The Weekly Sift

The GOP’s real problem, in terms of passing legislation, isn’t that the party can’t agree on specifics, or that legislators need to bargain their way toward a compromise that gives everyone something they want. It’s that they don’t agree on, or in some cases even have, basic goals when it comes to health policy.

– Peter Sunderman, Reason.com

This week’s featured post is “Poor People Need BETTER Heath Insurance than the Rest of Us, Not Worse.”

This week everybody was talking about TrumpCare

So there finally is a TrumpCare bill. Unfortunately, the promised unicorns and fairy princesses are not in it.

The Congressional Budget Office analysis is supposed to come out today, and it is widely expected to show that many millions of people will lose their coverage. Millions of others who continue to have “health insurance” of some sort will find that it costs them more and doesn’t cover as much as an ObamaCare policy did.

I could spend my entire weekly word budget telling you what’s wrong with this bill, but other people already have. Not only don’t liberals like it, but neither do conservatives, doctors, nurses, hospitals, insurance companies, neutral experts, the AARP, or just about anybody else. If you’re rich, your taxes will go down. If you’re young, healthy, and middle-class, your net insurance costs (after government subsidies and tax credits) will probably be lower than under ObamaCare. But if you’re anybody else, you’re going to be worse off.

The people who will be hurt the most are — wait for it — the Trump base: rural working-class people nearing retirement. They join the long list of folks who have trusted Trump and gotten screwed: banks and investors who loaned him money, contractors who worked on his projects, Trump U students, and people who lost down-payments on Trump Tower Tampa condos that never got built, just to name the ones I can think of off the top of my head.

It’s all summed up in a great graphic from the NYT’s Upshot blog. The people who lose the most voted for Trump over Clinton 58%-39%.

It will be interesting to see if these voters face reality and admit what has happened. During the Clinton impeachment, I remember saying that Bill had never lied to me about anything I cared about. (I never cared whether he had sex with “that woman”.) I imagine many Trump voters feel the same way about their guy: Sure, he lied about the size of his inaugural crowd, and releasing his tax returns, and maybe some other stuff, but they never cared about any of that.

This, they should care about. But will they?

Ezra Klein does a good job of analyzing how the bill got to be so bad.

The biggest problem this bill has, the more I read it, is that it’s not clear why it exists, what it’s trying to achieve, what it makes better. In reality, what I think we’re seeing here is that Republicans have lost sight of what they were trying to achieve in the first place. They are trying so desperately to come up with something that would allow them to say they’ve repealed and replaced ObamaCare, that they’ve let repeal and replace become not just a political slogan, but a goal.

Criticizing ObamaCare has been easy these last eight years, particularly if you make things up (like Death Panels). But forming a consensus view of the government’s proper role in healthcare, and figuring out how to translate that vision into a piece of legislation — that’s hard. So for eight years, Republicans have been skipping that part. And now it shows.

“It says our health insurance is being replaced by a series of tweets calling us losers.”

So the message going out to congressional Republicans now isn’t “This is good, and here’s how you explain its goodness to your constituents.” It’s “This is what we might be able to pass, and if we can’t pass something we’re all screwed.” No one is enthusiastic about this bill (other than the billionaires with their tax cut), but Ryan, Trump, et al are counting on desperation to make even the most recalcitrant Republicans hold their noses and stay in line.

That could work, but here’s the most likely failure path: Conservatives in the House force the bill to be even more draconian, so that when it reaches the Senate, Republicans from blue or purple states have enough cover to vote against it. The bill’s margin for error is slight: Since it offers no concessions to liberal values, congressional Democrats are likely to remain united against it. So 21 Republican defections in the House or 3 in the Senate are enough to sink it.

I doubt they will, but this would be a good time for Democrats to propose the changes they would like to see in ObamaCare. Such a bill wouldn’t pass, of course, but it would put a stake in the ground for 2018.

Here’s a thought: The various legitimate problems ObamaCare is having — like regions where only one or two insurers offer policies, so it’s easy for them to raise premiums — couldn’t all that be fixed by sticking a public option back into the program? You could even set it up so that a public option would only be triggered in places with insufficient competition.

and the revised Muslim ban

A week ago, Trump signed an executive order replacing his Muslim ban, which had been blocked by the courts. The Guardian summarizes what is the same and different, and lets you read the 23-page text if you’re so inclined.

In general, the revised ban is more orderly than the original, and won’t produce the same kind of drama:

• It stops new visas from being issued to people from six (not seven) Muslim-majority countries, but honors existing visas. So the conflicts happen in distant offices, not in American airports where demonstrators can congregate.
• Green-card holders are unaffected this time, so people who already have perfectly legal jobs and lives in America will be able to cross the border.
• Iraq isn’t one of the listed countries any more, so victims won’t include people who worked with our soldiers there.
• It takes effect on March 16, rather than immediately when published, so the federal employees who have to enforce it will have time to figure out how it works rather than getting briefed quickly in the middle of the night.

So the rough edges are gone, but the essence is the same: It’s still a Muslim ban. And that’s going to make for an interesting court case, because it will hang on how willing judges are to examine the intent behind the order. The administration will argue that the order’s specific provisions fall within the legal powers of the president, and the ban’s opponents will have to argue that its intent and effect is to discriminate based on religion.

Trump campaigned on banning Muslims from entering the country, which would be an unconstitutional establishment of religion. His first order was an poor attempt to disguise the Muslim ban, and the second order smooths out problems in the first. But the original purpose is still there. His supporters can claim that this is just a small subset of Muslim countries, but the intent from the beginning has been to establish a precedent that can be expanded: If a six-country ban is OK, what about nine? Fifteen?

The non-religious justifications for the order have always been paper-thin. But intent is always a difficult thing to establish, and it will take guts for a court to say openly that the President of the United States is bullshitting. A judge would always rather find a procedural flaw, as judges did with the original ban. But Hawaii has set the ball rolling by filing suit. claiming that a Muslim ban is a Muslim ban.

The central issue for the Trump base has always been nostalgia for an America clearly dominated by straight white Christians. That’s why they want a wall and that’s why they want a Muslim ban. If there were no terrorist threat, they would still want a Muslim ban.

Tweeting in support of the xenophobic, anti-Muslim candidate in the upcoming Dutch elections, Iowa Congressman Steven King wrote:

Wilders understands that culture and demographics are our destiny. We can’t restore our civilisation with somebody else’s babies.

and the U.S. Attorney firings

Friday, Attorney General Sessions asked for the resignations of all the U.S. attorneys who were held over from the Obama administration, including one that Trump had specifically said could stay on. In some circles this is being covered as if it were scandalous, but at this point it’s not quite at that level. U.S. attorneys are political appointees, and usually do get replaced by a new administration. The Clinton administration replaced all 92 at once in 1993, but usually a number of them stick around to handle ongoing cases before they resign. About half of the Obama USAs were already gone, and the Trump administration had seemed content to let them drift out at their own pace. (No one, for example, has yet been nominated for the jobs of any of the 46 just asked to resign.) So the abrupt change of course is a cause for speculation, but is not in itself extraordinary.

and corruption

Trump campaign adviser Roger Stone admitted to being in contact with Guccifer 2.0, which is believed to be responsible for hacking the DNC emails and “is believed by the U.S. intelligence community to be a cover identity for Russian intelligence operatives.” Stone described the contact as “innocuous”.

The lies continue to unravel. This week, fired National Security Adviser Michael Flynn retroactively filed as a foreign agent, having received more than half a million dollars to represent the government of Turkey while he was advising the Trump campaign. Worse, the transition team that OK’d Flynn’s appointment had been told about this possibility both by Flynn’s lawyers and by Democratic Congressman Elijah Cummings.

Vice President Pence was the head of the transition team, and yet he told Fox News’ Brett Baier Thursday “Hearing that story today was the first I had heard of it.” That can’t be true, and yet (like Attorney General Sessions’ lie to the Senate) he volunteered it without being asked.

Where did that money from Turkey go? Some of it paid a retainer to the retired FBI agent who started one of the Clinton-scandal stories three weeks before the election. Why Turkey would care about torpedoing Hillary Clinton’s campaign is still a mystery.

and you might also be interested in

Courts seem increasingly inclined to strike down gerrymandering plans. Friday, federal judges ruled that Texas’ map illegally discriminates against Hispanics. This follows a similar ruling in January concerning Wisconsin.

The WaPo published two maps that illustrate one way congressional districts could be simpler and more natural.

The economy continues on its recent path of good-not-spectacuar growth, adding 235K jobs in February. The unemployment rate returned to the 4.7% low it hit in December.

When asked about Candidate Trump’s claims that Obama’s low unemployment numbers were “phony” and “fiction”, Sean Spicer replied:

I talked to the president prior to this, and he said to quote him very clearly. They may have been phony in the past, but it’s very real now.

Both Spicer and the roomful of reporters laughed, because the President tacitly admitting that he has repeatedly lied is so hilarious.

Mike the Mad Biologist commented on the constant lying that so many now just accept as a normal feature of the Trump administration:

What happens in a crisis where people need to trust Il Trumpe? Suppose a nasty strain of influenza were to hit or some other immediate public health crisis were to occur? If he says, you need to do X, will people trust him? While politicians have always stretched the truth, Trump’s lies are constant and ongoing. How could we possibly believe what he is saying?

And SNL made a similar point in its alien-invasion sketch.

I thought I covered this when it happened, but Google says otherwise: In mid-February, the Washington Supreme Court considered the appeal of a self-described Christian florist who was sued for refusing to sell flower arrangements for a same-sex wedding, and ruled 9-0 against the florist. The ruling is a good lesson on where the law currently stands on these so-called “religious freedom” cases, i.e., the ones where someone is claiming religion as a legitimate basis for discrimination.

Cases like these revolve around two claims: (1) The refused service constitutes “speech” of some sort, and so this refusal to speak is protected by the First Amendment. (2) The discrimination is not against gays per se; it’s against their action in attempting to get married.

On the first, the Court wrote:

The Supreme Court has protected conduct as speech if two conditions are met: “[(1)] [a]n intent to convey a particularized message was present, and [(2)] in the surrounding circumstances the likelihood was great that the message would be understood by those who viewed it.”

So it’s not enough that in the florist’s own mind her refusal was intended to avoid making a statement she didn’t believe. The Court was not convinced that people who saw the floral arrangements would interpret them as the florist’s endorsement of same-sex marriage.

On the second, it ruled that “some conduct is so linked to a particular group of people that targeting it can readily be interpreted as an attempt to disfavor that group”, and quoted a Supreme Court opinion that “[a] tax on wearing yarmulkes is a tax on Jews”.

The latest right-wing conspiracy theory is that leaks, protests, and other opposition to Trump is being organized by an Obama-led “shadow government”.

My response to this idea is like the response economist John Maynard Keynes had during the Depression to the notion of an international bankers’ conspiracy: “If only there were one.”

and let’s close with some folk art

Some people stack wood, but others make an art out of it.