Mandate Upheld; Right-Wing Hysteria Ensues

When reading a story about the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold the individual mandate aspect of the Affordable Care Act today, I was lucky enough to see this quote from the always-irrelevant Sarah Palin: “Freedom dies.”

That’s correct, to the right wing, freedom has died today. We took a baby step toward a modern healthcare system, the Supreme Court narrowly supported it, and freedom is now dead. We’re all enslaved, apparently. We’re not free. Who knew we’d wake up today and find out that we’re no longer free? Geez, that sucks.

I couldn’t resist the opportunity to click over to Fox News to watch the hyperbole machine at full speed, and I got a few gems. For example, according to one guest, “A fraud has been perpetrated on the American citizenry,” and “the Court aided and abetted that fraud.” It didn’t change much from there. Swing vote John Roberts is the devil, yada yada. A couple of former Bush administration officials actually supplied voices of reason, but they clearly weren’t taken very seriously.

Perhaps my favorite theme on Fox News this afternoon has been that, since the Court declared the mandate legal as a tax — even though President Obama and other Democrats rejected that premise in the past — Obama is in deep trouble for lying on two accounts: by saying that the mandate is not a tax, and by saying he wouldn’t raise taxes on the middle class.

See, Fox News is trying to create a George H.W. Bush-like “Read my lips” situation here. “He said it wasn’t a tax but then he argued that it was before the Court. Liar!” Members of the middle class clearly have every intention of eschewing health insurance, and therefore, they’re the ones who will be hit with this horrendous, unfair tax. As a result of this fraudulence, Obama is now more vulnerable against Mitt Romney in November.

The thing is, only in the “right-wing bubble,” as Bill Maher calls it, will people view it that way (because they’re being told to view it that way, and they often refuse to think for themselves). Those who like the law don’t care what the mandate is called in legal terms; those who dislike the law will continue to do so. I doubt anyone will say, “I was going to vote for Obama, but now that the Court calls the individual mandate a tax as opposed to part of the commerce clause, it’s Romney all the way!”

What’s more, the individual mandate was a Republican idea in the 1990s. And the mandate merely became part of the Affordable Care Act because that was the only chance the bill had to get through the Senate with obstructionist Republicans adamantly opposed to the public option (let alone a single-payer system).

These are today’s Republicans vis-à-vis President Obama. They obstruct the healthcare overhaul until it’s watered down to their 20-year-old idea. Then they claim that idea is unconstitutional, and when proven wrong, they seek a technicality they can use to label Obama a liar. You’ve got to think the president took at least a few minutes to enjoy this decision today, if for no other reason because of the hysteria it caused among his critics. I know I did.

Gay Marriage's Unfortunate Reality

Barack Obama and his campaign are taking some heat this week over the issue of gay marriage, and while I understand some of the criticism, I also recognize what he’s doing.

The criticism I get: Progressives want the president of the United States to take a firm stand in favor of 100 percent equal marriage rights for all Americans. Period. I would love that, but while I absolutely believe that Obama supports gay marriage in his heart, I also understand why he’s been reluctant to say so. The political system in which our national politicians operate does not make it easy to take such a stand.

The criticism I can’t fathom: The message from Obama’s team on same-sex marriage is inconsistent, and it shows a lack of discipline. That’s garbage. It more likely shows a nuanced political approach to an issue that shouldn’t be so politicized, but unfortunately, it is.

Like most progressives, I support equal marriage rights with as much enthusiasm as I support anything. Nothing frustrates me more than a bunch of straight people casting ballots that say gays and lesbians shouldn’t have the same rights as them, especially those straight people who supposedly get their direction from book that’s thousands of years old. I would like a constitutional amendment that prohibits any state from preventing gay marriage. I’m pretty sure I won’t see that in my lifetime.

Nevertheless, it’s kind of understandable why Obama has handled gay rights the way he has. Every so often he does something that indicates he’s on the side of progressives and gay activists. He verbally supports repealing Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell; his administration decides it won’t enforce DOMA; he claims his position on the subject is “evolving”; he signs the repeal of DADT; he sends his aides and VP out to declare their support of gay rights, in varying degrees.

Meanwhile, he won’t say something that hurts him in a swing state where voters may like his economic policies but are socially conservative. And therein lies the problem with our system. A small majority of Americans are fine with gay marriage, but the majority of Americans won’t count during November’s election. The majority of registered voters in a handful of swing states will make all the difference, and many of these voters base their decision on cultural issues that will never impact their lives (i.e., abortion, gun rights, Catholics and contraception, gay marriage). These are the people Obama must appeal to if he wants a second term.

We have a foolish system for electing the president. Not only are most states winner-take-all contests, but electoral votes are granted based on a state’s total of representatives + senators; in other words, it’s the number that it should be, plus two, which makes it disproportionate and gives small states more influence than they deserve. If you vote in California, New York or Texas, large states where the outcome is a given, then you are, for all intents and purposes, disenfranchised. If you live in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Indiana or Florida, for example, your vote matters. For the record, gay marriage is legal in none of those states.

My regret here is that if Obama loses in November, we can all forget about our leader openly supporting gay rights for at least another four years, and that would be a terrible blow to the cause. What would it mean to have the president stand up and say, “I support gay marriage,” rather than, “I support civil unions, and I believe gay marriage should be decided by the states”? I’d hate to see the president wait for a day that never comes.

That said, Abraham Lincoln, the “Great Emancipator,” drove radicals so crazy with his plodding pace on the slavery issue that many wanted to see him defeated for the 1864 Republican nomination. But Lincoln sought to gently guide public opinion without taking any drastic steps (remember, the Emancipation Proclamation didn’t actually free the South’s slaves since he had no say over the South at the time).

If Obama proclaimed his support for full marriage equality in a speech next week, I’d be thrilled. But I don’t think he will, and unfortunately, I understand why.

Lobbyists Call On Barack Obama To Tone Down Anti-Lobbyist Rhetoric

That's not my headline. And no, it's not the Onion's (though when I saw it pop up on Reddit, I just assumed it was, since it's pitch-perfect satire.)

No, it's from a Huffington Post article on an actual thing that's actually happening right now.

The American League of Lobbyists is calling on President Barack Obama to tone down his criticism of lobbyists.

In a letter addressed to "The Honorable Barak H. Obama" [sic], the group's president, Howard Marlowe, said Monday that Obama's statements are encouraging lobbyists to deregister themselves.

Keep reading, of course, since there's a bit in there that provides a glimpse of just how the sausage is made.

But the essence is really in the headline.

Focused on the Irrelevant

Public Policy Polling (PPP) recently conducted surveys of likely Republican voters in Mississippi and Alabama, and a couple of questions/answers were interesting. For example, 66 percent of those Mississippians polled do not believe in evolution, which means that every other question in the poll was essentially moot.

But there was one that left me shaking my head more than the others, for several reasons. The question was, “Do you think Barack Obama is a Christian or a Muslim, or are you not sure?” In Alabama, 45 percent said they thought Obama was a Muslim; that was seven percentage points lower than Mississippi. I will now try to take the 4,000 reasons this nearly made me vomit and reduce it to a few:

1. Religion has been a factor with many presidential candidates in our history, because as much as we love to tout our credentials as a nation founded on the principle of religious freedom, that’s largely a pile of crap, and most of us know it. In the 1960 campaign, John F. Kennedy had to make a major speech to try to reassure people that even though he was the wrong type of Christian (Catholic), he wouldn’t be all pope-ing it up in the White House; he still needed vote fraud to win that election. More than three decades earlier, Al Smith tried to become the first Catholic president, but the country simply wasn’t ready for it. So we got Herbert Hoover. If you want to be president in the U.S. and you’re not Protestant, well, good luck.

But Obama says he’s Christian and he had a long affiliation with a United Church of Christ institution on the South Side of Chicago (some of the same people who approach hysteria over his association with Christian pastor Jeremiah Wright still manage to call him Muslim). Since when do we ask poll questions that get people’s opinions on someone’s religion? This is not an opinion question. It’s like asking, “Do you believe Barack Obama has male or female genitals?” We know that 30 percent of southern conservatives would choose the latter just as a way of expressing their hatred for the man, and then the topic would be in the news. This is what’s happened here. It keeps the Obama-is-a-Muslim fallacy out there for discussion, much like the Obama-isn’t-American or Obama-is-a-socialist fictions remain topical.

2. If you’re going to ask people what they think of someone’s religion, at least make these the options: a) Christian; b) Muslim; c) None of my damn business; d) Who gives a crap; e) Questioner interrupts answer with this.

We made great strides by electing a black man as president of the United States, but there are other walls to knock down: namely, gender and religion. When we can elect an Asian-American woman who happens to be an atheist, then I’ll believe that voters may finally be making their choices based on the best candidate, not a bunch of irrelevancies. I’m much more concerned about a president who thinks his/her actions are guided by a higher power. This is why I’d prefer to light myself on fire than vote for Rick Santorum in November.

3. As I mentioned above, part of this is a way for these conservatives to register their complaints of Obama, and it’s so disheartening that calling him a Muslim is the equivalent of calling him a terrible president and suspect human being. Muslims are not the enemy. Americans complained about Muslims when they rioted in response to U.S. soldiers burning copies of the Koran, and certainly it is a phenomenal overreaction to kill people after some pieces of paper are damaged.

Yet, while most Americans (myself included) don’t fully understand Islamic/Middle Eastern culture — and even fewer make any attempt to — we all know that when the Islamic world sees something as an affront to its beliefs, violence is likely. And I can say this pretty confidently — if soldiers of a Middle Eastern country had been on our soil for a decade, fighting Christian terrorists with a whole lot of collateral damage, and then several of them tossed some Bibles into a bonfire, our religious leaders wouldn’t say, “Oh, it’s OK, it was just an accident.” I mean, a priest recently suggested he’d die for the right to keep women from using birth control on the church's dime.

I hope that some day, we'll pay less attention to which holy books politicians (and people in general) read or don’t read, and focus more on things that actually matter.

The Unprompted Counterrevolution

There have been many “counterrevolutions” in history, but the term implies a response to something that at least resembles a revolution. Not here and not now. The current counterrevolution in the U.S. is a reaction to essentially nothing. At least nothing real.

This rightward lunge of the GOP, from the culture wars of the 1990s through the inexplicable affinity for Sarah Palin in 2008, has become even more pronounced since Barack Obama’s inauguration. It gained strength with the Tea Party and is swallowing up supposed moderates within its own party. We can only hope it’s reaching its zenith (or nadir) with the ascension of Rick Santorum to contender status in the race for the presidential nomination.

What’s most remarkable about this counterrevolution is that there was no revolution in the first place. Under Obama we’ve killed terrorists, escalated a war, helped depose another dictator, implemented a watered-down health care “overhaul” almost 80 years after FDR nearly got it, seen an extension of the Bush tax cuts, watched as the president was granted the right to detain U.S. citizens indefinitely for being terrorism suspects, and on and on.

So what are the reactionaries reacting to? The stimulus package that many liberals decried as insufficient? The fact that we finally became like the millionth country to allow gays to serve openly in the military? The “war” on religious freedom (what a holy farce that is)?

The reality is, Obama is not interested in any sort of revolution; he's even less liberal than the moderate Bill Clinton. But conservatives have created an image of a tax-hiking, big-government, un-American lunatic who must be stopped. Newt Gingrich, who never met a hyperbole worth keeping to himself, even titled a book: “To Save America: Stopping Obama’s Secular-Socialist Machine.” The problem is, “secular” makes no sense as an attack line (this isn’t a theocracy), and calling Obama a socialist only works is you disavow the actual definition of the word "socialist." So there’s nothing to “save America” from.

The result of this counterrevolution against nothing has been a party that seems to be looking way back into our past for some of its policies. Santorum wants states to be able to ban contraception, he favors overturning Roe v. Wade, he’d support teaching creationism in public schools if he didn’t actually say that the idea of state-funded public schools is “anachronistic.” We already know where he stands on homosexuality. Oh, and the president is a snob for encouraging Americans to continue their education beyond high school. He wants an America run by the Bible, where gays and lesbians suppress their true selves and live in closeted agony, birth control and abortions are illegal and education is for the wealthy. He'd have fit in nicely in the Jacksonian era. Yet Santorum's current opponents seem determined to keep up with him. They’re not trying to stall a plodding advance; they’re trying to send it back where it came from and beyond, in light speed.

Obama’s very slight turn to the left after eight years of unpaid-for wars ending in a steep recession — among myriad other problems — was merely an attempt to restore some stability, a very small-scale version of what FDR faced in 1933. We’re not worse off than we were in 2008, and our lives aren’t appreciably different. There's no reason for a counterrevolution. A half step forward need not be followed by 10 steps back.

The Pro-Lifers' Big Lie

A few weeks ago I wrote about abortion opponents’ obsession with Planned Parenthood, and how it reflects their preference for moral superiority over the advancement of their own cause. Well, just in case that hypocrisy wasn’t obvious enough, the recent actions of the state of Texas put it into stark relief.

Yes, the Texas legislature would prefer to deprive 130,000 low-income women of reproductive health care, including contraceptives, rather than allow the funds to be spent at Planned Parenthood.

The logic of such a move is exquisite in its simplicity. Abortion, pro-lifers would say, is murder. How could women’s preventive healthcare ever be as important as stopping baby murder?

Sometimes I attempt to put myself in their mindset, to imagine the moral outrage that abortion opponents must feel. I encourage you to try it. Imagine if the Supreme Court ruled that real, genuine baby murder were a constitutionally protected right. Imagine the Court declaring that the state may not infringe upon parents’ right to kill their own children, say up to age 6. In this scenario we have to imagine that at least half the population not only accepts this ruling, but supports it enthusiastically and fights to protect it. So from there forward in our nightmare scenario, well over a million young children, from birth to age 6, would be euthanized each year by medical professionals, upon the request of their parents -- simply because the parents didn’t want them anymore.

It’s a horrifying, dystopic premise, isn’t it? Can you even begin to imagine what you would do? Personally, I like to think I’d do more than express my disdain for it at cocktail parties, or write screeds about it online. Maybe I would spend my weekends at child euthanasia clinics, desperately trying to convince the entering patrons that what they’re doing is wrong. Or would this enormity be too appalling not to provoke more immediate action? If literally, daily, innocent children were being put to death, would you be satisfied with attending rallies? Election cycle after election cycle, would you vote for the most vocally anti-infanticide candidates on ballot? And what if this went on for 40 years? After 40 years of voting against child murder, you’d find that there’d been no serious attempt to pass a constitutional amendment banning the practice. There’d been no legislation creating new government programs to help take care of the unwanted children, so their parents might not have to kill them in the first place. There’d been no meaningful progress in stopping this wide-scale, wholly legal child murder.

At what point would you find that more drastic measures had to be taken? After how many decades of this abomination do you decide to leave the country, or start an underground resistance? How long until your only option is armed revolt?

The truth is that all but the most radically fanatical abortion opponents don’t really believe that abortion is murder, regardless of what they claim. They couldn’t possibly. People may believe, in a philosophical or abstract sense, that life begins at fertilization, and that an embryo is a human life. But that’s a far cry from believing that there’s no difference at all between an embryo and a fully-formed person.

Still, even though they don’t really feel it, calling abortion murder works for the pro-life movement rhetorically. It’s inflammatory and polarizing, and it automatically grants them the unassailable moral high ground. Nothing can be as wrong as baby killing; nothing can be as important as stopping it. The murder of children is an evil so intolerable, that preventing it trumps women’s reproductive freedom. It trumps the healthcare needs of the poorest women. It trumps all practicality and logic. Who could ever condone baby murder?

Yet we do condone abortion. The vast majority of Americans believe that abortion is acceptable and should be legal under at least some circumstances. I would imagine that if polled on whether euthanizing preschoolers might be okay even under very limited circumstances, significantly fewer people would get on board. Almost everybody knows that, whatever their personal feelings about the morality of abortion, it is most certainly different from actually killing a child.

By adopting this extremist rhetoric which even most pro-life people don’t sincerely believe, the movement shuts out all possibility of compromise, or even conversation. It places moral correctness above the practical goal of preventing abortions from happening. It also places moral correctness above the very real concern of women’s access to reproductive healthcare, and far, far above women’s liberty. No other matter can ever approach the urgency of ending legally-sanctioned infanticide.

If those who find abortion morally abhorrent really want to make constructive advances toward their ostensible goal, they need to let go of the polarizing and exaggerated claims about embryonic personhood. They’ve disingenuously chosen a position which precludes cooperation and therefore precludes progress. They’ve embraced the sort of cognitive dissonance that has allowed them to endure 40 years of minimal headway on what they claim is the most urgent issue of our lifetime. In lieu of demanding an end to abortion, they’ve been content to be strung along by leaders who declare devotion to their moral cause, yet do next to nothing to move that cause forward -- except to increasingly make a big show of trampling upon women’s rights. These self-proclaimed “pro-lifers” have chosen moral righteousness over moral rightness, and in doing so revealed their underlying contempt for women.

I think it’s time to call out the pro-life movement on their big lie. It’s time to insist upon, at the very least, a little intellectual honesty.

Not a compromiser, just a coward

Olympia Snowe announced yesterday that she wouldn't be seeking a fourth term in the Senate, and vainglorious New York Times weathervane David Brooks was so moved that he Godwinned the entire GOP.

What will we do, he wondered, without republicans like Snowe? The great compromisers, the great negotiators, the great lady who represents the middle 60%?

In typical Brooks fashion, he totally neglected to mention that Snowe was the perfect example of what's wrong with politics today. Back in 2009 she negotiated on behalf of "moderates" for health care reform. The Dems, so thrilled that somebody on the red side of the aisle would invite them to the cool kids' table at lunch, capitulated and gave Snowe every little thing she asked for.

Everything. Not a single compromise - just a list of demands. Harry Reid and company couldn't roll over fast enough.

Though triumphant, Snowe did not take the bill back to her constituents and say "This is what we can get when we work together." She did not take the bill to her peers and say "This is how we can responsibly implement a mandate, a fundamentally conservative stance." She did not comply with the comedy rule of threes.

She just bided her time, then gutlessly voted against the bill when it came to the floor in December of 2009.

There's no more perfect example of legislative cowardice in recent years. Snowe made a list of everything she wanted, gave her word, then backed away as quick as she possibly could.

Even the GOP doesn't need senators like that.