veto this legislation, and not make it easier for banks to fraudulently throw homeowners out of their homes.
Today, the White House announced that President Obama will not sign H.R. 3808, the Interstate Recognition of Notarizations Act of 2010, and will return the bill to the House of Representatives. The Interstate Recognition of Notarizations Act of 2010 was designed to remove impediments to interstate commerce. While we share this goal, we believe it is necessary to have further deliberations about the intended and unintended impact of this bill on consumer protections, including those for mortgages, before this bill can be finalized.
Notarizations are important for a large range of documents, including financial documents. As the President has made clear, consumer financial protections are incredibly important, and he has made this one of his top priorities, including signing into law the strongest consumer protections in history in the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. That is why we need to think through the intended and unintended consequences of this bill on consumer protections, especially in light of the recent developments with mortgage processors.
Welcome to The WonkLine, a daily 9:30 a.m. roundup of the latest news about health care, the economy, national security, immigration and climate policy. This is what we’re reading. Tell us what you found in the comments section below. You can also follow The Wonk Room on Twitter.
Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT) has joined the climate peacock caucus, saying that “cimate change is a real issue that has to be addressed” but that “he supports a measure that would ban the Environmental Protection Agency from writing climate change legislation to regulate greenhouse gases linked to climate change.”
“Triple-digit temperatures will be the norm in Texas within a few decades, and 115-degree heat won’t be surprising,” warns Texas state climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon, which will devastate the state’s livestock and agriculture.
Gov. Joe Manchin (D-WV) is suing over EPA’s new mountaintop-removal rules, “in protection of our working families and way of life.”
“Republicans have won points with many voters by promising a conservative overhaul of taxes and spending, but Democrats are working hard in the closing weeks of the campaign to convince voters that a conservative social agenda is waiting in the wings, too, should Republicans be elected in large numbers.”
“Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Gov. David Paterson have asked the federal government to bar New York City food-stamp recipients from using the benefit to buy sugary drinks, an effort to determine if the move would decrease obesity and diabetes problems.”
“A slate of Republican doctors seeking House seats is benefiting from a group of deep-pocketed medical groups that are funneling thousands of dollars to their campaigns and providing support on the airwaves. ”
The Obama administration announced Wednesday that in the past year it has deported more than 392,000 undocumented immigrants — a record number and about half of whom were convicted criminals.
Latino activists in Chicago protested the likely mayoral campaign of Rahm Emanuel, blaming him for the lack of immigration reform and saying his immigration record as congressman and as White House chief of staff will cost him Latino support.
Henry Cejudo, the youngest American wrestler to win gold and U.S. citizen by birthright says nothing holds more value than his U.S. citizenship, not even the Olympic gold medal he won for his country.
Reuters asks if Republicans could gut parts of the Dodd-Frank financial regulatory reform law.
As they sit on “unprecedented levels of cash,” U.S. companies are buying back their own stock in huge numbers; this year, “firms have announced they will purchase $273 billion of their own shares, more than five times as much compared with this time last year.”
According to the latest Census data, “about one in 18 women working full time earned $100,000 or more in 2009, a jump of 14 percent over two years.” One in seven men make that much.
“The Obama administration scrambled to halt a sharp deterioration in its troubled relationship with Pakistan on Wednesday, offering Pakistani officials multiple apologies for a helicopter strike on a border post that killed three Pakistani soldiers last week.”
“As hereditary heir Kim Jong Eun assumes a public role in Pyongyang, appearing for photo sessions and watching live fire drills, the Obama administration has clarified at least one thing about its North Korea policy: Everything depends on South Korea.”
“Efforts to stem the smuggling of weapons from the United States to Mexican drug cartels have been frustrated by bureaucratic infighting, a lack of training and the delayed delivery of a computer program to Mexico, according to U.S. and Mexican officials.”
Illinois Governor Gov. Pat Quinn told the Daily Herald yesterday that civil unions could be passed into law in the state by the time “Christmas comes around” and promised not to oppose expanding marriage to gay people if “the voters of Illinois want to have it come to pass“:
“The votes are there, I believe,” Quinn said. “In the Senate for sure, and definitely I think we can do it in the House. He called himself a “strong advocate of civil unions, which would give partners the same rights and responsibilities to adoption, emergency health care decisions and property ownership, among other things, that married couples have.
While he believes there is enough support among Democrats and Republicans for a new General Assembly to pass the measure in 2011, he said he thinks it will be taken up before then, during the fall veto session.
“I think we can pass it this year. I would like to see it voted on earlier, Quinn said.
Civil union legislation has “passed out of committee last spring, but has not yet been called for a vote.” State Rep. Greg Harris, who has sponsored legislation to legalize civil unions in Illinois, “was hesitant to say whether he believed he had enough votes for the measure in the upcoming veto session, which starts Nov. 16.”
LGBT groups in the state remain optimistic, however. In August, Equality Illinois’ Rick Garcia predicted that it will be easy to get the bill (SB 1716) through the House when lawmakers return to Springfield in November. Currently, at least 10 states recognize some form of civil union.
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