The Great Debate

So the Supreme Court has upheld most of the Affordable Care Act as constitutional. As someone who supports universal healthcare, who has lived most of his life in the UK, which has an admirable national health service, and who believes affordable healthcare for all is the mark of a civilized nation, I say it’s too bad. It is a wretched piece of legislation: complex, expensive, incomprehensible – do you know anyone, even a health expert, who can tell you what it means in a single sentence – easy for the unscrupulous to manipulate, unpopular, and politically catastrophic for the president.

All credit to Barack Obama for at least getting universal healthcare on the statutes, something that has eluded presidents of both stripes for a century. It is a shaming fact that 50 million Americans have to either burden themselves with debt or throw themselves on the mercy of emergency rooms when they get sick. Some may be libertarians, others so rich they don’t have to worry about paying out a fortune when they fall ill. But they are in a minority.

Most are ordinary folks, those who don’t enjoy the canopy of care provided through employers, oblivious young people who imagine they’re immortal, or those without work or who simply can’t afford exorbitant premiums. These are the mothers with blubbing young children you meet in any emergency room at any time of day or night, throwing themselves and their offspring on the mercy of hospital staff. They are not making some principled stand about keeping government at bay. They are the sort of people – poor people, or people on modest incomes — you might imagine a Democratic president would strain to serve.

At first it seemed Obama would do the right thing. Long an advocate of a public option, he said in 2003: “I happen to be a proponent of a single-payer health care program. I see no reason why … the wealthiest country in the history of the world … cannot provide basic health insurance to everybody … a single-payer health care plan, a universal health care plan. And that’s what I would like to see.”

In the primary debates in 2008 he dissed Hillary Clinton for proposing a mandate that would drive everyone into the arms of insurance companies. Back then he thought such a plan unconscionable. “The insurance companies don’t mind making sure that everybody has to purchase their product,” he scoffed. Yet that is what his Affordable Care Act entails, a mandate the Supreme Court has now approved.

Whatever happened to George W. Bush? While 88-year-old George H.W. Bush still goes skydiving and chats about Justin Bieber with his granddaughter Jemma, the faux Texan who brought us two wars, waterboarding, an economic meltdown and record public borrowing is strangely missing. Just as well, you might think. What could he possibly say?

But George W. is a key witness in the trial of Barack Obama. Under attack from Mitt Romney for presiding over a stagnant economy, Obama blames his plight on the gaping hole in the country’s finances left by his predecessor. “Huge reckless bets were made with other people’s money,” Obama told an audience in Cleveland, this month. “And too many, from Wall Street to Washington, simply looked the other way.” Then, “in the fall of 2008 it all came tumbling down with a financial crisis that plunged the world into the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.”

Obama has made light of his sour inheritance, joking: “Some have said I blame too many problems on my predecessor, but let’s not forget that’s a practice that was initiated by George W. Bush.” But in invoking the ghost of George W. he is deadly serious. To be left nursing the worst economy since Herbert Hoover is no laughing matter. The figures for the Bush years suggest Obama has a lot to complain about. Whether you judge it by stock market prices, or the number of Americans in poverty, or median household income, or growth in public debt, or GDP growth, or job growth, or number of Americans without health insurance, Bush passed on to Obama an economy heading South.

The political fireworks in Wisconsin, culminating in the recent unsuccessful recall election of the Republican governor, Scott Walker, have a lot of people saying good riddance to public-sector unions. Last year, Walker and the Wisconsin state legislature enacted Wisconsin Act 10, stripping most – though crucially not all – of the state’s public unions of their most fundamental powers, including collective bargaining and the ability to deduct dues from workers’ paychecks. Many observers – and not only Republicans – have signaled their approval, arguing that public unions – representing teachers, bus drivers, healthcare workers – shouldn’t exist in the first place.

“Public sector unions have reached their high water mark,” a Forbes columnist cheered last week. “Let the cleanup begin as the red ink recedes.”

It turns out, however, that killing off public-sector unions is a lot harder than most people imagine. And, curiously, the reason is related to recent court decisions about gay marriage. Late last month, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit ruled that the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act is unconstitutional and cannot be enforced. The principle is equal protection under the law: If you allow same-sex couples to marry – as eight states and the District of Columbia now do – you can’t economically discriminate against them (by denying the ability to file joint tax returns or withholding Social Security benefits) simply because they are not heterosexual.

The brewing controversy over leaks of classified information presumes that disclosures of classified information to unauthorized persons are always impermissible and undesirable. But that presumption does not correspond precisely to the reality of government operations as they are conducted in practice.

The leaders of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees said last week that they would work “to ensure that criminal and administrative measures are taken each time sensitive information is improperly disclosed.”

In fact, however, classified information is frequently disclosed at the interface between national security agencies and the news media. This is not necessarily a surreptitious or underhanded process. Rather, though it is not often discussed, it is how the system normally functions.

If the U.S. Supreme Court decides later this month that President Obama’s healthcare plan is unconstitutional, most Republicans will be rejoicing. But none more so than Mitt Romney, who has made revoking the Affordable Care Act a principal plank of his platform. The Court will have saved him from having to explain an embarrassing batch of recently discovered confidential emails from the time he was governor of Massachusetts.

What opponents of the law that mandates every American buy private health insurance call “Obamacare” should more properly be called “Romneycare,” as the scheme Romney introduced in Massachusetts in 2006 is nearly identical to the one Obama introduced in 2010. Indeed, Romney’s plan is still in place and working well, and there is no groundswell in Massachusetts to abandon it. The president’s people, when drawing up their healthcare scheme, drew heavily on Romney’s experience. The fact that Senator Edward Kennedy approved of Romneycare and even agreed to be photographed with the governor when it passed into law gave the Obama camp an added incentive to follow in Romney’s footsteps.

To add to the ideological confusion surrounding Obama’s plan, Romney’s health scheme was inspired by Stuart M. Butler of the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank. In the 1989 Heritage document “A National Health System for America,” Butler proposed that “every resident of the U.S. must, by law, be enrolled in an adequate health care plan to cover major health care costs.”

As America’s national leaders get ready to tackle the country’s serious challenges, they will need solid information on which to base their decisions.

Unfortunately, with its recent vote to defund the American Community Survey, the U.S. House of Representatives has undercut the most dependable source of information they should be relying upon.

The House voted to cut all funding for the Census Bureau’s annual collection of data on the economic, demographic and housing characteristics of U.S. households. Backers of the plan called the annual survey of 3 million random households “unconstitutional” and “an invasion of privacy” and balked at the relatively modest price tag of $2.4 billion a decade. This action, along with a current move in the Senate to enact “compromise” legislation that would make the American Community Survey (ACS) voluntary, works against laudable efforts by Congress to eliminate ineffective programs and curtail government waste.

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“I wish I could tell you that the world is a safe place today. It’s not.” With these words, delivered at a Memorial Day commemoration last Monday in San Diego, Mitt Romney perpetuated what is perhaps the greatest single myth in American foreign policy – that we live in a world of lurking danger and rising threats.

Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, the world today is safer than at any point in human history. Wars of all kind, including civil wars, are on the decline; and inter-state war, in particular, is even rarer. According to the Uppsala University Conflict Database, in 1992, there were 53 armed conflicts raging in 39 countries around the world; in 2010, there were 30 armed conflicts in 25 countries.

And when wars do occur, they are for the most part low-intensity conflicts that, on average, kill about 90 percent fewer people than did violent struggles in the 1950s, according to the Human Security Report Project at the School for International Studies at Simon Fraser University. In fact, the first 10 years of this century witnessed fewer deaths from war than any decade in the last century

Sixty years ago in London, Queen Elizabeth was crowned in succession to her father, the now famously stammering chain-smoker George VI. For most Brits the queen’s Diamond Jubilee is a chance to celebrate her reign with street parties, fireworks, concerts, and pageants along the Thames. They will be toasting the woman who has so far presided over 12 prime ministers, including perhaps the greatest of them all, Winston Churchill.

It is a mark of Elizabeth’s benign demeanor and quiet charm that she will be celebrated not only in the 54 member states of the Commonwealth, the independent nations that were Britain’s former colonies and dominions, but around the world, too. Few countries do pomp as well as the Brits, as the weddings of Prince William to Kate and Prince Charles to Diana attest. But not all Americans, when they watch the Jubilee, will  grasp the true role of the queen.

She is a constitutional monarch, which means she wields no political power. She personifies the state and opens sessions of Parliament by reading out the new legislative program her prime ministers have written, as if she herself had decided what the people need. She keeps her views strictly to herself and does as she is asked by elected officials, whether it is greeting fellow heads of state or dubbing new knights with a sword.

In the late 1970s, the cutting edge of communications technologies was the autodialer, a machine capable of calling up scores of people in one shot, with little human involvement. It was innovative, and annoying. By the early ’90s, Congress had had enough. “Computerized calls,” railed South Carolina Democrat Fritz Hollings from the Senate floor, “are the scourge of modern civilization.”

And so, Congress legislated. But the focus was on commercial calls. Mindful of the free flow of speech and – let’s be honest – interested in self-preservation, lawmakers exempted political calls from its Telecommunications Consumer Protection Act. But Congress decided that some phones were too sensitive to get even autodialed political calls: those in hospitals, those designated for emergency purposes – and those in our pockets.

But here we are, some two decades later, and voters across the country are getting political text messages they never asked for.