HEALTH CARE MOTIVATES VOTERS — AND PHYSICIANS RUN AS DEMOCRATIC CANDIDATES

An amazing demographic shift is playing out right now in American politics. Polls suggest health care is among voters’ top concerns as midterm elections approach. And now, more than 50% of party-affiliated doctors are Democrats.

The Democratic field has opened up for people of color and women, and they’re changing things. They’re also running for office—specifically, the House of Representatives, Joan McCarter noted at DailyKos (8/27), citing an article by Shefali Luthra at Kaiser Health News.

There are at least nine Democratic doctors running right now as first-time candidates in House races. Contrast that with 12 of the 14 current physicians in the House and Senate—Republicans. The sitting members aren’t just physicians. One-half of them practice in highly paid specialities like orthopedic surgery. The Democratic challengers have a much more expansive view of health care, coming “predominantly from specialties such as emergency medicine, pediatrics and internal medicine, though one is a radiologist.”

They’re taking the Hippocratic oath to the core, seeing the harm being done to the body politic by Republicans’ eight-year war on the Affordable Care Act. “It’s at a boiling point for many of these physicians,” says executive director of Doctors for America Jim Duffett. His group supports universal healthcare, as do all of the Democrats running for office this cycle.

Michigan’s Dr. Rob Davidson was spurred to run by a confrontation with his representative, Republican Bill Huizenga, at a town meeting. “I told him about my patients,” Davidson said. “I see, every shift, some impact of not having adequate health care, not having dental insurance or a doctor at all.” Huizenga, a staunch Obamacare hater, failed to show any consideration at all to Davidson’s concerns, or to the uninsured people he was there to plead for. He says he’ll support Medicare for All in the House.

Dr. Kyle Horton, a female internist running in North Carolina’s 7th Congressional District, wants both a public option for Obamacare and to lower the Medicare eligibility age to 50. Another woman, Dr. Hiral Tipirneni, an emergency physician in Arizona’s 8th Congressional District, supports allowing anyone to buy into Medicare.

It took eight years of Republican sabotage and Donald Trump to finally turn the country’s attitude on the Affordable Care Act around, and to appreciate what it’s done for health care. That’s why it has risen to the top of the list of issues people are concerned about this cycle, including these physician candidates.

This is great for 2018, but it’s even better for the future, McCarter noted. “Doctors in Congress have always been the voice of authority on health policy. Doctors in office who actually care about the health of all Americans will eventually get us to universal healthcare.”

TRUMP, GOP PLAY DOWN OBAMA ECONOMIC GAINS. The GOP tweeted on Aug. 24, “IMPORTANT: President Trump currently presides over the longest running bull market in modern financial history, and the longest streak of job growth ever.”

Bob Cesca replied to the tweet Aug. 26, “Most of that streak — eight years of it was under Obama. 1.5 years under Trump. And yet the much more significant eight-year portion of the streak was defined by Trump as ‘American carnage.’ Nice try, @GOP, but math doesn’t lie.”

But Trump and his confederates do lie, and Trump retweeted lines from a Washington Examiner column by Jennifer Harper (8/14) that was titled, “Mainstream Media tries to ‘rewrite history’ to credit Obama for Trump accomplishments,” in which she wrote, “Since President Trump took office, the economy is booming” and quoted an Investor’s Business Daily editorial that stated, “The stronger the economy gets, the more desperate his critics are [to hand credit over to Obama]. The editorial claimed Obama had “had the weakest recovery from a recession since Great Depression.”

In fact, the Great Recession started out with the collapse of financial markets under George W. Bush in 2008 and bottomed out under new President Obama in October 2009, when the unemployment rate peaked at 10%. But by late 2009 the GDP was growing again, with the help of the bailout of the big banks and the auto industry and the $840 billion stimulus package. Obama steered the economy out of the crisis and through 75 consecutive months of growth that created 15.8 million jobs and reduced the employment rate to 4.7%. The 7.5 years of recovery was one of the longest on record.

John Cassidy noted in The New Yorker in January 2017 that the Great Recession of 2008 and 2009 wasn’t a normal recession. “It was an old-fashioned financial bust, and it always takes economies a long time to recover fully from those — if they ever do,” Cassidy wrote. “Japan took two decades to rebound from a financial bust in the early 1990s.” Much of Europe still is recovering from the Great Recession.

REPUBLICANS PREDICT PROBES IF DEMS TAKE OVER. Congressional Republicans are getting ready for hell, reported Axios.com (8/26) after obtaining a spreadsheet that’s circulated through Republican circles on and off Capitol Hill that previews investigations Democrats will likely launch if they flip the House.

The document, which catalogs requests Democrats have already made, predicts the following probes:

President Trump’s tax returns;

Trump family businesses — and whether they comply with the Constitution’s emoluments clause, including the Chinese trademark grant to the Trump Organization;

Trump’s dealings with Russia, including the president’s preparation for his meeting with Vladimir Putin;

The payment to Stephanie Clifford — a.k.a. Stormy Daniels;

James Comey’s firing;

Trump’s firing of US attorneys;

Trump’s proposed transgender ban for the military;

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin’s business dealings;

White House staff’s personal email use;

Cabinet secretary travel, office expenses, and other misused perks;

Discussion of classified information at Mar-a-Lago;

Jared Kushner’s ethics law compliance;

Dismissal of members of the EPA board of scientific counselors;

The travel ban;

Family separation policy;

Hurricane response in Puerto Rico;

Election security and hacking attempts;

White House security clearances.

The spreadsheet, which reportedly originated in a senior House Republican office, catalogs more than 100 formal requests from House Democrats this Congress, spanning nearly every committee.

The bottom line, according to Jonathan Swan at Axios: “Thanks to their control of Congress, Republicans have blocked most of the Democrats’ investigative requests. But if the House flips, the GOP loses its power to stymie. Lawyers close to the White House tell me the Trump administration is nowhere near prepared for the investigatory onslaught that awaits them, and they consider it among the greatest threats to his presidency.”

STUDENT LOAN WATCHDOG QUITS, CLAIMING TRUMP HAS ‘FAILED BORROWERS.’ The Trump administration’s student loan ombudsman stepped down (8/27) from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), arguing in his resignation letter that acting director Mick Mulvaney has done “damage” that “sacrifices the financial futures of millions of Americans.”

Seth Frotman, who held the position of ombudsman and assistant director for the Office for Students and Young Consumers since 2016, is the latest government official to resign from the CFPB, which has undergone massive changes since Mulvaney took the helm in 2017.

As ThinkProgress previously reported, Mulvaney has consistently undermined his own agency, firing all 25 members of the agency’s advisory board and even refusing to request funding for the bureau, opting instead to use emergency funding to operate. Earlier this summer, Mulvaney announced that the agency would go by the name “Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection,” a change that seemed like a deliberate attempt to confuse consumers.

In May, Mulvaney ordered a dramatic restructuring of the agency, essentially ending the operations of its student lending office. As a result of those changes, Frotman saw most of his responsibilities — including evaluating tens of thousands of student loan complaints, returning millions of dollars to borrowers, and assisting in lawsuits against for-profit colleges and student loan services — disappear, leaving his team to handle only financial education matters, such as developing pamphlets and other communications content pertaining to student loans.

“The current leadership of the Bureau has made its priorities clear — it will protect the misguided goals of the Trump administration to the detriment of student loan borrowers,” Frotman’s letter reads, according to NPR.

Frotman cited a number of abuses by the administration and Mulvaney which, in his estimation, make it “clear that consumers no longer have a strong, independent Consumer Bureau on their side,” and indicates an unwillingness on the part of the federal government to provide oversight on the the $1.5 trillion student loan industry.

These abuses include the Education Department’s repeated attempts to block or repeal protections for victims of predatory lending practices at for-profit colleges. Last month, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos proposed a rule change that would make it harder for those students to get their loans forgiven.

In July, the CFPB claimed the Education Department was preventing the Bureau from accessing documents pertaining to its lawsuit against student loan servicer, Navient.

“When the Education Department unilaterally shut the door to routine CFPB oversight of the largest student loan companies, the Bureau’s current leadership folded to political pressure,” Frotman wrote. “By undermining the Bureau’s own authority to oversee the student loan market, the Bureau has failed borrowers who depend on independent oversight to halt bad practices and bring accountability to the student loan industry.”

TRUMP LIED ABOUT THE PARIS CLIMATE DEAL. HIS OWN EPA JUST CONFIRMED IT. Everything President Trump has said about President Obama’s climate plan and why he had to pull the United States out of the 2015 Paris Climate Accord turns out to be a lie, Joe Room wrote at ThinkProgress (8/23).

That’s the inescapable conclusion from the EPA’s 289-page “Regulatory Impact Analysis” released by the administration (8/22) along with Trump’s new “Affordable Clean Energy Plan.” 

This new analysis reports a very low cost of complying with Obama’s much-vilified “Clean Power Plan,” (CPP) which set the rules for cleaning up the dirty US power sector and was the cornerstone of America’s climate pledge at Paris.

Trump’s EPA now calculates that achieving the emissions reductions of the CPP would cost just $700 million in 2030, dropping to $400 million in 2035. The Obama EPA’s estimate for the 2030 costs were seven times larger.

According to the new analysis, the present value of the CPP’s compliance costs would be just $3 to $5 billion — while the value of the health, economic, and environmental benefits of the reduced pollution would be as much as $80 billion.

In short, Obama’s CPP is a no brainer — small cost, huge benefits. And remember, this is according to figures buried in calculations released alongside the announced plan to repeal the CPP.

Yet, Trump has asserted for years that the CPP was a costly mistake, and that’s why the US had to become the only major country in the world to withdraw from the Paris climate accord.

In fact, just a few hours after the EPA released its analysis, Trump repeated his falsified claim to a Charleston, W.V., audience.

In his speech, Trump said (emphasis added): “We’re canceling Obama’s illegal anti-coal destroying regulations, their so-called “Clean Power Plan.” Doesn’t that sound nice, ‘clean power.’ You know, when I ended the Paris Accord — what’s a more beautiful name than the Paris Accord. Let’s call it the West Virginia accord, maybe I would’ve signed it. But when I entered it, that was going to cost us hundreds of billions of dollars — hundreds of billions.

Trump’s EPA has just debunked that claim, Romm noted.

The West Virginia speech was filled with absurdities — “You know what you can’t hurt? Coal. You can do whatever you want to coal. Very important” — but Romm said Trump’s key message was the biggest lie of all: “We are back. The coal industry is back.”

In fact, coal has been on an irreversible decline for years because alternatives like wind, solar, and natural gas are cleaner and cheaper. Building and running new wind and solar farms is now cheaper than just running existing coal plants in many places.

Indeed, the Trump administration’s own Energy Information Administration just reported that over the past 12 months, US coal production has dropped by 4.2% compared to the previous 12 months.

EPA concedes that, absent any new climate rules, market forces will cause coal production for the electric power sector to drop 20% by 2025. But EPA also concludes that, under Trump’s plan, it would drop as much as 24%.

As for coal jobs, they will be lost at an even faster rate than coal production, since they have been a victim primarily of productivity gains in the last few decades, Romm noted.

“Starting around 1980, rapid productivity gains driven by technology slashed US coal mine jobs by two thirds. Oddly, we never hear about Ronald Reagan’s war on coal.”

DEMS LIMIT ROLE OF SUPERDELEGATES. The Democratic National Committee (8/25) voted to limit the rule of “superdelegate,” which have been the source of controversy in two of the past three presidential election cycles, Jason Linkins noted at ThinkProgress (8/25).

Buzzfeed’s Ruby Cramer reported under the new system for choosing a Democratic nominee, in the first round of voting at the national convention, superdelegates will no longer be cast a delegate vote for the candidate of their choosing. Around 700 people had superdelegate status in 2016. In the case of a contested convention and second round of voting — a historically unlikely possibility — superdelegates would be allowed to cast a delegate vote.

This new role essentially strikes a balance between the superdelegates’ symbolic place in their party’s hierarchy and the actual power with which they were vested — which has in recent years become the cause of considerable intra-party rancor.

But the reduction of the superdelegates’ power contains its own controversies. As Cramer points out, the superdelegate process allowed the Democratic party to elevate women, members of the LGBT community, and people of color in their midst. Some who supported retaining the superdelegate system fretted that eliminating it would strip these marginalized voices of vital representation.

It’s also likely that in the coming days, some will ruefully express regret that the presence of superdelegates is how a party avoids nominating someone like, say, Donald Trump — the theory being that had there been a coterie of Republican party elites similarly vested with this sort of power to alter the trajectory of a nomination, the reality-show mogul might have been kept from the presidential ballot.

JUDGE STRIKES DOWN TRUMP ORDERS IN WIN FOR FEDERAL UNIONS. A federal judge (8/25) struck down key parts of the executive orders President Trump signed in May that would make it easier to fire federal workers and weaken their representation, Frank Dale reported at ThinkProgress.

US District Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson in Washington ruled Trump’s actions would “impair the ability of agency officials to bargain in good faith as Congress has directed.”

The decision marked another recent triumph for unions after many years of bad news from the Supreme Court and numerous states that have adopted anti-union laws. Missouri voters handed a resounding defeat to a ”right-to-work” law in a referendum in August.

Rep. Don Beyer (D-VA) praised the ruling, which he said “shut down some of Trump’s harshest attacks on federal workers.”

Sharon Block, a former Labor Department official under President Barack Obama, called the ruling a “stinging rebuke” for Trump.

The American Federation of Government Employees, the largest union involved in the lawsuit against the White House’s executive orders, with 750,000 members, said, “President Trump’s illegal action was a direct assault on the legal rights and protections that Congress specifically guaranteed to the public-sector employees across this country who keep our federal government running every single day.” The new rules would affect 2.1 million civil servants.

The New York Times reported that the Trump administration “will most likely appeal the decision to a federal circuit court, and could then appeal to the Supreme Court if it loses there.”

ARIZONA GOV. HAS A TOUGH CHOICE FOR McCAIN’S REPLACEMENT. Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey (R) has a big choice to make: Should he replace the late Sen. John McCain with someone McCain would have been happy about, or with a Trump loyalist who will please the Republican base? Laura Clawson notes at DailyKos (8/27), “You don’t have to believe that John McCain was anything but a war-loving partisan Republican with an independent streak on a few specific issues to see what a gulf there is between Ducey’s options.”

With Republicans clinging to a 50-49 Senate majority, hearings on the Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh looming and Mr. Trump under intensifying legal scrutiny, Gov. Ducey’s choice carries enormous implications in Washington, Jonathan Martin noted in the New York Times (8/26).

Ducey reportedly is looking for a pick who will run to keep the seat in the 2020 special election. Beyond that—and this part is hilarious—he is rumored to want to appoint a senator who will make both the base and the McCain camp happy. “Having achieved that consensus,” Clawson wrote, “Ducey will ride a unicorn up a rainbow.”

That search for a safe consensus pick has already left McCain’s allies deflated, Martin noted in the Times.

“Like with everything else in politics, these days we’ll end up with mediocrity,” said Grant Woods, McCain’s first congressional chief of staff and a former Arizona attorney general.

Clawson concluded, “It’s the Republican Party in 2018. A mediocrity is the best-case scenario.”

MAINE’S TOP COURT ORDERS GOV. LEPAGE TO STOP IGNORING MEDICAID MANDATE. Voters in Maine approved a ballot initiative last November that made their state the 32nd to take advantage of the Medicaid expansion option created by the Affordable Care Act of 2010. It wasn’t close: Expansion won by a 59-41 margin after a very extensive public debate. And the initiative was made necessary by the state’s famously paleolithic Republican governor Paul LePage, who vetoed legislation expanding Medicaid on five separate occasions.

But LePage didn’t let the express instructions of the Maine electorate bother him, Ed Kilgore noted at NYMag (8/23). LePage chose the tack of fighting tooth and nail against appropriations to pay for the state’s small share of expanded Medicaid services (which would have been zero for several years had Maine expanded Medicaid when that step first became available), while exaggerating their actual cost.

In early June, a state judge ordered LePage to comply with the ballot initiative and send the feds a plan for a Medicaid expansion. He refused and appealed the decision. In early July, he vetoed legislation funding an expansion.

His defiance of the will of his constituents may finally be running out of time, though. The Maine Supreme Judicial Court sustained the lower court ruling that LePage had to begin implementing Medicaid expansion immediately:

Maine’s top court has ruled that the LePage administration must file a plan to expand Medicaid even as it fights implementation of the ballot initiative approved by voters last fall.

The ruling Thursday delivers a blow to the governor, who has steadfastly opposed efforts to extend the public health coverage to an estimated 70,000 additional adults in Maine.

This isn’t absolutely the last ditch for LePage, Kilgore noted, because LePage can still challenge the funding and even the ballot initiative, although he can no longer drag his feet on implementation in the interim. He has said he’d go to jail before cooperating in the Medicaid expansion. The open question now is whether he will get that opportunity to wear an orange jumpsuit before he leaves office in January.

REPUBLICAN STAFFERS TIED TO ALLEGEDLY FORGED SIGNATURES ON PETITIONS TO SPOIL OPPONENT’S VOTE. Campaign staffers for US Rep. Scott Taylor (R-VA) have been tied to allegedly forged signatures on dozens of petitions in an effort to get left-leaning Independent candidate Shaun Brown on the November ballot and spoil the vote for Taylor’s Democratic opponent, Elaine Luria.

An investigation by the Norfolk *Virginian-Pilot* found 59 people who said they did not sign the petitions for Brown submitted by Taylor staffers, and another four who were dead at the time they reportedly signed.

“He’s 102,” Carol Campbell told the Virginian-Pilot of her father, Floyd Felten, whose signature appears on the petition. “He really can’t sign his name that well.”

Eddie Newkirk’s father, a retired Marine and Korean War veteran, died in 2016. That didn’t keep his name off the petition for Brown submitted by the Taylor staffers.

“I’m not surprised,” Newkirk told The Virginian-Pilot. “But I’m disappointed that someone would stoop to that level.”

Brown needed 1,000 valid signatures to be included on the ballot as an independent. Of the more than 1,900 that were submitted – including 1,350 turned in by her supporters – 1,030 were declared valid by the State Board of Elections.

A special prosecutor, Roanoke Commonwealth’s Attorney Don Caldwell, has been appointed to investigate the alleged forgeries. The Virginia Democratic Party has also filed suit in state court to block printing of ballots with Brown’s name on them. That suit includes affidavits from 35 people whose names appear on the petitions for Brown but who claim they did not sign them.

Taylor fired his campaign manager and a consultant over the petition signatures. He knew some of his campaign staffers were collecting signatures for Brown, according to the Virginian-Pilot, but he denies it was to spoil the vote for Luria, Joshua Eaton noted at ThinkProgress (8/24).

From The Progressive Populist, September 15, 2018

Populist.com