ACS
Login:

BookTalk

ACS BookTalk features posts by authors of books on pressing law or policy concerns. Click here to catch up on the latest.

This week's selection »

Blog

Topics

Join ACS

Featured Videos

More Videos »

Video Podcasts

More Podcasts »

Find a Lawyer Chapter or Student Chapter

Blogroll

Legal Blogs

Policy Blogs

Join The Conversation

LinkedIn

Archive
Home > Blog > All > social safety net

social safety net

  • July 3, 2012

    Barriers to Fixing the Social Safety Net: Roberts Court’s Affinity for Corporate Interests

    by Jeremy Leaming

    Despite upholding the Affordable Care Act, corporate America continues its winning ways before the nation’s highest court.

    Specifically, the Chamber of Commerce, the nation’s biggest lobbyist for business interests has “prevailed in 68 percent of its cases before the Roberts Court,” writes Neil Weare for the Constitutional Accountability Center (CAC). He adds that the Chamber’s “success has grown significantly since the stable Rehnquist Court, when it was just 56” percent.

    In close cases, Weare says “Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito have become the Chamber’s strongest champions.” Roberts has sided with the Chamber 84 percent of the time; Alito has sided with it 92 percent of the time.

    “In sum,” Weare concludes, “the October 2011 Term yet again demonstrates the roaring success of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has had before conservative Justices on the Roberts Court.”

    The trend also shows liberals are making little headway in reversing the decades-long movement to destroy the nation’s social safety. While poverty continues to grow, and a small group of outlandishly wealthy people continues to consolidate its power, all three branches of the federal government, not to mention a slew of Republican-controlled statehouses, seem forever beholden to the wealthy few.

    The Affordable Care Act, which the high court narrowly upheld, and did so by placing limits on Congress’s spending power, is also under attack by right-wing politicos who are bent on hampering even moderate efforts to create a decent social safety net in a wealthy country.

    As noted here, Republican governors are loudly proclaiming they’ll work to undermine the Affordable Care Act, especially its provision calling for an expansion of Medicaid. TPM’s Brian Beutler reports that Louisiana’s right-wing governor, Bobby Jindal, says “we’re going to do everything we can” to trash the Obama administration’s health care law.

    More
    Tags:
    Economic inequality, Supreme Court, Affordable Care Act, Bobby Jindal, Chamber of Commerce, Connor Kikpatrick, Constitutional Accountability Center, Jocobin, Neil Weare, Obama administration, Roberts Court, social safety net, Tea Party
  • June 7, 2012

    How Poverty Puts Our Democracy at Stake

    BookTalk
    So Rich, So Poor
    Why It's So Hard to End Poverty in the United States
    By: 
    Peter Edelman
    Available here

    By Peter Edelman a law professor at Georgetown University, co-director of the University’s Joint Degree in Law and Public Policy, and Faculty Director for the school’s Center on Poverty, Inequality and Public Policy. Edelman is also the chair of the American Constitution Society’s Board of Directors, and will be signing copies of his book at the ACS National Convention next week.

    It’s never hard to find a policy hook to discuss poverty in the United States, but one we have just now is the recent budget for FY 2013 proposed by Paul Ryan and the House Republicans which proposes to slash virtually every program that helps low-income people in our country.  My new book is called So Rich, So Poor: Why It’s So Hard to End Poverty in the United States. Paul Ryan and colleagues are definitely a policy hook for talking about my book.

    I could just say that people like Paul Ryan and the House Republicans are the reason why it’s so hard to end poverty in our nation. That’s not wrong, but the story is much more complicated than that. We have a long list of successful programs without which we’d have 40 million additional people in poverty over and above the 46 million we have now. Don’t let anybody tell you that nothing works. Paul Ryan’s line is that if we have 46 million people in poverty now, it’s because the programs are a failure – because social security, food stamps, the earned income tax credit, housing vouchers, and Medicare and Medicaid are failures. And some people – all too many -- take him seriously.    

    No, we have 46 million people in poverty and tens of millions more struggling every day to make ends meet for other reasons. There are two problems here, actually: the millions who work as hard as they can and can’t get out of poverty or near-poverty, and the smaller (but not small) group who are virtually destitute, with incomes below half the poverty line, or below $9,000 for a family of three. The first group – whose basic problem is the huge number of low-wage jobs now extant in our economy – now constitutes a third of the population, 103 million people who have incomes below twice the poverty line (below $36,000 for a family of three). The second – those in deep poverty – now number 20.5 million, up by almost 8 million since 2000. Both numbers are staggering, each in its own way.

    More
    Tags:
    Economic inequality, Financial regulation, Economic, Workplace and Environment Regulation, BookTalk, Peter Edelman, poverty, Rep. Paul Ryan, So Poor, So Rich, social safety net
  • June 6, 2012

    The Right’s Aggressive Efforts to Employ the Constitution to Shred the Social Safety Net

    by Jeremy Leaming

    The libertarian argument wielded against the Obama administration’s health care reform law was propelled quickly and effectively by a right-wing “infrastructure” that has its sights set on longstanding, but weakened social safety net laws.

    Media Matters’ David Lyle says those concerned about the nation’s social safety net and the Constitution’s progressive values, “should remember how aggressively and efficiently the right was able to deploy its view of the Constitution as a weapon, and meet future attempts to do so head on.”

    Lyle cites a recent Salon piece by Northwestern University law and political science professor Andrew Koppelman, which provides a detailed examination of the evolution of the wildly libertarian argument used against the Affordable Care Act’s minimum coverage provision. That provision of the law requires Americans who can afford it, to purchase a minimum amount of health care insurance starting in 2014.

    Lyle writes:

    Koppelman's research shows that within a few months in mid-2009 the constitutional argument against health care reform went from nonexistent to a subject of mainstream discussion. Koppelman was unable to find any published claim that the individual mandate would be unconstitutional prior to a July 2009 Federalist Society issue brief written by two former Bush administration officials. In August 2009, conservative lawyers David Rivkin and Lee Casey, who regularly write on issues the right-wing legal infrastructure wishes to move into the mainstream, published a Washington Post op-ed attacking the mandate on constitutional grounds. On September 18, law professor Randy Barnett, who would play a leading role in the subsequent litigation against the act, first weighed in on the issue with a post on Politico. Koppelman notes that days later CBS News reported that "[i]n the last few days, a new argument has emerged in the debate over Democratic healthcare proposals," and that CBS mentioned that the constitutionality issue had emerged on The O'Reilly Factor and Fox News.

    The Right’s ability, Lyle continues, to define the constitutional debate “is all the more potent because it so effectively complements a highly ideological, bordering on politically partisan, conservative pro-corporate wing of the federal judiciary.”

    He notes, among other instances, a recent concurring opinion by D.C. Circuit Judge Janice Rogers Brown in Hettinga v. United States. Brown, appointed to the federal appeals court bench by George W. Bush, used her opinion to launch a screed against the federal government’s efforts to battle poverty and provide a sturdy social safety net.

    More
    Tags:
    Fidelity to the Constitution, Supreme Court, Constitutional Interpretation and Change, Economic, Workplace and Environment Regulation, ACA, Affordable Care Act, Andrew Koppelman, David Lyle, healh care reform, Health Care Law, Hettinga v. United States, Judge Janice Rogers Brown, Medicare, Simon Lazarus, social safety net, Sociay Security