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Guns And Molasses

Frankly, supporters of gun controls have been naive.

It was naive to think "surely this time people will simply dismiss the NRA" - as if the NRA hasn't been doing exactly what it's done, successfully, for years. 

It was naive to assume that convenient polling - "90% of Americans want an assault weapons ban!" - told the whole story on creating successful gun policy.

It was naive to think that one incident, however horrific, could reverse decades of inertia and resistance to changes on guns.

After each terrible shooting the past few years, I've listened to people say we need to "do something" about guns and tried to point out that the other piece of the puzzle - the deeply disturbed individuals who seem to fall through the enormous cracks in our badly broken system of approaching mental health - deserves as much, if not more, attention. This time, after Newtown, a number of conservatives, faced with immediate cries for gun legislation, lurched to the same proposition: the real problem is mental health, and that's the best plac to start.

It's telling, I think, that much promised legislative alternatives to address mental health have gone nowhere; I keep patiently watching John Cornyn, the loudest voice I heard, who promised "significant mental health legislation" within months. And.... nothing. The issues around dealing with the deeply disturbed - the lack of treatment options, the turning of mental health into a law enforcement problem rather than a healthcare problem, the challeges of separating the truly dangerous from the merely ill - are complicated, multilayered and touch on issues (like the ability of adults to make their own choices), that don't lend themselves to easy, blanket proposals. There's nuance needed. Our federal system does nuance pretty badly.

I'd argue that nuance is part of the problem on guns; the assault weapons "ban" is example A of trying to issue broad brush rules where the devil is in the details, of what isn't said and what isn't ruled out. While the ban of 1994 was somewhat successful, a vast array of exceptions were created to get around the rules, and did. People get that. And I think the idea of a new ban never quite overcame the reality that rules are made, for some, to be broken.

As someone who lives in the cultural and social world where guns are anathema, I share the sense of frustration that nothing gets done. But I've had gun owning and gun advocating friends and spent my time talking and listening to conservaives; many people on the antigun side don't, I think, appreciate the equally passionate opposing views on the other side. While antigun people lampoon the NRA and see Wayne LaPierre as a joke, the NRA knows that we are not their target audience. And the message they've pursued since Newtown is geared, primarily to people they can actually persuade.

The most obvious leg of that strategy has been to gin up agitation among gun owners - gun sales, ammunition sales, magazine sales, all soared ("They're coming to take away your guns!"). Indeed, the NRA hardly had to write that script: it writes itself. But the less noticed and less discussed strategy has been to layer confusion and disarray into the debate - that gun legislation is "too complicated," "won't work," and "doesn't address the real issues." 

My own theory on guns was that if Newtown had an impact, it was on a significant margin: it was exurban residents, primarily women, who don't mind the idea of guns for protection, but are horrified by mass shootings, especially in schools, especially on kids. There was a moment, briefly, when these people were persuadable: it's time to do something; let's not keep doing nothing.

I think that's probably why we've seen as much progress on guns as we're likely to get - New York, Connecticut, and Colorado all saw fairly quick, bipartisan, comprehensive action, in part because the ground shifted in commnities further out from major cities (Newtown and the Danbury area of Connecticut, which abut Westchester, Putnam, Dutchess and Rockland counties in New York; Aurora and distant suburbs of Denver in Colorado). But the NRA has moved to beat back the tide and it worked. The further away you get from the epicenters of tragedy, the harder it is now to get action. Nationally, created inertia has set in: the NRA has convinced its target audience - those exurban women - that doing something is complicated, the proposals are not targeted, and it's better to wait. And yes... wait for what? More shootings? More contoversy? 

But the lesson here is one, I think, that coastal liberals have to relearn again and again: that we live in bubbles, that there's a world out there of people who don't see what we see, get what we get, know what we know. Believing, as some do, that "the nation is with us" on guns is a fallacy and a dangerous one. The guns issue is complicated and sad and we live in a violent country with a dangerous and seductive gun culture; that's hard to fight, and complicated to undo. There will be more shootings. We cannot just eliminate the reality of guns in our lives. We can do something, or we can throw up our hands... and do nothing.

So nothing, it seems, has won again nationally. We've done nothing to better address mental health, we may barely regulate more gun sales and require more background checks (which, though well meaning, don't fully prevent gun possession in the wrong hands). And some time, soon, we'll probably see another mass shooting. I think the question is... have the forces that lost this gun debate learned something from the failures? Has anyone figured how to slow, or stop, the reach of the NRA? That, I think, is the depressing part, because I think when this happens again, this same dance in the molasses will start again. And inertia will win.

Related articles

One Party To Rule Them All (The Galadriel Syndrome)

Maddow Tears Into NRA: You Can't Oppose Gun Laws Just Because 'Criminals Don't Follow Laws'

Fox's Megyn Kelly Grills Wayne LaPierre On The NRA's Opposition To CT's New Gun Magazine Limits

Connecticut Lawmakers Approve New Gun Control Measures

Who Agrees With Expanding Background Checks For Gun Purchases?

The NRA Wins Again

Mental Health and Gun Control

How Connecticut Got Its Tough New Gun Legislation

The Phony Dance Of Gun Control

Oh Fer The Love Of God!

I always say (to myself, anyway) you wait long enough... and there will surely be something to blog about. 

Sure enough, I decide to wait until the end of Easter/Passover vacation to get started again... and there you go.

Google's decision to run a graphic for the birthday of Cesar Chavez on Easter should really be no big deal - though I have to admit, I was a little surprised, until I realized they were the same day. Easter was a busy day this year - I'm now on Facebook, and two other FB friends (or as I used to say, friends) also had birthdays on Easter. And it was Easter. And Passover.... and a bunch of other stuff, which was kind of sad.

Anyway, I don't think it's surprising, exactly, that the conservative right went nuts over the linking of Chavez to Easter - or, more hilariously, that they mistook Cesar Chavez for Hugo Chavez, the recently deceased leader of Venezuela, which made them all the angrier. I mean, as they say, we do all look alike, especially when the last names are similar. 

In the wake of Republicans trying to rebuild a relationship with Latin Americans, though, this farce is basically example A of why most of these efforts are doomed. Too often and for too long, the right wing's predictable responses to even the mildest discussions of liberal figures - Cesar's hardly worth the controversy, and let's face it, Hugo's dead - is screaming outrage. And the outrage just seems misplaced - and in the case of Venezuela, awfully late now that the real question is whether Venezuela will simply fall apart in the wakr of his (er, Hugo's) death.

But the enmity for the Chavezes and all they represent - the union building, poverty work and immigration friendly politics of Cesar; or the communistic approach to governing Venezuela more in favor of the downtrodden - is what's really going to keep conservatism, and by extension the GOP, from going wide. There's just got to be something about Hispanic culture and politics that conservatives have to figure out how to support and present positively, or it's just, don't bother. This story is already over.

And it's not as though liberals are going to care deeply about whether Republicans get this right or not - frankly, at this point, the left's view of the right's Hispanic outreach is just that, as farce. The guys who want double edged barbed wire along the Mexican border, whose most extreme elements would actually try to round up "illegals" in every corner of the country and deport them, whose last Presidential candidate attracted about 30% of the Latin vote - these guys are not people we take seriously as any sort of threat. Have at it guys, because at the rate you're going, we'll get Hispanic support for the Democrats up to or near the 90+% numberws we enjoy with African Americans. Not even trying.

Of course, beyond the gloating, all of this is depressing. It's depressing to hear the shrill rhetoric opposed to anything that might make life even sort of slightly better for people on the edges of society, be they migrant farmworkers or the poorest citizens of a third world country. It's disheartening to see people you might otherwise at least respect as thoughtful opponents descend into the absurd anger and shrieking of the fringiest conservative elements, or even at a minimum, simply draw a line, any line, about rhetoric that goes too far. When Don Young of Alaska, a member of House leadership, blithely refers to "wetbacks" with little more than "oh, gee" from other Republicans, that's the kind of thing that shows what the right accepts in its senior leadership. For God's sake, this isn't hard.

But then that's Easter in the land of politics: dressing things up, trying to put a kindly face on the oldest of stories (I've always preferred the Potestant version, which sems to focus on the white light and the post-rising Good News rather than the more Catholic-seeming obsession with the pain and suffering He felt on the cross), candy coating the bad stuff so we won't maybe notice. The same week of all these Hispanic fumbles, the right is practically in seizures as (several) lifetimes of antigay rhetoric don't add up to a hill of beans fighting marriage equality, the battle they can lose now, or lose later. By Sunday, even Catholic priests in America were scrambling to find the right words to try and evince some sort of caring for gay people, even while condeming homosexuality and absolutey trying to rule marriage off limits. The contortions were breathtaking, the mixed messages were head scratchingly confused. We - the angry gay radicals of near limitless power, thank you John Roberts - have apparently managed, if nothing else, to turn "homophobia" into such a dirty word that conservatives almost universally flinch as they try to expalin opposing unions for people they really, really... well, we don't hate them, we just think they should settle for second best... or something. Really... breathtaking.

It's a weird Easter this year - it came too early, the weather's too weird for it, all of these crazy controversies and a new Pope who seems, genuinely, to believe that "poverty" and "humility" are not just nice words but a better, more honest way, to approach one's duties as a Priest. No cars, furs, or penthouse papal apartments? Good lord, now what?

It's a weird Easter, in some weird zone between secular and religious, where liberal theology and social justice apparently won the war while no one was looking. A moment when the Christian, decent things we can all pretty much sign on to - treating each other decently, caring for those less fortunate, helping those in actual need - seem to trump the less pleasing notions of doing for ourselves, getting what's mine, and judging others with a critical eye. It's an Easter big enough for the death of Christ, the birthday of the man who stood for farm workers, and even my friend the married gay minister. And that's pretty good... for the love of God.

Related articles

It's Cesar Chavez, You Idiots! Not Hugo!

Google angers Christian right by honouring socialist at Easter - Hamilton Spectator

Nothing From Nothing Leaves Nothing

One of the better bitter pills the right has had to swallow as a result of the election is that "Repeal Obamacare" was pretty soundly rejected as a rallying cry. The implementation of the Affordable Care Act continues, and conservatives are scrambling to try and figure out ways to revive their opposition and paint Obamacare as terrible, yet again.

Although I've never been thrilled with the ACA, or its organizing principle - that is, codifying the employer based health insurance system we have, and doubling down on it - I think we're obliged to see how it plays out. As I've said, I remain convinced that the real looming disaster in implementing the ACA is in Medicaid and the problems with expanding that program to everyone up to 133% of the poverty line, but the crunch time for that is probably months (though months, and not years) away.

Right now, the real developments in health insurance have to do both with the establishment of the "exchanges" - health insurance markets in every state that will help freelancers and small business employees get more affordable coverage, in theory - and seeing how employers react to new requirements for offering coverage.

What's interesting to me is that conservatives have settled on "outrage" and sympathy for an odd group of employers - midsize franchisees of chain restaurants like Applebee's and TGI Friday's. It's fascinating because the chains are frantic about the costs of offering insurance to wait staff and kitchen help, and because conservatives are trying to stake a "pro-business" claim by supporting the businesses in their whining about having to provide health insuarnce to workers. 

In a similar vein came news this weekend that Wal-Mart (naturally) has decided to set 30 hours as the lower limit for insurance for its workers, provoking (naturally) new howls about how Wal-Mart pushes its workers onto welfare, or in this case, into the Exchnages, rather than take its own responsibility seriously.

The inetersting thing to me is that these stories are two sides of the same coin, and a reminder why the ACA, or some solution was needed - it's service workers in these semi-part-time jobs in these shadow fields of endeavor who have the hardest time accessing affordable health care. Restaurants have notoriously refused to pay decent wages, never mind benefits, to workers. And while wait staff - especially in top boites - can survive and even thrive on tips, the same is not the case for kitchen workers and support staff. Wal-Mart, too in indicative of a problem (especially pervasive in retail and other service work) that doesn't actually have a good answer: making insurance available to part time workers is a laudable goal... but where is the reasonable point to draw a line in regards to hours worked?

I work for a company that - for now - offers a pretty full benefit package to workers starting at 20 hours a week (it's a little more complicated, but basically this). Wal-Mart probably deserves some scorn for going with 30, rather than a more inclusive number like even 25, but any number will serve to keep some workers out of the pool. And force the into other choices.

It's easy to lambaste these business owners for trying to limit coverage, but I tend to be heartened by the reverse predicament: that the ACA has forced these notoriously cheap employers to provide at least some sort of basic health care coverage to their full time staff. The threats of layoffs and cuts to hours may happen, but these are business people who know enough to know that providing worse service will not help the bottom line. Wal Mart can run on a small crew... but it does need bodies at registers and manning the floors. And if the net result is fewer people working more hours... than we may have broken an especially bad model that was good for business, but terrible for workers looking for a living wage and benefits.

But liberals should see the arnings in all of this. First, as much we'd like it to be otherwise, these businesses have to make choices about costs and expenses against how much money they can make doing business. Less profit will force other choices. Raising prices will affect who comes and how they spend. Each equation comes with a trade off. And for workers, we shouldn't make progress for some the enemy of good for all. More coverage, even for only a subset of these workers, is itself a vast improvement.

A lot of this, though, will come back to those exchanges, and by extension to these questions of how and how well the Medicaid expansion is done. Businesses, in their plans, will be heloing to, in some ways, enhance the division between the "working poor" - those who have the jobs and the willingness to do the long hours - and a new tier of people, just under them, who choose or are pushed into situations with some hard choices and harsh realities. Will the exchanges and Medicaid provide good coverage (and if the Exchanges are that good... will employers simply push their workers onto them?) , or do they become, between them, insurers of last resort for those with the least income and the fewest choices? That question could have a painful answer, but if we're trying to decide whether a bit of something is better than nothing... well, I'd rather not have nothing.

Articles We Never Finished Reading: You're Indispensable...Or Priceless. Or Something.

Many observers have criticized the approach of using litigation to achieve social change ever since a Hawaii court ruled in 1993 that the denial of marriage benefits to same-sex couples was unconstitutional—criticism that only accelerated after Massachusetts's landmark Goodridge decision in 2003 ruling that bans on same-sex marriage are unconstitutional. Much of this criticism takes the form of what I call the "countermobilization myth"—that is, the idea that victories won through the courts produce a unique amount of political backlash that make them counterproductive. The remarkable wave of success for LGBT rights on Election Day, combined with a steady increase in support for same-sex marriage, makes the countermobilization myth even more untenable. Michael Klarman's invaluable new book, From the Closet to the Altar, remains ambivalent about the use of litigation to advance same-sex marriage. But ultimately, it provides a powerful case that in the right circumstances, litigation can be an effective tool for social reform.

- Scott Lemieux, "Don't Fear The Backlash", The American Prospect, Nov. 15 2012

I make a very poor Grammar Nazi, and I'm only a so-so Usage Slut... but "invaluable" just annoys me. It's that thing about "disingenuous" where people usually mean the thing without "dis" but want to sound classy. I had to look up "invaluable" because I was just so annoyed (and I do find, in this insta-phone age, that my usage querulousness is faster and more easily confirmed - and yes, you can look that up, too), and a quick look for definitions made me both right and wrong. It's fair to say "invaluable" to mean the book has a value that can't be calculated... but I think Lemieux was going for more of the other words associated with invaluable - like "indispensable" or "priceless". 

My point is that, in context, Lemieux basically suggests the book does, indeed, have value. It's a very important book, clearly, and useful and informative... but is the value of it indeed beyond all measure? "Valuable" seems just as worthwhile a word choice, or even "extremely valuable" - but "invaluable"?  Really?

The other reason "invaluable" annoys me, and why I didn't bother finishing the article, is that the pint Lemieux's making is one of those "not so deep" points that strikes me as obvious: yes, people were initially reluctant to support gay marriage lawsuits (and, as I recall, many of us felt that we were being steamrolled into backing an issue, like gays in the military, that brought up larger issues we didn't entirely like), but what I found then, and still find is that most gays were willing to at least let the lawsuits run their course because, like gays in the military, the underlying point was obviously correct. Thus, "fear of backlash" was never quite the issue one wants to make it out to be: some gays may worry about adverse reactions to us standing up for our rights, but historically, most of us gays will prefer to see the positive result. Gay Pride, gay equality... we weren't all heroes who stood up right when Stonewall happened... but "they may not like us and be mean to us for speaking out" is a lousy approach to life. And mostly... we already knew that. And such an insight hardly seems... invaluable. 

Ew, It's Gross. I'm Not Doing It (Plus Some Thoughts On Taylor Swift)

 

"We are never ever ever getting into leather" is much fun (via one of my regular must reads, the World of Wonder blog), but then so is the Taylor Swift original which kicked off her album Red.

 

 

Swift has gotten a lot of grief because the song, apparently, is a thinly veiled diss of Jake Gyllenhaal. This is in line with previous songs, her subtextual critics suggest, with a string of songs aimed at exes and occasionally their new girlfriends. For her part, Swift doesn't entirely deny that her songs come out of her experiences, or that some of them are indeed, about a specific person or event.

That is usally how one writes a song.

I'm sort of struck by the obvious sexism at play in this, and by the blindness of otherwise sensitive types (like Jezebel) to the double standard at work. It's as if all that material written by high profile male rockstars to their (often equally high profile) girlfriends and exes never happened. Did nobody hear the backstory of "My Sharona"?  Or how Dylan aimed a string of (actually rather bitchy) singles at his girlfriends from the sixties (including, just as a for instance, Edie Sedgwick)? How about something more recent - did no one listen to the words to "Gives You Hell" by All American Rejects? (Yeah, I don't love it either... but still).

Apparently, it's wrong for a woman to complain about bad boyfriends... or something. Or perhaps it's just that Swift's kiss-offs are aimed at young, handsome, popular celebrity men whose puppy dog reps (even a dog like John Mayer) preclude thinking badly of them in the public sphere. Perhaps it's simply the charmed nature of Swift's career and her own super-sweet public persona. I know I resisted at first, but Swift's chops as a musician and songwriter have become simply impossible to dismiss or ignore. And that, really, is why a song like "We are never ever getting back together" has sting. 

Whatever the case for resistance and ugly backlash, I can't help the feeling that if Swift were a man and the disses in question were aimed at ex-girlfriends we wouldn't be having this backlash and the star would be a hero, not a bitch. And that's just like... ew.

Come To Jesus

I was just a fresh, new voter in 1984, an idealistic (no, seriously) kid, convinced that Everyone Must Know That Liberals Were Right About Everything. After voting, for the first time, in my home state primary, I went off to college, convinced that the guy I wanted to be President would win. He just had to. How could anyone want four more years of that aging actor, Ronald Reagan?

And thus were my naive political dreams shattered. 

Walter Mondale won just one states: his home state of Minnesota. It was then that I learned that I had grown up in a liberal cocoon, cossetted and protected from a rougher, realer world where people didn't care about the issues I did, and didn't hold to principles that I held dear. And in 1988, I got my hopes up - again - that Michael Dukakis might win over a badly prepared, poorly presented George HW Bush... only to have Reagan and his people embrace Bush in a bear hug that dragged him over the finish line as the promise of Reagan Term III (and that, kids, is a big part of why Bush lost in 1992, because he failed to live up to that promise0.

I mention all of this because when older Democrats talk about the hard won return to electoral success - including the self doubting, sweet uncertainty so many of us carried in the last few months, despite what, we now know, was a virtual certainty of reelection for the President - we're not being theoretical. The Democratic Party I still believe in and support is not the Party of my childhood, or my teen years. We're tougher, more pragmatic, less doctrinaire (and, yes, sometimes frustratingly not as liberal as I or others might like). We keep our eye on what it takes to win elections, and we work to actually win them. We don't pin our hopes and dreams to unrealistic notions of what might be or what we wish would be... we have a clearer eye on what can happen, and what can't.

(And that, kids, is why we have Obamacare.)

The point here is that somewhere between 1988 and 1994, most liberals had a Come To Jesus moment. We got seriously tired of losing. We got tired of characterization of us and our beliefs by others who had no idea who we were or what we actually believed. And, too, we let go of old notions of how government works and what voters want that didn't really work. We ended the Oppression Olympics. We let go of ideas that only Government Knows How To Solve Problems. We softened notions that we hate Big Business, or The Rich. After all, many of us were rich, or about to become rich. And we embraced the adventurous idea that we could embrace notions of change, modernity, and innovation and use technological advancements to help us do better, help people, and succeed.

This was not done easily, and there are plenty of people who, still, resist the ideas of moderation, of giving in, of leaving traditional liberal ideas behind. We don't do enough or think hard enough about poverty. We've let a housing crisis deepen and worsen. Social Justice is still often more a concept than a plan. We have a lot of internal tensions that are likely to leave a big mess as we approach 2016. Yet, and still, we won this last election (from the Presidency to the Senate to the House, picking up seats in both houses) because we are not the Democrats of 1984.

And Republicans, in many ways, are still the party of 1992.

This election, it appears, was the "1984" for many Republicans, that the actual 1984 was for me. A moment when illusions met reality. When wishful thinking met the cold light of day. In 1980, I had excuses for why Reagan won, why it was his moment, how you can fool all of the people some of the time. That, really, was what 2008 was for Republicans. John McCain was a sad joke. Even they knew it. Sarah Palin failed. "Hope and Change" was a slogan that many found hard to resist. On and on. Iran hostages, Carter was weak... believe me, I was there. We had reasons. But 1984 was shattering. We should have won, It should have been closer. How could we have been so wrong?

I've been saying for six years that Republicans are actually in a wilderness created by the disastrous Bush presidency of 2000 and 2004. But that's just the manifestation of a far longer and deeper issues that conservatives are loath to face: that you can't be the party of the super wealthy elite and voice the concerns of the white working class. That you can't adopt rigid, absolutist positions and attract a wide swath of the public. That you cannot dismiss the concerns of traditionally marginalized groups wholesale.  You learn these lessons, adapt and change... or you die.

This, then is the conservative Come to Jesus moment. Will they actually, for once, admit and accept defeat? Can they see that the change that has to happen is change they have to make? Or will they, yet gain, call the voters stuoid, blame the "Magical Black Man", and offer excuse upon excuse about how they're right, and the rest of us, a growing and compelling majority of us, are bad and wrong? 

I am telling you, conservative folks... I've been there. We, we older liberals, have been there. We called the voters stupid, we resisted changing anything, we called all y'all bad and wrong. And then, we had a Come To Jesus moment. And we stopped doing those things. Or, at least, we realized that those excuses are not an answer, and no sense of a solution.

You'd think, really, that Coming To Jesus would come naturally to the folks who wear religiion, and an especially muscuar Christianity, on their sleeves. But then, the falseness and wafer thin commitment to actual Christian valiuues and politically driven religious piety is one of their problems, now, isn't it? Change or die, people.... change or die.

The Change We Cannot Make

Six or so years ago, I started a blog; partly out of a passion to write, and partly because, I realized soon after starting it, I was immensely frustrated by the politics of the early 2000s.

At the time I wasn't alone, and a whole world of blogging grew and thrived and started the wave of change that, I'm convinced, eventually swept Barack Obama into the White House. 

Six years later, life is different, politics is different, and my passion for writing... drifted. This year I largely sat out the election, and blogging - both thoroughly disenchanted with the politics of right now, and pursuing some personal ambitions.

In any case, I'm glad I waited. Now, I feel like I have something to say. Again.

For months - probably close to a year - I've been gamely predicting to anyone who'd listen that Barack Obama would, most likely, be reelected by a grim electorate who, while clearly not impressed with his first term, saw little alternative. When Mitt Romney steamrolled his way to the GOP nomination, I calmly told family and friends that America would not elect him President.

Yeah, I feel pretty vindicated, but that's not really my point.

Mitt Romney was a bad bet that Republicans made whose loss confirmed political ideas I've been trumpeting for months, if not years: that Republicans have deep internal issues that must be addressed to grow and thrive, that anger alone cannot win an election of make a movement, and that both Mormonism and a pronounced inability to seem genuine or sincere wrecked Romney well before the debates. I feel particularly heartened that the dark witch's brew of undiscussed racial bias and deep personal hatred for Obama of many conservatives led to nothing but failure. And I remain amazed about how months of obvious indications of Romney's unfitness - the "47 percent" remarks, the lack of any common touch, the ham-handed inability to note any comprehension of the problems ordinary people face - still left so many with some sense that Romney could win this. He couldn't. He never could.

More obviously, though, this election is yet further confirmation, as if we needed it, that the Presidency of George W. Bush and the worst tendencies of the conservative movement have combined to create a Republican Party on a slow path to complete failure. Virtually everything about this election underlines that reality:

The Forces We Can't Control

This week, in the face of a major hurricane, Republicans had to postpone the start day in Tampa of their convention.

And that, if nothing else, seems like a good set of reasons to get back into the game of writing.

I started a blog almost 6 years ago, and part of the reason for that was the times I had lived through, and a desire not to remain silent. A terrible hurricane had ravaged New Orleans. Our President was terrible. And somehow, something had to be done.

Six years later, the Republican remains a spectacular mess of a political party, its organization in disarray, attempting to put a brave face on a weak set of Presidential prospects, blown off course, yet again, by hurricanes and other forces they can't control (though Todd Akin, one would think, is something they could have controlled. Somehow). Hurricane Isaac, once headed straight for Tampa is, naturally, now headed towards New Orleans. And therein, I think, lies about all the metaphor one needs for why Republicans are likely to face disastrous results in the next three months.

There's the obvious stuff about how any planning committe should have wondered about planning a convention during the height of hurricane season in a hurricane prone city. There's the slightly surreal point that a party full of people quick to point to natural events as "God's wrath" having, well, God's actual wrath descend on them.  And then there's Isaac, headed right in the direction Katrina went, seven years ago.

Like many a liberal, I considered George W. Bush's presidency a failure very early on, probably before 9/11, though after that, calling him hopeless hardly sufficed. Sure, I'd been angry about the 2000 election. We all were. But long before conservatives called "anti-Bush rage" a thing, I stopped being angry. Anger serves little purpose. And anger was hardly the point. The failures, the long list of them, were really the point.

And the point, even now, is that we are left witha Republican Party that cannot admit failure. They cannot admit - or even speak of - the failed Bush Presidency. One can argue that neither political party dwells on failure... but liberals are, even these days, pretty quick to admit that, however nice a man Jimmy Carter is and however admirable his post-presidency acts are, his time as President was disastrous. For Democrats. And for America.

Democrats spent years - at least 12, until Clinton - paying for that failure, and the first, necessary step away from failure was admitting the failures and starting to change things. We are different Democrats than we were in 1978. The world has changed. And we changed with it - we faced up to forces beyond our control (like huge swaths of voters selecting Ronald Reagan. Twice). And we stopped trying, quite so hard, to control them.

Imagine a GOP that responded to the weather events of this week with massive volunteer efforts to send delegates and young people to the hurricane zone, away from Tampa. Imagine a GOP that pulled out a ready made slide on "improving disaster preparedness" and ticked off 10-15 proposals for ways that government (and knowing them, public-private partners) could be more successfully respond to hurricanes and their aftermath. That party, those thinkers, would be formidable opponents. 

Instead, we've got MItt Romney and Paul Ryan and a GOP that's generally at odd with itself, unable to agree on the time of day or just how mean and restrictive they want to be on almost anything. Romney, who I believe still will never be President, is the worst combination of known and unknown imaginable: what we know about him is mostly dreadful, what we don't know is close to terrifying. Ryan is surely young and energetic.... but also clearly a craven "say anything" politician trying hard to run away from a host of extreme policy ideas and positions.

However much Republicans put on their good face and their best show in Tampa (and I doubt it will be that good), what hangs over them is the stray clouds winging out from the center of a hurricane - Isaac's promise of current misery, Katrina's history still on view in New Orleans and our national psyche, and the grim cloud of the failed Bush Presidency. Until Republicans surrender some of this need for control - and yes, that can metaphorically stretch to immigrants and women's health, too, if one thinks about it - they can't get past the clouds on their horizon. And while those clouds hang there... I doubt they'll see the kind of success they crave.

So... You Either Have Insurance Or Pay A Tax, But Congress Can't Make The States Offer Affordable Coverage To Poor People?

There will be lots of focus today on the 5-4 upholding of the indvidual mandate, and that's sort of fair: the requirement to have insurance or pay a relatively small fee was the linchpin of a much broader consitutional argument, and that argument, as I suggested earlier this week, remains a non-starter. While Congress may not have the right to "compel" commerce, it does have the power to tax you if you don't show proof of health insurance. It's worth pointing out that 4 Justices would have accepted the Commerce Clause argument, while 4 others would have rejected the tax claims as well. So... basically, only John Roberts thinks that Congress can tax you, but can't regulate commercial inactivity. Or something.

Lost in today's coverage - except, admirably, from Megyn Kelly on Fox - is the 7-2 decision that may yet prove the bigger problem: the Court sharply limited Congressional ability to force the states to expand Medicaid coverage or face the loss of all Medicaid funds. The practical implications of this are still being sorted, but from what I can tell, this could be not only a huge mess for Medcaid recipients, but also for the individual mandate.

Remember, the ACA does about 4 things to make sure that everyone has access to affordable health insurance: most people will get covered by their employers (including ending pre-existing condition limits, lifetime caps, and extended coverage for young people on parent plans to age 26), seniors remain covered by Medicare, people above 133% of poverty but unemployed (or self employed or such) can buy coverage on new "insurance exchanges"... and people at or below 133% of poverty figures were to be covered by Medicaid.

Unfortunately, Medicaid right now isn't budgeted to offer that kind of massive expansion of coverage. So Congress, trying to paper over the problems of adding a huge budget increase did what it usually does when poor people are involved: Congress played math games, pretending that a less than full increase of funding can somehow cover the first five years of the expansion, and then told the states that after the first five years, a large bulk of the expansion would become their budget problem instead. 

Let's be clear: Medicaid right now already fails to adequately cover the small number of people in dep poverty it needs to cover. Medicaid expansion doesn't just enormously increase the problems of insuring poor individuals (who, most likely, need healthcare they can't afford now, meaning costs for care will have a large initial spike... but Medicaid is also the insurer of last resort for poor elderly people in nursing homes. By widely exapnding the ability of people to qualify for Medicaid, it's likely that even more elderly people in extended care will need coverage. And for the sunbelt states - most of which were the main parties to this suit - that cost increase could be crippling.

What the Supreme Court said - apparently - is that these states could decide not to expand Medicaid and to refuse the funds tied to the expansion, but still receive their existing Federal Medicaid grants. And it may be, as some theorize, that even with that permission, a number of states will take the extra money and do some sort of expanded offering to their poor citizens. But it's also quite possible that Texas, say, will just refuse to do anything, not lose the limited Medicaid funds it already gets, and leave millions of poor people with no real way to get insurance coverage.

And guess what happens then... under the mandate's tax policy... they owe the tax.

In a sense, Roberts has shown himself to be a more traditional conservative, a more Reagan era appointee than many guessed at the time of his appointment. A product of the Reagan Justice Department, Roberts was part of the first wave of true believers, and his decision - and make no mistake, this ruling is all him; no other Justice or group of Justices agreed with the whole of his opinion - reflects those beliefs. While he makes more allowances for federal power than some far right types would like, he also shows the myopia to policies which make it hardest for people in poverty to change their circumstance, a classic Reagan-era conceit. This is "Welfare Queens" and Bootstrap Logic all over again, and in some ways worse. And the end result is some real mischief, which explains why my sympathies lie most with the angriest Justice: Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who correctly pointed out that health care reform is meaningless if it doesn't help the most vulnerable and in need. Upholding a tax on lack of insurance was never the worst thing this Court could do - the worst thing would be making it harder to make sure poor people never faced that tax.

And that's exactly what seems to have happened.

A Nation Of Laws. Occasionally, Also, Lousy Ones.

I've been on a break - and how - from writing, especially about politics, for a number of reasons. Much of it is related to my promotion at work, which has consumed a great deal of my time; other life interests are intervening as well. Still, I've also been so thoroughly disgusted with much of what passes for politics lately, that a general run of silence seemed the most practical response. 

Lately, I've been finding myself waiting - like others - for the Supreme Court's health care decision; since until they provide some clarity on something, it's hard to say where health care issues really are, politically. But yesterday brought a decision in the Arizona immigration case, and it reminded me of a couple of things that I think have been lost in a lot of recent political handwringing.

Let's start with the fact that striking down Arizona's immigration law was really the only sensible, plainly logical step to be taken. Giving state and local law enforcement broad powers to stop and check the immigration status of anyone was everything its opponents claimed: probably racist, an intrusion by the state into federal jurisdiction, and no solution to the ostensible problem it claimed to solve.

It shouldn't, really, be remarkable that the Supreme Court invalidated large chunks of the law. Yet the decision, clearly, surprised both overconfident conservatives who expected to celebrate the power of a newfound majority, and a shock to liberals sure that conservative politics would trump common sense and basic decency.

That's why I think the decision was a good reminder of a couple of less discussed points: that being a nation of laws actually matters, and that conservatives cannot win a battle based on a failed idea like "states rights."

The concept of States Rights - that the federal government has amassed too much power and control and some of that should return, naturally, to the various 50 states, has its roots in the Civil Rights era, though the concept is older, and reflects the basic tension of founding a country of states bound together by a Constitution and a central government (and a lesson in how not to do this, lately, is the European Union). Fundamentally, States Rights is an argument that variations in governing and laws between the states are okay, so long as certain "basic" functions of government are handled nationally. States Rights was a partciularly attractive argument to white southerners looking for a way to carve out protections first for slavery, then for Jim Crow and voting rights limitations (not to mention disparities in education between the races, and so on). 

The idea of states prevailing over the federal government is a dream of the right which has never really won out - in most cases, especially the high profile ones, the Supreme Court has pretty firmly restated the primacy of federal law and national government every time. Even the occasional nibbling at the edges - such as the surprise ruling in the "Guns 500 feet from schools" ruling that placed some limitations on the Commerce Clause (that is, that Congress' power to regulate interstate commerce will generally overcome objections to most laws) - have never really embraced the idea that the States can supersede federal power in siginificant ways.

In this sense, the decision in the Arizona case wasn;'t even close: it was a 5-3 decision, with Elena Kagan recused (remember when liberals fretted that Kagan's appointment would be a disaster for cases where she would recuse, like the Arizona immigration case?), and Kagan clearly would have sided with the majority, making it 6-3 (or 7-2 where Justice Alito agreed with the majority as well). Even with a spate of "conservative" appointments, some of the biggest conservative goals - like significantly lmiting the ability of federal law to trump states - remain almost entirely out of reach. And despite continued liberal handwringing, that still isn't likely to change.

This isn't to say that we're living in a moment where conservatism poses no threat, or to deny that some decisions by the Court clearly set up problems (though I'm not one to see Citizens United as the disaster many want to see it as).  But time and again, with each successive conservative appointment, we're told that this one means legal armageddon on the Court. While the reality is that in many ways - this week, most obviously on immigration and children facing life without parole - we conitnue to see that liberal ideas tend to continue to win out.

More pointedly, what we've seen this week is that fears about the Court being solely about the easy political divides of left and right miss the reality that the Justices are still deeply concerned most with the law and interpreting it properly. Our long history as a nation of laws has given us a Supreme Court that tends to favor established precedent, that tends to err on the side of our freedoms, and manages, surprisingly often, to adapt our legal system to the changing realities of the world (as they did this year, when a surprising majority ruled electronic surveillance of a car by GPS an illegal search because placing the GPS device requires a warrant). We would have better politics, and a healthier debate, I'm convinced, if we could stop casting the Supreme Court into a role it doesn't play in our political life. Rather than fear the worst, we could wait, calmly, for the Court to do its best. And realize that extreme, untenable views of the law will be marginalized in the Court even when they can't be entirely marginalized in leglislatures and even society.

A corollary to that thought is that liberals really ought to stop approaching these halthy debates of issues from an endless defensive crouch; we've always been right about rejecting States Rights arguments, and we continue to be right. As long as Republicans chase a dwindling, extreme minority of angry, mostly, white, mostly older, conservatives, they will continue to marginalize themselves into irrelevance. Immigration is a difficult, complicated issue that won't be easy to solve (and the reforms we need, I suspect, are ones that involve controls and restrictions some liberals will not like)... but conservatives will continue to lose, and lose big, favoring a closed nation with fences and guard dogs and random stops and arrests. That's not who we are. And as liberals, we should be confident to say that, and hold to it.

I don't know what the coming days hold in terms of the health insurance mandate and the Court's decisions; I have suspicions, ones that the Arizona case only reinforced, but I admit the possibility that liberals could lose, and lose big. And maybe there is a newfound, newly powerful conservative majority. But if there were, as with Arizona, I'd think we'd see more evidence of it than we've seen thus far. If this Court is serious about our nation of laws, as they seem to be, then the law will guide them to a sensible result. And bad laws can be fixed, too.