Sen. Harry Reid

Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) said he has “mixed” feelings about the nuclear option, saying he feared a GOP-controlled Senate would replicate the nuclear option to change filibuster rules in a bid to repeal Obamacare.

“If they take over the White House and over the Senate, they will get rid of the health care bill in a shot,” Rockefeller said. “We can do business the way we are.”

Asked if that meant he’d vote against the nuclear option, Rockefeller said: “Don’t put me down there yet, OK?”

This answer is deeply wrong on so many levels. First, Republicans don’t even need to get rid of the filibuster to eliminate Obamacare. Before the 2012 election Mitch McConnell prepared a plan to repeal the bulk of the law using reconciliation.

Second, just because Democrats are pathetic cowards doesn’t mean Republicans will be. Deciding not to fix the rules now will do nothing to stop a future Republican majority from taking action.

Finally, Republicans should have the right to repeal Obamacare if they win. That is how a democracy is supposed to work.

By 2017 the law will have been in place for seven years and fully implemented for over two. If the law remains unpopular and Republicans run on a repeal platform in 2016, than they should be allowed to repeal it if they manage to win the Presidency and a majority in both chambers of Congress.

The fact that a public disdain of democracy is considered an acceptable position in Washington is partly why it is so dysfunctional.

Photo by Talk Radio News Service under Creative Commons license

Senator Orin Hatch (R-UT)

While most of the media has focused on scandals and tornadoes, the Senate has taken the unusual step of actually getting some real work down using regular order. Late yesterday the Senate Judiciary Committee finished mark up on the immigration reform bill and approved it in a vote of 13 to 5.

The bill received the support of all ten Democrats on the committee plus three Republicans, Lindsey Graham (SC), Jeff Flake (AZ) and Orin Hatch (UT). Democrats were able to get Hatch’s conditional support by reaching a compromise on high-tech visas.

While Graham and Flake were originally part of the Gang of Eight, Hatch’s support is an important new development. The growing bipartisan support for the bill is a good sign the legislation will eventually clear the Senate by a healthy margin.

Another positive sign for the legislation is that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell promised to allow the bill to come to the floor for a full debate while saying positive things about the legislation. McConnell will not try to engage in any procedural actions to delay or stop the measure’s consideration.

Of course the Senate has always seen as the easier of the two chambers for immigration reform. In the House a bipartisan group is still trying to write their own immigration bill, but so far have failed to come to a final agreement.

Photo released under Public Domain 

Many UFCW members have what are known as multi-employer or Taft-Hartley plans. According to the administration’s analysis of the Affordable Care Act, the law does not provide tax subsidies for the roughly 20 million people covered by the plans. Union officials argue that interpretation could force their members to change their insurance and accept more expensive and perhaps worse coverage in the state-run exchanges.

Hansen, who is also the head of the Change to Win labor federation, told The Hill that his members often negotiate with their employers to receive better healthcare services instead of higher wages. Those bargaining gains could be wiped away because some employers won’t have the incentive to keep their workers’ multi-employer plans without tax subsidies.

Being able to provide members with a quality union run insurance plan is one of the biggest benefits these unions have. It is often one of their best tools for recruiting new members.

If low income people using these union plans don’t qualify for subsidies it would put them at a huge structural disadvantage compared to the option of simply dropping coverage and forcing workers to buy commercial plans on the exchanges. On the exchanges they would qualify for subsidies.  However, these exchange plans would likely be of a much lower quality.

If the administration decides to write the regulations this way it would break one of Obama’s core promises that ‘if you like the insurance you have, you will be able to keep it’ under his signature law.

Photo by nasa hq photo released under Creative Commons License

The Republican and Independents who have heard the most about it disapprove of it the most strongly, while better informed Democrats are more likely to rally around the Obama administration.

Sadly, this is not an isolated incident of reflexive partisan defensiveness. Many things Democrats once disapproved of under George W. Bush, like unauthorized military intervention, they support because Obama did it.

Bush engaged in many abuses of power but in some ways Obama may have done even more significant long-term damage by normalizing these abuses and giving them a bipartisan seal of approval. Obama has helped turn principled concerns into just another partisan fight.

• Nationally, nearly half of all seniors (48%) live with incomes below 200 percent of the poverty threshold under the supplemental measure, compared to 34 percent under the official measure.³  The share of seniors with incomes below 200 percent of poverty is higher under the supplemental measure in every state than under the official measure.⁴
• Under the supplemental measure, at least two-fifths of seniors (40%) have incomes below 200 percent of poverty in 48 states and in DC; using the official measure, this is the case in only six states.
• At least half of seniors have incomes below 200 percent of poverty in 10 states and DC based on the supplemental measure: DC (59%); California (56%); Hawaii (55%); Georgia (54%); Louisiana, New York, Rhode Island, and Tennessee (52%); Florida and Mississippi (51%); and Arizona (50%).

Of course in light of this new data many elected officials in Washington, including President Obama, call for making the problem significantly worse by cutting Social Security benefits using the Chained-CPI.

It should be noted that even without cutting government programs this problem will likely get much worse in the future. The pension system has been steadily eroding for years, which should leave many Americans with insufficient income when they try to retire.

Photo by squirlaraptor released under Creative Commons License

Health care cost growth has slowed substantially, as the latest projections from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) make clear Since late 2010, CBO has reduced its projection of cumulative Medicare and Medicaid spending over the 2011-2020 period by $900 billion (or nearly 10 percent over that period).

That date’s important because it was in late 2010 — and based on CBO’s August 2010 projections — when fiscal commission co-chairs Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson issued their original budget proposal, which called for over $300 billion in Medicare cuts and nearly $60 billion in Medicaid savings through 2020. The original Bowles-Simpson proposal is often considered an appropriate benchmark for evaluating other deficit-reduction plans.

Even though government health care spending has already fallen by several times more than what Bowles and Simpson once said was necessary, just last month the duo was still claiming the government needed to cut Medicare benefits and raise the retirement age. How little these proposals change in the light of important new data should demonstrate what this austerity push has always been about.

Photo by RalfHeB released under Creative Commons License

But a close reading of the rules makes it clear that those mandates affect only plans sponsored by insurers that are sold to small businesses and individuals, federal officials confirm. That affects only about 30 million of the more than 160 million people with private insurance, including 19 million people covered by employers, according to a Citigroup Inc. report. Larger employers, generally with more than 50 workers, need cover only preventive services, without a lifetime or annual dollar-value limit, in order to avoid the across-the-workforce penalty. [...]

Administration officials confirmed in interviews that the skinny plans, in concept, would be sufficient to avoid the across-the-workforce penalty. Several expressed surprise that employers would consider the approach.

The Rube Goldberg nature of how people are supposed to get insurance under the Affordable Care Act creates a huge amount of bureaucratic waste and the potential for many to fall through the cracks. The maddening lack of consistent standards could end up causing much more damage.

Since the exchanges will be very small markets it is unlikely most large businesses will use this strategy. If even a modest number of companies use this to cheaply shift their least health insured employees onto the exchanges, these companies could push up premiums to discourage use.

More importantly, President Obama’s most used justification for the law was to stop people from going “bankrupt if they get sick.” Most Americans who experience medical bankruptcy are actually underinsured not uninsured. By allowing large companies to underinsure employees the ACA will not stop medical bankruptcy.

Photo by Images_of_Money released under Creative Commons License

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid

Reid has privately consulted with President Obama on the need to revisit filibuster reform, and the President has told the Majority Leader that he will support the exercising of the nuclear option if Reid opts for it, the aide says, adding that senior Democrats expect the President to publicly push for it as well. “If Senator Reid decides to do something on nominations, the president has said he’ll be there to support him,” the aide says.

Reid is eyeing a change to the rules that would do away with the 60-vote threshold on all judicial and executive branch nominations, the aide says, on the theory that this is a good way to immediately break an important logjam in Washington — without changing the rules when it comes to legislation.

It is important to point out we have already seen this show played out before with zero results. At the beginning of 2011 Reid was talking about fixing the filibuster but at the last minute come to a toothless gentlemen’s agreement with Mitch McConnell (R-KY). Reid then threatened to do something at the start of this year but came to an agree with McConnell that included only meaningless temporary changes. Reid has a habit of talking a good game then backing down at the last minute.

If Reid did take this step it would be a big deal and go a long way toward  fixing our comically dysfunctional Senate. It would make it possible for the President to actually govern as the Constitution intended. More importantly, it would prove that the 60 vote threshold is not an insurmountable obstacle but merely an idiotic procedural issue the majority can easily eliminate at anytime.

Given Reid’s history though, at this point it is best to remain highly skeptical.

Photo by Talk Radio News Service under Creative Commons license

I look at this trends and see a sad expression of the breakdown of the American dream. Traditional pension are disappearing, 401(k)s have been a policy failure, and the promise of ever-rising home prices left many Americans burned over the past decade.

Even though the country is technically much richer than it was two decades ago a comfortable retirement is becoming much rarer. Instead, most regular people are forced to work harder for longer and with less security.

I look at these numbers and see a serious crisis with our retirement system. The “deficit hawks” look at this trend and think the only problem is that the trend is not moving fast enough.

Top officials from President Barack Obama’s campaign arm, which was recently rechristened as Organizing for Action, are working to dampen the passionate grassroots opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline, just as the organization launches its campaign against climate change, according to donors and OFA members.

Leaders of the group have on multiple occasions told gatherings of activists and donors that OFA will not pressure the White House on Keystone regardless of its members’ interest in the project, a 1,700-mile pipeline that would move heavy crude from the Canadian tar sands to the Gulf.

No one piece is a smoking gun, but they all point in the same direction. It would seem that the Obama administration is, at the very least, leaning towards approving the pipeline in the near future.