A Mile Wide, An Inch Deep

This week we’re on red alert in response to reports that Republican leadership is gearing up for a vote to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and gut Medicaid the week of September 25 , with a sham hearing possible before then. Now is the time to call, write, and rally to urge the Senate to reject this new threat and support a bipartisan package instead. The bill, known as Graham-Cassidy-Heller-Johnson for its sponsors Senators Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Bill Cassidy (R-LA), Dean Heller (R-NV), and Ron Johnson (R-WI), is being sold as a “compromise” and “non-partisan” solution—even though no Democrats support it. But not only is Graham-Cassidy not a compromise, it is the most radical proposal yet. And like the proposals that preceded it, the bill goes far beyond Republicans’ campaign pledge to repeal the ACA; it also attacks long-standing traditional Medicaid. Republicans only have two weeks to ram through repeal with just 50 senators and Vice President Mike Pence because on Sept...

I’ve been asked what I think is going to happen in the House now that Kevin McCarthy has pulled out of the running for speaker. The answer is... complicated. But first… If you haven’t been following the tumult in the U.S. House of Representatives with a bowl of popcorn and an ear-to-ear schadenfreude grin… well, let’s just say you don’t live in our home. Here’s the thirty-second recap:  In late September current House Speaker John Boehner was facing a likely coup attempt and an imminent government shutdown unless he caved to the demands of ~40 whackjobs to "defund" Planned Parenthood. As a devout Catholic, he had also just fulfilled his lifelong dream of bringing the pope to speak to a joint session of Congress. So, with little warning even to his closest allies, he announced that he would bring a “clean” short-tern funding bill (i.e. one free of partisan non-starters such as the defund language) up for a vote to prevent a government shutdown. Then he would step...

Knowing that I will soon be leaving Congress, I made this flowchart today to help my colleagues predict in my absence whether or not Speaker Boehner has the votes necessary to pass any given bill. The flowchart was right during Boehner's "Plan B" tax proposal in 2012, right again during the battle over the Violence Against Women Act reauthorization, right again during the 2013 shutdown, right during the farm bill debate, right during the transportation spending bill, right during... Well, you get the idea. UPDATE: The flowchart also correctly predicted the outcome of the DHS funding showdown in spring 2015 over the president's immigration executive orders. If House Republicans could have controlled themselves and just gone after the 2014 EO (DAPA) related to the parents of legal residents, they could probably have peeled off a number of mushy Democrats. But they couldn't resist the siren call of full crazy and passed a funding bill that also invalidated t...

Sitting on the beach at the Ritz Carlton discussing with Jesse the futility of saving for the boys' college, I'm reminded again of the need for a "confiscatory" top marginal tax rate. (The Ritz plays no small part in my thinking.) What? I'm going to save and save so that university presidents can collectively raise tuition 1,200% over three decades and reward themselves with multimillion dollar salaries? Truly, I'd be more inclined if it all didn't seem so laughably impossible to think we could ever put aside enough to keep up with the tuition explosion. But if there's a solution, it's not in more federal grants to students or cheaper loans -- wherein I agree with my conservative brethren that federal policies have helped enable the universities. It's in getting at the root cause of the problem. Then Jesse alludes to the old blackmail race-to-the-top (or bottom) dilemma that results in Wall Street CEOs getting 6-figure bonuses while taking...

Fiscal Cliff Deal Late last night (or rather, early this morning) the Senate passed a White House-negotiated deal to avert and postpone, respectively, key parts of the fiscal cliff. The 89-8 vote (opposed by Democrats Michael Bennet of Colorado, Thomas R. Carper of Delaware, and Tom Harkin of Iowa, and by Republicans Chuck Grassley of Iowa, Mike Lee of Utah, Rand Paul of Kentucky, Marco Rubio of Florida, and Richard C. Shelby of Alabama (with absences from Mark Kirk of Illinois, Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey, and Jim DeMint of South Carolina, who's on his way out to head the Heritage Foundation) sends the legislation to the House where Speaker John Boehner has been huddling with his leadership team about how and when to bring the bill to the House floor. There's been some discussion that the House might amend and send it back to the Senate, but my money is on the House grudgingly taking up the Senate package as-is (perhaps with some kind of procedural mechanism that help...

A compendium of all of my thoughts on... OBAMACARE aka the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA)  aka the Affordable Care Act (ACA) History of Health Reform: A Legislative Timeline of Obamacare At some point, I hope to come back and flesh out a fuller history of U.S. healthcare reform attempts prior to passage of the ACA ("Obamacare"), but for now, I’m going to skip over some of the more interesting details. That back story includes Pres. Richard Nixon’s role in shaping how the vast majority of us get healthcare and his work with Sen. Ted Kennedy on a proposal that shares some similarities to today’s ACA, the political collapse of Pres. Bill Clinton’s proposal (known derisively as “Hillarycare”) before ever receiving a vote [1] , and the Heritage Foundation’s counter proposal which became the basis for the Massachusetts reform which in turn became the basis for the ACA. Until then, a timeline: In March 2009, congressional committees begin holding...