I don’t get all the Ezra Klein hate, and here is why- he puts out some really interesting stuff. As an example, this rundown of how the GOP managed to take an idea they promoted for several decades, the individual mandate, and within two years set the stage for the Supreme Court to declare it unconstitutional:
The first step was, perhaps, the hardest: The Republican Party had to take an official and unanimous stand against the wisdom and constitutionality of the individual mandate. Typically, it’s not that difficult for the opposition party to oppose the least popular element in the majority party’s largest initiative. But the individual mandate was a policy idea Republicans had thought of in the late-1980s and supported for two decades. They had, in effect, to convince every Republican to say that the policy they had been supporting was an unconstitutional assault on liberty.
But they succeeded. In December 2009 every Senate Republican voted to call the individual mandate unconstitutional. They did this even though a number of them had their names on bills that included an individual mandate. (For more on the political history of the mandate, see this post.)
The unity among Senate Republicans reflected a unity among all the institutions associated with the Republican Party. Fox News and right-wing talk radio pushed the idea that the mandate was unconstitutional. Republican attorney generals began pushing the idea that the individual mandate was unconstitutional. Conservative think tanks — including the Heritage Foundation, which arguably brought the mandate to Washington and the Republican Party in 1989 — began releasing a steady stream of material arguing that the mandate was unconstitutional. Conservative legal scholars began developing arguments showing the individual mandate was unconstitutional. Within a matter of months, the fact that the individual mandate was unconstitutional was as much a part of Republican Party dogma as “no new taxes.”
All of this forced the controversy over the individual mandate into the mainstream media, too. After all, if one of America’s two major political parties thinks the most significant health reform since Medicare is unconstitutional, well, that’s a story! And, as most Americans are not constitutional law scholars, it made the individual mandate look like questionable policy. As Yale law professor Jack Balkin put it to me in the New Yorker, “If you’re reading articles in the Times describing the case against the mandate, you assume this is a live controversy.”
Read the whole thing- it’s a great piece.
David Koch
This isn’t rocket science.
Remember in 2000, Bush campaigned against nation building and against deficit spending, and within a year he flip flopped.
Teh wingers do this all the time. Reagan signed teh most liberal abortion law as governor of california, and then flip flopped when he ran for president.
Romney.. well…
Brachiator
Agree that this is good stuff. Seems to be similar to a longish piece he did in the New Yorker on the same topic.
Interesting how the individual mandate started out as a GOP reply to Democratic Party reform ideas.
piratedan
yes, it’s fascinating to watch an entire political party become so enamored of power that they’ll gladly turn their backs on their entire belief system in order to achieve it. Congrats on being the preferred party of assholes, all you had to do was discard your ethics, morals, history and then adopt the attitude that there is no greater good other than I got mine, fuck you.
David Koch
O.T.
PPP has a poll saying the race btwn Elizabeth Warren and Brown is tight, and if she has any chance to win, it will be on Obummer’s coat tails.
Oh, that’s just delicious. All the progressive betters who hate Obummer and advocate staying home to teach him a lesson are not dependented on him to drag their idol accros the finis line.
The Moar You Know
We have always been at war with Eurasia.
pragmatism
ezra and GG do put out really good stuff from time to time. they also put out mash notes to teh village from time to time. gotta protect those future prospects, i understand.
Mark S.
Just imagine if the GOP wins in November. You won’t hear anything about the deficit for four years.
hildebrand
The question I have is fairly basic – why did the media not pounce on such an Orwellian change of position? Yes, yes, the media is in the bag for the Republicans – frankly, that is too pat of an answer. This is like driving at highway speeds and then jamming the car into reverse, it is a story, and a huge one – how could the media have completely ignored this particular version of ‘we have always been at war with Eastasia?’ More importantly – why did the media ignore such a stunningly blatant change?
And, as long as I am asking naive questions – after Scalia’s outburst in the Arizona case, how can the media possibly take him seriously?
dedc79
I can only assume they see the last name Klein and assume it’s that ass-hat Joe Klein.
Davis X. Machina
I have before me a draft, purloined from the hard drive of a staffer for the Ranking Member of the Senate Budget Committee, of the Republican legislation to replace the PPACA.
It’s called “The Help Us Get That Awful Negro Out Of The White House And Then We’ll Talk, O.K? Act of 2013″…
Villago Delenda Est
The Republican party now consists of the people Orwell was warning us about.
There is no crime they will not commit in their monomaniacal pursuit of power for the sake of exercising power.
beltane
@David Koch: I also don’t think the efforts of the RW screechers “forced” to media to do anything as much as they provided the needed pretext for the media to carry the Republican’s water. We are, after all, dealing with a media that is so pure and unbiased that Mrs. Dan Senor can pen an op-ed hit job on Planned Parenthood that gets published in the liberal NYT without it every being disclosed that she is, in fact, Mrs. Dan Senor.
The main problem in this country is not the Republican party itself, but the supposedly neutral institutions that have long been corrupted by Republican interests.
Martin
Should have titled the piece:
“We’ve always been at war with the Individual Mandate.”
This is a perfect implementation of Orwell by the GOP.
(Damn the two of you that beat me to it)
Violet
There Ezra goes again, relying on quaint things like facts. Doesn’t he know the rightwing doesn’t operate in that world anymore and they’ve got billions of dollars and the media to enable them? Who cares what the facts say when there’s propaganda to push.
@The Moar You Know:
This is it exactly.
JC
These guys always flip-flop. They never get called on it. They lie and lie and lie – even though there is reporting on it, no one seems to really care.
I just saw a Business Insider article, by Blodget, about the growing gap between rich and poor, CEO’s and their business’s, and workers. It laid out, quickly and concisely, the lies that Republicans have been telling for the last few years. And, blodget made an error by doing that frustrating ‘sociasecurityandmedicare’ thing, when if he had separated them out, it would have been even more of a liberal story being the TRUE story.
The Supreme Court, just completely inserted itself into a case, a labor case, that wasn’t even before them. And that’s not even the health care debate, which we will see on Thursday.
Fallows is right, as are we all – this is a slow motion coup.
IOKIYAAR.
Elections won by dumping in billionaire’s money.
Evisceration of labor.
Lie and lie and lie.
And yet, we still get people saying ‘it gets better’. Well, social issues are getting better.
But we now have 32 years of the plutocracy gripping ever more fiercely the United States, and yet the public will still elect them.
And this whole inevitability – which is part of the magic of the Right Wing Borg – depresses and deflates me.
MikeJ
He’s friends with people with whom we disagree on politics, therefore he must be evilevilevil.
burnspbesq
@hildebrand:
Alas, it is precisely because of such outbursts that they take him seriously.
amk
So what is exactly new that ezra has said here ? Isn’t it just a rehash of what is now a common knowledge ?
the Conster
Authoritarians fall in line – it’s what they do. If they thought about any of the points Ezra raised, they wouldn’t be Republicans. They’re all as dumb as a box of hair.
Violet
@hildebrand:
Because they’re conditioned to support Republicans after decades of being called liberal. Because they’re owned by corporations who want their view sold. Because they think reporting the news means just repeating talking points. Because both sides do it, of course.
Jon O.
@hildebrand: I think this goes to two things:
1) There was a 24-hour news network and an entire news radio industry happily declaring that it was always this way, thereby providing us with “one side of the story”
2) The vast majority of journalists, television and otherwise, may have a mind for minutia but are historically terrible with history and policy. They basically evolved to be this way – those aren’t necessarily skills that will drive debates or bring up ratings.
As for Scalia… well, they’ll take him seriously for the two reasons above, as well as the fact that the media loves a Serious Person, and ipso facto if you’re on the Supreme Court you are serious. Yes, even if you reference fictional television characters in defining your support for torture.
Frankensteinbeck
@hildebrand:
To some extent, you have this backwards. The fact that the media does not pounce on stuff like this is why people have ammunition to believe they’re in the tank for the GOP. We’re asking the same question you are, some of us just have favorite explanations. I personally go with Rosen’s ‘Cult of the Savvy’ explanation. They already believe politics is about politics, not ideals, so gigantic lies like this strike them as playing the game well.
JC
@hildebrand: I don’t know. Scalia is like your crazy old uncle now. What he says makes absolutely no sense whatsoever anymore.
Do you think we will start to see the frank discussion of the partisan nature of the Supreme Court, in the media?
It is doubtful.
Alex S.
I can get why Republicans changed their position, it’s because of short-term political gain. But a Supreme Court decision that strikes down the mandate would have a long-lasting negative effect on insurance companies. And burning down the whole legal system just to deny Obama a political win is just too insane… or is it?
Violet
I think this is why Romney is the perfect GOP candidate for this time in history. He lies and lies and lies and our media doesn’t seem to care. Foreign media notices, however.
celticdragonchick
The wingnuts have taken a giant stinking shit all over the comment section at Wonkblog. They are actually talking about Bildebergers, Nazis and thge extinction of the white race. Wow.
The Moar You Know
@hildebrand: He’s a brave truth-teller who dares to defy the liberal media and judicial activists. That’s why those ni**er loving libtards call him a liar and a fraud!
And I am not joking. This is exactly how they present it, and exactly how it is perceived.
JGabriel
John Cole:
I didn’t even know there was a lot of Ezra hate. I’ve always thought of him as a somewhat better than average pundit, a little too centrist for my taste sometimes, but knowledgeable on policy, and with interesting things to say.
.
Valdivia
I agree with you John. I get frustrated sometimes with his feints toward Village CW (that piece about Romney governing like Keneysian so maybe it would be better for the economy if he were President), but his blog is the most wonky production on the internet. His daily briefing is really good.
Baud
I don’t get the Ezra hate either. He occasionally concern trolls, and goes off on some Villager tangent, but by and large he is pretty solid.
amk
@hildebrand: Exactly. What these pundtwits do is just normalize the extreme positions, even reversed ones, of the repubs by stating it as a matter of fact. Madow is the one does a bit of questioning their positions a bit.
Villago Delenda Est
@JC:
The MSM stood by and said nothing about what amounted to a coup d’etat in 2000.
Why should they be any different now?
JWL
Klein is OK with me, although I rarely read him (he writes for the late, lamented Washington Post, doesn’t he?). But if the cited post is any indication of the rest of his work, I think I understand his critics. He writes about politics the way a sportscaster broadcasts a World Series, i.e., he dumbs it down for the casual fan. Inside baseball fans find that very annoying, you know what I mean? After a few paragraphs, I was able to sum up the gist of his insight with the single phrase, “The republican party is the party of Rule or Ruin”. And I already knew that.
Litlebritdifrnt
Not quite OT but “Pennsylvania GOP Leader: Voter ID Will Help Romney Win State” they are not even hiding their brazen behavior any more. They can’t win by ideas so they will just stop anyone voting for their opponents.
http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/06/pennsylvania_gop_leader_voter_id_will_help_romney.php
celticdragonchick
@JC:
I think the media is noticing, but the stuff I have read is pretty timid:
“Scalia’s political opinions might be infuencing his decisions” is pretty typical.
Martin
@celticdragonchick:
When the GOP is openly talking about the extinction of the white race that means it was a good day.
J. Michael Neal
In large part it’s because he doesn’t do anger. You see, Republicans are so evil that if they don’t make you frothing at the mouth mad, then you must be a centrist sell out.
It’s pretty much the same thing that gets Kevin Drum that same label. If you talk reasonably and offer any sort of nuance, you get labeled as the enemy. If you ever tell the ravening hordes that they’re wrong about something, they don’t take the time to try to understand what you’re saying, they just lump you in with the bad guys.
It’s been kind of depressing that so much of the left isn’t really that much different than the right in the way they analyze things. They just started from a more reasonable place.
celticdragonchick
@Martin:
“The
ForceAlex Jones tin foil insanity is strong with this one…”celticdragonchick
@Martin:
“The
ForceAlex Jones tin foil insanity is strong with this one…”celticdragonchick
@Martin:
“The
ForceAlex Jones tin foil insanity is strong with this one…”Napoleon
@JC:
James Fallows of “slow motion coup” fame has a regular gig on one of NPR’s serious news shows on the weekend. If you have people like him going on shows like that and saying that, perhaps you finally will.
JGabriel
@hildebrand:
Because Scalia is still a Supreme Court Justice. For better or more likely worse, we all have to take him seriously until he leaves the bench.
.
pragmatism
Damn you cole for getting montell jordan stuck in my head. i’m kinda buzzed and its all because, this is how we do it. south central does it like nobody does.
Brachiator
@JWL:
But the thing is that there are far more casual fans of poitics than there are people who follow it religiously.
And too many of those annoyed insiders are not able or not interested in writing for a larger audience.
And everybody, casual fans as well as insiders, get to vote.
kindness
Ezra has changed since going to the WaPo. He’s become more…placated of the things in Washington that drive us all nuts. He isn’t an outsider any longer and it shows. Still, I bitch about Kevin Drum more. Any of the ‘progressives’ that call out for respect of (neocon) policies we know are horrid fry my ass.
Roger Moore
@piratedan:
Or it would be, if they had a belief system to turn their backs on. I honestly believe that the Republicans no longer have any consistent beliefs beyond the idea that they should be the ones in power. Their professed beliefs are more about proving their tribal identity than any kind of internally consistent belief system.
reflectionephemeral
@The Moar You Know:
Funny you say that– I was just thinking, “imagine the descriptions the foul-mouthed, intemperate, blustery Scalia would get if he were black.” It’s an old idea– someone somewhere wrote a “What if the Tea Party were black” story a while back. But it hadn’t occurred to me about Scalia until like 15 seconds before I read your post.
I agree with the general view in this post that the criticism of Scalia is along the lines of “he’s controversial” or “he’s a conservative force”. For my part, I called him a “cafeteria Catholic”. Funny how the Church’s views on immigration and torture and just war don’t seem to matter to him– any more than originalism matters to him in affirmative action cases. Best just to ignore it! Just like he did the US Conference of Catholic Bishops’ amicus brief claiming that the Arizona law would infringe on their “religious liberty”. I somehow doubt he’ll be so restrained if/when the contraception insurance coverage case gets up to the SC.
Linnaeus
I don’t hate Ezra Klein; he is more centrist than I am, which means that I think he’s off the mark sometimes, but he does write decent stuff most of the time.
@J. Michael Neal:
Anger can be useful, though. Some things should make people angry. The key is to channel it into constructive action, and I agree that that doesn’t always happen.
Baud
OT:
Tonal Crow
@piratedan:
In other words, the Republicans are all “Yes my Precious!” all the time.
J. Michael Neal
@Valdivia:
The reason for some of the Ezra hate is that half-assed, misleading summaries of what he says, like this one, get passed around.
He made an extremely limited point: that in *2013* there was likely to be *more stimulus* if Romney gets elected *along with a Republican Congress* than if Obama is elected *along with a Republican Congress*.
He made no comment to the effect that Romney would be better for the economy long term. In a follow up, he pointed out what should have been obvious to anyone who read the first piece, namely that the comparison was premised upon the idea that the Republicans control Congress and said nothing about whether Romney with a Republican Congress would produce more stimulus than Obama with a Democratic Congress. Again, that should have been obvious to anyone who read the original with an open brain, but that apparently does not include everyone.
This is where a lot of hatred for the wonky bloggers comes from. By their nature, they write posts that contain a lot of premises before their conclusions. There are plenty of people on the left who either miss or ignore these assumptions and just rush to the conclusion and forget the context.
There are others who just oppose the idea of saying anything like that Romney is far more likely to get spending bills through a Republican Congress than Obama is and thus would probably provide more stimulus. This even though these very same people can often be found complaining that the GOP is a bunch of hypocrites that only care about the deficit when there is a Democratic president. In other words, they object to Ezra Klein saying what is patently true: in the very narrow terms he frames his argument in, Mitt Romney is more likely to produce a short run stimulus package, though badly skewed in its priorities, than Obama is, unless we somehow make sure that the Dems control both houses of Congress *and* do away with the filibuster.
shortstop
@JWL: That part is fine by me. I’m not worried about the inside baseballers. I’m worried about the half-informed. Anything EK can do to reduce their very large numbers is useful.
J. Michael Neal
@Linnaeus: I never said that everyone should blog like Ezra Klein does. There is absolutely a place for anger. What I strongly object to is the idea that anyone who isn’t angry must be the enemy. Focus on what he does, not on what he doesn’t do.
gene108
The real question that needs to be asked, is if the invidivual mandate is struck down and we undo 75 years of jurisprudence on the Commerce Clause, what then?
Will Republicans and/or their supporters look to go back to a pre-New Deal era style of rules and regulations?
That really seems to be the 800lb. gorilla that no one in the media really seems to notice.
There are plenty of movement conservative, who want to do away with the minimum wage, for example and a pre-New Deal reinterpretation of the Constitution would allow for such laws to be overturned.
The minimum wage is mighty popular among the 99%.
There has to be more to this than just being contrarian against prior policy than just a power grab.
I really think the big money donors, who grease the wheels of the GOP really see a crack in the New Deal armor and want to do away with pesky labor laws, minimum wage, etc. and this is just the first step.
NR
Which was then passed into law by a Democratic supermajority, instead of real health care reform. And we’re supposed to be happy about that?
Fuck that.
For their next trick, maybe the Democrats will sign on to the Republicans’ tax policy, too. Oh wait, they already did that!
Southern Beale
The individual mandate started with the Heritage Foundation. And Ezra Klein doesn’t explain how all of the institutions of the Republican Party suddenly did an about-face on their own idea, just that they did it. Unless we’re supposed to surmise that the Republicans are unprincipled partisan hacks. Ezra is too polite to say it, I guess.
Along those lines, if you’re paying attention you’ll have noticed that there’s a new meme in town. Those unprincipled partisan hacks? It’s not the Republicans, noo! It’s the Democrats! That’s the line they’ve started pushing, and you’ll be seeing and hearing a lot more of it. Betcha anything Ezra starts pushing that line, too. He’ll internalize the right wing message so thoroughly he won’t even realize he drank the damn Kool-Aid.
El Cid
I’ve actually heard Republicans — media figures and people I know — explain how the Republican generated and proposed “individual mandate” was right but Obama’s “individual mandate” was taking over 1/6th of our economy, etc.:
“It’s totally different. It’s completely different, they are not the same things at all.”
That’s usually as far as it goes.
You just say, “It’s different,” you say it angrily, loudly, and with a sense of outrage, and people just go along.
Mnemosyne
@NR:
And since Republicans never, ever have any good ideas, ever, that’s why we need to close down the EPA. After all, if Nixon came up with it, it must suck.
gene108
@J. Michael Neal:
I’ve never read Klein’s hypothesis on this, but I think it’s true.
Republicans know, if they get majorities in both Houses and the White House they have to bring the unemployment rate down at all costs.
Democrats know that if they oppose the Republicans, the media will kick up enough of a shit storm about it that they will pay a political price and lose to Republicans.
I think the message will be, “You guys [Democrats] had your shot to make things better and failed and now you are crying like spoiled brats because Republicans are going to put people back to work.”
The talking point will be, “Democrats are spoiled brats”.
Republicans have no principles, so I don’t see anything incongruous about them pumping a few hundred billion into road construction, etc. and Republican governors happily building light rail.
El Cid
@Southern Beale: It was the Heritage Foundation and Ronald Reagan who so strongly pushed (and brought into law in 1986) the principle that those least able to pay our onerous federal income taxes — those lowest income workers — should be relieved of this burden by tax credits so that they may be more likely to work their way out of poverty into the middle class.
Now, of course, conservatives are outraged that somehow libruls let all these people out of paying income taxes just because they don’t make as much money.
So, the first paragraph, above?
It was never written. No such thing ever happened. If it did, it’s different. The situation can’t be compared. It must have been Bill Clinton, or maybe it’s something only Obama’s doing now.
The past didn’t necessarily happen, and whatever did happen can’t be known until you know how it needs to have happened in order to accord with what you believe you know about how things are — or should be — now.
Roger Moore
@gene108:
Yes, that’s the whole point. They think they’re getting a game winning play. Once the 1% has a Supreme Court that’s gives them everything they want, they figure they can give the 99% the finger. And with the ability to bribe public officials and no right for the Feds to regulate anything they do, they may well be right.
Valdivia
@J. Michael Neal:
But the piece by Ezra got pimped ALL OVER the internet by people who want to defeat Obama and those who constatnly troll about him as Ezra saying Romney would be better for the economy. So his nuanced point needed clarification precisely because it got read half-assed not just by me, but by pretty much everyone. If your point is so subtle everyone reads it wrong maybe you need to be more explicit.
NR
@Mnemosyne: Even you should be able to see the difference between a government agency that works for the betterment of the country, and a law forcing people to give money to private corporations who are only working for their own bottom line, or a tax cut that throws money at the 1% when it’s desperately needed elsewhere.
JWL
@shortstop: That’s an excellent point. But any writer who makes a living by pointing out the obvious will over the long haul draw an inevitable flack-field of snide remarks.
Southern Beale
@gene108:
That is exactly correct. This will dismantle a whole shitload of established precedent. It will return the U.S. to the 1920s. By the 2020s when all of the legal crap has shaken out we’ll be back where we started. By then they’ll have replaced FDR on the dime with Reagan, too.
piratedan
@Roger Moore: in all honesty, I actually thought that the R’s used to believe in more government being done at a local level versus a federal one, yet not advocating a states rights type of an agenda, i.e. local school boards set standards, not the feds, etc… I guess stating if that there was a local agency that was in place, why have a duplication of effort at the federal level. Also more of an interventionist policy (courtesy of Eisenhower and Nixon) in world affairs. Religious toleration and proponents of the national good.
Naturally those thoughts have been exposed as nothing more than generational naivete.
NR
@gene108: Well except for the fact that the ACA has absolutely nothing to do with the New Deal, everything you wrote is true.
General Stuck
And why it is poppycock to believe that republicans on the whole, and those on the supreme court would leave the mandate in tact, cause it was likely to make corporations fatter and richer
Power, at least at the political level, will trump corporatist interests every time, if the GOP writ large genuinely fears that power is slipping away from them. Plutocrats will reluctantly agree, because loss of pol power as determined at the ballot box, portends all sorts of dire things into the future for their interests overall.
The wingnuts know from bitter experience, that with government involvement in providing vital services to the general population, led by progressives, is much easier to nip in the bud, with the anti government railings, than later on after the public begins to value what democrats have made available. In this case, more rights for current health insurance policy holders who make up 80 percent of the population. With whatever gratitude directed to democrats at the voting booth.
So it’s a full court press with all hands on deck to keep this from happening, especially with the tides of demographics turning against them. And besides, the status quo, and returning to it satisfies the profit gawds for the short term. And that is all they care about.
Reading my own little crystal ball from the happenings today, I am changing my position to the mandate being upheld. If for no other reason, not doing so, would open a pandora’s box, that even the wingnuts on the high court can’t stomach. At least the sane one, and the one who cares most about legacy.
That said, I think there are other ways to sabotage the ACA via it’s sweeping regulations, and the government dictation for private insurance companies to conduct their business in some pretty large ways. I don’t know all the legalities involved, with complex arrangement between government and say private utility companies, as an example. Just saying, I don’t think the mandate is the only provision for the supremes to make mischief on.
Linnaeus
@J. Michael Neal:
Fair enough. On the whole, I think Klein and Drum are good. I think Drum in particular has gotten better. In his earlier days of blogging, I would get frustrated with him sometimes when I thought he went too far in the direction of trying to sound “reasonable”.
Chris
@General Stuck:
The aristocrats, industrialists and other elites who backed fascism in the hopes that they could control it, discover to their horror that they can’t…
Davis X. Machina
@Baud: How come Obama never gives speeches about outsourcing and offshoring?
Davis X. Machina
@General Stuck:Tossed, 5-4, with the Honey Badger writing for the majority.
General Stuck
@Davis X. Machina:
The ‘honeybadger’ shot his wad today on the dissent for AZ. That even long time court watchers are saying was off the deep end, even for his raspy ass. Alito wasn’t quite as insane, but was acting like a giant bug found a home in his caboose. Very unhappy campers.
Caz
Ok, so both parties are corrupt, and both supported various versions of a mandate at some point. That doesn’t change the fact that this one is unconstitutional. And if and when the R’s propose a similar mandate, I’ll call them out for being unconstitutional too.
The federal government can only regulate interstate commerce. When someone is not engaged in commerce, the federal govt can’t force them to engage in it. The total lack of engaging in commerce means their inaction is beyond the govt’s authority. Without question, this mandate is the most unconstitutional law passed by Congress perhaps ever.
I mean, if guns and rape, both affirmative activities, are not considered interstate commerce by the SC, then there’s no way in hell that the total lack of any activity by an individual can be considered interstate commerce.
I know you all want this law to stand because you think it’s a good, beneficial law, regardless of how unconstitutional it is (but mostly because you just support whatever your progressive overlords want). But if you don’t stand up for adherence to the constitution all the time consistently, then rights you hold dear might be the next to be attacked.
How will you feel when the govt passes a law forcing you to spend a percentage of your monthly income on health foods, gym memberships, and vitamins? Same idea applies – by not buying those things, you are causing increased health care costs which affect everyone, so therefore you are affecting interstate commerce and should be forced to buy that stuff.
It’s the same thing, and if you would put aside your blind loyalty to the party, you’d see that it’s all unconstitutional.
Why is it so hard to support what’s right regardless of the party that’s involved?? It’s not like these politicians give a shit about you anyway. They aren’t family. They are a bunch of corrupt, scummy, power-whores who would sell you out without blinking an eye. So why the blind, dumb loyalty to them to the detriment of the constitution and rule of law?
It’s either cowardice, dishonesty, idiocy, or a combination thereof.
That’s why this blog is so pathetic, although I find it very entertaining, and it’s fun to be the only one posting a reasonable thought on here and standing out as the only voice of reason among a sea of useful idiots.
gene108
@Southern Beale:
I go with Reagan on the $50 bill. The Southerners in the Republican Party would love to “stick it” to the general, who won the Civil War.
Baud
@Davis X. Machina:
And why is Obama always pulling his punches? It’s like he wants to lose so he can go to work for his Wall Street buddies.
celticdragonchick
caz haz a sad.
You will find it easier to communicate with other people here when you get your case of cranial rectosis treated.
Tonal Crow
@Davis X. Machina: My bet is that the Court will uphold the ACA 7-2 under the tax-and-spend clause (Art.I s.8 cl.1) as a conditional tax credit.
The dissent (Thomas & Alito) will hold that the ACA iolates the Commerce Clause, and also hold that it violates the tax-and-spend clause because Hamilton argued that the tax-and-spend power (though phrased in terms of “the general welfare”) was limited to fulfilling the goals outlined in the other enumerated powers of Congress.
Also too Thomas will argue some substantive due process negative right, while elsewhere blasting the entire concept of substantive due process as leading to “evils” like Roe.
Republicans have become fully self-satirizing.
gene108
@Caz:
Do you know anyone, who has never gone to the doctor?
I mean from birth till the current date.
You can’t avoid participating in the healthcare system. You just can’t, therefore there is no inactivity.
The only question is who pays for it, because healthcare can get very expensive very fast and be beyond the means of most people to pay for, without a third party paying for medical care.
Baud
@Tonal Crow:
I, for no reason whatsoever, am also starting to believe that the Tax and Spend Clause will be the way out for the court if they uphold the ACA.
Bobby Thomson
Meh. Klein takes an awful lot of words to say that Republicans “legitimized” opposition to the ACA by opposing it lockstep.
I don’t think that’s true as a normative or empirical statement.
More importantly, it assumes that the hacks on the Supreme Court care about legitimacy. That’s an assumption that I don’t think holds water. And if someone is proceeding from that assumption I tend to ignore whatever else they have to say about the Supreme Court.
I don’t know that I hate Klein. He just doesn’t seem very useful, especially when he’s writing outside of his comfort zone.
Tonal Crow
@Caz: You don’t need to consider the Commerce Clause. The ACA is constitutional under the tax-and-spend Clause (Art.I s.8 cl.1).
In substance (though not in phrasing), the mandate is a conditional tax credit just like the child tax credit.
Everyone is liable for the penalty, which is waived if you have eligible health insurance. This is just like everyone being liable for the tax on their taxable income, some of which is waived if you have an eligible dependent child.
wrb
@gene108:
I believe that this is it.
A Romney presidency could result in far more radical changes to this country than many liberals imagine possible.
J. Michael Neal
@Valdivia: If you’re reduced to arguing that we should blame a writer for readers making egregious misrepresentations of what he says, then you need to rethink. And, yes, those misinterpretations were egregious. What Klein meant was perfectly evident to anyone who read the piece thoroughly and honestly. He spelled out those assumptions. He spent two paragraphs (and, again, this is the original piece, not just the follow up) making it clear that he was talking specifically about a scenario in which Republicans controlled both houses of Congress and not just the White House. He spends another paragraph laying out that he is comparing this to a scenario in which the Republicans control at least the House after Obama wins re-election.
It isn’t his job to hold your fucking head and rub your nose in it. At least, it shouldn’t be. If you’re going to insist that every liberal blogger write so clearly and precisely that no one can misinterpret what they say, then there won’t be any of them. Ezra took every reasonable precaution in laying out his piece.
Nick
This ties quite well into the whole “reality-based community” quote where Rove (allegedly?) says, “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality…”
C-R-A-Z-Y
Sentient Puddle
@Valdivia:
I don’t believe the problem was that everybody read it wrong so much as it was that a few people lazily read it, cherry-picked some out-of-context point, then whined about it to the rest of the blogosphere, thus leaving everyone else with the impression that he said something he didn’t. And at that point, they didn’t bother reading the rest of the piece because, hey, why bother? So no, I disagree with your assessment.
Also, when you try to prove that something is bad writing by saying “I was too lazy to read it,” that really should throw up a red flag in your head.
Jebediah
@NR:
Ever heard of blue dogs?
Listen dickleak, you know damn well what was passed was all that was going to get through that Congress. You want better? Get out there and get more progressive representatives and senators elected.
What Have The Romans Ever Done for Us? (formerly MarkJ)
What’s worrisome is that they’re going to do this with the next debt ceiling debate. Last time around Boehner and a few other main line Republicans didn’t quite get the message at the outset. The noise Boehner’s been making this time ’round is full on wingnut, let’s destroy the full faith and credit of the US and see what happens.
I guess they’ve been doing it with everything since Obama took office. I just wish the American people would stop awarding hissy fits and temper tantrums every off-year election.
Valdivia
@Sentient Puddle:
I actually read it and thought it was the ‘this is interesting I am just going to run a thought experiment but I am not endorsing it, too cute’ kind of post. I wasn’t defending myself from not reading it. I was making the point that every site on the known universe from right wing talking points promoters to progressive ones (TPM for example) lead with it for a couple of days as the new CW of Washington DC that Romney would be better for the economy, in the tone of Even Liberal Blogger Ezra Klein says.
There is a reason why Ezra had to post an explanation. Not because I was lazy but because the whole Village just interpreted him as saying something he may not have said because his point was too subtle for the Village brains and too clever by half for someone who reads him every day.
Yutsano
@Caz:
While riding double with Jeebus on a dinosaur? Since we’re discussing things likely to happen.
Valdivia
@J. Michael Neal:
I just answered above–but I should add it isn’t me who needs hand holding and rubbing my nose in it, apparently it is every liberal blogger in the universe who read the piece, not honestly apparently, and misread him.
To me the problem with the piece was to take the talking point of the day in Village parlors and give it credence in a thought experiment full of caveats that was read by the Village not as something serious but a confirmation that Romney would be better even in liberal terms. The fact that his piece created that debate was not because I read him the wrong way, but because the piece left that impression on the whole gliteratti of politics.
NR
@Jebediah:
Bullshit. What got through Congress was exactly what the leadership wanted to get through Congress. See: The secret backroom deals that were cut to kill the public option and drug reimportation.
The fix was in from the beginning.
Misterpuff
Ezra basically did this whole article for the first half of the Rachel Maddow Show he hosted on Friday. Totally laid out the 180 the Repugs have done, which we all know, but some viewers may have not connected the dots on….and obviously The Village residents haven’t up to this point.
Misterpuff
Ezra basically did this whole article for the first half of the Rachel Maddow Show he hosted on Friday. Totally laid out the 180 the Repugs have done, which we all know, but some viewers may have not connected the dots on….and obviously The Village residents haven’t up to this point.
J. Michael Neal
@Valdivia: If we are all required to reduce our writing to the level that no one is going to misinterpret it, it’s time to give up. That TPM is too immature to avoid idiot hatchet jobs is not news; they do it all the time and no amount of hand holding is going to stop them. As I said, he laid out his premises over multiple paragraphs. If that’s insufficient, then too bad.
Mnemosyne
@Caz:
So, to be clear, you were born at home without a nurse, midwife, or doctor in attendance; you never saw a single doctor throughout your entire childhood, adolescence, or adulthood; you have never received a single vaccination in your entire life; and you have always lived in the same state from the day of your birth until present day, right?
If not, congratulations. You have participated in the interstate healthcare system and need to STFU about your “inactivity.”
Mnemosyne
Also, too, if healthcare doesn’t meet the barrier for interstate commerce and cannot be regulated by the federal government, don’t we have to close down the National Institutes of Health immediately? After all, they engage in all kinds of interstate commerce and regulation by deciding which drugs and medical devices can be legally sold in the US.
But, hey, in caz’s world, the individual states have unlimited resources to do all of the clinical trials on drugs and medical devices, so we can just dissolve the NIH and CDC and let the states do it themselves, right?
Mike Lamb
@Caz: It’s amazing that after so many years, the GOP and folks like yourself only just realized that the policy they supported is unconstitutional.
Here’s a question: Is it unconstitutional for the federal gov’t to require emergency rooms to treat people regardless of ability to pay?
CaliCat
I thought the stage was set when conservatives appointed hacks to the SC who do their bidding no questions asked.
El Cid
So, there’s nothing in the Constitution which gives the Supreme Court the authority to declare what laws may and may not be Constitutional, and instead they awarded that authority to themselves, but extending the Commerce Clause’ application is just way too un-Constitutional.
Keith G
@David Koch:
Please work on providing a list of such progressive betters. I am sure one or two exist. Hell there probably are a few folks who will support any hair brained notion, but I have yet to come across anyone of importance advocating a “stay at home” position.
Michael57
Every wingnut has a “tell.” In Caz’s case, it’s “if and when Republicans ever come up with an idea like the mandate.” I mean, duh, that’s the point: it was their idea.
His other “tell” is a kind of hysterical arrogance. Lots of them have that.
Tonal Crow
@Keith G: Don’t feed trolls. It makes them grow and grow until they explode — and then another troll grows from each piece..
Keith G
Funny, some of the typists here peddle it.
Klein works out a position. A less than serious blogger type finds fault with a sentence or two and pounces. The blogger type’s doppelgangers join in as a new outrage is proclaimed. Names are called as logic beats a hasty retreat. Then the sun sets on another day at the Juice.
Jack the Second
@Alex S.:
Democrats are corrupt individually. They’re on the take, they’re trying to cover up an affair. Whatever.
Republicans have a _cause_, or at least the mentality of having one, which might be even worse. As an individual, you can only be so wicked, because you still have to look yourself in the mirror each day. Once you have a cause, however, there is no limit to the evil you can do and still sleep soundly at night, because you did it all for the greater good.
Republicans will do anything, cross any line, burn it all to the ground, because they have a cause.
JackHughes
Look, this is just further proof that the “Republican Party” isn’t a political party any more. It’s just a massive, self-sustaining, propaganda machine.
Money goes in one end and propaganda comes out the other, which generates more money, and so on.
Other than for cutting taxes on the rich, Republicans don’t even do “policy” any more. It takes up too much time from their pandering.
SiubhanDuinne
@Baud:
Excellent. Please, sir, may we have some moar?