Killing GOP Anti-Healthcare Bill Is Genuine Feel-good Story; But John McCain Ain't No Hero

Roll Call vote on S.Amdt. 667 to S.Amdt. 267 to H.R. 1628
(American Health Care Act of 2017),
(Roll Call vote, July 28, 2017, United States Senate)

The political legend of John McCain long ago veered into the ridiculous.

But McCain's vote early Friday morning against the Republican Party's bill to take away healthcare from millions of Americans was not heroic, maverick, or confirmation of his supernatural streak of independence and decency to which we can only look upon in awe, (Business Insider).

McCain's vote was not even fleeting recognition that Americans deserve healthcare every bit as excellent as that McCain receives as he battles his own tragic bout with cancer.

No, McCain's grandstanding vote was all about McCain. And much of the American political press omits the fact two years ago McCain voted along with his fellow Republicans to deny healthcare to 10s of millions of Americans in an effort to repeal ObamaCare, (McCain and Healthcare Vote).

If we conceptualize the workings of the United States Senate in term of heroism, (never a good idea), the heroes are Sens. Lisa Murkowski, (R-Alaska) and Susan Collins, (R-Maine), along with the 48 Democratic Party and independent senators who represented the overwhelming pro-healthcare sentiment of the American people, (Esquire).

"If you want to laud Senator John McCain for his military service, or for his occasional high-profile stabs at bipartisanship, feel free. But it didn’t take a lick of courage to vote against an ACA repeal bill that was supported by fewer than 20 percent of the electorate, and which would have killed off some unknown number of his constituents if it passed," notes Joshua Holland at The Nation in a piece to which every political commentator should allude.

Friday's vote against Republicans and only Republicans including the lunatic in the White House to deny healthcare to the American people was not a "goddamned Frank Capra movie," (Pierce, Esquire); it was the sum total of American will and millions of citizens who told clueless senators they demand healthcare as an unalienable right.

"If millions of Americans had not raised their voices at town hall meetings, made phone calls to their senators, posted on social media, and resisted in other ways, this bill might already be law. But we know this fight is not over: the threat of repeal remains real. Republicans in Congress will not give up. Neither can we. MoveOn members will remain vigilant and prepared to mobilize at a moment’s notice if it appears Congress is attempting to advance a new bill," notes Anna Galland, executive director of MoveOn.org, (Stewart, MoveOn).

A citizenry prepared to mobilize. That is the real feel-good story of the Summer.

As John Nichols writes, (Twitter):

They traveled to D.C.
They slept outside in wheelchairs.
They were arrested.
They never lost faith.

Republican Push to Limit HealthCare Hits Wisconsin's Tammy Baldwin

Madison, Wisconsin—An out-of-state organization seeking to repeal ObamaCare to benefit health insurance corporations took out a half-page ad in the Wisconsin State Journal, (Madison, Wisconsin), this week to blast Sen. Tammy Baldwin, (D-Wisconsin), for backing people over insurance companies.

The ad is part of an early multi-state TV blitz in an effort to target Democratic senators up for reelection in 2018, (The Hill). 

One Nation is a massive SuperPac, affiliated with Republican senate SuperPacs and funded heavily by the health insurance industry.

Thirty-three U.S. Senate seats are to be contested in 2018 and the Democratic Party has to defend a whopping 25 of those seats, (Red State).

Republicans think they can flip Wisconsin's first-term Democratic senator, Tammy Baldwin, but they know it's a fight.

Here's their strategy:

Republicans excite their base by repeatedly messaging their healthcare is earned, as opposed to the blacks' healthcare which comes out of your pay-check. [Sure it's crazy, but so is racism.]

Blacks and browns are making your healthcare rates soar, (by some manner too mysterious to note with no mention of, or accountability by health insurance companies): Fucking Obama catered to these people with Obamacare and made your life bad. White folks just don't have a chance. 

This is what One Nation is accomplishing, and they want to reach white swing voters.

This appeal is of course ludicrous. But the idea is to tie every issue to race with the compelling message that some manner of The Other is taking yours and getting paid for it no less.

In Wisconsin, appeals to race work and have for many decades. Whether the race-baiting politicians are natives like Tommy Thompson or transplants like Scott Walker and Donald Trump, the ole-time religion of blaming the black and browns is home-cooking in the Badger State.

The Tammy Baldwin v. Republican 2018 race will offer a leading indicator showing if Democrats have figured out how to prevail on an issue they should own: Healthcare.

Shouldn't be that hard and Baldwin is better than most Dems as witnessed by her defeat of Tommy Thompson in 2012 that saw Baldwin successfully define Thompson as what he is: An opportunistic hack who turned his back on Wisconsin. Baldwin won 51 percent to 45 percent.

The turnout in 2018 will be in the 55-percent range. Republicans have worked hard to suppress that urban vote in Milwaukee.

What's the early prediction on the Baldwin reelection race? There is none, Wisconsin folk are utterly unpredictable.

I'll make one observation that will inform the race.

Baldwin was first elected to Congress in 1998.

Magic 98

In 1998 I worked as a poll worker at the then Gordon Commons on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus at a voting precinct serving the southeast dormitories, (mostly freshmen and sophomores). The city-wide turnout wildly exceeded predictions, and the southeast dorms led even these turn-out numbers.

At the polls we ran out of ballots about 5:00 P.M, as students were coming to vote and being told to come back. I personally sprinted to a polling site at a Dayton Street school about a half-mile away and was told they too were out of ballots and to try the Memorial Union polling site. Sprinted to the Union. I picked up about 100 or so ballots, sprinted back to Gordon Commons and was shaking too much to counter-sign the ballots. Serious fun.

Baldwin defeated one Josephine W. Musser, 52 to 46 percent. It was a race many recall with fond memories. [That same 1998 race saw Sen. Russ Feingold narrowly defeat a rightwing Evangelical Mark Neumann by some 37,000 votes. Neumann blamed the Dane County turnout, so did many in Dane County, especially Madison's Isthmus neighborhoods. Read one homemade sign on an East Dayton Street house months later in the heart of the Isthmus in the spring of 1999: "one neighborhood" beat Mark Neumann. Milwaukee County with all those urban types also gave Feingold electoral breathing room.]

What happened in 1998? Baldwin captured the public imagination who saw in her candidacy the hopes and possibilities of people. It was that vivid. Everyone doing field work saw the same thing, but political consultants didn't see the throngs of people turning out as they did. This phenomenon was electoral magic—something that cannot be explained or predicted.

Twenty years later the 2018 race will feature Baldwin against a Republipuke who will run a campaign asking in effect, 'are you gonna let the niggers win and take your healthcare?'

Rightwing thinks anti-healthcare message is a winner in 2018
U.S. Senate races. Who needs healthcare?

'Marginalizing the Ones You Impoverish'

The Hillary Clinton-Scott Walker nexus: See Jason' Hirthler's Slouching Toward Hillary?

Hillary Misleads Horribly on Healthcare

One reason Hillary's poll numbers are tanking days out from the Iowa Caucuses is that Hillary lies, a lot.

Hillary's whopper from last Sunday's debate:

Well, a– as someone who– as someone who has a– a little bit of experience standing up to the health insurance industry that (CHEERING) spent, you know, many, many millions of dollars attacking me and probably will so again because of what I believe we can do, building on the Affordable Care Act, I think it’s important to point out that there are a lot of reasons we have the health care system we have today.

I know how much money influences the political decision making. That’s why I’m for huge campaign finance reform. However, we started a system that had private health insurance. And even during the Affordable Care Act debate there was an opportunity to vote for what was called the public option.

In other words, people could buy into Medicare. And even when the Democrats were in care of the Congress we couldn’t get the votes for that. So what I’m saying is really simple, this has been the fight of the Democratic party for decades. We have the Affordable Care Act. Let’s make it work. Let’s take the models that states are doing. We now have driven costs down to the lowest they’ve been in 50 years. Now we’ve gotta get individual costs down. That’s what I’m planning to do. [Time Magazine]

On Planet Reality, and c'mon this was just some six years ago, the Public Option was hugely popular and one senator, Sen. Joe Lieberman (D,I-Health Insurance Lobby) killed it, that's why 'we couldn’t get the votes for the Public Option.'

Notes Wendall Potter at the Center for Public Integrity:

The Democrats needed [Joe] Lieberman’s vote to get reform passed, and insurers knew it. Shortly before the Senate was set to vote on the bill, Lieberman said he would vote for the bill only if the public option was stripped out.

Lieberman accused public option supporters of having an ulterior motive.

 'A public option plan is unnecessary,' he told Fox News. 'It has been put forward, I’m convinced, by people who really want the government to take over all of health insurance.'

Hillary forgot to mention this bit of history, instead doing what Hillary does best: Lie on behalf of the health insurance industry and Wall Street and make $ millions in return, shafting the uninsured in the process, (Jilani, The Intercept).

So Bernie should just drop the public option now? Forget it.

Scalia Around the Bend in ObamaCare Law Case

Updated - "To reject the government’s defense of the law, the justices would have to suspend their own settled approach to statutory interpretation as well as their often-stated view of how Congress should act toward the states."

I have no doubt that the justices who cast the necessary votes to add King v. Burwell to the court’s docket were happy to help themselves to a second chance to do what they couldn’t quite pull off three years ago. To those justices, I offer the same advice I give my despairing friends: Read the briefs. If you do, and you proceed to destroy the Affordable Care Act nonetheless, you will have a great deal of explaining to do — not to me, but to history. (Greenhouse, NYT) (See also Moncrieff, The New Republic; and Lithwick, Slate)
 ---
Justice Antonin Scalia may be playing devil's advocate or he may just be playing, not taking too seriously the lives and health of Americans.

In Oral arguments in King v. Burwell, Scalia is enjoying himself contemplating millions of Americans losing their health insurance because of a four-word phrase that comports less-than-perfectly with a nearly 1,000-page law, the Affordable Care Act, but fits well to sensible, fair-minded jurists. (Barnes, Washington Post)

It's a game for Scalia and his brand of jurisprudence, an incoherent game with no rules but a game nevertheless.

Scalia's intellectual legal nemesis, Richard Posner, in his book Reflections on Judging (Harvard University Press. 2013) notes Scalia's appetite for "'gotcha' jurisprudence" (p.182).

Scalia is a goof. But he may have to go along with his betters this time.

From SCOTUSBlog:

After the Solicitor General briefly discussed the standing issue, he outlined the government’s two broad arguments on the merits. The first is that the government’s interpretation of the statute, which makes subsidies available on exchanges created by both the states and HHS, is the best way to give meaning to all the words of the statute. The second point is that the government’s reading “is compelled by” the structure and design of the statute–specifically that it was designed to ensure state flexibility in setting up exchanges, to avert death spirals, and to provide affordable care for all. He argued that in light of these goals, Congress simply could not have intended for the statute to function as intended.

That provoked an immediate and sharp response from Justice Scalia, who said that “of course” Congress could have enacted a statute that functions the way petitioners describe. Justice Scalia then engaged the Solicitor General in a back and forth about whether statutes can ever be written in less-than-optimal ways, and about whether they can ever be nonsensical. The argument implicit in the questioning was that even if Congress wanted to enact a law that works, it doesn’t mean that it actually did so. In that sense, Justice Scalia seemed to be drawing an even harder line than the petitioners.

... Justice Scalia’s questions are very interesting in light of recent statements he’s made reiterating that statutes should be read as a whole. Of course, the government urges such a reading in this case, arguing that a holistic reading supports its view of the subsidy provisions, but the petitioners make whole-statute arguments as well even as they emphasize the particular words in Section 36B that support their argument most clearly.

Health Care for All Is Winning Message as Republicans Run

What few of the extremist band of Republicans will openly admit is the fact they reject health care as a fundamental human right.

Republicans, like Wisconsin's Paul Ryan and Scott Walker, in their Randian musings of incoherent hate, believe health care is not a right, it's a special type of commodity that buys you a privileged state of living that you achieve, inherit, or earn.

Republicans won't admit to their views, by design, as they continue to oppose and block the Affordable Care Act enacted against unanimous Republican opposition.
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The GOP's rejection of human rights stems from the fact that Republicans are not all that crazy about people to begin with, especially Americans of color whom Republicans revile as a malignant blight, a parasitic cancer. Republicans truly are a delusional bunch.

It's no giant leap for Republicans, repulsivecans, to wish to prevent the creation of a society that exists for the benefit of all its people, and that does not include the working class or people of color.

This view of people is of course sociopathic, a warped conception of humanity that can only be supported with lies that rightwing hacks are all too happy to tell.

Republicans desperately oppose health care reform because as the benefits become clear and GOP lies are exposed, Republicans will lose politically and for decades be known as the Party that blocked your access to health.

Watch Republicans ratchet up their opposition to any measure based upon inclusion and health care for all as destructive to white America, the real America, and feeding lazy and greedy minorities eating away at white America from within and without.

"Contained therein (Fox News' Bill O'Reilly's post-election rant) were all the same old dog whistles, the same ridiculous, no-longer-so-coded racial appeals. The insistence that all those people of color 'want stuff'—unlike the selfless ascetics who populate white America," writes Kevin Baker (Harper's, Nov. 8, 2012) ... "The aging white men who make up the G.O.P.’s spine have become so accustomed to talking in terms of 'the other,' and they’ve spent so much time mentally dehumanizing anybody who might disagree with them on anything, that they’re now almost congenitally incapable of forming a coalition with the rest of America. This won’t change until they finally feel able to make an argument that consists of more than spouting a slogan and running away."

Considering the delusional architecture of Republicans, now politically backed up against the wall, with new infusions of money from the Koch brothers don't expect Republicans to do anything but spout a slogan and run away.

Paul Starr: Endorses Health Care Reform in 2010 as stunning historical achievement

A look back at January 2010.

Paul Starr came out vigorously for passing health care reform into law, narrowly held as constitutional by the Roberts court.

Starr's advocacy in the pages of The American Prospect marked an endorsement by perhaps the preeminent social historian of American medical care.

Starr is the author of The Social Transformation of American Medicine (Basic Books, 1982) that likely does not occupy a place on the book shelves of the Tea Party and assorted imbeciles like Senators Jim Demint and John McCain screaming about a "government take-over" of the American health care system. Today, we can add Scott Walker and other members of the Tea Party set.

Writes Starr in 2010:

[Health care reform] is a stunning historical achievement and the most important liberal reform since the 1960s. It may also be the most underappreciated social legislation in recent history. Never in my experience has such a big reform been treated as so small. Never have Democratic members of Congress who are putting their careers on the line for something they believe in been so vilified as sellouts by influential progressives. And never have those progressives been so grudging in their endorsement of landmark legislation or so willing to see it defeated.

How this happened is clear. Facing united Republican opposition, Democratic leaders made a series of concessions to win over centrists in their own caucus and to neutralize key interest groups. One point of contention -- the public option -- came to symbolize hopes on the left, and when that provision was unable to pass the 60-vote hurdle in the Senate, some progressives such as Howard Dean concluded that the entire bill had been gutted.

But that conclusion is wrong. The legislation [is a] major advance in two important respects. After a long period of rising inequality, it would boost the living standards of low-wage workers and their families and improve economic security for the middle class as well. And it would be the most ambitious effort in recent history to reorganize a major institution on a basis that agrees more closely with principles of justice and efficiency.

Scotusblog live blogs US Supreme Court Today on Health Care Decision

Update: Wait until Monday.

See Scotusblog.com for live coverage.

For background: Why the Supreme Court Should Uphold the Individual Mandate; and Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act Cases (U.S. Supreme court.)

Update: No Decision announced on Health care case -- Scotusblog live blogs U.S. Supreme Court Today

No decision.

Scotusblog.com

For background: Why the Supreme Court Should Uphold the Individual Mandate

Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act Cases