If anything, the Senate hearings for Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh hurt his support, with the country still deeply divided about his confirmation, Kerry Eleveld noted at DailyKos, as a new Quinnipiac poll (9/10 found 42% of voters say he shouldn’t be confirmed while 41% say he should.
That needle has barely moved since a Washington Post/ABC poll the previous week found that voters opposed his confirmation by the narrowest of margins, 39-38 percent. But Kavanaugh’s support has ticked down slightly from the Quinnipiac poll’s 8/15 survey, when 44% supported his confirmation compared to 39% who opposed it.
The partisan breakdown of Q’s latest is nothing short of polemic:
Support for confirmation is 81-3 percent among Republicans and 45-39 percent among independent voters, with Democrats opposed 76-9 percent.
In addition, the gender gap is nearly a mirror image, with women opposing Kavanaugh by 11 points (47-36 percent) and men supporting him by 9 points (46-37 percent).
In short, Eleveld noted, confirming Kavanaugh—which Republicans seem bent on doing despite hiding some 90% of his work history from public view—will be a purely partisan victory, and will do nothing to help improve the gender gap they will be battling at the polls in November.
OBAMA EMBRACES MEDICARE FOR ALL. Former President Barack Obama called Medicare for All a “good new idea” (9/7), providing a high-profile boost to the progressive movement pushing the policy.
In a speech at the University of Illinois, Obama argued that Democrats were innovating policies aimed at addressing the unique economic challenges facing young people, who in many cases do not have the same opportunities as their parents’ generation.
“It’s harder for young people to save for a rainy day, let alone retirement,” he said. “So Democrats aren’t just running on good old ideas like a higher minimum wage, they’re running on good new ideas like Medicare for All, giving workers seats on corporate boards, reversing the most egregious corporate tax cuts to make sure college students graduate debt-free.”
Obama’s remarks were greeted with a mix of reactions from progressive activists on social media, some of whom asked why the former president had not backed the policy sooner.
“I can think of about 8 reasons why this is infuriating for people like me to hear him say now, but I sure am glad he said it,” tweeted Dan Riffle, a congressional aide to Minnesota Rep. Keith Ellison, the House’s lead co-sponsor of single-payer legislation. Riffle later told David Marans of HuffPost, “There’s a very good chance that this is a watershed moment in the single-payer movement … It’s one of the things that can go a long way to heal that rift between people in the party.”
During the Affordable Care Act fight in 2009-10, many congressional Democrats and progressive activists unsuccessfully fought for the inclusion of a “public option” to buy into Medicare in the individual insurance market exchanges the law created. In the end, then-Sen. Joe Lieberman, an independent from Connecticut who caucused with the Democrats and represented several large insurance companies, preventing the public option from making it into the Senate bill, which became the final legislation.
Ever since, advocates of the policy have debated whether Obama and other Democratic leaders exerted enough pressure on Lieberman — and whether that would have mattered. While Lieberman ultimately killed the policy, other moderate senators and key industry groups also made support of the ACA contingent on the public option’s exclusion.
Obama renewed his call for a public option in July 2016, joining Hillary Clinton, who ran on enacting it.
In the wake of the 2016 election, however, it’s Sen. Bernie Sanders’ call for a wholesale expansion of Medicare — and improvement of the benefits the program covers — that has captured the imagination of activists and lawmakers alike.
The Medicare for All legislation that Sanders introduced in September 2017 won the support of more than one-third of the Senate Democratic Caucus. The bill’s Democratic co-sponsors include rumored presidential contenders — Sens. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.); Cory Booker (N.J.); Kamala Harris (Calif.); and Kirsten Gillibrand (N.Y.) — as well as Wisconsin Sen. Tammy Baldwin, an incumbent up for re-election in a state Donald Trump won in 2016.
Backers of the policy are undoubtedly attuned to the growing support that it enjoys with the American public. A slim majority of the American public — 53% — now support single-payer health care, according to a June 2017 poll conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation.
Obama has already endorsed a number of Democratic congressional and gubernatorial candidates who have either co-sponsored Medicare for All legislation or are publicly running on it. These candidates include California House contenders Katie Porter, Mike Levin, Ammar Campa-Najjar, Gil Cisneros, Harley Rouda, Josh Harder, T.J. Cox and Katie Hill; New Mexico House candidate Debra Haaland; Rep. Jared Polis, who is running for governor of Colorado; Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams; and California gubernatorial candidate Gavin Newsom.
“There’s a lot of support [for Medicare for All] from people young and old,” Porter said of her experience talking to voters while campaigning in the Orange County, Calif., district. “Those who are on Medicare know that the system works, and young people… know the path we’ve been on the last few years is not one we can stay on.”
Single-payer is undeniably popular in California, Addy Baird noted at ThinkProgress (9/10). A poll last year found that 70% of Californians support a single-payer health care system. But Orange County in particular — known for its conservative voters in the otherwise deeply blue state — is one of the last places one would expect to find support for it.
Yet, voter after voter at events in and around Orange County told ThinkProgress — some more hesitantly than others — they support a single-payer system.
Sherry Cole, a retired Orange County resident who didn’t vote in 2016, said at Porter’s campaign event that she has voted for Republicans in the past. If she wasn’t familiar with the candidates in a particular race, she would skip voting.
This year, she said, will be the first time she votes for Democrats up and down the ticket. And, she added, she strongly supports Medicare for All. “I’m very much in favor of that. We are the only industrialized, progressive nation in the world that doesn’t have universal health care,” she said.
GOP ON OBAMA: HE MADE US ELECT A RACIST IDIOT. Republicans had an interesting response to former President Barack Obama’s re-entry into politics: they essentially blamed him for Donald Trump. For example, Sen. Marco Rubio tweeted (9/8):
“We should ALL, the Dems, the GOP, the media, admit our role in turning politics into theatre. Being outrageous equals clicks, viewers & therefore ratings & $ for media & fame for politicians. Being normal gets you ignored & a primary challenger for being ‘too weak.’” Politico’s Edward-Isaac Dovere noted Rubio won his Senate seat in 2010 by running a tea party challenge to Charlie Crist, Florida’s Republican governor at the time.
Laura Clawson noted at DailyKos (9/10), “Barack Obama was outrageous for clicks? Yeah, no. He was the model Rubio tried to follow in his own 2016 presidential primary run (up until Rubio got desperate and started telling dick jokes, anyway). That model—and all other responsible-adult models—failed in a Republican primary, which says something.”
Then there was former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie:
“I find it richly ironic that he talks about the fact Trump is a symptom, not the cause,” Christie said on ABC’s This Week, centering on one of the key lines from the Sept. 7 speech that opened Obama’s campaign tour. “If he’s right and Donald Trump is the symptom of a cause, well, Donald Trump got elected in 2016 after eight years of Barack Obama as president. He can’t detach himself.”
Clawson commented, “Um, Chris? Have you considered that Trump is the symptom of a racist backlash to Obama? No, Obama can’t detach himself, but are you going to hold him responsible for that? Well, actually, blaming a successful black person for racism is a classic Republican move, so, yeah.”
Politico’s Dovere looked around and couldn’t find any Republican who seriously disputed the substance of Obama’s critique that Trump is divisive and dishonest and specializes in attacking the institutions of democracy, Clawson noted. But they sure were thrilled to get to take a break from trying to defend Trump and return to attacking Obama.
TRUMP’S LIE COUNT PASSES 4,713. Donald Trump has made 4,713 false or misleading claims since he became president, the Washington Post Fact Checker reported (9/4). That’s an average of about eight claims a day.
“When we first started this project for the president’s first 100 days, he averaged 4.9 claims a day. But the average number of claims per day keeps climbing as the president nears the 600-day mark of his presidency,” Glenn Kessler, Salvador Rizzo and Meg Kelly wrote.
“In fact, in the past three months, the president averaged 15.4 claims a day, so almost one-third of the total claims made as president have come in this period. At that pace, he will top 5,000 claims in September.
“On July 5, the president had reached a new daily high of 79 false and misleading claims, but he came close on Aug. 30 with 73 claims, when he held a campaign rally and had an extended interview with Bloomberg News. On a monthly basis, June and August rank in first and second place during Trump’s presidency, with 534 and 469 claims, respectively. July is in third place, with 448 claims.”
Trump tends to repeat, over and over, many of his false or misleading statements. Fact Checker has counted nearly 160 claims that the president has repeated at least three times, some with breathtaking frequency.
“Almost one third of Trump’s claims — 1,458 — relate to economic issues, trade deals or jobs. He frequently takes credit for jobs created before he became president or company decisions with which he had no role. He cites his ‘incredible success’ in terms of job growth, even though annual job growth under his presidency has been slower than the last five years of Barack Obama’s term. Almost 40 times, he has claimed the economy today is the ‘greatest’ in US history, an absurd statement not backed up by data.
“Just on trade, the president has made 496 false or misleading claims. He frequently gets the size of trade deficits wrong or presents the numbers in a misleading fashion. Five times in one week, he touted the false claim that the trade deficit fell by $52 billion from the first to the second quarter, calling it one of the ‘biggest wins’ in the latest GDP report. In a somewhat unusual move, he stopped making this claim after we published a fact check showing his math was faulty.
“More often than not, the president can’t let go of a favorite talking point. On June 20, he claimed he had received a phone call from the head of US Steel and learned the company had announced it would open ‘six major facilities.’ But US Steel had made no such announcement and we debunked this claim as worthy of Four Pinocchios. Yet 23 more times over 10 weeks, the president has asserted that US Steel was building new plants, inflating it even to seven facilities and then to eight.
“Not surprisingly, immigration is the top source of Trump’s misleading claims, now totaling 592. Forty-three times just in the past six months, for instance, the president has falsely claimed his long-promised border wall with Mexico is being built, even though Congress has denied funding for it.”
AFTER BLOWING UP DEFICIT WITH TAX CUTS, R’S WANT CREDIT FOR FISCAL RESPONSIBILITY. “The federal fiscal burden threatens the security, liberty, and independence of our nation,” the 2016 Republican party platform warned. To get off “the path to bankrupting the next generation,” they vowed to “fight for Congress to adopt, and for the states to ratify, a Balanced Budget Amendment.”
Now that the GOP controls Congress and the White House, however, the party has apparently abandoned these principles. Rather than move toward a balanced budget, the GOP majority and President Trump instead have massively increased the budget deficit they once decried, thanks in large part to the tax bill they passed. And yet that has not stopped Republicans from audaciously running on a balanced budget again in 2018, Josh Israel noted at ThinkProgress (9/10).
A ThinkProgress review of House Republicans running for re-election in districts deemed competitive by the Cook Political Report found 18 of them explicitly call for a constitutional amendment to require a balanced budget on their current campaign re-election websites, yet also voted for massive Trump tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy. The plan is predicted cost the government more than $1 trillion in revenue, massively increasing the current budget deficit.
Thirteen of those lawmakers also voted for the 2018 omnibus spending bill, which cost another $1.3 trillion. Combined, these helped swell the annual federal budget deficit (which was $584 billion in Fiscal Year 2016) to an estimated $1 trillion starting next year.
The hypocrites include Rep. French Hill (AR-2), Rep. David Schweikert (AZ-6), Rep. Tom McClintock (CA-4), Rep. Mimi Walters (CA-45), Rep. Vern Buchanan (FL-16), Rep. Brian Mast (FL-18), Rep. David Young (IA-3), Rep. Jackie Walorski (IN-2), Rep. Andy Barr (KY-6), Rep. Bruce Poliquin (ME-2), Rep. Fred Upton (MI-6), Rep. Tim Walberg (MI-7), Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (PA-1), Rep. Pete Olson (TX-22), Rep. Pete Sessions (TX-32), Rep. Mia Love (UT-4), Rep. Dave Brat (VA-7), Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (WA-5), Rep. Mike Coffman (CO-6) and Rep. Claudia Tenney (NY-22) And new Rep. Troy Balderson (OH-12) was not in Congress yet, but ran in a special election on his support for the tax cuts and also a Balanced Budget Amendment to the Constitution “forcing Washington to live within it means, just like American families.”
House Republicans in June proposed cuts to Medicare and Social Security as part of a budget proposal that would cut the deficit by $8.1 trillion over the next decade, MedicareWorld.com reported (6/29). The GOP plan proposes to cut $537 billion from Medicare, $4 billion from Social Security, $1.5 billion from Medicaid and $230 billion from education and training programs and Pell Grant awards to help students with university costs. It would also add work requirements for food stamp and welfare recipients, but keep the tax cuts.
House Budget Chairman Representative Steve Womack (R-AR) said, “The time is now for Congress to step up and confront the biggest challenge to our society. There is not a bigger enemy on the domestic side than the debt and deficits.”
However, the Republican budget plan would increase military spending from $647 billion to $736 billion by 2028.
TEXAS LEADS LAWSUIT TO OVERTURN CARE FOR PRE-EXISTING CONDITIONS. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (9/5) led 20 Republican-led states into a federal courthouse in Fort Worth in a quest to put an end to the Affordable Care Act one and for all.
Paxton and other Republican state leaders are seeking to overturn the law’s coverage of pre-existing conditions, a move that would make it all but impossible for many sick Americans to get meaningful health coverage.
The Republicans asked US District Judge Reed O’Connor to grant a preliminary injunction, which would put the law on hold as a lawsuit trying to repeal it moves through the court system. Supporters of the Affordable Care Act, led by California’s attorney general, asked the judge to reject the preliminary injunction and preserve protections for those with pre-existing conditions.
Paxton’s staff led the charge to overturn the ACA, also known as Obamacare, saying President Trump’s tax plan last year made the ACA unconstitutional because it did away with the tax penalty levied on those who didn’t have insurance.
“The Supreme Court held Obamacare was only tethered to the Constitution by a very thin thread — the fact that the individual penalty raised some revenue,” Paxton, who didn’t attend the hearing but said in a written statement. “Congress severed that thin thread with the tax act of 2017, and all of Obamacare must fall.”
Defenders of the ACA, which went into effect in 2010, say it is constitutional and it protects as many as 133 million Americans with pre-existing conditions such as asthma, high blood pressure, cancer or diabetes, state and federal estimates show.
Defense of the health care plan came from attorneys representing more than a dozen states: California,Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, and Washington, and Washington, D.C.
They argued that Congress removed one facet of the health care plan and left the rest alone, which should show legislative intent. They noted that the penalty for not having insurance goes away next year, which removes any harm to Americans.
US Justice Department Deputy Assistant Attorney General Brett Shumate said his department doesn’t support an immediate injunction to stop the law because that could create “a potential for chaos.”
Instead, he suggested the judge deny the preliminary injunction and delay any decision — to avoid mass confusion — until after the “open enrollment” period for insurance has for the most part wrapped up across the country.
O’Connor told the crowd of about 50 people gathered in his courtroom that he would take their arguments under advisement, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported (9/5). “I will think about what you all said and get out (a decision) as soon as I can,” he said.
DACA GETS WIN IN COURT FROM JUDGE WHO THINKS IT’S ILLEGAL. Just before the beginning of Labor Day weekend (8/31), a federal judge wrote that the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program likely fail to pass constitutional muster in the future. Yet, he ruled that the program could continue for the time being.
US District Judge Andrew S. Hanen of Brownsville, Texas, acting on a lawsuit filed by Texas and seven other states, said that President Obama exceeded his constitutional authority in 2012 when he created DACA, which protects undocumented immigrants brought to the US by their parents from deportation. But, Hanen reasoned, ending the initiative abruptly after six years would create an unreasonable and unhelpful level of chaos. He compared the act of doing so to unscrambling an egg.
“Here, the egg has been scrambled,” Hanen wrote. “To try to put it back in the shell with only a preliminary injunction record, and perhaps at great risk to many, does not make sense nor serve the best interests of this country.” (NY Mag.)
Kevin Drum noted at MotherJones that Hanen’s order demonstrates the difficulty of repealing executive orders put in place by a previous administration. “It is very much not just a ‘stroke of a pen’ that’s required, but a lot of people don’t seem to get this,” Drum wrote.
“There are basically two ways that an executive order can take root: time and time. In the first case, it’s the time taken to produce a detailed plan supported by scientific judgment and public hearings. Once that’s done and an EO is finalized, it can’t simply be tossed in the ash can on a presidential whim. That’s typically considered ‘arbitrary and capricious’ and courts won’t allow it.
“In the second case, if an EO has been around for a while, judges will rule the same way Andrew Hanen did. He was skeptical of DACA, but after six years the public has a right to expect that it’s the current law of the land unless it goes through a thorough review by the courts. Until then, the president can’t just ask for a preliminary injunction and then sit back and watch the chaos unfold.
“Generally speaking, it takes a lot of effort to get an executive order fully established: it requires real work, real policymaking, and real public consultation. Once it’s in place—especially after it’s been in place for a few years—it’s considered well grounded and justified, and can’t be arbitrarily repealed by a new president who happens not to like it. If you want to repeal it, you have to go through the same process of policymaking and public consultation to demonstrate that the original process got something wrong. That takes a while.
“Oh, and generally speaking, the policymaking has to be real, not made-up. That is, you have to do real research and real cost-benefit analysis and real science. Some presidents are better at that than others.”
TRUMP TEAM RETURNS EPA TO REAGAN-ERA STAFFING LEVELS. Under President Donald Trump, the staff of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has shrunk to levels not seen since the Reagan administration, Joe Romm reported at ThinkProgress (9/20).
But if Trump has his way, pollution levels will rise to Reagan-era levels too. Not only is the president seeking to roll back or terminate countless clean air and clean water rules, but he wants to make sure that the laws we do have in place are not enforced.
Since Trump took office, some 1,600 workers have left the EPA — including 260 scientists, 106 engineers, and 185 “environmental protection specialists,” according to the Washington Post.
Indeed, EPA’s Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance has shrunk a stunning 15.7% in the past 18 months — nearly one in six workers have left.
Former office director Granta Nakayama told the Washington Post, “If you don’t have people to enforce the regulations, you’re not going to get enforcement, and you’re not going to get compliance.”
Despite the fact that EPA funding has been fairly stable, the Trump team has made the EPA a hostile environment for career staff who actually care about the environment.
One EPA regional office headquarters in Denver, Colorado, for instance, has turned to therapy dogs as a form of stress relief amidst more work pressures.
And during his tenure, former administrator Scott Pruitt left staff out of major decisions and dismissed the EPA’s own scientific research — while at the same time favoring big polluters.
Meanwhile, there have been under 400 new hires. And as Washington Post reporter Juliet Eilperin tweeted, “Many of the new hires include political appointees and advisory committee members, who earn no more than $150/year and only meet on a periodic basis.”
So the large brain drain is being accompanied by an influx of anti-science, pro-industry political appointees. The overall effect is pernicious.
As one recently retired 34-year EPA veteran described the current regime, “These people are like termites, gnawing at the foundation.”
From The Progressive Populist, October 1, 2018
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