The Best Defense

The Washington Post has a slogan on their website that is very apt right now: “Democracy dies in darkness”. From the struggles in the House of Representatives to get the atrocity known as the American Health Care Act (AHCA) passed, Mitch McConnell might have taken the lesson that this was a terrible bill for the American people. Instead, he decided the real lesson was that the Senate version must be kept secret as long as possible in order to get it passed. Even his fellow Republicans in the Senate must not have the time to read the full bill before having to vote on it, and under no circumstances should the public have a chance to react until the bill was law. This is darkness at its finest, and democracy stolen again by the Party of voter suppression. It has meant that, in the face of severely limited news of how the new law was being shaped, press coverage has been overshadowed by other issues and developments. Democrats have decided to hope that it will be enough that the public prefers keeping Obamacare to the public efforts so far by the Republicans to repeal and replace it. It will not be enough, but there is still time to do something about it. If preserving the status quo was the best defense against Republican aggression, I would be writing now about how the presidency of Hillary Clinton looks as we approached the six month mark.

What we need instead is a way to put the subject of health care back in the forefront of public discussion. To begin with, let’s take the wind out of one of the Republicans’ favorite arguments by admitting that Obamacare has not delivered on all of its promises. But Democrats need to reframe that argument. They need to say that the Affordable Care Act was not crafted well enough to withstand Republican sabotage, and certainly not to withstand the onslaught of a united Republican government. They also need to say that prices were not controlled as well as they should have been, because Obamacare still makes the American people pay for items that have no bearing on health care outcomes: marketing costs, obscenely high CEO paychecks, and stock dividends for health insurers and big pharmaceutical companies. Democrats furthermore must coopt one of Donald Trump’s favorite promises, to deliver better healthcare that costs every American less. To make all of this news worthy, the Democrats in the Senate must introduce their own healthcare plan in the Senate, and force a very public debate on it. Let it become the standard that any Republican bill will be measured against. During the Obama presidency, it was common for Democrats to point out that the Republicans never presented an alternative plan. If only for that reason, it is essential that there be a Democratic alternate plan now.

I am talking, of course, about universal healthcare, and I have previously laid out the pitch for it here. Bernie Sanders lost the primaries to Hillary Clinton while advocating universal health care, so why should the Democrats play this risky card? First, Sanders never made the capitalist case for it, as I have done. But Sanders also fell into a trap that Hillary Clinton laid for him during the campaign. He got bogged down in the numbers, and wound up proposing large tax increases for everybody to pay for his plan. In doing so, Sanders failed to make the point that universal healthcare will be paid for in large part with moneys that are now being spent on other health care programs, including Obamacare. So the actual funds needed to get from here to there are lot less than the total price tag for universal health care as a stand alone item. It is also not enough to say that it would be less than the average American spends now on health care. The Democrats and the press must explicitly state where those savings will come from. The public resents having to pay for corporate profits out of public funds, but that resentment needs to be harnessed.

Clearly, there isn’t much time, and the Democrats will not do this on their own. Activists must coalesce around this strategy, and start pushing for it immediately. We need to find a Democratic Senator who can be persuaded to introduce a new Democratic health alternative to the Republican plan. So much the better if this starts with someone other than Bernie Sanders, because that would be more newsworthy. The goal here is to control not only the discussion in the Senate, but also the news cycle. Imagine the reaction in the media if someone like Cory Booker were to introduce this with an impassioned speech on the floor of the Senate. That’s what needs ideally to happen, in order to steal this issue from Mitch McConnell’s darkness, and bring it back into the light where it belongs.

This week’s song has everything to do with the news cycle:

Great Irresponsibility

Peter Parker’s Uncle Ben tries to teach him that, ”With great power comes great responsibility.” During Spiderman’s origin story, after Parker gains his powers and Uncle Ben dies in his arms, these words become the guiding principal that makes Spiderman a hero. But, after fifty issues, that responsibility becomes so great a burden that Peter Parker considers giving it all up, and trying to have a normal life instead. The image above is from that fiftieth issue. There is no supervillain, just a young man battling the words of his uncle, and those words finally win.

This past week, anyone who did not already know learned that Donald Trump and the Republicans in the House do not have any sense of responsibility to anyone to go with the power they wield over all of our lives. How else can you explain the passage in the House of the atrocity known as the American Health Care Act? Despite the late addition of an amendment to provide political cover for moderate Republicans, this was not a serious effort to improve health care for anyone. Instead, there was the actual goal of making savage benefit cuts in order to try to pave the way for huge permanent tax cuts for the wealthy. There was a mad rush to get the bill passed for several reasons. For Donald Trump, the fact that his first one hundred days in office passed with no major legislative victories was galling. His ego demanded the passage of something to brag about, no matter what its merits. For Paul Ryan, the bill is his greatest victory in his nearly religious crusade against the safety net. For the Republican leadership in general, two deadlines were looming that meant they had to get the votes, even if no one had so much as read the bill they were voting for. They knew the bill was doomed if the Congressional Budget Office had a chance to score the AHCA, giving precise details of how much harm it would do. And the Republican leadership also didn’t dare let their members leave on recess, and face their constituents in town halls, with the AHCA vote pending on their return. There was to be no epiphany, no chance for anyone to wake up and realize that the nation needed them to do what is right.

The greatest danger we face now is complacency. We must not assume that the ACHA will die in the Senate. We assumed that Donald Trump could not possibly win the Republican nomination, and I like so many others wrote about that. Then we assumed that he could not possibly win last November, and again, I am as guilty as anyone else, having written about how we should handle a Hillary Clinton presidency. Finally, we assumed it was time to move on to other issues, with the AHCA dead in the House without a vote in March. Now we have a last chance to prevent this atrocity from becoming law. We must pressure Senators of both parties to craft a much better, and substantially different bill. But our job does not end there. We must then make sure that the House and Senate can not reconcile the two and pass anything that even remotely resembles the AHCA. We have the majority of the American people on our side, despite the result last November. But, as Peter Parker discovered, we have a power, and with it the responsibility to use it for the greater good. Like him, we must not walk away again until the job is done.

My song choice this week may seem to have nothing to do with this post. But Luka is about what happens when someone misuses the power they have over another person. I always interpreted the song as being about a woman, but the video suggests that Luka is a child. Either way, I am calling out Trump and the House Republicans for abusive behavior towards the American people, and I stand by that:

The Art of No Deal

The AHCA, the health care monstrosity that Paul Ryan wrote and Donald Trump tried to sell to the House of Representatives, is dead. There are some delicious ironies here, but first some thanks are in order. Thank you to all of the activists who showed up at Republican town halls, and showed moderate Republicans that they risked their seats if they supported this. Thank you to everyone who wrote, called, or emailed your Representative with the same message. And thank you to the Democrats for staying united in opposition to this terrible legislation. A lot of hard work went into defeating this and saving the ACA, and it is appreciated. Next up is another round of equally hard work to defeat the nomination of Neil Gorsuch. We must draw strength from this victory, and bring it to the next fight, but we must also understand that this next battle can not be won in the same way.

It is worth looking at the dynamics of the House of Representatives that made this victory possible. Yes, the moderates let their misgivings be known, and those misgivings only grew as the bill got amended in an attempt to appease the Freedom Caucus. Irony number one here is that the only way Trump can get the House to pass a health care bill is to craft something that all of the Democrats and a handful of moderate Republicans can support. Why then did Ryan try to save this bill by tacking to the right and not the left? That is irony number two. The death of the AHCA was brought about by years of Republican gerrymandering.

The Republicans have worked long and hard to create as many safe seats as possible for Republican candidates. These are convoluted districts that look ridiculous on a map, but have all but assured a Republican majority in the House for the foreseeable future. Swing voters, who might support either a moderate Republican or a Democrat, are not welcome here. As a result, these districts don’t just reliably elect Republicans, they reliably elect Republican extremists. These districts are won not in the general election but in the Republican primary, and moderates fair poorly. In other words, they elect the Freedom Caucus. This brand of Republican is an absolutist. They believe that compromise is weakness, meaning, as we saw this week, that they are completely unable to govern. They were not interested in the replace part of repeal and replace, seeking only to eliminate Obamacare, and not replace it with anything.

We won this battle by bolstering the moderate wing of the Republican Party, giving them cover to stand up against the extremists. We won also by giving the Democrats the strength to stay united. But it was and is the dynamic created by gerrymandering that made this a viable strategy in the face of a Republican majority. It is a dynamic we will be able to use again to our advantage, but it won’t work in the Senate. There we must give the Democrats the strength to stay united in opposition to Gorsuch, but it would be best if we could also find some moderate Republicans to cross the aisle and stand with us. It will be harder to find stories to tell of how this will affect us personally, but the special education community might be a good starting point. We came to accept many extreme positions as normal when Antonin Scalia served on the Supreme Court, so we will now also be battling against legal precedents that never should have been established. I believe we can win again, but the fight will be different. The goal here is to persuade a majority of Senators that supporting Gorsuch will endanger their chances of getting reelected. That means we need to get the voters to tell pollsters they oppose this nomination. It won’t be enough to say that Gorsuch and Trump would be stealing the seat that should have gone to Merrick Garland, although that is true. Instead, we must make the case that Gorsuch would hurt people like them. I believe that we can do this, and I look forward to the fight.

Tonight’s song is a new discovery for me, but it works in its own way:

A Plan for the Democrats

The Republicans who now control the White House and both houses of Congress have a problem, and it is the job of progressives in particular, and the Democratic Party as well, if they will only accept the challenge, to make that problem worse for them. The Republican Party as now constituted is dedicated to the proposition that government can only do harm, and never do anything good. The Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, flies in the face of that proposition, which is why from the beginning the Republicans set out to sabotage the ACA once they understood that they could not stop it. It was also necessary to amplify every problem that occurred during the rollout of the ACA, to promote the idea that the ACA overall was bad. One defense the Democrats pursued was to challenge the Republicans by asking what their alternative was. Now we know: it is the monstrosity known as the American Health Care Act, which I prefer to call Ryancare. At this point, it is not Trumpcare, because Trump had no apparent hand in shaping it, but he has said that he will try to sell it.

In trying to “repeal and replace” the ACA, Republicans ran into sharp opposition from their own constituents at emotional town halls. It turns out that people are discovering, when faced with the prospect of losing the ACA, that they really like and need it. Oddly, Ryancare is also opposed by the most extreme members of the Republican Party, who object to the fact that it fails to completely repeal the ACA. So it would seem that progressives would have nothing to worry about, because the Republicans will not be able to find the votes to pass Ryancare. This assumption, however, fails to take into account the extraordinary sales skills of Donald Trump. This is a man who could sell sand in the Sahara Desert. The last time we underestimated him, he became president. The Democratic Party is being too complacent at the moment, and not listening to their own advice. It is not enough to defend the status quo, to insist that the ACA must remain in place. Despite the exaggerations and outright lies of the right wing, there are real problems with the ACA that created the opening for Trump’s victory in the first place. For many, lack of insurance has been replaced by insurance that people can not afford to use. So, in order to make sure that Ryancare fails, The Democrats need to offer up their own plan, just as they insisted the Republicans do. Let me offer my idea of what that plan should be, and how to sell it.

The purpose here is to offer up a plan that highlights the inadequacies of Ryancare and the harm it will do. We also need to undercut Trump’s efforts to get it passed. So we need a plan that really does deliver on a promise that Donald Trump made, that he would deliver a plan that would save money and deliver better care than the ACA. That plan is universal health care. I have talked before about how and why Democrats have failed to sell it to the American people, but I want to go into more detail now about how to win this battle. Hillary Clinton tried to get universal healthcare in 1993, but her instincts are always to find a consensus solution to any problem. There is no consensus solution here, because there is no way around the fact that you are destroying a vital part of the insurance industry, taking them out of the very lucrative health care business entirely. Done properly, universal health care also hurts the pharmaceutical industry, because you should insist that the government has the right to negotiate for the best prices. So you need to stand up to some powerful lobbies to pass universal health care. That is why the best time to do it is during a severe economic crisis. Barack Obama had that opportunity in 2009, but he too was intent on government by consensus, so we got the ACA instead. Last year, Bernie Sanders tried a different approach, insisting that universal health care was a right, a moral imperative. It is, but Hillary Clinton was able to get him bogged down in the details of how to pay for it. She made him lose the same battle she had lost thirteen years earlier, and also managed to make him look unprepared to govern while she was at it. I believe this was a major reason why Sanders lost the primaries. Ironically, the answer to how to sell universal healthcare was at Sanders’ fingertips the whole time, but he never effectively put the whole package together for the voters.

Universal health care would give the American people cash to spend on other things, so it would provide a major boost to consumer spending. Money that now gets deducted from paychecks for premiums, or spent on copays and deductibles, would instead go directly into the economy, leading to a major boost in job creation. It would also make American companies more competitive, by reducing the cost of hiring, and freeing companies from the expense of providing retiree health benefits. To pay for it, we must first recognize that the current cost of the ACA and other government health programs would no longer be needed, so those funds would go here instead. On top of that, companies currently deduct $260 billion for employee health benefits. Add in increased revenue from all of those new jobs I mentioned. And then there is the kicker. Pair universal healthcare with a measure that costs the government nothing, and you suddenly need very little in the way of new taxes to pay for it all. That measure is an immediate increase in the minimum wage to $15, indexed to inflation. Right wingers like to make the disputed claim that increasing the minimum wage is a job killer, but pair it with the job creating aspects of universal healthcare and that problem disappears. Over time, the minimum wage increase promotes consumer spending, which also means more jobs, and more revenue to pay for healthcare. Bernie Sanders erred in failing to realize the powerful synergy between his two proposals. It even gets better. All those new jobs, plus increased pay for existing jobs, means a sharp reduction in the number of the working poor, meaning funds that had been spent on public assistance programs such as food stamps can be used to pay for universal healthcare instead. I am not an economist, but I think it is possible that this proposal could be sold as being revenue neutral. At the worst, it should be possible to claim convincingly that the only new taxes needed would be on the wealthy.

I am a realist. I understand that there is no chance that a Republican-controlled Congress would ever pass this. Even if they did, you can be sure that Donald Trump would veto the measure. But that is not the point. By offering up this proposal and selling it properly, the Democrats would guarantee the failure of Ryancare, and expose the callousness of the Republican Party for all to see. If anything, the fact that this proposal would not pass should help reluctant Democrats to rally around it, knowing that they would have to answer to their constituents in redder states only for an idea, but not a law that would be vilified in the right wing media. The minimum wage increase is a popular idea, and so is universal healthcare if the public can be made to accept that their taxes do not need to rise to pay for it. The Democrats need to show that they are better than the Republicans who could not come up with an alternative to the ACA for eight years, and this is how to do it.

OK, I admit the song this time is a stretch, but I couldn’t resist: