Today the Supreme Court found in favour of Obamacare, as I had predicted,and the wheels fell off the Republican clowncar. This is great news for America, as it now means that the law has overcome most of its significant Supreme Court challenges and become settled fact, and the 10 million people who are benefiting from it can continue to have some faith that they can get the healthcare they need. But this is a disaster for the Republican presidential campaign, coming as it does before the primaries, because it means that all 10 riders in the clowncar will now have to rampage through the primaries promising to repeal Obamacare. Whoever wins that hilarious circus of stupidity is then going to have to go to the election with a record of promising to repeal the law – which is going to really worry 10 million people who depend on it, and force them all to vote Democrat.
My guess is it’s going to be a Clinton-Bush battle, pitting one of America’s most popular politicians (Clinton), with a record of rational policy-making in healthcare, supported by the best get-out-the-vote campaign team in American history, against a man who has to hide his last name and is starting the election with a possible 10 million vote deficit. Even putting aside the deep, cutting irony of a democracy holding an election campaign between the scions of two dynasties[1], Bush trying to worm and squirm his way out of promises to repeal this law is going to be very entertaining. Furthermore, some of the states where people are benefiting most from the Medicaid expansion and federal exchanges are conservative or swing states like Alabama, and those 10 million voters are likely to be disproportionately clustered in them.
The alternative for Republicans is to – don’t laugh – come up with an alternative health care plan, something they have signally failed to do for the past 8 years, despite repeated complaints about how terrible and ineffective and bad and fascist Obamacare is. Sure, they have a few op-eds on the matter but they haven’t done anything resembling serious policy development and they’re already in the primary stage. Contrary to journalistic silliness in the USA that the Republicans are “tripping over themselves” to make new laws (I kid you not, a journalist from Vox actually wrote that!) the Republicans are not in any way serious about health policy, and no plan they come up with will be anything except terrible, which is why they aren’t trying. Their “plan” for America’s uninsured is to leave them uninsured.
So what are the Republicans going to do? They seriously threaten their election chances with promises of repeal, but they will look like the idiots and fools they are if they release a plan (can you imagine Trump’s healthcare plan!?) If this decision happened after the primaries maybe they’d be okay – refuse to be drawn on the issue during the primaries because “there’s a court case” and then run for election with the promise of a plan (isn’t that what Obama did?) But it’s hard to win with the promise of a plan when you’ve already made it clear that you’re going to tear away the health insurance of 10 million people. Better the devil you know, and all that. And now any plan they do release will be compared with Obamacare – will it insure more people? Will it cost more? Will it cause millions to lose their insurance? Why should we risk it when we have a plan that is covering more and more people every day!?
I think the Republicans were assuming that their pet conservatives on the Supreme Court would deliver them Obamacare chaos, and they could then coast home to win the election on the basis that Obama had messed everything up, with vague promises of a plan that “serious” political journalists would pretend to believe. But Roberts was appointed to the Supreme Court by George W Bush, proponent of “compassionate conservatism,” and is probably out of step with the modern Republican movement (I have already read people at patterico claiming he is a closet homosexual who is being blackmailed by Obama![2]) They probably shouldn’t have bet their entire political strategy on the opinions of a couple of old men who might, actually, take their role in politics seriously. But then maybe the Republican political movement has forgotten what it means to take a political role seriously, since they’re mostly just grifters, failure and con artists, and couldn’t imagine that those old men might see themselves as bigger than their party allegiances.
Two minor side points of this decision are that 1) hopefully US politics will now begin to back away from the ideology of repeal-through-the-courts, which is fundamentally undemocratic (if you don’t like a law, repeal it through politics not the courts!) and 2) I think it’s well past time I retired the use of the word “conservative” when talking about the American right. There’s nothing about their politics, their attitude towards their institutions, or their public behavior that is conservative – they’re radical. The word “conservative” is not very useful in politics generally, but at least in Australia and the UK it refers to two broad streams of political thought that we all understand and (with a few notable exceptions like Tony Abbott) can accept are broadly trying to be responsible and politically rational. It’s no more or less meaningful than “radical” or “liberal” or “left-wing” in those contexts, though all these words are only of limited use. But in the American context it’s just meaningless. The Democrats are the conservatives of American politics and the other side is, broadly speaking, a convocation of clowns and radicals. So what’s an alternative word for the broad spectrum of anti-Democrat politics in the USA that is still meaningful to readers, but not an insult to actual conservatives? I am thinking “right wing” but is there something more evocative? Radical Constitutionalists? Clownsiders? The Idiot Wing? The Grifter Party?
The primary season hasn’t started properly yet and already the clowncar is overcrowded and looking pretty wobbly. The next couple of months are going to be simultaneously hilarious and deeply depressing. Strap yourselves in, folks, it’s going to be a wild ride …
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fn1: Will Chelsea Clinton run in future?
fn2: This is interesting, right here. When the High Court of Australia ruled in favour of Aboriginal people in the Mabo dispute, there was a lot of angst but I don’t remember anyone saying that court members were being blackmailed by the government or demanding an armed insurrection (as is happening in comments at Redstate). It really seems to me like the fragmentation of US politics is complete, and there is no more common ground to be found there.
June 29, 2015 at 9:13 am
“1) hopefully US politics will now begin to back away from the ideology of repeal-through-the-courts, which is fundamentally undemocratic (if you don’t like a law, repeal it through politics not the courts!)”
Yeah, the fact that every significant law in the US needs to be approved by the house, then the senate, then the president then the courts makes the entire process even more of a farce than it should be. It takes an amazingly small number of idiots (i.e. 1 -> Roberts) to have a brain fart and overturn the apple cart.
I’d actually also point to gay marriage in the US as being in the same vein. I’m in favour of gay marriage, but the way the US has gotten it guarantees that it’ll linger as a fighting point for decades – the same way abortion has.
When you contrast that to the result in Ireland the difference is stunning. To put in in perspective, the Irish result got Andrew Bolt to write columns accepting the result and moving to his next battleground [1]. Hopefully Australia can relatively quickly pull together a bipartisan endorsement of gay marriage that can demonstrate how society really feels about it (i.e. broadly supportive or at least unopposed).
On the topic of dynasties in US politics, I’ve seen some right wing commentators fulminating about how it reflects a corruption of the citizen representative ideal. I actually have a lot of sympathy for that point of view…
[1] He opposes polygamous marriage or something. Amusingly enough, I’m in favour as long as the tax, divorce and welfare aspects are worked out in advance. [2]
[2] I don’t care who you sleep with, but working out how family tax breaks would work in a star marriage where half a dozen people are married to various combinations of each other would be a nightmare. The biggest single cost of such marriages would probably be updating accounting and tax software to support the various combinations…
June 29, 2015 at 11:08 pm
I agree about the gay marriage aspect, and I get the impression that Roberts wrote an opinion that expresses that position without being homophobic, though I could be wrong. In defense of the plaintiffs and to play devil’s advocate for a moment, though, in Ireland they only had to have the debate in connection with one legislature, while in the US it has to happen 51 times and it’s clear that some of those states, though they’re a tiny minority of the country, will never change. This means that you can get married and have your marriage not recognized in some parts of your own country until you have had that debate 51 times, so I can see why someone would want to take a state to the Supreme Court. Plus of course there is the follow-up hypocrisy of your opponents being able to pass a single law at the national level to disenfranchise you after you have won a majority of the local battles: Some of the presidential candidates were pleading states’ rights over the confederate flag on Monday, and then proposing a federal amendment to override states on the rainbow flag by Friday. Which tells me that a) this battle would be exhausting for gay rights activists [or any other activists, obviously] and b) this is yet another example of how the constitution is not actually very helpful. I can see why people go to the Supreme Court for help, and also why people dread the Supreme Court’s intervention. This is especially true given that justices seem to be appointed not on their merits but on their politics (this was especially clear when Bush – I think – was trying to get an appointment for a judge with no constitutional law experience, just on the merits of their politics). This is why you often read American political sites talking about the importance of their preferred president not just in terms of their specific policies but also in terms of their supreme court picks (a common left-wing response to complaints that Republicans and Democrats are indistinguishable[1] is “Supreme Court!”). It also explains why now some Republican presidential candidates are talking about sacking the court and complaining about Bush’s “liberal in conservative clothing”, because they don’t accept its role as a constitutional safeguard except that it agrees with their politics.
The best comparison for me is when the Australian High Court ruled that states can’t raise their own taxes. No side of politics wanted that decision, it was just sucky, but no one in politics talked about sacking the court – they just got on with fixing the problem. Even Mabo, one of the High Court’s most contentious decisions, got a restrained response from those conservatives it pissed off (except Heffernan, of course!) The contrast between that and the last week’s outrage in America is remarkable. But the High Court can’t easily derail legislation, and Australia doesn’t face the legislative gridlock that the USA does, so obviously the incentive to stack the court with political appointees is much reduced.
What a mess the US constitution is!
[Also incidentally I could be wrong but I don’t get the impression Bolt sees gay rights as a hill worth dying for – am I wrong? Confusing him with Tim Blair?]
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fn1: which seems to be a particularly left wing form of ennui. Conservatives don’t fall for this bullshit, they understand that even incremental differences in policy are important!
June 30, 2015 at 11:48 am
“In defense of the plaintiffs and to play devil’s advocate for a moment, though, in Ireland they only had to have the debate in connection with one legislature, while in the US it has to happen 51 times and it’s clear that some of those states, though they’re a tiny minority of the country, will never change.”
Hmm. That’d make more sense if at more states had actually voted for it. A count of the list at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Same-sex_marriage_in_the_United_States
Shows that 12 out of the ones listed passed it via statute. If we were talking about bring the last 10 in line that’d be different to saying 39 should suck it up because a philosopher king insists [1].
“I don’t get the impression Bolt sees gay rights as a hill worth dying for”
He had opposed it on all the usual arguments (kids, tradition, etc [2]). Bolt on gay marriage (28/5): http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/column_gay_marriage_advocates_must_now_protect_marriage_as_ive_tried/
I don’t have a Herald Sun subscription, but my memory of the free copy in the work kitchen was this was him falling back to the next hill.
Hmm. Its noteworthy that while I can happily comment on gay marriage and how to implement it, health policy is basically a non-discussion point. An analogy between the US positions appears to be between funding hospitals and burning them down. I can see some edge cases for burning hospitals down (filled with zombies springs to mind), but it’s not something I’d bother debating. And I’d happily debate whether a packet of already opened chips was the flavour marked on the outside of the packet… [3]
[1] I’m really opposed to judicial activism. The idea that being the (nigh-inevitably rich) lawyer class of a country (which already has disproportionate political power) should get to not only enforce the rules but also makes them makes me seethe with rage at the disenfranchisement of it.
[2] I don’t recall him giving “Gays, ewww” as an argument, so good on him for avoiding outright homophobia I guess.
[3] I’m relatively polite, but still a troll. But you should see my youngest (2 year old) troll his older brother (3 years old) – outright lies on topics like who had a tractor on their side designed intentionally to piss his brother off.
June 30, 2015 at 5:44 pm
A lot of those court cases appear to be overturning bans that were endorsed in referenda, too. I’m not sure what to make of the fact that so many of these bans are ruled unconstitutional: it seems as if at both the State and Federal level, as soon as one of these bans is challenged it is knocked down as being unconstitutional. I’m tempted to say that the weight of evidence suggests that actually these popular votes are illegal [in the US sense]. However, given how precedent works in the law, they can’t really be construed as 12 independent decisions … In any case if I wanted to get married and the state said I couldn’t but my sibling could, I think I’d take it to the court too …
Everyone knows that when a hospital is full of zombies you bar the doors weakly and write “Be careful!” in water-soluble paint on the outside!
July 1, 2015 at 12:44 pm
The water based paint idea is OK too. Have you ever fought a zombie that’s on fire?