Obama administration

by Jeremy Leaming

Slowly the economy continues to recover, with jobs being added over the past 26 months, but that progress is amazing in an atmosphere where one of the two major political parties is concerned only with advancing the outlandish interests of the nation’s super wealthy.

The Great Recession, underway before the Obama administration was in existence, has shoved millions into poverty and the gap between the nation’s top 1 percent and everyone else is the widest since the 1920s. Last fall, the Census Bureau reported that the number of people in poverty is at its highest in more than 50 years. As noted earlier this week the super wealthy are increasingly out-of-touch, indeed one retired multimillionaire is pushing a book that calls for more economic inequality.

But how did the country arrive at this point where the middle class is shrinking, the poor is growing and a tiny group of people are amassing most of the wealth? Because, according to some, the nation’s conservative party has been bought by the out-of-touch super wealthy.

The mainstream media, in the name of objectivity, will continue to blame both parties for gridlock in Washington, but a growing number of economists, academics, lawyers, activists, and others concerned about the well-being of all people are pushing back against that tired line.

Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein, who have studied Congress for several decades, say the Republican Party is to blame for pushing fantastical policy and refusing to budge from it, therefore creating an atmosphere where progress or change is difficult to foster.

“The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics, Mann and Ornstein write for The Washington Post. “It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”

One of the group’s to blame for the Republican Party’s unmovable concern about the nation’s super wealthy is Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform, which pushes conservative lawmakers to sign a pledge against raising any taxes. Norquist (pictured) is all about policy that starves the federal government of revenues, so policies to help the less fortunate dwindle, because those are not the people Norquist or the Republican Party are concerned with.

In his May 4 column for The New York Times, economist Paul Krugman notes the work of Mann and Ornstein, writing, “Specifically money buys power, and the increasing wealth of a tiny minority has effectively bought the allegiance of one of our two major political parties, in the process destroying any prospect for cooperation.”

“And the takeover of half our political spectrum by the 0.01 percent is, I’d argue, also responsible for the degradation of our economic discourse, which has made any sensible discussion of what we should doing impossible,” Krugman continued.

In a piece last year for Rolling Stone Tim Dickinson, said the party of Ronald Reagan has “undergone a radical transformation, reorganizing itself around a grotesque proposition: that the wealthy should grow wealthier still, whatever the consequences for the rest of us.”

by Jeremy Leaming

The Supreme Court has set aside a large chunk of time later this month to hear argument over the constitutionality of the health care law’s integral provision, but the primary argument against the minimum coverage provisions has been loudly and repeatedly bandied about since the law’s enactment.

The law’s minimum coverage provision requires people who can afford it to obtain a minimum coverage of health insurance or pay a penalty when filing their income tax returns. It’s not the only provision being challenged by the states, but it is the one that has largely driven the right-wing argument that if the federal government can force some people to purchase health care insurance, there’s no limit to what Congress will be able to require individuals to purchase. (Maybe Congress will require everyone to purchase a gun, to protect their lives, from predators. While becoming a target of crime is obviously something that does and can happen anywhere in the world, it is not as certain as humans’ need for medical treatment due to many other causes, many natural.)

As noted on ACSblog numerous times, the liberty argument is not only wobbly, but hypocritical. A former U.S. Solicitor General Walter Dellinger noted at last year’s ACS Convention that many of the folks complaining about the minimum coverage provision are also supporters of laws requiring women to undergo sonograms and listen to propaganda from doctors before receiving an abortion.

In a March 7 piece for The Nation, Georgetown University law school professor and constitutional law expert David Cole provides, as usual for the professor, an accessible explanation about why the argument against the minimum coverage provision is unlikely to be invalidated by the high court.

Not only is the argument against the minimum coverage provision on flimsy ground, it’s also not conservative. The argument is, in reality, “radically libertarian,” Cole writes.

Cole states:

We’ve seen this kind of libertarian constitutional argument before. In the early twentieth century, after the Industrial Revolution had concentrated economic power in employers’ hands, Congress and the states passed many laws designed to protect workers from exploitation. Time and again, the Supreme Court invalidated these statutes. It deemed the federal laws beyond Congress’s power to regulate interstate commerce because they were said to regulate the terms of production, manufacture or mining, all of which were said to precede interstate commerce. And it invalidated state labor laws as infringements on the “freedom of contract” protected by the due process clause.

After the Depression, however, the court “overruled both lines of precedent it abandoned altogether the due process notion that economic regulation infringes on ‘freedom of contract,’” and “it has never since invalidated any law on that ground. And it ruled that in our integrated national economy, Congress is entitled to regulate on the presumption that all economic activity, not matter how local, affects interstate commerce.”