Most folks – the majority of folks – like guarantee issue, community rating, no rescission, Rule 26, caps on insurance co. profits, etc, etc.
Free benefits are always popular. Whether they're popular enough to pay for is something else.
Healthcare reform has often been a story of the Dems (or the public) wanting Universal Coverage (or in this case, to expand coverage) but flinching away from how much it'd cost.
Calling it "simplistic rejection" ignores that dynamic.
In the case of the GOP’s blanket opposition it was rather easy to organize since the party’s naked immediate interests and political welfare were both aligned so it didn’t take a lot of work.
True, but this deserves a lot more detail. If Obamacare was in the country's best interest, why was opposing it popular?
Obama was amazing popular and respected while the GOP weren't. The obvious move for Obama was for him to explain to the American people how this Bill was in their interest and have them put pressure on the GOP until they caved. Reagan was a master of this, others could make it work.
So Obama explained... that you could keep your doctor (the lie of the year), and costs would go down, etc. Lots of people recognized that these were lies and decided that Obamacare wasn't in their best interests. That the Bill was thousands of pages long (and thus unreadable) didn't help, nor did the fact that most Congressmen didn't understand what was in it (meaning the public couldn't).
The ACA was basically the GOP’s final offer from the previous time health care reform had been debated.
And yet no Dem, no matter how far to the left, voted against it because it was too far to the right. And with a super majority it'd be very odd behavior to write a right-leaning bill. The way it was presented at the time was the left negotiated with the far left in terms of what they'd do.
Obama offered the entire farm on the sequester negotiations and the only reason the GOP didn’t get it is they were so gone into rejectionism that they couldn’t countenance trading tax increases for spending cuts on a ten to one basis in their favor.
Was this when they were using 10 year accounting with the offered spending cuts happening in years 9 and 10 (i.e. after Obama left office)?
...then there’s no way they’re going to be able to pass that buck onto the liberals.
I think that's a reasonable statement, but given how many times the GOP has been wrong about who the voters will blame, I don't think a serious miscalculation on their part is unlikely.
Rather than think the GOP is stunningly competent in spite of all the evidence, I'd rather believe that they're every bit as disorganized, short sighted, and selfish as their actions suggest. They're JV High School, not Pro. Most of them would sell out their "principles" for a loose dollar. All of them are for whatever will get them elected.
Which means keeping them unified and opposed needed huge amounts of "help" from Obama himself. When the Grandmaster Chess player loses, repeatedly, to some High School Schmuck it's worth checking out his record, and if that record doesn't actually have a noted history of success, then why am I supposed to think he's a Grandmaster?
I think it's more like "how do we *make* these people do this".
Even assuming Trump EC delegates were picked for loyalty to the GOP and not loyalty to Trump (which btw I don't think is correct), Trump has been on a massive "sanity" show recently.
...the idea that the GOP’s hissy fit during the end stages of the ACA constituted the ACA being deeply unpopular doesn’t pass the laugh test.
The GOP's "base" wasn't the group that took Ted Kennedy's seat from the Dems and handed it to the GOP, for the express and specific purpose of blocking Obamacare. Similarly Obamacare got every Blue dog dem thrown out of office.
He passed the ACA and ran again- he won again.
Which was fine for him, less fine for everyone else who needed to run on voting for it. Lesson to be learned here is big changes/programs are big political risks if they only have narrow majorities.
Obamacare was passed with the political gamble that it'd be popular no matter how unpopular it was. Obamacare's various promises turned out to be happy marketing talk which raised expectations higher than could be met. Healthcare costs went up, not down as promised. You couldn't keep your doctor as promised, etc.
The GOP have majorities in Congress and the Presidency. If they look back at the past eight years and think that blame will fall to the minority party without the Presidency if they repeal the ACA with nothing to replace it that’d be an… extraordinary leap to say the least.
This is the same group which repeatedly shut down the gov thinking "this time" they wouldn't be blamed.
BTW this kind of shown incompetence is one of the reasons I doubt they were super-competent when dealing with Obama in "denying" him various victories and "preventing him" from having bipartisan wins. IMHO it's a lot more likely he's just not good at this sort of thing (probably deal making here, although coalition building and reaching out to the other side also are part of it).
A really thin resume should be read for what's not on it as well as what is. Keeping politicians unified and preventing them from doing what's in their own selfish interest is like herding cats.... and the Minority head of the House/Senate have a lot less power than a Popular President with sky high approval ratings.
Well written, and very believable... but I heard really similar statements on why Trump couldn't win the Primary, and again on why he couldn't win the election (heck, I made them myself and believed them at the time).
Now I think Trump is a lot better at this than we thought, that the media under counts him significantly, and with different rules he would have played his cards differently. He'd have told different lies, picked different outrageous fights, shown himself to be a total ass**** in different ways...
...and in this alternate universe, we'd be talking about how under EC rules he wouldn't have won.
At that point, the definition of “the left” reduces to “anyone the right disagrees with”. And then we’re back to playing a game which literally could, as I said, go on all day.
Race riots enflamed by BLM's lies (Mike Brown didn't have his hands up).
Union violence (the worst incident in living memory would be burning down a hotel's worth of people because they crossed picket lines, but less extreme happens whenever someone seriously tries right to work).
And right now members of the Electoral College are getting death threats because the left doesn't like Trump and is looking for ways to get the EC to move against him.
This isn't "anyone the right disagrees with", this is "pretty mainstream left".
Dark Matter: Are you claiming Obamacare was popular when he passed it and that the Dems didn’t pay a political cost for supporting it?
North: Certainly not. Are you claiming that Obama and his Party didn’t campaign on reforming healthcare in 2008?
Your 2nd statement doesn't pass the "so what?" question.
The Dems knew Obamacare was deeply unpopular and passed it anyway. We live in a democracy, the people's response was to punish the Dems and reward the GOP.
At that point they can either try to repeal the ACA without anything to replace it and see how much the electorate likes that...
We'll see. They could just repeal it and then "negotiate" with the Dems on what to replace it and gamble that the voters blame the Dems for any problems.
or they can do what the GOP should have done in 2009 and add their own policies to the mix in exchange for their votes and then support it.
The reported price for adding their own policies to the mix was supporting single payer.
With the Trump win what exactly does the GOP have now?
Depends on what Trump does, rather than what he says. If he tries to implement White Power (which I assume he won't), then he'll go down in flames and the GOP will suffer.
Someone on this board described the GOP as a selection of people who care about Guns! Moats! God! & Money!
He ran on the first three, but it's easy to picture him as a Money! guy.
If Trump takes the Presidency seriously and devotes himself to Money! (i.e. economic growth) and good governance, then that's enough to build a party on even if Trump himself has serious personality problems.
Troublesome Frog: Why would that phenomenon be unique enough to Republicans that it would bias the results?
Every state votes for President, but a third of the Senate isn't up for election at all that cycle. The House often is Germandered enough so that it's only the Primary that's interesting.
None of this is "unique" to the GOP, but California is enough to move the needle and California (from the GOP's standpoint) was the odd duck out this cycle because there was nothing of interest for a GOP voter. The GOP vote there was sharply down from previous elections (and even in a typical election a GOP vote there wouldn't count much).
So in a different year California's GOP would have had an extra million or two voters (not 3), and with different rules we need to infer what would happen from what did happen this election in the battleground states.
Trump's people turned out in really high numbers where it mattered (HRC's did not), so make California and other states matter and I don't see why we'd think she has a cakewalk.
For Chicago? Probably... although the PV was only 1% away from a tie in 2000, and Chicago probably did (corruptly) swing the election in 1960. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_1960#Controversies
However California is in a position to wait and see how much they'd need to move the needle to move the election, and that's a pretty tempting power to abuse. I don't want to be in the business of trying to make every part of the US non-corrupt for the Presidential election when we have Bush v Gore showing even the Supremes can be moved.
Imagine a recount, not limited to just Florida or some backwards place, but covering all of America. Now picture Chicago magically "finding" just enough votes to swing the election.
I like the EC, but I don't see why we need people in it. Force them to vote the way they're supposed to vote and call it a day.
greginak: That trump could have won the PV is an assertion without any evidence.
He won where he wanted to win, where it was important for him to win, even in places like Michigan and various other members of the Blue Wall.
You tell me the rules, I'll tell you my actions. Telling me you could have won with different rules? That also has no evidence because everyone would have changed their actions.
This would make more sense if Trump won the popular vote. He did not. He lost it by three million people.
Meaning the GOP in California didn't turn out because both "past the post" candidates for their election were Dems and they knew there'd be no point in voting for the Presidency.
If the rules were set up to care about the popular vote, there's a good chance Trump would have still won.
Agree with all of this... but I'm not sure it matters.
The Left is going to stay in denial for a while. Worse, they're seriously not ready for Trump being much better than Obama at the nuts and bolts of the Presidency, and that's looking more and more likely.
(Or, rather, Federal money can only be spent letting them go if…)
I don't see how this is a serious impediment. Everyone with a gun on that base takes orders from Obama. As you pointed out, there are non-profits with boats and whatever. In theory you open the door and let them walk out for a budget cost of nothing.
Further, although I'm not a lawyer, I doubt the constitutionality of a law trying to prevent the President from giving the military orders, overseas, in a time of declared war, at a budget cost of nothing.
22 have been recommended for release (I.e., jumped through the hoops Congress set up, which they did back in *2010*), but have not been released because their country is too unstable.
Meaning we think they'd be killed if they go back and no one else is willing to take them.
7 have been charged with war crimes and not got to trial yet. ...there is an actual ICC we could hand them over to if they’ve actually committed war crimes, but whatever.
In any government program we should ask ourselves if the jobs it's creating are worth the cost.
It’s bad enough that dubious pardons are done at the end, but that’s just to stop political blowback.
We already have the Clinton example of pardoning unreformed terrorists for his wife's political advantage, so imho a last day adventure doesn't set new ground.
The remaining 27 are the problem. The system that Congress set up recommended that they not be released and yet they have not been charged with anything.
"Experts" have their place, but we've yet to find a really good solution for the agency problem (i.e. acting on his own interests rather than mine, be it regulatory capture or personal enrichment), and so called experts can sharply disagree.
Many of the decisions "experts" are supposed to make come down to "how should I live my life". Should my taxes increase to pay for "X"? How much growth am I willing to sacrifice for entitlements/safety/global warming/etc? These are things best left up to the political process.
Worse, the government is a massive tool, it's tempting to use it to solve the problem of the moment, but it's benefits are often overstated and it's costs hidden. Over promising and under delivering is the norm.
Democracy is a terrible system whose saving grace is all the others are worse, "rule by experts" included.
We should have handed them all back to Afghanistan the second their government had the resources to hold them.
Agreed.
Yes, some of the people Pakistan hands to us are, indeed, terrorists….and other people are just people Pakistan does not like.
And we've had years to filter out which is which. Your rhetoric leads towards just closing the camp and letting everyone go. We have heard this sort of thing from the left in general and Obama specifically. But there's a disconnect between the reality that rhetoric assumes and the reality that Obama's actions describe.
Obama made closing the camp a high priority. Congress stopped him from dumping all of them into the US prison system, but he's got lots of other alternatives. He can pardon, he could just let people go by finding they're falsely accused innocents, probably he could just let them go by declaring the war is over, etc.
And with all of that, while he did let some go, there's a lot Obama hasn't released and doesn't want to let out. Presumably he's unwilling to release POWs during an active war.
It's possible Obama will prove me wrong in the next few weeks. He'll be no longer beholden to political blowback so he could show he really does believe his own rhetoric just before he steps down. If he really thinks these men are innocent and only in there because of mistakes, malice, and US-red-tap, then he SHOULD do this.
Perhaps. Whatever the details we're looking at some flavor of the Streisand effect here, one assumes the opposite of what the court intended.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect
Wilders appears to have benefitted from the trial. His Party for Freedom, known by the Dutch acronym PVV, currently leads in polls ahead of a general election in March, thanks in part to a surge in support during his trial.
:Sigh: Yes, any publicity is good, and any public attempt by "the man" to shut you down lets you capture the protest vote.
Upon landing, Dasch and Burger turned themselves in to the Federal Bureau of Investigation with some difficulty, since the FBI did not believe them immediately. They convinced the FBI that they were telling the truth and the remaining six were taken into custody in New York and Chicago, Illinois by FBI agents. The FBI had no leads until Dasch gave his exaggerated and romanticized version in Washington, D.C.
... On August 3, 1942, two days after the trial ended, all eight were found guilty and sentenced to death. Roosevelt later commuted the death sentence of Dasch to 30 years in prison and the sentence of Burger to life in prison, as they had both confessed and assisted in capturing the others.
Relying on cells to turn themselves in (knowing that we'd then sentence them to death), seems problematic.
The problem is that our approach to the War on Terror made certain aspects of dealing with unlawful enemy combatants tricky to say the least.
Agreed. The actual solutions on the table are "blow them up before they have access to lawyers", or "lock them up as POWs forever, with or without charges".
I'm not sure what other alternatives we've got.
I suppose we could capture and release, but politicians don't want to take responsibility for the people who'd be later killed by a released terrorist.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “The Electoral College Option”
Free benefits are always popular. Whether they're popular enough to pay for is something else.
Healthcare reform has often been a story of the Dems (or the public) wanting Universal Coverage (or in this case, to expand coverage) but flinching away from how much it'd cost.
Calling it "simplistic rejection" ignores that dynamic.
"
Then why did Obama have to go out and give the lie of the year (among others) to get it to pass?
"
True, but this deserves a lot more detail. If Obamacare was in the country's best interest, why was opposing it popular?
Obama was amazing popular and respected while the GOP weren't. The obvious move for Obama was for him to explain to the American people how this Bill was in their interest and have them put pressure on the GOP until they caved. Reagan was a master of this, others could make it work.
So Obama explained... that you could keep your doctor (the lie of the year), and costs would go down, etc. Lots of people recognized that these were lies and decided that Obamacare wasn't in their best interests. That the Bill was thousands of pages long (and thus unreadable) didn't help, nor did the fact that most Congressmen didn't understand what was in it (meaning the public couldn't).
And yet no Dem, no matter how far to the left, voted against it because it was too far to the right. And with a super majority it'd be very odd behavior to write a right-leaning bill. The way it was presented at the time was the left negotiated with the far left in terms of what they'd do.
Was this when they were using 10 year accounting with the offered spending cuts happening in years 9 and 10 (i.e. after Obama left office)?
I think that's a reasonable statement, but given how many times the GOP has been wrong about who the voters will blame, I don't think a serious miscalculation on their part is unlikely.
Rather than think the GOP is stunningly competent in spite of all the evidence, I'd rather believe that they're every bit as disorganized, short sighted, and selfish as their actions suggest. They're JV High School, not Pro. Most of them would sell out their "principles" for a loose dollar. All of them are for whatever will get them elected.
Which means keeping them unified and opposed needed huge amounts of "help" from Obama himself. When the Grandmaster Chess player loses, repeatedly, to some High School Schmuck it's worth checking out his record, and if that record doesn't actually have a noted history of success, then why am I supposed to think he's a Grandmaster?
"
I think it's more like "how do we *make* these people do this".
Even assuming Trump EC delegates were picked for loyalty to the GOP and not loyalty to Trump (which btw I don't think is correct), Trump has been on a massive "sanity" show recently.
"
The GOP's "base" wasn't the group that took Ted Kennedy's seat from the Dems and handed it to the GOP, for the express and specific purpose of blocking Obamacare. Similarly Obamacare got every Blue dog dem thrown out of office.
Which was fine for him, less fine for everyone else who needed to run on voting for it. Lesson to be learned here is big changes/programs are big political risks if they only have narrow majorities.
Obamacare was passed with the political gamble that it'd be popular no matter how unpopular it was. Obamacare's various promises turned out to be happy marketing talk which raised expectations higher than could be met. Healthcare costs went up, not down as promised. You couldn't keep your doctor as promised, etc.
This is the same group which repeatedly shut down the gov thinking "this time" they wouldn't be blamed.
BTW this kind of shown incompetence is one of the reasons I doubt they were super-competent when dealing with Obama in "denying" him various victories and "preventing him" from having bipartisan wins. IMHO it's a lot more likely he's just not good at this sort of thing (probably deal making here, although coalition building and reaching out to the other side also are part of it).
A really thin resume should be read for what's not on it as well as what is. Keeping politicians unified and preventing them from doing what's in their own selfish interest is like herding cats.... and the Minority head of the House/Senate have a lot less power than a Popular President with sky high approval ratings.
"
Well written, and very believable... but I heard really similar statements on why Trump couldn't win the Primary, and again on why he couldn't win the election (heck, I made them myself and believed them at the time).
Now I think Trump is a lot better at this than we thought, that the media under counts him significantly, and with different rules he would have played his cards differently. He'd have told different lies, picked different outrageous fights, shown himself to be a total ass**** in different ways...
...and in this alternate universe, we'd be talking about how under EC rules he wouldn't have won.
"
Race riots enflamed by BLM's lies (Mike Brown didn't have his hands up).
Union violence (the worst incident in living memory would be burning down a hotel's worth of people because they crossed picket lines, but less extreme happens whenever someone seriously tries right to work).
And right now members of the Electoral College are getting death threats because the left doesn't like Trump and is looking for ways to get the EC to move against him.
This isn't "anyone the right disagrees with", this is "pretty mainstream left".
"
Your 2nd statement doesn't pass the "so what?" question.
The Dems knew Obamacare was deeply unpopular and passed it anyway. We live in a democracy, the people's response was to punish the Dems and reward the GOP.
We'll see. They could just repeal it and then "negotiate" with the Dems on what to replace it and gamble that the voters blame the Dems for any problems.
The reported price for adding their own policies to the mix was supporting single payer.
"
If you need to point to events which happened 50+ years ago, it's an indication of the weakness of your argument, not its strength.
If my city (or even "a city") burns, the way to bet is it will be because some group of the left doesn't like something.
"
Are you claiming Obamacare was popular when he passed it and that the Dems didn't pay a political cost for supporting it?
"
From his picks, he seems to be taking his "gov is a problem, lower its burden" talk seriously. There's certainly a lot of low hanging fruit.
I'm starting to get hopeful.
"
Depends on what Trump does, rather than what he says. If he tries to implement White Power (which I assume he won't), then he'll go down in flames and the GOP will suffer.
Someone on this board described the GOP as a selection of people who care about Guns! Moats! God! & Money!
He ran on the first three, but it's easy to picture him as a Money! guy.
If Trump takes the Presidency seriously and devotes himself to Money! (i.e. economic growth) and good governance, then that's enough to build a party on even if Trump himself has serious personality problems.
"
Every state votes for President, but a third of the Senate isn't up for election at all that cycle. The House often is Germandered enough so that it's only the Primary that's interesting.
None of this is "unique" to the GOP, but California is enough to move the needle and California (from the GOP's standpoint) was the odd duck out this cycle because there was nothing of interest for a GOP voter. The GOP vote there was sharply down from previous elections (and even in a typical election a GOP vote there wouldn't count much).
So in a different year California's GOP would have had an extra million or two voters (not 3), and with different rules we need to infer what would happen from what did happen this election in the battleground states.
Trump's people turned out in really high numbers where it mattered (HRC's did not), so make California and other states matter and I don't see why we'd think she has a cakewalk.
"
For Chicago? Probably... although the PV was only 1% away from a tie in 2000, and Chicago probably did (corruptly) swing the election in 1960. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_1960#Controversies
However California is in a position to wait and see how much they'd need to move the needle to move the election, and that's a pretty tempting power to abuse. I don't want to be in the business of trying to make every part of the US non-corrupt for the Presidential election when we have Bush v Gore showing even the Supremes can be moved.
"
The potential downside of that is pretty extreme.
Imagine a recount, not limited to just Florida or some backwards place, but covering all of America. Now picture Chicago magically "finding" just enough votes to swing the election.
I like the EC, but I don't see why we need people in it. Force them to vote the way they're supposed to vote and call it a day.
"
He won where he wanted to win, where it was important for him to win, even in places like Michigan and various other members of the Blue Wall.
You tell me the rules, I'll tell you my actions. Telling me you could have won with different rules? That also has no evidence because everyone would have changed their actions.
"
Meaning the GOP in California didn't turn out because both "past the post" candidates for their election were Dems and they knew there'd be no point in voting for the Presidency.
If the rules were set up to care about the popular vote, there's a good chance Trump would have still won.
"
Agree with all of this... but I'm not sure it matters.
The Left is going to stay in denial for a while. Worse, they're seriously not ready for Trump being much better than Obama at the nuts and bolts of the Presidency, and that's looking more and more likely.
On “Sebastian Mallaby: The cult of the expert – and how it collapsed”
Well put.
On “Confession of a Liberal Gun Owner”
I don't see how this is a serious impediment. Everyone with a gun on that base takes orders from Obama. As you pointed out, there are non-profits with boats and whatever. In theory you open the door and let them walk out for a budget cost of nothing.
Further, although I'm not a lawyer, I doubt the constitutionality of a law trying to prevent the President from giving the military orders, overseas, in a time of declared war, at a budget cost of nothing.
Meaning we think they'd be killed if they go back and no one else is willing to take them.
In any government program we should ask ourselves if the jobs it's creating are worth the cost.
We already have the Clinton example of pardoning unreformed terrorists for his wife's political advantage, so imho a last day adventure doesn't set new ground.
They're POWs, we should be facing that reality.
On “Sebastian Mallaby: The cult of the expert – and how it collapsed”
"Experts" have their place, but we've yet to find a really good solution for the agency problem (i.e. acting on his own interests rather than mine, be it regulatory capture or personal enrichment), and so called experts can sharply disagree.
Many of the decisions "experts" are supposed to make come down to "how should I live my life". Should my taxes increase to pay for "X"? How much growth am I willing to sacrifice for entitlements/safety/global warming/etc? These are things best left up to the political process.
Worse, the government is a massive tool, it's tempting to use it to solve the problem of the moment, but it's benefits are often overstated and it's costs hidden. Over promising and under delivering is the norm.
Democracy is a terrible system whose saving grace is all the others are worse, "rule by experts" included.
On “Confession of a Liberal Gun Owner”
Agreed.
And we've had years to filter out which is which. Your rhetoric leads towards just closing the camp and letting everyone go. We have heard this sort of thing from the left in general and Obama specifically. But there's a disconnect between the reality that rhetoric assumes and the reality that Obama's actions describe.
Obama made closing the camp a high priority. Congress stopped him from dumping all of them into the US prison system, but he's got lots of other alternatives. He can pardon, he could just let people go by finding they're falsely accused innocents, probably he could just let them go by declaring the war is over, etc.
And with all of that, while he did let some go, there's a lot Obama hasn't released and doesn't want to let out. Presumably he's unwilling to release POWs during an active war.
It's possible Obama will prove me wrong in the next few weeks. He'll be no longer beholden to political blowback so he could show he really does believe his own rhetoric just before he steps down. If he really thinks these men are innocent and only in there because of mistakes, malice, and US-red-tap, then he SHOULD do this.
On “The Intercept: Conviction for Racist Speech Could Help Make Geert Wilders Dutch Prime Minister”
Perhaps. Whatever the details we're looking at some flavor of the Streisand effect here, one assumes the opposite of what the court intended.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect
"
:Sigh: Yes, any publicity is good, and any public attempt by "the man" to shut you down lets you capture the protest vote.
On “Confession of a Liberal Gun Owner”
Upon landing, Dasch and Burger turned themselves in to the Federal Bureau of Investigation with some difficulty, since the FBI did not believe them immediately. They convinced the FBI that they were telling the truth and the remaining six were taken into custody in New York and Chicago, Illinois by FBI agents. The FBI had no leads until Dasch gave his exaggerated and romanticized version in Washington, D.C.
... On August 3, 1942, two days after the trial ended, all eight were found guilty and sentenced to death. Roosevelt later commuted the death sentence of Dasch to 30 years in prison and the sentence of Burger to life in prison, as they had both confessed and assisted in capturing the others.
Relying on cells to turn themselves in (knowing that we'd then sentence them to death), seems problematic.
Agreed. The actual solutions on the table are "blow them up before they have access to lawyers", or "lock them up as POWs forever, with or without charges".
I'm not sure what other alternatives we've got.
I suppose we could capture and release, but politicians don't want to take responsibility for the people who'd be later killed by a released terrorist.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.