Under increasing pressure to find unconventional ways to pay for the cost of health reform (which was supposed to save money for American families), the Senators sponsoring this legislative nightmare are getting more radical and desperate. While much of the debate has been on the higher-profile issues of cost and coverage, there are many more just as important, though unnoticed skirmishes, over defining the power of the federal government. Promoting Raw Power. The Senate HELP Committee is using $58 billion in “savings” from the CLASS Act provisions to help pay …
President Obama has repeatedly claimed that his health care reforms also represent entitlement reform. Not surprisingly, the Congressional Budget Office shows this claim implausible. They have scored several health care proposals as costing more than $1 trillion in the first decade, and certainly more thereafter. Accordingly, lawmakers are considering substantially raising taxes (during a recession!) to fund their proposals. Of course, health care reforms that are intended to save money usually do not typically require painful tax increases to offset their cost. The reality is that health care reform will …
Yes, it’s early in the day, but this one is a winner. Sotomayor, responding to Senator Coburn, on the use of foreign law: “There’s a public misunderstanding of the word ‘use.’” Positively Clintonian. Update: Another candidate for Quote of the Day: Sotomayor, responding to Senator Coburn’s question as to whether Americans have a right to self-defense: “That’s an abstract question with no particular meaning to me.”
Playing politics with national security is always a bad idea. It’s been hard to tell that watching the back-and-forth in Washington over the role of the CIA in the War on Terror. The administration and partisan forces in Congress have been whipsawing back and forth between trying to kowtow the ACLU, trying to continue to campaign against Bush-Cheney, and not letting the professionals in Justice and the CIA think they have been thrown to the wolves. Arguably, all this started with a catfight between Obama and former Vice President Cheney. …
House Ways and Means Chairman Charlie Rangel announced that a surtax on individuals and families above a certain income level would be used to pay for health care reform. The surtax is 1% for joint filers over $350,000, 1.5% for joint filers over $500,000 and 5.4% for joint filers with over $1,000,000 in adjusted gross income ($280,000, $400,000, $800,000 for individuals respectively). The surtax would be increased if large cuts in health care do not materialize. The surtax is on adjusted gross income, so the surtax is applied before any …
In response to questioning by Senator Cornyn, Judge Sotomayor explained that, “When parties are dissatisfied, they file for rehearing en banc“–that is, a new hearing before all the judges on the Circuit. She continued: “That’s what happened in Ricci,” the case challenging New Haven’s discrimination against white and Hispanic firefighters. Except it didn’t. Karen Lee Torre, counsel for the New Haven firefighters, decided to appeal the case straight to the Supreme Court, because the odds of persuading the entire Circuit to rehear a summary order are essentially zero–a summary order …
The reviews of Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor’s testimony are coming in… and they are not good. The Washington Post’s Eva Rodrigues, who initially supported Sotomayor, wrote: “I’m surprised and disturbed by how many times today Sonia Sotomayor has backed off of or provided less-than-convincing explanations for some of her more controversial speeches about the role of gender and ethnicity in judicial decision-making.” Commenting on Sotomayor’s testimony yesterday, liberal Georgetown law professor and Critical Legal Studies cofounder Mike Seidman said: “I was completely disgusted by Judge Sotomayor’s testimony today. If …
Yesterday, House Democrats unveiled their much-anticipated health care plan– the same day that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released a preliminary scoring of the bill putting a $1.3 trillion price tag on the effort. Weighing in at 1,018 pages, that comes to $1.264 billion per page. But even this analysis understates the true costs of the bill. The CBO only scores bills on a ten-year time frame, and House Democrats have designed their bill to obscure the catastrophic long-term fiscal path on which it places our country. This Monday, President …
As Congress debates health care reform and how to pay for it, the Congressional Budget Office reported today on something that economists have long known: ordinary workers – not their employers – will be paying for it. How can that be, when employers pay the lion’s share of health insurance premiums? Although workers do not physically write a check for the full cost of their health benefits, their employers write a smaller check to them every pay period. Workers pay for health benefits through lower wages. As the CBO explains: …
Transformers aren’t only in the movies and toy stores; they’re a fact of life in the U.S. Congress as well. And we should beware of them. As Washington’s plans for super-sized health care reform get mugged by reality, beware the fallback proposals that are likely to emerge. Such proposals could lure the unwary into traps. In ancient times, disguised threats were called Trojan Horses; the modern equivalent is Transformers. A common tactic in Congress (and other legislative bodies) is to replace a troubling piece of legislation with a scaled-down substitute, …
