progressive politics and regressive entertainment. like peanut and butter.
July 30, 2012 2 Comments
Ham and Cheese
You don’t interpret a penalty to be a pig. It can’t be a pig.
–Justice Antonin Scalia on Fox News Sunday
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia (Photo credit: The Higgs Boson)
July 3, 2012 Leave a comment
The idea that the health care mandate is the biggest tax increase in the history of the United States is a duplicitous charge that is wrong on so many levels. Let’s start with the factual level, and let’s look at it visually. The good folk at Talking Points Memo put together a graph that demonstrates how the health care mandate compares to the tax increases passed by Clinton, George H.W. Bush, and Ronald Reagan. Yeah, of course you knew the conservatives were lying, but it’s still productive to see it all laid out in bright blue bars.
June 28, 2012 8 Comments
Yes, I would prefer single payer public option health care. But at least a health care mandate pushes for individual responsibility and greater health care coverage. Don’t believe me? Listen to Mitt Romney say so, from a press conference on March 6th, 2006.
April 14, 2012 2 Comments
In the April 9th edition of The New Yorker, Jeffrey Toobin point out the worrisome sign that Justice Anthony Kennedy already doesn’t understand the health care mandate.
Consider, then, this question, posed to [Solicitor General] Verrilli by Justice Anthony M. Kennedy: “Assume for the moment that this”–the mandate–”is unprecedented, this is a step beyond what our cases have allowed, the affirmative duty to act to go into commerce. If that is so, do you not have a heavy burden of justification?” Every premise of that question was a misperception. The involvement of the federal government in the health-care market is not unprecedented; it dates back nearly fifty years, to the passage of Medicare and Medicaid. The forty million uninsured Americans whose chances for coverage are riding on the outcome of the case are already entered “into commerce,” because others are likely to pay their health-care costs.”
Toobin goes further in his critique, but the case is already made that Kennedy doesn’t get it, and that doesn’t bode well for the impending decision. It’s unfortunate that Kennedy is frequently referred to as a moderate, because he’s not. He’s a conservative Reagan Republican, only given our conservative activist Supreme Court, that makes him a swing vote between the moderates and the far-right wing conservatives.
