#how Republicans plan to destroy every American law and consumer protection

[scottguy]

There is no "deep state." There are just government workers doing the jobs we Americans ASKED them to do like: make sure your water is safe, make sure your air is clean, make sure you get your Social Security check or your doctor paid by Medicare.

Do you really want those people fired?

Ironically, Trump and the Heritage Foundation wrote plans for an ACTUAL "deep state" of fools who will NOT enforce our pesky laws that inconvenience the rich.

Project 2025 is a written plan AND a job application database for MAGA fools to sign up to take government jobs from competent people which will be assigned to idiots who will just do whatever they're told.

For example: They'd make a call and say, "Trump says to stop sending Social Security checks!"

New Project 2025 Social Security employees: "Okay, whatever Trump wants!" And they'd just ... do it!

No one should be okay with that.

It's corrupt. It hurts Americans. Hiring an army of mindless zealots to DESTROY the functions of government would be a true "deep state".

Republicans want this because it's a LOT QUICKER than changing all the pro-consumer American laws on the books. Project 2025 short-circuits government.

It's a truly evil plan, and it's all written down. See for yourself:

You can actually apply at the link below this paragraph. (Some pasted links don't create the nice graphic-containing links on Tumblr. I don't know why.)

But be warned. They are only looking for diehard fanatics. They have training videos. They're REALLY serious about ending any public say over things that inconvenience oligarchs and prevent christofascism like that pesky 1st amendment.

https://www.project2025.org/

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

August 14, 2021

Heather Cox Richardson

On this day in 1935, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act into law. While FDR’s New Deal had put in place new measures to regulate business and banking and had provided temporary work relief to combat the Depression, this law permanently changed the nature of the American government.

The Social Security Act is known for its payments to older Americans, but it did far more than that. It established unemployment insurance; aid to homeless, dependent, and neglected children; funds to promote maternal and child welfare; and public health services. It was a sweeping reworking of the relationship of the government to its citizens, using the power of taxation to pool funds to provide a basic social safety net.

The driving force behind the law was FDR’s Secretary of Labor, Frances Perkins. She was the first woman to hold a position in the U.S. Cabinet and still holds the record for having the longest tenure in that job: she lasted from 1933 to 1945.

She brought to the position a vision of government very different from that of the Republicans who had run it in the 1920s. While men like President Herbert Hoover had harped on the idea of a “rugged individualism” in which men worked their way up, providing for their families on their own, Perkins recognized that people in communities had always supported each other. The vision of a hardworking man supporting his wife and children was more myth than reality: her own husband suffered from bipolar disorder, making her the family’s primary support.

As a child, Perkins spent summers with her grandmother, with whom she was very close, in the small town of Newcastle, Maine, where she witnessed a supportive community. In college, at Mount Holyoke, she majored in chemistry and physics, but after a professor required students to tour a factory to observe working conditions, Perkins became committed to improving the lives of those trapped in industrial jobs. After college, Perkins became a social worker and, in 1910, earned a masters degree in economics and sociology from Columbia University. She became the head of the New York office of the National Consumers League, urging consumers to use their buying power to demand better conditions and wages for the workers who made the products they were buying.

The next year, in 1911, she witnessed the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire in which 146 workers, mostly women and girls, died. They were trapped in the building when the fire broke out because the factory owner had ordered the doors to the stairwells and exits locked to make sure no one slipped outside for a break. Unable to escape the smoke and fire in the factory, the workers—some of them on fire—leaped from the 8th, 9th, and 10th floors of the building, dying on the pavement.

The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire turned Perkins away from voluntary organizations to improve workers’ lives and toward using the government to adjust the harsh conditions of industrialization. She began to work with the Democratic politicians at Tammany Hall, who presided over communities in the city that mirrored rural towns and who exercised a form of social welfare for their voters, making sure they had jobs, food, and shelter and that wives and children had a support network if a husband and father died. In that system, the voices of women like Perkins were valuable, for their work in the immigrant wards of the city meant that they were the ones who knew what working families needed to survive.

The overwhelming unemployment, hunger, and suffering caused by the Great Depression made Perkins realize that state governments alone could not adjust the conditions of the modern world to create a safe, supportive community for ordinary people. She came to believe, as she said: “The people are what matter to government, and a government should aim to give all the people under its jurisdiction the best possible life.”

Through her Tammany connections Perkins met FDR, and when he asked her to be his Secretary of Labor, she told him that she wanted the federal government to provide unemployment insurance, health insurance, and old-age insurance. She later recalled: “I remember he looked so startled, and he said, ‘Well, do you think it can be done?’”

Creating federal unemployment insurance became her primary concern. Congressmen had little interest in passing such legislation. They said they worried that unemployment insurance and federal aid to dependent families would undermine a man’s willingness to work. But Perkins recognized that those displaced by the Depression had added new pressure to the idea of old-age insurance.

In Long Beach, California, Dr. Francis Townsend had looked out of his window one day to see elderly women rooting through garbage cans for food. Appalled, he came up with a plan to help the elderly and stimulate the economy at the same time. Townsend proposed that the government provide every retired person over 60 years old with $200 a month, on the condition that they spend it within 30 days, a condition designed to stimulate the economy.

Townsend’s plan was wildly popular. More than that, though, it sparked people across the country to start coming up with their own plans for protecting the elderly and the nation’s social fabric, and together, they began to change the public conversation about social welfare policies.

They spurred Congress to action. Perkins recalled that Townsend “startled the Congress of the United States because the aged have votes. The wandering boys didn't have any votes; the evicted women and their children had very few votes. If the unemployed didn't stay long enough in any one place, they didn't have a vote. But the aged people lived in one place and they had votes, so every Congressman had heard from the Townsend Plan people.”

FDR put together a committee to come up with a plan to create a basic social safety net, but committee members could not make up their minds how to move forward. Perkins continued to hammer on the idea they must come up with a final plan, and finally locked the members of the committee in a room. As she recalled: “Well, we locked the door and we had a lot of talk. I laid out a couple of bottles of something or other to cheer their lagging spirits. Anyhow, we stayed in session until about 2 a.m. We then voted finally, having taken our solemn oath that this was the end; we were never going to review it again.”

By the time the bill came to a vote in Congress, it was hugely popular. The vote was 371 to 33 in the House and 77 to 6 in the Senate.

When asked to describe the origins of the Social Security Act, Perkins mused that its roots came from the very beginnings of the nation. When Alexis de Tocqueville wrote Democracy in America in 1835, she noted, he thought Americans were uniquely “so generous, so kind, so charitably disposed.” “Well, I don't know anything about the times in which De Tocqueville visited America,” she said, but “I do know that at the time I came into the field of social work, these feelings were real.”

With the Social Security Act, Perkins helped to write into our laws a longstanding political impulse in America that stood in dramatic contrast to the 1920s philosophy of rugged individualism. She recognized that the ideas of community values and pooling resources to keep the economic playing field level and take care of everyone are at least as deeply seated in our political philosophy as the idea of every man for himself.

When she recalled the origins of the Social Security Act, Perkins recalled: “Of course, the Act had to be amended, and has been amended, and amended, and amended, and amended, until it has now grown into a large and important project, for which, by the way, I think the people of the United States are deeply thankful. One thing I know: Social Security is so firmly embedded in the American psychology today that no politician, no political party, no political group could possibly destroy this Act and still maintain our democratic system. It is safe. It is safe forever, and for the everlasting benefit of the people of the United States.”

—-

Notes:

​​https://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php

https://www.ssa.gov/history/perkins5.html

https://francesperkinscenter.org/life-new/

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[reading-writing-revolution]

Heather Cox Richardson

August 14, 2021 (Saturday)

On this day in 1935, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act into law. While FDR’s New Deal had put in place new measures to regulate business and banking and had provided temporary work relief to combat the Depression, this law permanently changed the nature of the American government.

The Social Security Act is known for its payments to older Americans, but it did far more than that. It established unemployment insurance; aid to homeless, dependent, and neglected children; funds to promote maternal and child welfare; and public health services. It was a sweeping reworking of the relationship of the government to its citizens, using the power of taxation to pool funds to provide a basic social safety net.

The driving force behind the law was FDR’s Secretary of Labor, Frances Perkins. She was the first woman to hold a position in the U.S. Cabinet and still holds the record for having the longest tenure in that job: she lasted from 1933 to 1945.

She brought to the position a vision of government very different from that of the Republicans who had run it in the 1920s. While men like President Herbert Hoover had harped on the idea of a “rugged individualism” in which men worked their way up, providing for their families on their own, Perkins recognized that people in communities had always supported each other. The vision of a hardworking man supporting his wife and children was more myth than reality: her own husband suffered from bipolar disorder, making her the family’s primary support.

As a child, Perkins spent summers with her grandmother, with whom she was very close, in the small town of Newcastle, Maine, where she witnessed a supportive community. In college, at Mount Holyoke, she majored in chemistry and physics, but after a professor required students to tour a factory to observe working conditions, Perkins became committed to improving the lives of those trapped in industrial jobs. After college, Perkins became a social worker and, in 1910, earned a masters degree in economics and sociology from Columbia University. She became the head of the New York office of the National Consumers League, urging consumers to use their buying power to demand better conditions and wages for the workers who made the products they were buying.

The next year, in 1911, she witnessed the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire in which 146 workers, mostly women and girls, died. They were trapped in the building when the fire broke out because the factory owner had ordered the doors to the stairwells and exits locked to make sure no one slipped outside for a break. Unable to escape the smoke and fire in the factory, the workers—some of them on fire—leaped from the 8th, 9th, and 10th floors of the building, dying on the pavement.

The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire turned Perkins away from voluntary organizations to improve workers’ lives and toward using the government to adjust the harsh conditions of industrialization. She began to work with the Democratic politicians at Tammany Hall, who presided over communities in the city that mirrored rural towns and who exercised a form of social welfare for their voters, making sure they had jobs, food, and shelter and that wives and children had a support network if a husband and father died. In that system, the voices of women like Perkins were valuable, for their work in the immigrant wards of the city meant that they were the ones who knew what working families needed to survive.

The overwhelming unemployment, hunger, and suffering caused by the Great Depression made Perkins realize that state governments alone could not adjust the conditions of the modern world to create a safe, supportive community for ordinary people. She came to believe, as she said: “The people are what matter to government, and a government should aim to give all the people under its jurisdiction the best possible life.”

Through her Tammany connections Perkins met FDR, and when he asked her to be his Secretary of Labor, she told him that she wanted the federal government to provide unemployment insurance, health insurance, and old-age insurance. She later recalled: “I remember he looked so startled, and he said, ‘Well, do you think it can be done?’”

Creating federal unemployment insurance became her primary concern. Congressmen had little interest in passing such legislation. They said they worried that unemployment insurance and federal aid to dependent families would undermine a man’s willingness to work. But Perkins recognized that those displaced by the Depression had added new pressure to the idea of old-age insurance.

In Long Beach, California, Dr. Francis Townsend had looked out of his window one day to see elderly women rooting through garbage cans for food. Appalled, he came up with a plan to help the elderly and stimulate the economy at the same time. Townsend proposed that the government provide every retired person over 60 years old with $200 a month, on the condition that they spend it within 30 days, a condition designed to stimulate the economy.

Townsend’s plan was wildly popular. More than that, though, it sparked people across the country to start coming up with their own plans for protecting the elderly and the nation’s social fabric, and together, they began to change the public conversation about social welfare policies.

They spurred Congress to action. Perkins recalled that Townsend “startled the Congress of the United States because the aged have votes. The wandering boys didn't have any votes; the evicted women and their children had very few votes. If the unemployed didn't stay long enough in any one place, they didn't have a vote. But the aged people lived in one place and they had votes, so every Congressman had heard from the Townsend Plan people.”

FDR put together a committee to come up with a plan to create a basic social safety net, but committee members could not make up their minds how to move forward. Perkins continued to hammer on the idea they must come up with a final plan, and finally locked the members of the committee in a room. As she recalled: “Well, we locked the door and we had a lot of talk. I laid out a couple of bottles of something or other to cheer their lagging spirits. Anyhow, we stayed in session until about 2 a.m. We then voted finally, having taken our solemn oath that this was the end; we were never going to review it again.”

By the time the bill came to a vote in Congress, it was hugely popular. The vote was 371 to 33 in the House and 77 to 6 in the Senate.

When asked to describe the origins of the Social Security Act, Perkins mused that its roots came from the very beginnings of the nation. When Alexis de Tocqueville wrote Democracy in America in 1835, she noted, he thought Americans were uniquely “so generous, so kind, so charitably disposed.” “Well, I don't know anything about the times in which De Tocqueville visited America,” she said, but “I do know that at the time I came into the field of social work, these feelings were real.”

With the Social Security Act, Perkins helped to write into our laws a longstanding political impulse in America that stood in dramatic contrast to the 1920s philosophy of rugged individualism. She recognized that the ideas of community values and pooling resources to keep the economic playing field level and take care of everyone are at least as deeply seated in our political philosophy as the idea of every man for himself.

When she recalled the origins of the Social Security Act, Perkins recalled: “Of course, the Act had to be amended, and has been amended, and amended, and amended, and amended, until it has now grown into a large and important project, for which, by the way, I think the people of the United States are deeply thankful. One thing I know: Social Security is so firmly embedded in the American psychology today that no politician, no political party, no political group could possibly destroy this Act and still maintain our democratic system. It is safe. It is safe forever, and for the everlasting benefit of the people of the United States.”

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Elizabeth Warren's banking proposals are designed to demolish the private equity sector and force finance to serve the people

Elizabeth Warren's bid for the Democratic 2020 presidential nomination has been dominated by a series of bold, detailed policy proposals that are designed to enact deep, structural changes in American law and policy to reverse 40 years of post-Reagan corruption and wealth accumulation by the richest 1%.

One of these proposals deals directly with the finance sector, an area where Warren has real credibility, thanks to her excellent work in founding and structuring the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau (alas, many of the structures put in place to protect the CFPB from Republican Congressional meddling have backfired, saddling the Bureau with a long-term Trump appointee of the very worst sort).

Writing on The Reformed Broker, Joshua M Brown describes how the Warren finance proposals "have been designed to deliberately shrink the financial services business in general and its profits in particular" and how Warren's detailed knowledge of how private equity allows the super rich to grow their fortunes by destroying real businesses and real jobs mean that these proposals are "banking-sector napalm...burning away every loophole and unfair advantage these funds have and disintegrating their profitability into ash"

Here's how it works:

   My plan would transform the private equity industry and end this looting with a comprehensive set of legal changes, including:

*        Putting private equity firms on the hook for the debts of companies they buy, making them responsible for the downside of their investments so that they only make money if the companies they control flourish.

*        Holding private equity firms responsible for certain pension obligations of the companies they buy, so that workers have a better shot of getting the retirement funds they earned.

*        Eliminating the ability of private equity firms to pay themselves huge monitoring fees and limiting their ability to pay out dividends to line their own pockets.

*        Changing the tax rules so that private equity firms don’t get sweetheart tax rates on all the debt they put on the companies they buy.

*        Modifying bankruptcy rules so that when companies go bust, workers have a better shot at getting pay and benefits and executives can’t pocket special bonuses.

*        Preventing lenders and investment managers from making reckless loans to private equity-owned companies already swimming in debt and then passing along the danger to the market by requiring them to retain some of the risk.

*        Empowering investors like pension funds with better information about the performance and effects of private equity investments and preventing private equity funds from requiring investors to waive their fiduciary obligations.

*        Closing the carried interest loophole that lets firm managers pay ultra-low tax rates on the money they loot.

https://boingboing.net/2019/07/22/finance-napalm.html

[patriotsnet]

What Do Republicans Want To Do With Social Security

New Post has been published on https://www.patriotsnet.com/what-do-republicans-want-to-do-with-social-security/

What Do Republicans Want To Do With Social Security

Republicans Seek Pennsylvania Voters Personal Information As They Try To Review The 2020 Results

What the Republicans Want to Do to Social Security

Pennsylvania Republicans moved on Wednesday to seek personal information on every voter in the state as part of a brewing partisan review of the 2020 election results, rubber-stamping more than a dozen subpoenas for drivers license numbers and partial Social Security numbers.

The expansive request for personal information, directed at Pennsylvanias Department of State and approved in a vote by Republicans on a State Senate subcommittee, is the first major step of the election inquiry. The move adds Pennsylvania to a growing list of states that have embarked on partisan-led reviews of the 2020 election, including a widely criticized attempt to undermine the outcome in Arizonas largest county.

Democrats in the State Senate pledged to fight the subpoenas in court, saying at a news conference after the vote on Wednesday that the requests for identifiable personal information were an overreach, lacked authority and potentially violated federal laws protecting voter privacy.

Senate Democrats, going forward, intend to take legal action against this gross abuse of power by filing a lawsuit, challenging in the courts, and to ask the courts to declare the Senate Republicans actions in violation of separation of power, as well as declaring that they had no authority to issue these subpoenas, said State Senator Jay Costa, the minority leader.

The Department of State did not respond to requests for comment or issue a statement on the subpoenas.

transcript

Pennsylvania Republicans Subpoena Voter Social Security Numbers

Pennsylvania Senate Republicans voted Wednesday to subpoena vast troves of personal information on millions of voters, including partial Social Security numbers, as they engage with false conspiracies about the 2020 election.

The vote comes as Republicans across the country have pushed for so-called audits of last years election, saying they are a necessary response to doubts sowed by former president Donald Trump and Republicans themselves. The most significant of these efforts, so far, is an ongoing audit in Arizona funded and executed by Trump allies and conspiracy theorists with no end in sight.

But Pennsylvania appears to be taking a different approach than Arizona. Rather than requesting ballots and voting machines as Arizona did and as Trump supporters have been pushing for Pennsylvania Republicans are beginning their taxpayer-funded investigation by seeking voters personal information to, as the chair of the committee running the show said Wednesday, determine whether or not they exist.

What happens to that information and whether it is shared with as-yet-unnamed private vendors as part of an Arizona-style audit, is up to Republican committee chair Cris Dush and his legal team, he said during Wednesdays hearing.

This election was on the up and up, Santarsiero said. It was the most secure election in history.

Democrats Vs Republicans On Social Security

One large disagreement between parties on the issue of Social Security is how much of a forefront issue they believe Social Security is. A recent survey by Allianz Life showed that, when asked what they believe the most important economic issues facing America are, 65 percent of Democrats listed Social Security, while only 42 percent of Republicans did. In terms of contributing to the federal debt, more Republicans than Democrats named Social Security. Republicans also show a tendency to start preparing financially for retirement earlier in life than Democrats do. 79 percent of Republicans reported beginning to save before their 50s, with 69 percent of Democrats reporting beginning to save at the same time.

In recent budget negotiations, Republicans sought Social Security cuts as a means to reduce government spending. Instead, the Presidents proposal includes tax increases to cover the monetary gap. Brendan Buck, a spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner, stated that the Presidents refusal to seek these cuts a reaffirmation of what has become all too apparent: the president has no interest in doing anything, even modest, to address our looming debt crisis. The one and only idea the president has to offer is even more job-destroying tax hikes, and that non-starter wont do anything to save the entitlement programs that are critical to so many Americans. With three years left in office, it seems the president is already throwing in the towel.

Also Check: Did Trump Say Republicans Are Stupid

Republican Views On Social Security

May 7, 2014 By RepublicanViews.org

The Republican Party gets a lot of criticism over the issue of Social Security. Many will state that Republicans are against Social Security as a whole. This is untrue. Republicans are against Social Security in the form that it currently exists. While Social Security does represent ideas, such as government spending and redistribution of wealth, which the Party is generally against, very few Republicans will argue that Social Security should be done away with. Instead, they believe in large reforms to the system. They believe that workers need to be given greater control over their own retirement investments. In light of lengthening lifespans, Republicans believe that Americans need greater freedom to arrange personal retirement investments as a supplement to Social Security. They believe young Americans especially should be given this opportunity, as many members of the younger generations do not believe in the effectiveness of the Social Security system, and their money should not have to go into a system they do not support and/or believe in when they have many other options available to them.

Trump Payroll Tax Deferment Is Like An Election Year Bribe

Claudine Schneider

Rita Schwenk, 71, holds up medication which she receives under the Medicare prescription drug benefit program in 2006 in Portland, Maine.

Now Republicans are coming after Social Security and Medicare with President Trumps signature on an executive order that slashes the funding for these two programs.

When I served as a Republican member of Congress, we helped thousands of constituents who had problems receiving their Social Security checks or trouble with Medicare reimbursements. I cant say how many times my constituents cried tears of joy when I was able to tell them their Social Security or Medicare reimbursement issues had been resolved.

These programs help Americans retire with some peace of mind for their financial security and health care protection. Social Security and Medicare are not benefits they are entitlements that working Americans have funded through decades of hard work by their own payroll tax deductions.

Now, with the stroke of a pen, Trump has deferred the payroll tax deduction so that workers can get bigger paychecks now before an election. But do not be fooled: Under Trumps plan, workers have to pay back this deferred tax. This could be an expensive surprise to many, many people on tax filing day next year.

Trump claims he wants to make this payroll tax deduction cut permanent.

Anything for a headline as an election year bribe.

GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX

This election is all about trust.

Don’t Miss: What Caused Republicans To Gain Power In Congress In 1938?

What You Should Know About The Gop And Social Security

Who’s to blame for this mess? Well, some Americans would point their fingers specifically at Republicans in Congress. While they absolutely do take some of the blame, the inaction by Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill makes them equally culpable in exacerbating Social Security’s problems.

When it comes to Republicans and Social Security, here are the four things you absolutely need to know.

Republicans Very Much Dislike The Current Cola Measurement

You should understand that the Republican Party doesn’t like the current inflationary tether, the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers .

The biggest issue Republicans have with the CPI-W is that it doesn’t do a very good job of measuring the inflation that seniors are facing, thereby resulting in an inaccurate cost-of-living adjustment each year. That’s because, as the name implies, the CPI-W tracks the spending habits of urban and clerical workers, who in nearly all instances aren’t receiving a Social Security check. Essentially, seniors’ annual raise is tied to the spending habits of non-seniors, and that doesn’t sit well with anyone in Congress.

In particular, Republicans would like to replace the CPI-W with the Chained CPI. The Chained CPI takes into account the idea of substitution bias, which involves trading down from a pricier good or service to something less expensive if prices go up. For example, if the price of ground beef rises 40%, you might buy pork or chicken instead. The CPI-W does not take into account substitution bias.

Although substitution bias does take into account a real-life purchasing strategy of consumers, the consensus view among pundits is that it would result in lower annual COLAs more years than not, relative to the CPI-W.

Also Check: Donald Trump 1998 Republicans Are Stupid

California Residents Head To The Polls In Recall Election

Voters across California cast their ballots in a recall election to decide the political fate of Gov. Gavin Newsom. The Democrats main challenge is from the Republican candidate Larry Elder.

The coronavirus pandemic helped propel the recall attempt of Gov. Gavin Newsom to the ballot in California, and on Tuesday, his handling of the pandemic was an overriding issue as about two-thirds of voters decided he should stay in office.

Across the nations most populous state, voters surveyed by New York Times reporters outside polling places cited Mr. Newsoms pandemic restrictions and support for vaccine mandates as key factors in whether they voted to oust or keep him. The recall served as a preview of next years midterm elections nationally, with voters sharply divided along partisan lines over issues such as masks, lockdowns and mandatory vaccinations.

In San Francisco, Jose Orbeta said he voted to keep Mr. Newsom, a Democrat, in office, calling the recall a waste of time.

Its a power grab by the G.O.P., said Mr. Orbeta, a 50-year-old employee of the Department of Public Health. He said Mr. Newsom had done a decent job leading California through the pandemic despite his lapse of judgment in dining at the French Laundry during the height of the outbreak.

We really dont like the situation in California, said Fenglan Liu, 53, who immigrated to the United States from mainland China 21 years ago and helped mobilize volunteers in the San Gabriel Valley.

Yes Republicans Want Big Time Cuts In Social Security

Republicans Insist On Cutting Social Security Are Part Of Next Stimulus Bill

Over the last couple weeks, Dylan Scott has been out front on the House GOPs effort manufacture a Social Security funding crisis that would hit over the next two years. Theres more than one Social Security Trust Fund. Theres one that covers most retirees. Theres another that covers the disability part of the program. And over the years, Congress with little controversy has shifted funds back and forth between the two to maintain actuarial balance. So to date, the whole push has been rather technical and framed around bean counting. But earlier this month, most notably from Rand Paul, we heard the other prong in the attack come into play.

Speaking to Republican presidential primary voters in New Hampshire, Paul said that most Social Security disability recipients are in fact malingerers and scofflaws who have no business receiving benefits in the first place.

The thing is that all of these programs, theres always somebody whos deserving, everybody in this room knows somebody whos gaming the system. I tell people that if you look like me and you hop out of your truck, you shouldnt be getting a disability check. Over half the people on disability are either anxious or their back hurts. Join the club. Who doesnt get up a little anxious for work every day and their back hurts? Everyone over 40 has a back pain.

Read Also: How Many Democrats And Republicans In The Senate

Heres How The Gop Could Remove $174 A Month From Retirees Paychecks Without A Direct Cut

On Capitol Hill, both political parties have acknowledged that Social Security needs some TLC. Unfortunately, neither party is in the same ballpark as to how best to fix whats estimated to be a $13.9 trillion shortfall over the next 75 years.

What isnt in doubt, though, is that if Republicans were able to implement their two most prominent solutions, every beneficiary would see some form of reduction in their payout.

The GOP has long favored cost-cutting as the best means of reducing Social Securitys shortfall. The most commonly touted method of tackling this would be by gradually raising the full retirement age i.e., the age at which you become eligible for 100% of your monthly payout. Currently set to peak at age 67 in 2022 for those born in 1960 or later, Republicans would like to see this figure gradually increased to age 70. Such a move would require future generations of retirees to either wait longer to collect their full payout or to accept a steeper up-front reduction by claiming early. No matter their choice, lifetime benefits, and therefore program outlays, would be reduced.

But the thing about raising the full retirement age is that it takes a long time to work. Meanwhile, the other Republican proposal changing Social Securitys inflationary tether from the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers to the Chained CPI could yield modestly faster savings.

The Third Rail: What To Do With Social Security

Softer Rhetoric on the Right; Liberals’ Seek “No Cuts” Pledge

August 16, 2010 — Painting Republicans as bogeymen who want to privatize sacred entitlement programs, Democrats have turned to Social Security to save them in the coming Midterm election.

“I’ll fight with everything I’ve got to stop those who want to gamble your social security on Wall Street,” President Obama said in his weekly video address on Saturday, the 75 anniversary of Social Security’s enactment.

Along with Medicare, Social Security remains a sacred cow in American politics and focusing on protecting them is probably good politics for Democrats as they head into the fall elections where Republicans are expected to make big gains.

But there is political peril in the issue for both parties, especially as the President’s bipartisan debt commission considers ways to fix Social Security before it is expected to run out of money in 2037. The commission is mulling several options to keep the entitlement program solvent, including cutting benefits, and raising the retirement age to 70.

Reading the writing on the wall and expecting the commission to recommend some entitlement cuts, a coalition of liberal groups announced a plan this week to confront members of both parties at town hall meetings and prod them to sign a pledge never to cut benefits.

“Social Security did not cause the federal deficit; its benefits should not be cut to reduce the deficit,” the group’s website says.

Don’t Miss: Senate Party Breakdown 2017

Filling Public Trustee Jobs For Medicare And Social Security Is A Step To Shoring Up The Programs

The trust funds that support Social Security and Medicare are expected to run out of money. Policy experts argue Congress needs to act quickly to avoid benefit cuts.

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Political parties dont seem to agree on much these days, but at least 100 members split among Democrats and Republicans do share one common belief Social Security is in dire need of help and they want Congress to do something about it.

The trust funds that support Social Securitys activities are expected to run out of money by 2035, and if that were to happen, beneficiaries would receive about 80% of what theyre owed. Medicare is in even more imminent danger the Medicare Hospital Insurance fund, which supports inpatient care, is expected to be exhausted in 2026.

The Bipartisan Policy Center and the National Academy of Social Insurance released a letter this month, with 100 signatures from both political parties, addressing this issue, and one way to go about fixing it.

In the letter, Republicans and Democrats call on Congress to act on pending nominations for the public trustee roles for the boards of Social Security and Medicare, which have been vacant since 2015. These roles are supposed to be filled by two people, one Democrat and one Republican, who will work with the boards of Social Security and Medicare to provide guidance for these programs from an independent, nongovernmental perspective.

See: This word describes Social Security but not everyone agrees

Where Do The Candidates And Parties Stand On Social Security

We can’t lose sight of the need to reform Social Security and make it financially sustainable.

getty

With the political conventions of both major parties scheduled in the next few weeks, its a good time to look at the positions the presidential candidates and political parties hold on Social Security. Its also a particularly opportune time, since August 14th;is Social Securitys 85th;birthday: The Social Security Act was passed on this day in 1935.;

So, lets look at how our leaders propose to improve this essential program.

Social Security is a valuable program for millions of Americans

It almost doesnt need to be said, but its important to point out that Social Security is essential to the financial security of most older Americans and their families. According to the Social Security Fact Sheet, in 2020, 65 million Americans will receive more than one trillion dollars in Social Security benefits. For most of the elderly in this country, Social Security is their major source of income.

Social Security benefits are also the main reason that poverty among the elderly has fallen significantly in the 85 years since the program began. Its certainly the main reason that the poverty rate for the elderly is lower than the rate for other age groups.

Positions held by Joe Biden and the Democrats

Positions held by Donald Trump and the Republicans

The bottom line

Read Also: Trump Republican Or Democrat

Fact Checking The Fact Checkers: Trump Does Indeed Plan To Destroy Social Security

Donald TrumpOhio Republican who voted to impeach Trump says he won’t seek reelectionYoungkin breaks with Trump on whether Democrats will cheat in the Virginia governor’s raceTrump endorses challenger in Michigan AG race MOREs nonstop lies, together with his endless cries of fake news and hoax, make the role of media fact checkers more important than ever. Unfortunately, on the crucial issue of Social Security, too many of them are furiously defending Trump from his own words.

Instead of acting as a check on Trumps lies, they act like bullied children seeking to appease. They provide him cover, grade him on a curve, and give him every benefit of the doubt while denying that same leniency to Joe BidenJoe BidenTrump endorses challenger in Michigan AG race On The Money: Democrats get to the hard partHealth Care GOP attorneys general warn of legal battle over Biden’s vaccine mandateMORE and others. This is an extreme disservice in the lead-up to the election, muddying the debate over an issue about which voters care deeply.

Those who follow the issue closely know that Trump is deeply hostile to Social Security. The hostility is clear from his statements before running for president and his actions once in office. Trumps recent declaration that, if reelected, he will permanently terminate the payroll contributions which fund Social Security is consistent with many past Trump statements.

Nancy Altman is president of Social Security Works.

[trumptweettuesdays-blog]

Trump Tweet Tuesday  4/25/17

The themes for this week are: Mexico-US Wall, Trump’s Approval Ratings, Environmentalism (March for Science?), Super Bowl Patriots Visit, Taxes, Politics and Campaigns, Jobs and Economy, Health care, Propaganda, Presidential Notes

Theme 1: Mexico-US Wall

The Democrats and Republicans are facing a possible government shutdown this weekend if they don’t come to a budget agreement.  Trump promised on the campaign trail that he would build a wall on the United States-Mexico border and he promised that Mexico would pay for the estimated $21-70 billion dollar project.  He has had to back down from the promise that Mexico would pay for the wall after the Mexican president repeatedly refused to fund it.  Trump tried to insert some of the cost into the upcoming budget but Democrats rejected that plan so he has now withdrawn this item from the budget - but he has promised his Twitter followers that the Mexican wall will still happen.  He clings to the claims that Mexican immigrants are bringing violence and drugs to the United States, despite that there is no evidence to support such beliefs. Furthermore, a wall is one of the least effective strategies for preventing cross national drug exchange.

Mexico - US wall https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/25/us/politics/mexico-wall-spending-trump.html

Myths about immigrants https://www.adl.org/education/resources/fact-sheets/myths-and-facts-about-immigrants-and-immigration

A wall won’t stop drugs http://www.alternet.org/drugs/why-walls-do-not-stop-drugs

Theme 2: Trump’s Approval Ratings

Trump used his Twitter to complain about how ridiculous the 100 day evaluation of a president is, while simultaneously claiming that reports of his popularity, or lack of it, are false. So again we see Trump selectively reporting on his success, but also finding outlets to blame for his lack of approval among Americans. Rather than look at ways to improve he surmises that the reports are fake and reiterates that he beat Hillary. Almost every media outlet has supported the evidence that Trump has the lowest approval rating of any former president at the end of his first 100 days.  But, Donald Trump calls out the same news outlets he always does for being “inaccurate.”   While Trump did not rate poorly in all aspects of his presidency, young voters (ages 18 to 29) highly disapprove of him.  Furthermore, until he stops pointing the finger at the media and instead acknowledges that many of his constituents are not happy and do not approve of him, there is no way he will turn his presidency around and actually represent the people.

http://www.politico.com/story/2017/04/23/trump-approval-rating-237485

http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/president-trumps-first-100-days/100-days-how-trump-s-rotten-approval-ratings-compare-past-n750096

http://www.newsweek.com/trump-approval-rating-update-young-voters-589577

Theme 3: Environmentalism and (March for Science?)

Since Trump was on the campaign trail, environmentalists showed concern for the damage to earth that a Trump presidency would ensure; and those concerns have proven valid. Despite public claims of being “committed to keeping our air and water clean” as well as Earth Day remarks to celebrate natural beauty  Trump has shown little respect for the environment. Along with appointing climate change deniers to his cabinet and allowing the construction of detrimental structures (Keystone Pipeline for example), Trump makes it clear that he supports economic growth above all else. He claims that financial stability and growth in the country will enhance environmental protections, but as history indicates, when we prioritize profit, the environment and its people will suffer. Trump has shown great zeal and success in dismantling environmental protections; his determination to “build a wall” at the top of the list for the havoc it could wreak on the planet. This is largely why few were surprised when Trump did not use his Twitter to comment on the Earth Day (Saturday, April 22nd) march on the National Mall (March for Science), which was directed at Trump’s blatant disregard for and continued assaults against the planet.

Trump isn’t good for the environment

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/trump-100-days-environment-earth-day_us_58f87b68e4b0cb086d7e3175

The Wall could destroy the environment

http://www.nbcnews.com/science/environment/trump-s-border-wall-catastrophic-environment-endangered-species-activists-n748446

Theme 4: Super Bowl Patriots Visit

The New England Patriots won the Super Bowl in February of 2017 and as tradition dictates, the winning team is usually invited to the White House.  Some critics of Trump have suggested that The Patriots not visit the White House in order to make a stand against his beliefs and values.  Trump critics have also worried that The Patriots align themselves with the alt-right and Trump specifically, often citing a close relationship among Belichick, Brady and Trump.

Well, about two dozen Patriot players didn’t visit the White House, including Tom Brady.  Brady cited family reasons and other players also did not cite political reasons but some players did explicitly refuse the White House visit as a boycott of Trump.  Blount, Bennett, McCourty, and Long all openly expressed their disdain of Trump (see youtube video below).

Regarding the NYTimes piece, they initially had a photo comparing the Patriots visit in 2015 to that of 2017 to show how much smaller the 2017 visit was. The NYTimes has pulled this photo (see correction at the end of the article) because one photo included the whole staff and another only included coaches and players - a gaffe for sure but “a big lie?” Probably not so much.

Super Bowl visit to White House

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/04/trump-snubs-brady-after-brady-snubs-trump.html

Patriots against Trump

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOLube5CIk0&feature=youtu.be

NYTimes on Super Bowl visit

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/19/sports/-new-england-patriots-visit-white-house-donald-trump.html

Theme 5: Taxes

Trump failed at health care and then he failed at getting financial support for the Mexico border wall, and his approval ratings are historically low.  So, Trump is desperate for a win.  He has now moved on to taxes in the hopes that this issue will be his saving grace.  Trump has issued an executive order that directs an investigation into the tax system in order to discover any undue tax burdens on businesses or individuals.  Likely, most folks who have waded through the small font of tax directions would support an easier tax code, but Trump’s suggestions have heavily leaned toward creating more tax loopholes for wealthy businesses.  

What this big announcement is on Wednesday, 4/26, we will have to wait and see.  Be sure to read next week’s Trump Tweet Tuesday.

Executive Order

https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2017/04/21/presidential-executive-order-identifying-and-reducing-tax-regulatory

https://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2017-04-21/mnuchin-says-2016-17-tax-rules-to-be-reviewed-under-trump-order

Theme 6: Politics and Campaigns

Trump has actively used his Twitter account this week to insert himself into domestic and international politics.  On the home front, Trump supported Republican campaigns in Georgia.  Trump worked hard to support his fellow Republicans, especially after Democrat Ossoff ran the campaign slogan of “Make Trump Furious.”  Ossoff fell just short of winning the election and is now in a runoff election against Republican Handel.

Trump also engaged in some international political commentary.  He retweeted Fox News’ story about Netanyahu support of Trump’s decision to bomb Syria.  Trump suggested that France’s candidates needed to take a stronger stance on terrorism, implicitly supporting conservative Le Pen who called for a closing of all Islamic mosques.  And, like last week Trump called for China to use its economic power to stop North Korea growing military power.

Make Trump Furious

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-politics-georgia-analysis-idUSKBN17B0E9

Georgia runoff election

http://www.npr.org/2017/04/19/524580518/georgia-special-election-results-hang-in-suspense

International

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/apr/7/benjamin-netanyahu-israel-praises-us-missile-attac/

http://www.cnn.com/2017/04/21/europe/paris-police-shooting-champs-elysees/

Theme 7: Jobs and Economy

Trump took to Twitter again to tell his followers that he will be creating American jobs and American products. He signed an executive order meant to further promote “strict” guidelines for American companies as well as consumers. The “Buy American" notion refers to the laws that require the federal government to buy products made in the U.S. whenever possible. The "Hire American" part targets companies that abuse guest-worker programs by outsourcing technology and other special skills jobs to lower paid foreign workers. While this seems like it will only bring positive changes, even Trump’s friends at Fox News have expressed concern about how this will change the American market and what it will mean for consumers (http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2017/04/25/mike-rowe-im-nervous-about-trumps-buy-american-hire-american-order.html). There’s no telling when and how these effects will occur, but support and concerns have been expressed by both Trump’s supporters and his opponents.

“Buy American, Hire American” executive order

http://www.npr.org/2017/04/17/524422344/new-trump-order-extends-buy-american-and-hire-american-rules

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2017/04/18/trump-signs-buy-american-hire-american-executive-order-promising-to-fight-for-american-workers/

Theme 8: Health Care

Trump continues to misrepresent where his health care plans stand. First, he overestimated the amount of support for the bill and now he misrepresents who will benefit and how successful (or unsuccessful) the bill is currently doing. First, he claims that Democrats will need to spend big to keep the Affordable Care Act (ObamaCare) in place, when in actuality more people support keeping and improving the bill as opposed to Trump’s repeal and replace approach. Secondly, Trump claims that his health care plan will lead to a drop in premiums, but again Trump misrepresents the implications of his proposed bill. Last month, the Congressional Budget Office released a report that showed that Trump’s proposed health care plan would lead to an increase in premiums for older people, low-income individuals and households, and individuals with pre-existing conditions. (See link below for more information)

So, while the fate of ObamaCare is not entirely certain, it is not in as much trouble as Trump claims. In fact his own health care plan is the one in danger of failing, again.

Republicans are losing on health care

http://www.cnn.com/2017/04/25/politics/trump-healthcare-bill/

Trump and his healthcare plan “success”

http://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/330244-trump-obamacare-repeal-plan-will-result-in-real-healthcare-and-tumbling

Theme 9: Propaganda

Trump’s propaganda is all over the map this week.  The problem is that often what seems a benign tweet or an unrelated move is actually connected to or reflective of the Trump propaganda machine. Trump ‘welcomed home’ Aya this past week; Aya is an Egyptian-American aid worker who spent the last three years in a Cairo prison. The video that Trump tweeted out focuses on Trump and Ivanka as some level of heroes and freedom fighters (hmm, no) and doesn’t even talk to the work that Aya accomplished.

Trump then tweets about going to Walker Reed Medical center to award a Purple Heart, and he capitalizes on this moment as a campaign moment.  He also ignores the March for Science on this way there.

He also of course always has a moment to celebrate his Make America Great Again slogan.  He thanked Lake Worth as some residents came out to an event to support Trump.    And he is choosing to be in Pennsylvania to mark the completion of his first 100 days, and not be present in Washington DC for the White House Correspondents Dinner.

Aya

http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/330005-trump-greets-freed-egyptian-american-prisoner-in-a-welcome-video

http://www.vox.com/world/2017/4/21/15389362/trump-video-aya-hijazi

Walker Reed Medical Center visit

http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/04/22/525237227/trump-awards-purple-heart-in-first-visit-to-walter-reed-military-hospital

Lake Worth

http://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/breaking-news/what-did-lake-worth-earn-trump-twitter-thanks/JojGis2XHUuRNLRRjDP9tM/

Pennsylvania

http://www.philly.com/philly/news/politics/presidential/Trump-rally-Pennsylvania-Harrisburg-days.html

Theme 10: Presidential Notes

This week, Trump’s additional notes cover his signing more legislation, a joint press conference, and praises for NASA. Trump signed the Holocaust Remembrance Proclamation, urging people to understand the atrocities of the Holocaust, as well as to ensure it doesn’t happen again. Many have been critical of the remarks because, in the past, Trump and his administration have not properly acknowledged the severity of the Holocaust. Also, critics have noted that the wording of the proclamation is too similar to that of the Holocaust Museum website. In signing the Veterans Choice Program Extension and Improvement Act Trump has extended the program that allows veterans to seek private medical attention when Veterans Affairs (VA) offices take longer than 30 days. This extension will only last for about a year, and then an alternative plan must be approved.

In his meetings this week, Trump congratulated NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson and held a joint press conference with Italian Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni. Peggy Whitson broke the record for most consecutive days spent in space and Trump, joined by his daughter Ivanka discussed future NASA endeavors and STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) education in schools. The joint press conference covered many topics, but the two main points focused on domestic relations; Trump discussed health care plans and avoiding a government shutdown next week.

Trump’s Holocaust Proclamation

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2017/04/24/proclamation-trump-tries-make-amends-past-holocaust-statements/100855260/#

http://thehill.com/homenews/news/330290-trump-holocaust-remembrance-speech-uses-same-wording-as-holocaust-museum

Veterans Choice Program

https://www.usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2017-04-19/trump-extends-private-sector-health-care-program-for-vets

Trump speaks with Peggy Whitson

http://www.cnn.com/2017/04/23/politics/nasa-astronaut-peggy-whitson-trump/

Trump’s joint press conference

http://www.npr.org/2017/04/20/524936072/trump-holds-joint-press-conference-with-italian-prime-minister-gentiloni

[judithcsmith]

Not even the slightest pretense:

Since last night, my Twitter feed has been blowing up with people freaking out over the latest attack on justice, the rule of law and decency coming out of the Trump Administration.

Trump’s Department of Justice sent a brief to the 5th Federal Circuit Court stating that they’ve “changed their minds” about their position in the insane “Texas vs. Azar” lawsuit, and now agree with the plaintiffs in the case that the entire Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act should be ruled unconstitutional and repealed.

Before I get into the latest insanity, a quick review:

The case was originally brought by 20 Republican Attorneys General and Governors in February of last year, and the entire case is the height of chutzpah. It goes like this:

The Supreme Court ruled the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate penalty is kosher because it’s a tax.

Congressional Republicans changed the penalty from $695 to $0 as part of their 2017 tax bill.

However, they didn’t technically repeal the coverage requirement itself – just the penalty.

Since the penalty is no longer enforceable, the entire ACA must be repealed.

That’s it. That’s literally their argument: “We partly sabotaged the law, therefore we get to sabotage all of it.”

The case has no legal merit

The legal merits of the case are nonexistent. That’s not just me saying that; virtually every legal and Constitutional expert across the political spectrum agrees. Even Case Western Reserve University law professor Jonathan Adler, one of the chief architects of the infamous King vs. Burwell lawsuit (which until now held the crown for the most absurd anti-ACA case to ever make it to the Supreme Court) wrote an article at Reason stating point blank that the legal argument is “brazen and audacious,” and that there is “no basis whatsoever for the states’ argument or Justice Department’s concession on severability.”

Frivolous or otherwise meritless lawsuits are filed all the time, but here’s where things became truly dangerous: Last June, the Trump Administration’s Department of Justice – whose job specifically includes defending federal laws whether they like those laws or not – deliberately threw the fight, announcing that they had no intention of defending the ACA. In fact, they went even further, announcing that they agreed with the plaintiffs for the most part.

As both Adler and University of Michigan law professor Nicholas Bagley noted, this represented a complete dereliction of duty on the part of the Justice Department. Even worse, it basically means the Trump Administration can’t be counted on to defend or enforce any law they don’t want to.

None of this stopped right-wing Judge Reed O’Connor from ruling in favor of the plaintiffs on December 14th (just ahead of the busiest day of the ACA Open Enrollment Period). He did indeed rule the entire ACA unconstitutional, but also stayed his decision pending the appeals process, which is where things stand today.

The next phase is for the case to be heard by the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, which is expected to happen this July. Regardless of how they rule, the case will then be appealed to the Supreme Court by whoever loses. The Supreme Court will then either hear the case or refuse to do so.

Pretense of compassion?

Last June, when then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions decided to throw the fight, he partially hedged: He agreed with the plaintiffs that the ACA was unconstitutional, but disagreed with what the final ruling should be. While the plaintiffs wanted the entire law repealed, the DOJ asked that “only” the pre-existing condition protections be thrown out.

Yes, that’s right: The very same pre-existing condition protections which became the lynchpin of the entire Republican “repeal-and-replace” fiasco in 2017 … and then got their asses kicked over in the 2018 midterms, all while desperately by insisting that “no, really … we want to protect those with pre-existing conditions! Seriously, guys!”

Needless to say, the “lie-through-your-teeth” strategy failed for the most part, although there were exceptions like Missouri Attorney General Josh Hawley, who was one of the plaintiffs in the case and still managed to win his U.S. Senate race by running ads claiming he wanted to protect coverage of pre-existing conditions. Some people are … easily fooled, let’s just put it that way.

Then, of course, there was this:

Republicans will totally protect people with Pre-Existing Conditions, Democrats will not! Vote Republican.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 24, 2018

I’ll be honest: I never quite understood Sessions’ thinking last June. Repealing ACA pre-existing condition protection requirements like guaranteed issue, community rating and essential health benefits would effectively destroy the ACA exchanges (as Trump insisted he was going to do) even if the other provisions stayed in place.

There’d be no way of calculating the financial subsidies, for instance, since the ACA formula bases those subsidies on the “benchmark Silver plan”… except the benchmark plans are priced on the assumption that everyone of the same age in the same location is priced identically. Once carriers go back to medical underwriting, everyone’s premium would be priced differently … and once the benefits included start being scattered all over the place, there’s no longer any consistent Actuarial Value for the plans anyway.

The only reason I can think for Sessions to take this stance is political: He may have noticed that besides the threat to pre-existing conditions from the 2017 repeal-and-replace debacle, the other issue which really caught people’s attention was the threat to Medicaid coverage. Perhaps he thought that the GOP could survive the midterms if they destroyed the private exchanges but not Medicaid expansion as well.

The veil has been lifted

In any event, even that last, minuscule fig leaf of having the slightest bit of compassion or thought for the health or well-being of Americans was torn off last night. As Bagley put it:

The Trump Administration Now Thinks the Entire ACA Should Fall

In a stunning, two-sentence letter submitted to the Fifth Circuit today, the Justice Department announced that it now thinks the entire Affordable Care Act should be enjoined. That’s an even more extreme position than the one it advanced at the district court in Texas v. Azar, when it argued that the court should “only” zero out the protections for people with preexisting conditions. 

… Even apart from that, the sheer reckless irresponsibility is hard to overstate. The notion that you could gut the entire ACA and not wreak havoc on the lives of millions of people is insane. The Act is now part of the plumbing of the health-care system. Which means the Trump administration has now committed itself to a legal position that would inflict untold damage on the American public.

And for what? Every reputable commentator — on both the left and the right — thinks that Judge O’Connor’s decision invalidating the entire ACA is a joke. To my knowledge, not one has defended it. This is not a “reasonable minds can differ” sort of case. It is insanity in print.

How the GOP is reacting

The reactions from various Republican officials so far is pretty telling:

Steve Stivers, NRCC chair until recently, won’t comment on DOJ calling for ACA to be struck down, says he hasn’t seen it

— Peter Sullivan (@PeterSullivan4) March 26, 2019

Kevin McCarthy says to call his office for comment on the ACA case. Won’t comment at his press conference

— Peter Sullivan (@PeterSullivan4) March 26, 2019

… and so on. They can’t think of any coherent response, because, again, repealing the entire ACA – which would include killing off protections for those with pre-existing conditions, Medicaid expansion and so forth ��� is exactly what they’ve been trying to do for the past nine years. Since they can’t come right out and say that they agree with eliminating all of that, they can’t say much of anything.

My guess is that they’ll eventually go right back to gaslighting again in a few days, but the jig is up (and has been since the moment they passed the American Health Care Act back in May 2017).

A true train wreck for consumers …

As for what would happen if the ACA is eventually repealed (remember, the 5th Circuit won’t hear the case until July, and I’d imagine an appeal to SCOTUS could take as long as another six months after that?), here’s a quick reminder:

Medicaid expansion for over 16 million people across 36 states and DC: GONE.

ACA exchange subsidies for over 9 million people nationally: GONE.

Basic Health Plan coverage for over 800,000 people in Minnesota and New York: GONE.

Discrimination against coverage of 52–130 million* with pre-existing conditions: BACK.

Charging women more for the same policy simply because they’re women? BACK.

Charging older Americans 5 to 6 times as much as younger Americans? BACK.

Requirement that policies cover at least 60 percent of medical expenses: GONE.

Requirement that policies cover maternity care and mental health services: GONE.

Adult children being allowed to remain on their parents plans until age 26: GONE.

Annual and lifetime limits on healthcare coverage claims? BACK.

Requirement that policies cover preventative services at no out-of-pocket cost? GONE.

Tax credits to lower premiums for low- and moderate-income enrollees? GONE.

Financial help to reduce deductibles and co-pays for low-income enrollees? GONE.

A hard cap on out-of-pocket expenses? GONE.

The Medicare Part D “donut hole” being closed by the ACA? REOPENED.

* (depending on how you define “pre-existing conditions)

… but also for the entire healthcare system

…and that’s just for starters. After nine years, the Affordable Care Act has embedded itself into every facet of the American healthcare system. Even if everyone wanted to simply turn back the clock to 2009 (and God knows I don’t), it’s not something which could be done at the drop of a hat. It took nearly four years from the time the ACA was signed into law in March 2010 until the major ACA provisions went into effect, and with good reason.

The entire healthcare industry had to completely retool its billing practices, legal filings, actuarial tables, service contracts, marketing tactics and market position strategies to comply with the new law. Tearing all of that down – again, doing so with nothing whatsoever in place to pick up the pieces – would be a disaster of epic proportions. Utter chaos.

And utter chaos, of course, is exactly what Donald Trump – and, by their enabling and active assistance, the entire Republican Party – lives for.

from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8246807 https://ift.tt/2Wloaq8

[mikalajanie]

Not even the slightest pretense:

Since last night, my Twitter feed has been blowing up with people freaking out over the latest attack on justice, the rule of law and decency coming out of the Trump Administration.

Trump’s Department of Justice sent a brief to the 5th Federal Circuit Court stating that they’ve “changed their minds” about their position in the insane “Texas vs. Azar” lawsuit, and now agree with the plaintiffs in the case that the entire Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act should be ruled unconstitutional and repealed.

Before I get into the latest insanity, a quick review:

The case was originally brought by 20 Republican Attorneys General and Governors in February of last year, and the entire case is the height of chutzpah. It goes like this:

The Supreme Court ruled the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate penalty is kosher because it’s a tax.

Congressional Republicans changed the penalty from $695 to $0 as part of their 2017 tax bill.

However, they didn’t technically repeal the coverage requirement itself – just the penalty.

Since the penalty is no longer enforceable, the entire ACA must be repealed.

That’s it. That’s literally their argument: “We partly sabotaged the law, therefore we get to sabotage all of it.”

The case has no legal merit

The legal merits of the case are nonexistent. That’s not just me saying that; virtually every legal and Constitutional expert across the political spectrum agrees. Even Case Western Reserve University law professor Jonathan Adler, one of the chief architects of the infamous King vs. Burwell lawsuit (which until now held the crown for the most absurd anti-ACA case to ever make it to the Supreme Court) wrote an article at Reason stating point blank that the legal argument is “brazen and audacious,” and that there is “no basis whatsoever for the states’ argument or Justice Department’s concession on severability.”

Frivolous or otherwise meritless lawsuits are filed all the time, but here’s where things became truly dangerous: Last June, the Trump Administration’s Department of Justice – whose job specifically includes defending federal laws whether they like those laws or not – deliberately threw the fight, announcing that they had no intention of defending the ACA. In fact, they went even further, announcing that they agreed with the plaintiffs for the most part.

As both Adler and University of Michigan law professor Nicholas Bagley noted, this represented a complete dereliction of duty on the part of the Justice Department. Even worse, it basically means the Trump Administration can’t be counted on to defend or enforce any law they don’t want to.

None of this stopped right-wing Judge Reed O’Connor from ruling in favor of the plaintiffs on December 14th (just ahead of the busiest day of the ACA Open Enrollment Period). He did indeed rule the entire ACA unconstitutional, but also stayed his decision pending the appeals process, which is where things stand today.

The next phase is for the case to be heard by the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, which is expected to happen this July. Regardless of how they rule, the case will then be appealed to the Supreme Court by whoever loses. The Supreme Court will then either hear the case or refuse to do so.

Pretense of compassion?

Last June, when then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions decided to throw the fight, he partially hedged: He agreed with the plaintiffs that the ACA was unconstitutional, but disagreed with what the final ruling should be. While the plaintiffs wanted the entire law repealed, the DOJ asked that “only” the pre-existing condition protections be thrown out.

Yes, that’s right: The very same pre-existing condition protections which became the lynchpin of the entire Republican “repeal-and-replace” fiasco in 2017 … and then got their asses kicked over in the 2018 midterms, all while desperately by insisting that “no, really … we want to protect those with pre-existing conditions! Seriously, guys!”

Needless to say, the “lie-through-your-teeth” strategy failed for the most part, although there were exceptions like Missouri Attorney General Josh Hawley, who was one of the plaintiffs in the case and still managed to win his U.S. Senate race by running ads claiming he wanted to protect coverage of pre-existing conditions. Some people are … easily fooled, let’s just put it that way.

Then, of course, there was this:

Republicans will totally protect people with Pre-Existing Conditions, Democrats will not! Vote Republican.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 24, 2018

I’ll be honest: I never quite understood Sessions’ thinking last June. Repealing ACA pre-existing condition protection requirements like guaranteed issue, community rating and essential health benefits would effectively destroy the ACA exchanges (as Trump insisted he was going to do) even if the other provisions stayed in place.

There’d be no way of calculating the financial subsidies, for instance, since the ACA formula bases those subsidies on the “benchmark Silver plan”… except the benchmark plans are priced on the assumption that everyone of the same age in the same location is priced identically. Once carriers go back to medical underwriting, everyone’s premium would be priced differently … and once the benefits included start being scattered all over the place, there’s no longer any consistent Actuarial Value for the plans anyway.

The only reason I can think for Sessions to take this stance is political: He may have noticed that besides the threat to pre-existing conditions from the 2017 repeal-and-replace debacle, the other issue which really caught people’s attention was the threat to Medicaid coverage. Perhaps he thought that the GOP could survive the midterms if they destroyed the private exchanges but not Medicaid expansion as well.

The veil has been lifted

In any event, even that last, minuscule fig leaf of having the slightest bit of compassion or thought for the health or well-being of Americans was torn off last night. As Bagley put it:

The Trump Administration Now Thinks the Entire ACA Should Fall

In a stunning, two-sentence letter submitted to the Fifth Circuit today, the Justice Department announced that it now thinks the entire Affordable Care Act should be enjoined. That’s an even more extreme position than the one it advanced at the district court in Texas v. Azar, when it argued that the court should “only” zero out the protections for people with preexisting conditions. 

… Even apart from that, the sheer reckless irresponsibility is hard to overstate. The notion that you could gut the entire ACA and not wreak havoc on the lives of millions of people is insane. The Act is now part of the plumbing of the health-care system. Which means the Trump administration has now committed itself to a legal position that would inflict untold damage on the American public.

And for what? Every reputable commentator — on both the left and the right — thinks that Judge O’Connor’s decision invalidating the entire ACA is a joke. To my knowledge, not one has defended it. This is not a “reasonable minds can differ” sort of case. It is insanity in print.

How the GOP is reacting

The reactions from various Republican officials so far is pretty telling:

Steve Stivers, NRCC chair until recently, won’t comment on DOJ calling for ACA to be struck down, says he hasn’t seen it

— Peter Sullivan (@PeterSullivan4) March 26, 2019

Kevin McCarthy says to call his office for comment on the ACA case. Won’t comment at his press conference

— Peter Sullivan (@PeterSullivan4) March 26, 2019

… and so on. They can’t think of any coherent response, because, again, repealing the entire ACA – which would include killing off protections for those with pre-existing conditions, Medicaid expansion and so forth – is exactly what they’ve been trying to do for the past nine years. Since they can’t come right out and say that they agree with eliminating all of that, they can’t say much of anything.

My guess is that they’ll eventually go right back to gaslighting again in a few days, but the jig is up (and has been since the moment they passed the American Health Care Act back in May 2017).

A true train wreck for consumers …

As for what would happen if the ACA is eventually repealed (remember, the 5th Circuit won’t hear the case until July, and I’d imagine an appeal to SCOTUS could take as long as another six months after that?), here’s a quick reminder:

Medicaid expansion for over 16 million people across 36 states and DC: GONE.

ACA exchange subsidies for over 9 million people nationally: GONE.

Basic Health Plan coverage for over 800,000 people in Minnesota and New York: GONE.

Discrimination against coverage of 52–130 million* with pre-existing conditions: BACK.

Charging women more for the same policy simply because they’re women? BACK.

Charging older Americans 5 to 6 times as much as younger Americans? BACK.

Requirement that policies cover at least 60 percent of medical expenses: GONE.

Requirement that policies cover maternity care and mental health services: GONE.

Adult children being allowed to remain on their parents plans until age 26: GONE.

Annual and lifetime limits on healthcare coverage claims? BACK.

Requirement that policies cover preventative services at no out-of-pocket cost? GONE.

Tax credits to lower premiums for low- and moderate-income enrollees? GONE.

Financial help to reduce deductibles and co-pays for low-income enrollees? GONE.

A hard cap on out-of-pocket expenses? GONE.

The Medicare Part D “donut hole” being closed by the ACA? REOPENED.

* (depending on how you define “pre-existing conditions)

… but also for the entire healthcare system

…and that’s just for starters. After nine years, the Affordable Care Act has embedded itself into every facet of the American healthcare system. Even if everyone wanted to simply turn back the clock to 2009 (and God knows I don’t), it’s not something which could be done at the drop of a hat. It took nearly four years from the time the ACA was signed into law in March 2010 until the major ACA provisions went into effect, and with good reason.

The entire healthcare industry had to completely retool its billing practices, legal filings, actuarial tables, service contracts, marketing tactics and market position strategies to comply with the new law. Tearing all of that down – again, doing so with nothing whatsoever in place to pick up the pieces – would be a disaster of epic proportions. Utter chaos.

And utter chaos, of course, is exactly what Donald Trump – and, by their enabling and active assistance, the entire Republican Party – lives for.

from https://www.healthinsurance.org/blog/2019/03/26/not-even-the-slightest-pretense/

[janekira2]

Not even the slightest pretense:

Since last night, my Twitter feed has been blowing up with people freaking out over the latest attack on justice, the rule of law and decency coming out of the Trump Administration.

Trump’s Department of Justice sent a brief to the 5th Federal Circuit Court stating that they’ve “changed their minds” about their position in the insane “Texas vs. Azar” lawsuit, and now agree with the plaintiffs in the case that the entire Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act should be ruled unconstitutional and repealed.

Before I get into the latest insanity, a quick review:

The case was originally brought by 20 Republican Attorneys General and Governors in February of last year, and the entire case is the height of chutzpah. It goes like this:

The Supreme Court ruled the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate penalty is kosher because it’s a tax.

Congressional Republicans changed the penalty from $695 to $0 as part of their 2017 tax bill.

However, they didn’t technically repeal the coverage requirement itself – just the penalty.

Since the penalty is no longer enforceable, the entire ACA must be repealed.

That’s it. That’s literally their argument: “We partly sabotaged the law, therefore we get to sabotage all of it.”

The case has no legal merit

The legal merits of the case are nonexistent. That’s not just me saying that; virtually every legal and Constitutional expert across the political spectrum agrees. Even Case Western Reserve University law professor Jonathan Adler, one of the chief architects of the infamous King vs. Burwell lawsuit (which until now held the crown for the most absurd anti-ACA case to ever make it to the Supreme Court) wrote an article at Reason stating point blank that the legal argument is “brazen and audacious,” and that there is “no basis whatsoever for the states’ argument or Justice Department’s concession on severability.”

Frivolous or otherwise meritless lawsuits are filed all the time, but here’s where things became truly dangerous: Last June, the Trump Administration’s Department of Justice – whose job specifically includes defending federal laws whether they like those laws or not – deliberately threw the fight, announcing that they had no intention of defending the ACA. In fact, they went even further, announcing that they agreed with the plaintiffs for the most part.

As both Adler and University of Michigan law professor Nicholas Bagley noted, this represented a complete dereliction of duty on the part of the Justice Department. Even worse, it basically means the Trump Administration can’t be counted on to defend or enforce any law they don’t want to.

None of this stopped right-wing Judge Reed O’Connor from ruling in favor of the plaintiffs on December 14th (just ahead of the busiest day of the ACA Open Enrollment Period). He did indeed rule the entire ACA unconstitutional, but also stayed his decision pending the appeals process, which is where things stand today.

The next phase is for the case to be heard by the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, which is expected to happen this July. Regardless of how they rule, the case will then be appealed to the Supreme Court by whoever loses. The Supreme Court will then either hear the case or refuse to do so.

Pretense of compassion?

Last June, when then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions decided to throw the fight, he partially hedged: He agreed with the plaintiffs that the ACA was unconstitutional, but disagreed with what the final ruling should be. While the plaintiffs wanted the entire law repealed, the DOJ asked that “only” the pre-existing condition protections be thrown out.

Yes, that’s right: The very same pre-existing condition protections which became the lynchpin of the entire Republican “repeal-and-replace” fiasco in 2017 … and then got their asses kicked over in the 2018 midterms, all while desperately by insisting that “no, really … we want to protect those with pre-existing conditions! Seriously, guys!”

Needless to say, the “lie-through-your-teeth” strategy failed for the most part, although there were exceptions like Missouri Attorney General Josh Hawley, who was one of the plaintiffs in the case and still managed to win his U.S. Senate race by running ads claiming he wanted to protect coverage of pre-existing conditions. Some people are … easily fooled, let’s just put it that way.

Then, of course, there was this:

Republicans will totally protect people with Pre-Existing Conditions, Democrats will not! Vote Republican.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 24, 2018

I’ll be honest: I never quite understood Sessions’ thinking last June. Repealing ACA pre-existing condition protection requirements like guaranteed issue, community rating and essential health benefits would effectively destroy the ACA exchanges (as Trump insisted he was going to do) even if the other provisions stayed in place.

There’d be no way of calculating the financial subsidies, for instance, since the ACA formula bases those subsidies on the “benchmark Silver plan”… except the benchmark plans are priced on the assumption that everyone of the same age in the same location is priced identically. Once carriers go back to medical underwriting, everyone’s premium would be priced differently … and once the benefits included start being scattered all over the place, there’s no longer any consistent Actuarial Value for the plans anyway.

The only reason I can think for Sessions to take this stance is political: He may have noticed that besides the threat to pre-existing conditions from the 2017 repeal-and-replace debacle, the other issue which really caught people’s attention was the threat to Medicaid coverage. Perhaps he thought that the GOP could survive the midterms if they destroyed the private exchanges but not Medicaid expansion as well.

The veil has been lifted

In any event, even that last, minuscule fig leaf of having the slightest bit of compassion or thought for the health or well-being of Americans was torn off last night. As Bagley put it:

The Trump Administration Now Thinks the Entire ACA Should Fall

In a stunning, two-sentence letter submitted to the Fifth Circuit today, the Justice Department announced that it now thinks the entire Affordable Care Act should be enjoined. That’s an even more extreme position than the one it advanced at the district court in Texas v. Azar, when it argued that the court should “only” zero out the protections for people with preexisting conditions. 

… Even apart from that, the sheer reckless irresponsibility is hard to overstate. The notion that you could gut the entire ACA and not wreak havoc on the lives of millions of people is insane. The Act is now part of the plumbing of the health-care system. Which means the Trump administration has now committed itself to a legal position that would inflict untold damage on the American public.

And for what? Every reputable commentator — on both the left and the right — thinks that Judge O’Connor’s decision invalidating the entire ACA is a joke. To my knowledge, not one has defended it. This is not a “reasonable minds can differ” sort of case. It is insanity in print.

How the GOP is reacting

The reactions from various Republican officials so far is pretty telling:

Steve Stivers, NRCC chair until recently, won’t comment on DOJ calling for ACA to be struck down, says he hasn’t seen it

— Peter Sullivan (@PeterSullivan4) March 26, 2019

Kevin McCarthy says to call his office for comment on the ACA case. Won’t comment at his press conference

— Peter Sullivan (@PeterSullivan4) March 26, 2019

… and so on. They can’t think of any coherent response, because, again, repealing the entire ACA – which would include killing off protections for those with pre-existing conditions, Medicaid expansion and so forth – is exactly what they’ve been trying to do for the past nine years. Since they can’t come right out and say that they agree with eliminating all of that, they can’t say much of anything.

My guess is that they’ll eventually go right back to gaslighting again in a few days, but the jig is up (and has been since the moment they passed the American Health Care Act back in May 2017).

A true train wreck for consumers …

As for what would happen if the ACA is eventually repealed (remember, the 5th Circuit won’t hear the case until July, and I’d imagine an appeal to SCOTUS could take as long as another six months after that?), here’s a quick reminder:

Medicaid expansion for over 16 million people across 36 states and DC: GONE.

ACA exchange subsidies for over 9 million people nationally: GONE.

Basic Health Plan coverage for over 800,000 people in Minnesota and New York: GONE.

Discrimination against coverage of 52–130 million* with pre-existing conditions: BACK.

Charging women more for the same policy simply because they’re women? BACK.

Charging older Americans 5 to 6 times as much as younger Americans? BACK.

Requirement that policies cover at least 60 percent of medical expenses: GONE.

Requirement that policies cover maternity care and mental health services: GONE.

Adult children being allowed to remain on their parents plans until age 26: GONE.

Annual and lifetime limits on healthcare coverage claims? BACK.

Requirement that policies cover preventative services at no out-of-pocket cost? GONE.

Tax credits to lower premiums for low- and moderate-income enrollees? GONE.

Financial help to reduce deductibles and co-pays for low-income enrollees? GONE.

A hard cap on out-of-pocket expenses? GONE.

The Medicare Part D “donut hole” being closed by the ACA? REOPENED.

* (depending on how you define “pre-existing conditions)

… but also for the entire healthcare system

…and that’s just for starters. After nine years, the Affordable Care Act has embedded itself into every facet of the American healthcare system. Even if everyone wanted to simply turn back the clock to 2009 (and God knows I don’t), it’s not something which could be done at the drop of a hat. It took nearly four years from the time the ACA was signed into law in March 2010 until the major ACA provisions went into effect, and with good reason.

The entire healthcare industry had to completely retool its billing practices, legal filings, actuarial tables, service contracts, marketing tactics and market position strategies to comply with the new law. Tearing all of that down – again, doing so with nothing whatsoever in place to pick up the pieces – would be a disaster of epic proportions. Utter chaos.

And utter chaos, of course, is exactly what Donald Trump – and, by their enabling and active assistance, the entire Republican Party – lives for.

from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8246807 https://www.healthinsurance.org/blog/2019/03/26/not-even-the-slightest-pretense/

[scottguy]

Project 2025 is a written plan by the Heritage Foundation (the group that stacked the Supreme Court with radical right-wing judges) to replace honest government workers with MAGA loyalists who will break laws, lie, and cheat for Trump, especially regarding elections. This is how Trump will "fix it" so christofascists never have to vote again. They just won't report the results correctly.

This plan will be put in effect for ANY Republican president.

Project 2025 is a wish list by the billionaire class to destroy EVERY consumer and environmental protections to benefit the filthy rich which will impoverish Americans. It will mostly work by the MAGA loyalists installed simply refusing to enforce existing laws. It will ruin American's lives in countless ways. Pollution is suddenly increased? Oh well! Banks are charging new ridiculous fees? Oh well.

The 'project' includes plans to cut and completely privatize Social Security and Medicare.

Finally, it's a plan to force Catholic religious beliefs onto Jews, Muslims, Hindus, agnostics and EVERYONE else. We will all have to follow the religion beliefs of right-wing religious zealots whether we want to or not. They might even try to outlaw your religion.

It's unAmerican. It's wrong. It's the wish-list of the out-of-control oligarchy in America.

These wealthy people want everything for themselves. They do not care about us, average Americans. We exist only to be exploited for labor and consumer spending.

You, as an average American should resent and be shocked and outraged that the Republican party backs this..

dangerous...radical... greedy... inhumane... and un-American document to destroy American values.

[johndonohueus]

Not even the slightest pretense:

Since last night, my Twitter feed has been blowing up with people freaking out over the latest attack on justice, the rule of law and decency coming out of the Trump Administration.

Trump’s Department of Justice sent a brief to the 5th Federal Circuit Court stating that they’ve “changed their minds” about their position in the insane “Texas vs. Azar” lawsuit, and now agree with the plaintiffs in the case that the entire Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act should be ruled unconstitutional and repealed.

Before I get into the latest insanity, a quick review:

The case was originally brought by 20 Republican Attorneys General and Governors in February of last year, and the entire case is the height of chutzpah. It goes like this:

The Supreme Court ruled the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate penalty is kosher because it’s a tax.

Congressional Republicans changed the penalty from $695 to $0 as part of their 2017 tax bill.

However, they didn’t technically repeal the coverage requirement itself – just the penalty.

Since the penalty is no longer enforceable, the entire ACA must be repealed.

That’s it. That’s literally their argument: “We partly sabotaged the law, therefore we get to sabotage all of it.”

The case has no legal merit

The legal merits of the case are nonexistent. That’s not just me saying that; virtually every legal and Constitutional expert across the political spectrum agrees. Even Case Western Reserve University law professor Jonathan Adler, one of the chief architects of the infamous King vs. Burwell lawsuit (which until now held the crown for the most absurd anti-ACA case to ever make it to the Supreme Court) wrote an article at Reason stating point blank that the legal argument is “brazen and audacious,” and that there is “no basis whatsoever for the states’ argument or Justice Department’s concession on severability.”

Frivolous or otherwise meritless lawsuits are filed all the time, but here’s where things became truly dangerous: Last June, the Trump Administration’s Department of Justice – whose job specifically includes defending federal laws whether they like those laws or not – deliberately threw the fight, announcing that they had no intention of defending the ACA. In fact, they went even further, announcing that they agreed with the plaintiffs for the most part.

As both Adler and University of Michigan law professor Nicholas Bagley noted, this represented a complete dereliction of duty on the part of the Justice Department. Even worse, it basically means the Trump Administration can’t be counted on to defend or enforce any law they don’t want to.

None of this stopped right-wing Judge Reed O’Connor from ruling in favor of the plaintiffs on December 14th (just ahead of the busiest day of the ACA Open Enrollment Period). He did indeed rule the entire ACA unconstitutional, but also stayed his decision pending the appeals process, which is where things stand today.

The next phase is for the case to be heard by the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, which is expected to happen this July. Regardless of how they rule, the case will then be appealed to the Supreme Court by whoever loses. The Supreme Court will then either hear the case or refuse to do so.

Pretense of compassion?

Last June, when then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions decided to throw the fight, he partially hedged: He agreed with the plaintiffs that the ACA was unconstitutional, but disagreed with what the final ruling should be. While the plaintiffs wanted the entire law repealed, the DOJ asked that “only” the pre-existing condition protections be thrown out.

Yes, that’s right: The very same pre-existing condition protections which became the lynchpin of the entire Republican “repeal-and-replace” fiasco in 2017 … and then got their asses kicked over in the 2018 midterms, all while desperately by insisting that “no, really … we want to protect those with pre-existing conditions! Seriously, guys!”

Needless to say, the “lie-through-your-teeth” strategy failed for the most part, although there were exceptions like Missouri Attorney General Josh Hawley, who was one of the plaintiffs in the case and still managed to win his U.S. Senate race by running ads claiming he wanted to protect coverage of pre-existing conditions. Some people are … easily fooled, let’s just put it that way.

Then, of course, there was this:

Republicans will totally protect people with Pre-Existing Conditions, Democrats will not! Vote Republican.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 24, 2018

I’ll be honest: I never quite understood Sessions’ thinking last June. Repealing ACA pre-existing condition protection requirements like guaranteed issue, community rating and essential health benefits would effectively destroy the ACA exchanges (as Trump insisted he was going to do) even if the other provisions stayed in place.

There’d be no way of calculating the financial subsidies, for instance, since the ACA formula bases those subsidies on the “benchmark Silver plan”… except the benchmark plans are priced on the assumption that everyone of the same age in the same location is priced identically. Once carriers go back to medical underwriting, everyone’s premium would be priced differently … and once the benefits included start being scattered all over the place, there’s no longer any consistent Actuarial Value for the plans anyway.

The only reason I can think for Sessions to take this stance is political: He may have noticed that besides the threat to pre-existing conditions from the 2017 repeal-and-replace debacle, the other issue which really caught people’s attention was the threat to Medicaid coverage. Perhaps he thought that the GOP could survive the midterms if they destroyed the private exchanges but not Medicaid expansion as well.

The veil has been lifted

In any event, even that last, minuscule fig leaf of having the slightest bit of compassion or thought for the health or well-being of Americans was torn off last night. As Bagley put it:

The Trump Administration Now Thinks the Entire ACA Should Fall

In a stunning, two-sentence letter submitted to the Fifth Circuit today, the Justice Department announced that it now thinks the entire Affordable Care Act should be enjoined. That’s an even more extreme position than the one it advanced at the district court in Texas v. Azar, when it argued that the court should “only” zero out the protections for people with preexisting conditions. 

… Even apart from that, the sheer reckless irresponsibility is hard to overstate. The notion that you could gut the entire ACA and not wreak havoc on the lives of millions of people is insane. The Act is now part of the plumbing of the health-care system. Which means the Trump administration has now committed itself to a legal position that would inflict untold damage on the American public.

And for what? Every reputable commentator — on both the left and the right — thinks that Judge O’Connor’s decision invalidating the entire ACA is a joke. To my knowledge, not one has defended it. This is not a “reasonable minds can differ” sort of case. It is insanity in print.

How the GOP is reacting

The reactions from various Republican officials so far is pretty telling:

Steve Stivers, NRCC chair until recently, won’t comment on DOJ calling for ACA to be struck down, says he hasn’t seen it

— Peter Sullivan (@PeterSullivan4) March 26, 2019

Kevin McCarthy says to call his office for comment on the ACA case. Won’t comment at his press conference

— Peter Sullivan (@PeterSullivan4) March 26, 2019

… and so on. They can’t think of any coherent response, because, again, repealing the entire ACA – which would include killing off protections for those with pre-existing conditions, Medicaid expansion and so forth – is exactly what they’ve been trying to do for the past nine years. Since they can’t come right out and say that they agree with eliminating all of that, they can’t say much of anything.

My guess is that they’ll eventually go right back to gaslighting again in a few days, but the jig is up (and has been since the moment they passed the American Health Care Act back in May 2017).

A true train wreck for consumers …

As for what would happen if the ACA is eventually repealed (remember, the 5th Circuit won’t hear the case until July, and I’d imagine an appeal to SCOTUS could take as long as another six months after that?), here’s a quick reminder:

Medicaid expansion for over 16 million people across 36 states and DC: GONE.

ACA exchange subsidies for over 9 million people nationally: GONE.

Basic Health Plan coverage for over 800,000 people in Minnesota and New York: GONE.

Discrimination against coverage of 52–130 million* with pre-existing conditions: BACK.

Charging women more for the same policy simply because they’re women? BACK.

Charging older Americans 5 to 6 times as much as younger Americans? BACK.

Requirement that policies cover at least 60 percent of medical expenses: GONE.

Requirement that policies cover maternity care and mental health services: GONE.

Adult children being allowed to remain on their parents plans until age 26: GONE.

Annual and lifetime limits on healthcare coverage claims? BACK.

Requirement that policies cover preventative services at no out-of-pocket cost? GONE.

Tax credits to lower premiums for low- and moderate-income enrollees? GONE.

Financial help to reduce deductibles and co-pays for low-income enrollees? GONE.

A hard cap on out-of-pocket expenses? GONE.

The Medicare Part D “donut hole” being closed by the ACA? REOPENED.

* (depending on how you define “pre-existing conditions)

… but also for the entire healthcare system

…and that’s just for starters. After nine years, the Affordable Care Act has embedded itself into every facet of the American healthcare system. Even if everyone wanted to simply turn back the clock to 2009 (and God knows I don’t), it’s not something which could be done at the drop of a hat. It took nearly four years from the time the ACA was signed into law in March 2010 until the major ACA provisions went into effect, and with good reason.

The entire healthcare industry had to completely retool its billing practices, legal filings, actuarial tables, service contracts, marketing tactics and market position strategies to comply with the new law. Tearing all of that down – again, doing so with nothing whatsoever in place to pick up the pieces – would be a disaster of epic proportions. Utter chaos.

And utter chaos, of course, is exactly what Donald Trump – and, by their enabling and active assistance, the entire Republican Party – lives for.

from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8246807 https://www.healthinsurance.org/blog/2019/03/26/not-even-the-slightest-pretense/

[jscottscales]

On Obamacare, there’s not a nickel’s worth of difference between Republicans and Democrats

The Trump administration was right to resurrect short-term insurance plans last month as a limited off-ramp from Obamacare for those trapped in the insolvent individual market. However, let’s not forget that we are only in this position because Congress has refused to address the core problems with health care and medical insurance. Both parties have agreed to perpetuate the worst elements of Obamacare.

As early as 2016, my premiums had already tripled, and the coverage was terrible! I dropped out and opted for a health-sharing ministry, but since then, premiums almost doubled again. And now, in my state of Maryland, they are slated to go up another 91 percent. Yet Mitch McConnell and the overwhelming majority of Republicans believe that the regulations that led to this outcome are the solution, not the problem, and will do everything in their power to fight for their acceptance.

Last Friday, 10 Republicans introduced legislation to protect the core elements of Obamacare – guaranteed issue and community rating – from a potential lawsuit. Oral arguments will begin in the newest round of litigation against the law in the Northern District of Texas next Wednesday. “This legislation is a common-sense solution that guarantees Americans with pre-existing conditions will have health care coverage, regardless of how our judicial system rules on the future of Obamacare,” wrote Senator Thom Tillis in his introductory statement.

Tillis was joined by Lamar Alexander, Charles E. Grassley, Dean Heller, Bill Cassidy, Lisa Murkowski, Joni Ernst, Lindsey Graham, John Barrasso, and Roger Wicker. Remember, Alexander is the head of the committee with jurisdiction over the issue, Cassidy has led all health care legislative initiatives, and Barrasso is the chairman of the Republican Policy Committee and was the point man on Obamacare. The most prominent Republicans support the core elements of the law, and there is only a handful of senators who don’t share the Democrat philosophy on the issue. This is not about 60 or 51 votes. We don’t even have 15 Republicans who are with us on the most important fiscal issue of our time.

And this all starts with leadership. The entire messaging of the GOP establishment on health care for the past six years was built on a lie. It’s just a shame Mitch McConnell didn’t run ads during his 2014 primary promising to enshrine Obamacare rather than repeal it root and branch.

In June, the Department of Justice, led by Attorney General Sessions, announced that it would not defend Obamacare in court during the new round of lawsuits against it. Now that the tax law zeroed out the penalty for declining to purchase health insurance, 20 attorneys general and governors are arguing in a lawsuit that, pursuant to the Supreme Court’s ruling in NFIB v. Sebelius, the individual mandate can no longer be constitutional because it is clearly no longer a tax.

While this lawsuit faces an uphill battle in an intellectually dishonest and inconsistent judiciary, one would think that McConnell and company would relish the opportunity to at least save face by fighting the issue in the courts. That’s what they usually like to do, for example, on religious liberty. Yet McConnell, as well as these 10 other Republicans (and most of the others as well), is now criticizing the DOJ for not defending guaranteed issue and community rating, the regulations that made insurance insolvent, gave incumbent powers a monopoly against competition, and have led to the destruction of the entire private insurance market. Nobody can afford insurance without a subsidy or a group plan.

“Everybody I know in the Senate, everybody is in favor of maintaining coverage for pre-existing conditions,” said McConnell in June, going back on his campaign pledge. “There is no difference of opinion about that whatsoever.”

No difference whatsoever, indeed. There really is no difference between the two parties on the philosophy of endless subsidies, mandates, and regulations that drive up prices, create monopolies, limit freedoms, and hurt private practice. The funny thing is that the pre-existing condition provision was the heart and soul of what made insurance insolvent; it was both the root and the branch of the law. It is what created a monopoly to gouge consumers. Thanks to their “compassion,” the cost of a “bronze plan” for the averaged subsidized consumer, according to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, was $89 per month in 2018. A non-subsidized customer? As high as $2,500 a month for family plans. Thanks, Mitch.

Yes, a government-driven monopoly is definitely one way to “stabilize” the markets. With endless subsidies and both parties now owning the promise for perpetual bailouts and cost-sharing payouts, it’s actually quite easy for the few remaining insurers to remain in business, especially if one or two more drop out. But what happens to the remaining Americans who aren’t subsidized?

And here’s the kicker: 84 percent of all those who gained “coverage” under Obamacare were through the Medicaid program, which has nothing to do with these so-called private insurers and the pre-existing condition mandate. Moreover, almost all private insurance growth under Obamacare is from enrollees under 30. Most of these weren’t dying in the streets before Obamacare — they just didn’t feel a need to purchase a plan, even though insurance was much cheaper then. In fact, for those above the age of 26, Obamacare has caused a decline in private coverage (outside Medicaid and SCHIP).

So, we destroyed the insurance market for a handful of people, most of whom already had access to state high-risk pools. And remember, the entire problem of pre-existing conditions was born out of this very philosophy of giving insurance companies a monopoly over health care through the tax code, Medicare, and Medicaid, thereby eliminating price transparency, inflating the price of health care, creating monopolies, and destroying the concept of lifelong continuous renewal catastrophic insurance that is portable and held from day one of life.

For the amount of money we spend on Medicaid and the subsidies just to give people terrible access and create a monopoly for health care and hospital administrator conglomerates over private practice, we could take every uninsurable person and stick money in their HSAs to pay directly for their bills. Then they can shop around to any vendor with price transparency, cut out the middle man constantly gouging the consumer and taxpayer, and allow the rest of the market to run smoothly.

Yet not a single prominent Republican will support any bold alternative to the Democrat disaster on health care. There’s not a dime’s worth of difference between the parties on health care.

Author: Daniel Horowitz

Daniel Horowitz is a senior editor of Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @RMConservative.

On Obamacare, there’s not a nickel’s worth of difference between Republicans and Democrats

Source

http://conservativereview.com/news/on-obamacare-theres-not-a-nickels-worth-of-difference-between-republicans-and-democrats

[democratsunited-blog]

Never Trumpers Will Want to Read This History Lesson

https://uniteddemocrats.net/?p=6031

Never Trumpers Will Want to Read This History Lesson

“I was educated a Democrat from my boyhood,” a Republican delegate confided to his colleagues at Iowa’s constitutional convention in 1857. “Faithfully, I did adhere to that party until I could no longer act with it. Many things did I condemn ere I left that party, for my love of party was strong. And when I did, at last, feel compelled to separate from my old Democratic friends, it was like tearing myself away from old home associations.”

As often seems the case today, American politics in the 1850s were nearly all-consuming and stubbornly tribal. So it was hard—and bitterly so—for hundreds of thousands of Northern Democrats to abandon the political organization that had long formed the backbone of their civic identity. Yet they came over the course of a decade to believe that the Jacksonian Democratic Party had degenerated into something thoroughly autocratic and corrupt. It had fallen so deeply in the thrall of the Slave Power that it posed an existential threat to American democracy.

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Placing the sanctity of the nation above the narrow bonds of party, these Democrats joined in common cause with former Whig antagonists in the epic struggle to save the United States from its own darker instincts.

Today, a small but influential cadre of Republican elected officials, strategists and policy experts faces a similar choice. Heirs of Ronald Reagan, they have grown to believe that their party has also degenerated into something ugly and undemocratic—hostile to science and fact, rooted in an angry spirit of racial and ethnic nationalism, enamored of foreign strongmen and hostile to American institutions, and so fundamentally estranged from the nation’s founding values that it poses an existential threat to American democracy.

During the presidential campaign of 2016, and for the better part of the past two years, these Never Trumpers could plausibly speak of extracting their party from the grip of white nationalism and angry populism. Now, with midterm elections approaching—with broad majorities of the GOP electorate firmly in the president’s thrall and the Republican Congress all but fully acquiescent to the White House—such talk is fanciful.

Like that Iowa delegate in 1857, today’s Never Trumpers face a stark choice: passively acquiesce to the further ascent of Trumpism, or switch parties and play a vital part in stopping it.

If they do choose the latter, they might be surprised at the result: Like the GOP’s founding generation, in the process of leaving a party they once loved, today’s Never Trump Republicans might also free themselves from partisan dogmas that have lost relevance in the current age. At the same time, they might find Democrats demonstrating a new spirit of flexibility and accommodation—leading to a new unity that could cure the country of some of its worst ills.

***

From the late 1820s through the 1840s, Americans split their political loyalties between two parties, Whigs and Democrats, that disagreed on a host of economic and political questions including a national banking system, tariffs, infrastructure spending, monetary policy and workers’ rights. Both parties enjoyed strong bisectional support and, for the most part, conspired to keep slavery out of the national dialogue.

That changed in 1854 when Congress passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which organized the Kansas and Nebraska territories in preparation for the construction of a midwestern link to a planned transcontinental railroad. At the insistence of Southern Democrats who initially balked at supporting the bill, Stephen Douglas, chairman of the Committee on Territories and chief author of the bill, inserted a “popular sovereignty” provision allowing the residents of the two territories to decide for themselves whether to permit slavery. Kansas and Nebraska were part of the Louisiana Purchase, and as such they fell under the provisions of the Missouri Compromise, which prohibited slavery above the 36’30” parallel. In one quick motion, Douglas and his Democratic colleagues obliterated a longstanding arrangement between the North and the South and reintroduced the slavery question into American politics.

The backlash was swift. The Kansas-Nebraska Act created “a deep-seated, intense, and ineradicable hatred” of slavery, observed the editor of the New York Times. It wasn’t just that the ruling Democratic Party had repealed the Missouri Compromise. It also seemed intent on flouting any law or tradition that stood in the way of slavery’s extension into the territories. William Pitt Fessenden, a Whig senator from Maine, spoke for many Northerners when he called the Kansas-Nebraska Act “a terrible outrage. … The more I look at it, the more enraged I become. It needs but little to make me an out & out abolitionist.”

The introduction of the Kansas-Nebraska Act snapped the cords that bound many Northern voters to the two political parties and introduced a period of extreme volatility and excitement. For all intents and purposes, the Whig Party—which for reasons unrelated to the slavery issue had been in a state of slow decline—ceased to exist, while throughout the North, Democrats suffered massive defections by both voters and officeholders. At hundreds of political meetings around the country, antislavery activists abandoned their political bases for new “fusion” tickets uniting antislavery “Conscience” Whigs and “anti-Nebraska” Democrats, who opposed the Whigs on most policy questions but thought slavery was a dangerous social and political system. In some states, these fusion tickets were called Anti-Nebraska, Democrat-Republican or Free-Soil. In Ripon, Wisconsin, on February 28, 1854, several dozen residents of the surrounding county converged on the town’s simple, one-room, wood-frame schoolhouse to forge a new political party. They called themselves Republicans, and the name soon stuck.

Former Democrats-turned-Republicans weren’t disgusted simply by the imposition of “popular sovereignty” in territory that should, by their estimation, have been free. They also watched as their former party perverted the very idea of free elections and democratic process. In the Kansas territory, “border ruffians,” led by Missouri’s Democratic senator, David Atchison, moved in and out of Kansas with impunity—stuffing ballot boxes, visiting violence on free state settlers and attempting to tilt the scales in favor of slavery. “You know how to protect your own interests,” Atchison declared. “Your rifles will free you from such neighbors. … You will go there, if necessary, with the bayonet and with blood.” “If we win,” he promised, “we can carry slavery to the Pacific Ocean.” Although antislavery voters probably made up a healthy majority of the population, the slave forces stole a series of territorial elections, leading the Free Soilers to establish a shadow government in Lawrence, Kansas.

Tensions had already started to boil over when Atchison’s ruffians “sacked” and pillaged the free-state capital city, destroying the local Free-Soil newspaper office and laying ruin to the Free State Hotel, which housed the shadow legislature. Days later, on May 19, 1856, Charles Sumner rose on the Senate floor to denounce the “crime against Kansas.” The day after his speech, as Sumner attended to routine paperwork on the Senate floor, Congressman Preston Brooks entered the chamber and set upon him with a metal-tipped cane. The senators’ desks were bolted to the floor, making it impossible for Sumner to escape from his seat. Writhing in pain, he wrenched the desk up with his knees and collapsed on the bloodstained carpet. His injuries nearly killed him, and it would be four years before he could return to normal duties in the Capitol. As for Brooks: He enjoyed the full-throated support of Southern Democrats and the quiet approval—or at least non-disapproval—of his Northern party brethren who remained faithful to their party.

The incident soon became known as “Bleeding Sumner,” and it created a political firestorm. The symbolic importance of the crime was arresting. Southern Democrats and their fellow travelers up North were no longer content to employ violence and terrorism in Kansas. Now they had brought their war of aggression into the halls of Congress. “The South has taken the oligarchic ground that Slavery ought to exist, irrespective of color,” the New-York Tribune intoned, “that Democracy is an illusion and a lie.”

In the course of defecting to the new Republican Party, many former Democrats came to look back with disgust on the ways by which Southern Democrats had enforced rigid, doctrinaire support for slavery for decades. Starting in the 1830s, when Congress instituted a “gag rule” barring debate or discussion of the peculiar institution, the Democratic majority blithely tramped over the First Amendment rights of white Northern congressmen in the defense of chattel slavery

A onetime Democrat from Ohio—and future Republican congressman—put the matter in sharper relief when he complained that “we have submitted to slavery long enough, and must not stand it any longer. … I am done catching negroes for the South.” Hannibal Hamlin, a Democratic senator from Maine, lamented that “the old Dem. party is now the party of slavery. It has no other issue, in fact, and this is the standard on which [it] measures every thing and every man.” Hamlin soon switched parties and served as vice president in Abraham Lincoln’s first term.

It’s unclear whether the politicians were leading their constituents, or vice versa. The congressional district in Pennsylvania that antislavery Democrat David Wilmot and his Democrat-turned-Republican successor, Galusha Grow, represented had delivered a plurality of 2,500 votes to Democratic presidential candidate Franklin Pierce in 1852. Four years later, Republican nominee John C. Fremont won the district with 70 percent of the vote and a plurality of 9,000. (Grow would go on to serve as House speaker.) Throughout most of the North and Midwest, Democrats were reduced to minority status overnight. Defections were so profound in Illinois that a former Whig observed that “the men here who have been regarded as the elite of the Democratic party are now with us for the Republican ticket.”

That roster of Illinois ex-Democrats included Lyman Trumbull, who in early 1855 won just five votes in the legislature’s first-round balloting for the United States Senate. The incumbent Democrat, James Shields, won 41 votes, and Abraham Lincoln, a former Whig turned Republican, led with 45—just shy of the 51 votes needed to secure election. Lincoln understood that Trumbull’s holdouts were “men who never could vote for a whig.” Over the course of several roll calls, he began bleeding support to Trumbull, while the Democrats swapped Shields out for the popular incumbent governor, Joel Matteson. Fearing that some of the anti-Nebraska Democrats might reunite with their party and send Matteson to the Senate, Lincoln instructed his Whig supporters to fall in line with Trumbull.

***

Political accommodation between ex-Whigs and ex-Democrats didn’t come easy. It required men like Lincoln to set aside personal ambition in the interest of defeating the slave power. It required Whigs to vote for ex-Democrats, even when the Jacksonians were in the minority. But on balance, it required considerably more of ex-Democrats.

In 1948, the historian Michael Hasseltine suggested that the Republican Party was “little more than an enlarged Whig party disguised in a new vocabulary.” That’s a vast oversimplification, but it’s undeniable that former Whigs outnumbered former Democrats, and that each camp eyed the other warily. In Connecticut, former Democrats led by Gideon Welles and John Niles determined to prevent the state Republican organization from devolving into “but another phase of Whiggery.” For their part, ex-Whigs like David Davis of Illinois disdained former Democrats-turned-Republicans as “a perfect oligarchy with a maw ready to swallow everything.”

Republicans fundamentally agreed on two things: That slavery must not be extended into the territories, and that the Democratic Party was a dangerous, anti-democratic institution that must be ground out throughout the North. That left much room for disagreement and compromise over the tariff, monetary policy and the powers of the federal state. Ultimately, though, the Civil War compelled former Democrats to make the greater compromise, a point well-illustrated by hundreds of millions of Union greenbacks issued by Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase and signed by Francis Spinner, treasurer of the United States. Both were former hard-money Democrats.

The war greatly expanded the federal state in ways that ex-Democrats might once have found unconscionable. To raise, arm, feed and move the Union Army, the Republican administration and Congress introduced new taxes, expanded the federal debt and engaged in inflationary monetary policies that would have made Andrew Jackson turn in his grave. In the 1870s—with the question of slavery settled and civil rights for freedmen at least theoretically embedded in the Constitution—some ex-Democrats returned to their fold. Many did not. Those who returned to their party were unsettled not only by the seeming permeance of Whig economic policies that they had accepted as a wartime expedient, but also by political corruption that seemed the natural byproduct of the GOP’s close relationship with industrialists and manufacturers who had prospered on government contracts under the Lincoln, Johnson and Grant administrations.

***

Ex-Democrats in the 1850s and 1860s didn’t have to become Whigs. They were able to join a new political party—albeit one dominated by former Whigs.

The shrewdest of today’s Never Trump Republicans realize that they face only one clean choice, and it is, of course, more jarring: Become Democrats or, like the prominent GOP strategist Steve Schmidt, become independents and support Democrats. Third parties have rarely taken flight in American history, and when they have, they rarely stay airborne for long.

Like the Iowan who felt as though he were “tearing [himself] away from old home associations,” Never Trumpers will find it a bitter pill to swallow.

But history offers them some consolation.

In the process of abandoning their party allegiance, most Democrats-turned-Republicans disenthralled themselves from political prejudices that no longer made much sense. In Congress, they avidly supported distinctly Whiggish policies like the Homestead Act, the Land-Grant Agricultural and Mechanical College Act and the Pacific Railroad Acts, all of which established a foundation for the country’s post-war economic growth. On some level, the war catalyzed this political realignment. But something equally fundamental may also have been at play: Having concluded that their former Whig enemies shared their fundamental commitment to the good of the nation, ex-Democrats freed themselves to imagine a larger space for political collaboration.

So too can Never Trumpers and Democrats in 2018 find common cause. Relative to other center-left political parties in the developed world, the U.S. Democratic Party is more center than left. It’s the only American political party that has seriously attempted to develop market-based policies to expand health care access (the Affordable Care Act), address climate change (cap and trade) or upgrade the nation’s deficient infrastructure (an infrastructure bank.

As recently as the 1990s and early 2000s—before their party devolved into a spirit of revanchism—center-right Republicans used to compromise with center-left Democrats to address systemic challenges like children’s health care, tax policy and environmental protection. There’s no reason they can’t do so again, within the framework of an enlarged and more ideologically diverse Democratic Party.

If Never Trumpers are truly alarmed by Democrats’ recent embrace of single-payer health care and universal community college, they should become Democrats and develop market-based solutions to big, systemic problems. That would also require that Democratic voters understand their role in forging a new majority: They must pitch a larger tent and accommodate a broader range of ideas and perspectives. Some of them might be forced to make sacrifices like Lincoln’s and step aside in favor of former Republicans where circumstances demand it.

In the same way that former Democrats in the 1850s had to climb their way out of an intellectual foxhole, Never Trumpers in 2018 must arrive at some political accommodation—and quickly. Having devoted so many years and decades to denouncing theoretical and rhetorical incursions on personal liberty—usually in the form of taxes or regulations that Democrats support—many Republicans have been slow to recognize the very tangible and real-world danger of a thuggish central state under their own party’s control: the knock on the door at night, the separation of children and parents, congressional show trials, the erosion of civil society, the autocratic leader forcing private companies into submission, the state-run television station that insists the weather is bright and sunny when everyone can see that it’s raining.

This late in the game, you can be Never Trump or Never Democrat. But you can’t be both.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article misstated the name of former U.S. Treasurer Francis Spinner.

Joshua Zeitz, a Politico Magazine contributing editor, is the author of Building the Great Society: Inside Lyndon Johnson’s White House. Follow him @joshuamzeitz.

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[nhlabornews]

Trump's Sabotage Of The Affordable Care Act Will Hurt New Hampshire Families

Trump’s ACA Sabotage, Executive Order Will Gut Protections, Force Sickest to Pay Skyrocketing Prices, Destabilize Health Care for New Hampshire Families

Following an Executive Order that will increase junk insurance plans, news follows that President Trump will immediately end cost-sharing payments and destabilize health insurance markets

Concord, NH — Yesterday, President Trump issued a new executive order that will expand the availability of junk insurance plans in a direct attempt to trigger the collapse of the entire private health insurance market and destroy the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Last night, the Trump administration signaled that it would also immediately end cost-sharing reduction payments to insurance companies, which analysts and advocates agree will destabilize health insurance markets in New Hampshire and across the nation.

The Congressional Budget Office estimated back in August that ending cost-sharing reductions would increase insurance premiums by 20% next year alone, effectively kick a million Americans off insurance, and add $194 billion to the deficit.

“These partisan, political acts are part of Trump’s relentless campaign to sabotage the ACA by forcing premium increases, creating instability in the market, actively interfering with the ability of consumers to sign up for coverage, and rolling back the contraceptive coverage mandate,” said Granite State Progress Executive Director Zandra Rice Hawkins. “These actions threaten the collapse of the entire individual health insurance market and leave our sick and most vulnerable to pay the price.”

“For years, Trump and Congressional Republicans have called for the repeal of the health care law without offering any viable replacement. Trump is now bent on destroying the one health care law that allowed millions of Americans to gain health insurance and improved coverage for essential health care benefits like maternity, mental health, and prescription drugs. Trump is stripping these important consumer protections and ending critical payments that help millions of lower-income Americans afford coverage. Any problems in our health care system from here on out rest solely at the feet of President Trump and other politicians who have created instability and skyrocketing premiums, and allowed the sale of junk plans without the essential health coverage people need when they are sick,” Rice-Hawkins added.

“Last night, Trumpcare became a reality. By refusing to continue cost-sharing reduction payments, President Trump has committed his most shameful act of sabotage on the insurance markets, threatening the health and wellbeing of millions of Americans and making premiums skyrocket for millions more,” said Raymond Buckley, Chair of the NH Democratic Party.  “Governor Sununu’s self-proclaimed closeness with Trump and his administration hasn’t yielded any help for New Hampshire. Instead, Sununu’s constant praise and support of Trump is starting to look like blind flattery.”

Buckley continued, “Make no mistake, Governor Sununu has precipitated Trump’s sabotage by fueling the flames of ACA repeal,  opposing Medicaid expansion, supporting various forms of Trumpcare, proposing Medicaid block grants, rejecting a reinsurance program, and refusing to join a bipartisan group of governors in calling for the protection of key health care protections. Rather than actively campaigning against dangerous Republican health care ideas, Sununu has either stayed silent or belatedly voiced his opposition once and disappeared. That is not leadership. Sununu is engaging in political calculation when Granite Staters need its governor the most.”

In a letter to President Trump in August, Governor Chris Sununu called for Trump to continue the cost sharing reduction payments. One of the main requests in the letter:

“Commit to funding CSR reimbursements for 2017 and 2018: Carriers calculate their rates far in advance, so continued uncertainty about the reimbursements fuel dramatic increases and could lead them to exit the market. This hurts consumers – most of all, those who cannot get coverage through work and do not qualify for federal subsidies. While I am sympathetic to the argument that these payments are a subsidy, to withhold them at this late date as carriers are trying to calculate rates is resulting in significant instability and further rate increases and fewer options.”

“Despite the American people’s rejection of the Affordable Care Act repeal, this new order is part of a concerted effort by the Trump administration to unravel the law’s patient protections and to destabilize healthcare marketplaces,” said Senator Shaheen. “This order only introduces more unnecessary chaos into our healthcare system, which undermines the healthcare that Granite Staters, and all Americans, depend on. The President must abandon these political efforts to destabilize the ACA, and finally prioritize working with Congress to address and fix this manufactured crisis. There are Republicans and Democrats who are ready to move forward with bipartisan legislation that will provide stability in the insurance marketplace, increase access to care and lower cost sharing.”

Senator Shaheen is leading efforts in the Senate to provide marketplace stability by permanently continuing and increasing eligibility for cost-sharing reduction payments. Her bill, the Marketplace Certainty Act, would make cost-sharing reduction payments permanent and expand eligibility to more working Americans.

“By deciding to stop payments for so-called cost-sharing reductions – which help lower deductibles, co-pays, and other out-of-pocket expenses – President Trump is cruelly and intentionally raising health care costs for millions of Americans,” said Senator Maggie Hassan. “The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office found that stopping these payments would cause health insurance premiums to skyrocket for millions of Americans while also ballooning the federal deficit, yet the President moved forward with this plan out of political spite. I have pushed for months to get Congress to act to provide certainty around these payments and help block the Trump Administration’s blatant sabotage attempts, and now is the time to finally stop this madness.”

Congresswoman Carol Shea-Porter said that Trump should be “ashamed” for his actions that “will torpedo the individual insurance market”

“He is right to be so ashamed of this spiteful action he would only announce it in the dead of night. Stopping these payments won’t just hurt the lower-income people whose out-of-pocket costs are defrayed by CSRs, it will also hurt every one of the millions of Americans who buy their own coverage. That’s because insurance companies say they are going to charge everyone more to make up for the lost funding. Congress must act immediately to fund CSRs and protect our constituents from Trump’s vengeful and destructive actions.”

Congresswoman Annie Kuster also spoke out against the order.

“President Trump’s announcement today sadly continues to take us in the wrong direction on health care. During the last several months, I have been encouraged by conversations with both Republicans and Democrats about how we can address the ongoing challenges with the Affordable Care Act.  I believe that there are areas where we can all agree on solutions to fix issues faced by some Americans. Today’s executive order simply reverts back to the failed repeal and replace mantra. This executive order will result in higher costs to consumers and less access to health care for Granite State families. I will continue to work with my Democratic and Republican colleagues to look for commonsense solutions to stabilize the individual marketplace and strengthen our health care system.”

This executive order is not about helping people gain insurance coverage it is outright sabotage.  Millions of hard working Americans will be harmed by this executive order.  Some will lose their coverage. Some will be force to go without coverage because the costs are too high. Some will be forced to pay outrageously high premiums as they have no other option for coverage.

The American People spoke out loud and clear against the Republican healthcare plan. The Senate rejected the measure over and over because even some Republicans know that this plan will due massive harm to the American people.  But President Trump does not care about the will of the people, he is running the country like a unhinged tyrant.

UPDATED to include statement from NH Democratic Leadership

Senate Democratic Leader Jeff Woodburn, Senate Deputy Democratic Leader Donna Soucy, House Democratic Leader Steve Shurtleff and House Deputy Democratic Leader Cindy Rosenwald issued the following joint statement:

“President Trump’s decision to end cost-sharing reduction payments will dramatically hurt New Hampshire families’ ability to afford and access the health insurance they need. The Trump administration’s varied attempts to dismantle the Affordable Care Act and its protections are shameful and it is abundantly clear that this effort is an attempt to settle a political score rather than act in the best interest of the American people.

Today, we are calling on Governor Sununu and New Hampshire’s Republican legislative leaders to pass a reinsurance program to provide as much relief as possible to Granite Staters who will see premiums go up an average of 20% next year as a result of President Trump’s decision to cancel CSR payments. We are also calling on New Hampshire’s Attorney General Gordon MacDonald to join Attorneys General across the country who are promising to sue the Trump administration to protect cost-sharing reductions. We will work with anyone, anywhere to make sure Granite Staters continue to see the protections and guarantees they have received under the Affordable Care Act and fight back against President Trump’s destructive sabotage.”

Trump’s Sabotage Of The Affordable Care Act Will Hurt New Hampshire Families was originally published on NH LABOR NEWS

[takebackthedream]

Time to Recall a Progressive ‘Truly Great’ First 100 Days by Harvey J Kaye

  The Resistance needs to develop a memory of how past generations confronted reactionary threats to American democracy.

FDR radio broadcast, 1933 Photo credit: Library of Congress

Franklin Roosevelt’s first “Hundred Days” of 1933, in which the newly-elected president and a Democratic-controlled Congress confronted the ravages of the Great Depression by enacting an unprecedented roster of 15 major new laws, have haunted the egomaniacal Donald Trump – and his own first 100 days as president have fascinated the media. While Trump in his own inimical way has been both dismissing the significance of the first 100 days and hyping the greatness of his own presidential performance in the course of those days, journalists and pundits have been keeping scorecards on him. But no consensus has emerged.

Brushing aside the Trump campaign’s apparent ties to Putin’s Russia and the flagrant greed and conflicts of interest of the new president and his family, conservatives have unashamedly celebrated his Cabinet and Supreme Court appointments, executive orders, budget proposals and legislative initiatives. Breathing a sigh of relief that the Affordable Care Act survives, liberals have anxiously mocked Trump for his reversals, betrayals and immediate failures. And recognizing the destruction already wrought and further promised, progressives woefully agonize about what he is doing to the nation.

Unfortunately, few have taken the time to recall what FDR and his New Dealers actually accomplished in their legendary “Hundred Days.” But we who are determined to resist, and fight back against, Trump’s and the right’s assaults on the public good – their war against the public programs that enable life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; the public agencies and regulations that protect the environment and secure the rights of citizens as consumers, workers and voters; the public schools that empower generations; the public media, history and the arts that enrich our lives; and the public parks and spaces that allow us to refresh ourselves – should do so.

We should do so not only because Trump and his comrades have directly targeted FDR’s legacy for destruction, but also to remind us all how a progressive President and people launched a revolution and started making America truly greater. The Resistance needs to develop a memory of how past generations confronted reactionary threats to American democracy.

In the early 1930s, Americans had reason to wonder and worry about the future of American democracy. The Great Depression was destroying the economy and overwhelming public life and resources. But as much as Americans suffered, they did not suffer passively. Bearing the Stars and Stripes, Midwestern farmers were mobilizing and taking the law into their own hands to halt foreclosures and block shipments of produce to markets.

Organizing themselves in Unemployed Leagues, jobless workers were marching and demanding state and federal action to provide relief and jobs. And in 1932, 20,000 World War I veterans, many joined by their families, had made their way by every conveyance possible to Washington DC to petition Congress to immediately distribute the “Veterans’ Bonus” payments they were not supposed to receive until 1945. Sheriffs and their deputies fought farmers; police and hired thugs attacked workers; and General Douglas MacArthur led fully armed troops against the Bonus Marchers’ DC encampments – not to mention, southwestern state governments were repatriating both Mexicans and Mexican-Americans back across the border.

With unemployment, homelessness and hunger increasing, and unrest spreading, President Herbert Hoover seemed incapable of addressing the crisis. Echoing the fears and desperation of the upper-classes, Vanity Fair editorialized in its June 1932 issue, “Appoint a dictator!”

Though no less elite, Democratic politician Franklin Roosevelt, the son of Hudson Valley gentry, had a different view of things. He knew American history, and what he knew had led him to believe that to save democracy Americans had to do what they had done in the past – enhance it! He did not fear Americans’ democratic impulses. In fact, he told students at Milton Academy in 1926, he feared what might happen if they were too long thwarted.

As governor of New York (1929-1933), Roosevelt responded to the Depression by initiating a series of public programs and works projects to develop power resources, provide jobs and improve the lives of working people. But he fully appreciated that the crisis required concerted national action. At the Democrats’ Jefferson Day Dinner of 1930, he decried the accelerating “concentration of economic power.” And he told a friend: “There is no question in my mind that that it is time for the country to become radical for a generation.”

Campaigning for the presidency in 1932, FDR promised “bold, persistent experimentation” and plans that “put their faith once more in the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid.” Recognizing the need to create “work and security,” citing the imperative of a “more equitable distribution of the national income” and insisting that “economic laws are not made by nature [but] by human beings,” he “pledged” a “New Deal” that would include overseeing financial transactions; developing public-works projects; rehabilitating the nation’s lands and forests; easing the burdens of debt-ridden farmers and homeowners; raising workers’ purchasing power; and establishing a system of “old age insurance.” The point of government, he was to say, following Lincoln, “is to do for a community of people what they need to have done but cannot do at all or cannot do so well for themselves in their separate and individual capacities.”

In contrast to candidate Trump, FDR did not seek to exploit popular fears. Rather, he sought to remind Americans who they were and to engage their persistent hopes, aspirations and energies for the labors and struggles ahead. And he spoke not just of policies and programs, but also of America’s historic promise and how they might redeem and secure it anew. In a major campaign speech in San Francisco that September he proposed an “economic declaration of rights, an economic constitutional order” to renew the nation’s original “social contract” and, in the words of the Declaration, guarantee “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

Hoover portrayed Roosevelt as a radical. And he was essentially right. As FDR saw it, not simply the Depression, but the very political and economic order that had engendered it threatened American democratic life. “Democracy is not a static thing,” FDR would say, “it is an everlasting march.” Americans wanted action, were ready to march, and gave Roosevelt a landslide victory that November.

Taking office on March 4, 1933, with the Depression worsening and banks collapsing around the country, Roosevelt told Americans “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” He then set his “Brains Trust” and “New Dealers” to work drawing up plans and bills and called for a Special Session of Congress to legislatively address the crisis.

Roosevelt brought a remarkable team to DC. It included Frances Perkins as secretary of labor, the first woman ever to hold a cabinet-level appointment; Harold Ickes as interior secretary and director of the soon-to-be-created Public Works Administration (PWA); and, of course, Eleanor Roosevelt as first lady. Notably, Perkins agreed to serve on the condition that FDR pursue the enactment of Social Security (which he would do in 1935); Ickes, a progressive Republican who had led the NAACP in Chicago and had strong ties to Native American peoples, would initiate the desegregation of his department; and ER herself would break the mold of presidential wives not only through her many speeches and writings, but also by ardently advocating the causes of women, labor, blacks and the young.

FDR included many a traditional “WASP” figure in his cabinet, but he quickly transformed official Washington by actively enlisting progressive Catholics, Jews and African-Americans to create, initiate and manage the policies and programs of the New Deal. Plus, his administration soon moved to end the repatriation of Mexicans.

When historians refer to Roosevelt’s “Hundred Days” they mean the 100 days of the 1933 special congressional session during which FDR and the Democratic-controlled Congress began to attack the Depression, relieve the needs of the poor and empower working people.

After enacting the Emergency Banking Relief Act, which subjected banks to public account and regulation and instituted federal deposit insurance, they rapidly proceeded to pass laws creating: the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), to provide jobs and improve the national environment; the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA), to regulate farm production and raise farmers’ incomes; the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA), to provide jobs and basic necessities to the unemployed; the Tennessee Valley Authority Act (TVA) to develop an impoverished region of the South; policies to regulate securities transactions (which led to the 1934 Securities and Exchange Act setting up the Securities and Exchange Commission); the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation to refinance mortgages on homes threatened with foreclosure; the “Glass-Steagall Act,” to separate commercial banking from the riskier investment banking; the National Recovery Administration (NRA), to revive and regulate industrial activity, raise workers’ wages, and reduce class conflict; and the Public Works Administration (PWA) to fund major public works projects and create jobs.

Through those acts and “alphabet soup” agencies, the Roosevelt Administration initiated the labors of relief, recovery, reconstruction and reform known as the New Deal. The Depression would persist, and some of the original New Deal experiments would falter and fail – in fact, clauses of the Industrial Recovery and Agriculture Acts would be declared unconstitutional in 1935 and 1936. Nevertheless, Roosevelt and the American people would move forward determinedly, pushing each other further than either expected to go.

The NRA was supposed to boost economic activity and employment in a democratic fashion by not only giving corporate executives, workers and consumers representation on the boards that were to issue the codes regulating production, prices and wages, but also by guaranteeing workers “the right to organize and bargain collectively,” abolishing child labor, and setting both a minimum wage and a maximum numbers of weekly work hours (35-40).

FDR himself projected even more progressive possibilities when he said, on signing the National Industrial Recovery Act into law: “no business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country.” However, as much as the economy and workers’ lives improved, the NRA failed to produce the desired results. Corporate bosses – at the expense of small business interests and consumers – continually called the shots in writing the codes and repeatedly resisted workers’ efforts to organize. Still, workers would not be deterred. They would go on to fight for their rights and compel FDR to support the enactment of the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, under which the federal government would directly back workers’ pursuit of “industrial democracy.”

The New Dealers had more success improving the state of agriculture – but not for all farmers. Instituting a system in which farmers voluntarily reduced their planted acreage and limited their production of basic commodities in return for government-guaranteed prices and subsidies (paid for by taxes on food processors), the AAA raised both agricultural prices and incomes. However, while Midwestern family farmers saw real gains, many thousands of southern tenants and sharecroppers, black and white, saw no benefits when large landowners refused to share government payments with them. Worse, when those landowners reduced their cultivated acreage, their renters and croppers were shoved off the land and into the ranks of the jobless and homeless.

Nevertheless, based on the achievements of the “Hundred Days,” FDR and his fellow citizens launched a democratic revolution – a revolution in which they would harness the powers of government and subject banks and corporations to public account and regulation, direct the federal government to address the needs of the poor young and old, empower workers to organize labor unions, expand the nation’s public infrastructure and improve the environment, and enhance educational opportunities and cultivate the arts – a revolution that truly enhanced American freedom, equality and democracy.

What we did once we can do again. Yes, it was a time of crisis, a crisis that demanded and licensed radical action. But given the right’s control of all three branches of government, what do you think we will soon be facing? Our turn to launch a democratic revolution approaches.

Harvey J. Kaye is the Ben & Joyce Rosenberg Professor of Democracy and Justice Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay and the author of Thomas Paine and the Promise of America (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) and The Fight for the Four Freedoms: What Made FDR and the Greatest Generation Truly Great (Simon & Schuster). He is currently writing Radicals at Heart: Why Americans Should Embrace their Radical History (The New Press).  Follow him on Twitter: @harveyjkaye.

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Here’s What The First 100 Day Of A GOP Presidency Could Look Like

The various GOP presidential hopefuls, like all politicians since time immemorial, have made a lot of promises this campaign season. Here are some of the things they’ve vowed to do if they make it to the White House.

Reverse action on climate change.

Republicans across the board have sworn to roll back the country’s efforts to mitigate climate change, despite polls showing that a majority of Americans are in favor of addressing the problem. First to go would be the Clean Power Plan, which the Environmental Protection Agency announced in August. The plan would cut carbon emissions to 32 percentage below 2005 levels by 2030 and enable the U.S. to meet its current commitments to the United Nations.

Every GOP candidate running for chairman has come out against the Clean Power Plan. Even former New York Gov. George Pataki, who has supported other measures to rein in climate change, told Bloomberg in August that the Clean Power Plan “is a classic top-down, government-imposed solution” that will “result in higher costs of energy[ and] an increase in the vulnerability of the electrical supply, and I think it’s just completely wrong.”

Other candidates have taken a harder line against the Clean Power Plan, and indeed against all executive actions taken by President Barack Obama.

“If you live by the pen, you die by the pen, ” Sen. Ted Cruz( Texas) told The Washington Post in June for an article about what his first 100 days would look like. So there’s that.

Repeal Obamacare.

After two years of sign-ups following the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, more than 16 million people now have health insurance who didn’t have it before. But every GOP candidate except Ohio Gov. John Kasich has promised to repeal Obamacare — though for the most proportion, they’ve been pretty vague about what would take its place.

“[ I’d] figure out a way to repeal Obamacare, ” former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush said at a roundtable in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, this May, responding to a question about actions he’d take in his first 100 days. “I think repealing Obamacare and replacing it with a 21 st-century consumer-directed, patient-driven health care insurance system has to be a high, high priority.”

Deport, deport, deport.

Last year, Obama bolstered the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program and initiated a new one: Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents. These actions would defer the prosecution of children arrivals to the U.S. for two years and allow the parents of any U.S. citizen or resident to live and work in the country without anxiety of expulsion — meaning that 6. 3 million U.S. citizens wouldn’t have to see their families dismantled.

But the Republican presidential candidates have opposed this, for the most proportion characterizing it as executive overreach, a la Cruz, who called the measure “patently unconstitutional.”

Real estate mogul Donald Trump has been the most aggressive nominee on immigration. He has repeatedly promised that his plan to lead the forceful removal of 11 million immigrants, reminiscent of a 1954 program called “Operation Wetback, ” would be done in “a very humane way.” Experts tell that’s not possible.

Win McNamee/ Getty Images Demonstrators appeal to the Supreme Court to implement President Obama’s immigration reforms.

Make America “great” again, and stimulate China a loser.

On Trump’s campaign website, the candidate have committed themselves to take swift action against China for not playing fair: “On day one of the Trump administration the U.S. Treasury Department will designate China as a currency manipulator.”

Democrats like Sen. Charles Schumer( N.Y .) would exult. He and many in Congress agree that China’s intervention in the world’s currency market is stifling U.S. exports and costing the country millions of manufacturing tasks.

China purposely devalues its currency — which should be traded at the highest rates, because it’s in greatest demand by all the countries that need to buy China’s exportations in the local currency — by using its massive reserves to buy up U.S. dollars. This lowers the supply of the dollar compared to the Chinese yuan, which induces U.S. exportations more expensive, and therefore tougher to sell.

The U.S. trade deficit “has increased by $ 200 billion to $500 billion per year as a result, ” according to a 2012 report by the Peterson Institute for International Economics. “The United States has lost 1 million to 5 million jobs due to this foreign currency manipulation.”

Earlier this year, the International Monetary Fund declared China’s currency “fairly valued.”

Remind Congress that it’s super important for everyone to get along.

In response to a question about how his first three months in office would be unique, former neurosurgeon Ben Carson told at a National Press Club event that he would call a joint session of Congress to address hyper-partisanship in the legislature, emphasizing the importance of Judeo-Christian values.

“We’ve gotten to the point which is something we believe that if somebody disagrees with you, then you need to try to destroy them, destroy their family and their subsistence, ” Carson told. “Where did that come from? I assure you, it did not come from our Judeo-Christian values and roots.”

Wage yet another war against same-sex marriage.

This summer, a week after the Supreme court ruled in favor of marriage equality, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee said he would not accept the ruling.

“I reject this decision and will oppose from ‘Day One’ of my administration to defend our Constitution and protect religious autonomy, ” Huckabee told of the Supreme Court’s ruling in a press release.

On his website, Huckabee promises to push for a constitutional amendment to define marriage as between one man and one woman.

Those endeavours would likely be a waste of time, since a constitutional amendment requires a two-third majority in Congress — or in a state election — and same-sex marriage currently enjoys record-high supporting among Americans.

George Frey/ Getty Images Demonstrators protest new anti-gay policies from the Mormon church.

Roll out the red carpet for Wall street, and let them wipe their feet on consumers.

Everyone in the GOP field has promised to repeal the Dodd-Frank Act, which put into place a package of Wall street regulations following the 2008 fiscal meltdown. Dodd-Frank also established the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to act as an arbiter for the public in the face of unscrupulous business practices.

In July, Carson wrote in a Washington Hour op-ed that the CFPB is “the ultimate example of regulatory overreach, a nanny state mechanism asserting its control over everyday Americans that they did not want, did not ask for and do not need.”

For what it’s worth, the CFPB has secured over $10 billion in relief for customers since its creation in 2011. It’s currently addressing the student indebtednes crisis by suing for-profit colleges for fraud and taking on the country’s largest student loan company for allegedly cheating borrowers.

Reduce college student loan debt by discouraging liberal arts degrees.

Sen. Marco Rubio( Fla .), who has voted consistently against Dodd-Frank and the CFPB, said in November that within his first 100 days as chairman, he would deal with the student indebtednes issue by adjusting the academic accreditation system to incentivize low-cost training of professions like welding, rather than doctrine degrees, for example.

Renege on the Iran deal.

GOP candidates Rubio, Cruz, former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina and former Sen. Rick Santorum( Pa .) have all promised to instantly undo an international agreement that lifts fiscal imposing sanctions on Iran in exchange for constraints on uranium enrichment programs entail for the development of atomic weapons.

Expressing dissatisfaction with the deal in September, Fiorina said the first thing she’d do in the Oval Office would be to stimulate two phone calls. The first would be to reassure Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of America’s support. The second would be a message to Iran’s supreme leader: “Until you open every nuclear and every military facility to full, open, anytime, anywhere, for-real inspections, we are going to make it as difficult as is practicable for you to move fund around the global fiscal system.”

Chip Somodevilla/ Getty Images Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu fulfills with U.S. Senate leaders following the Iran nuclear bargain.

End mass government surveillance?

Rand Paul’s staunch opposition to the government collecting metadata from U.S. citizens is one reason the Kentucky senator may not win the Republican nomination in a time of heightened fear over national security. To date, he’s been the only person in the fields who’s was contended that privacy should win out.

“The president generated this vast dragnet by executive order, ” Paul said at the beginning of his campaign. “As president, on day one, I will instantly objective this unconstitutional surveillance.”

Boost cybersecurity, somehow.

Carson has said he would prioritize stiffening cybersecurity, although he’s been less specific about it than some critics would like.

“We must immediately hardened our electrical grid and have multiple layers of alternative energy, ” Carson told The Washington Examiner in September. “That’s critical … We also must beef up our cyber abilities both offensive and defensive.”

Keep former lawmakers from running straight to K Street.

Pataki has taken a strong stance on eliminating the “revolving door” between lawmakers and lobbyists, though he’s in the minority as far as actually making this a campaign issue.

In September, Pataki said he would “propose a law on day one” of his presidency: “You serve the working day in the House or Senate, there’s a lifetime forbid on you ever being a lobbyist in Washington , D.C.”

Invade Chinese airspace with Air force One.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie would solve U.S. challenges with China by flying Air force One over military installments in the South China Sea to show them “we mean business.”

At the undercard GOP debate in November, Christie said this would be the first thing he would do when it comes to China — surely a smart way to establish a good rapport with the United States’ primary trading partner.

Send Vladimir Putin a message — that we’re gonna keep doing what we’ve been doing.

Fiorina pledged at a town hall meeting in August to address the threat of Russia by “rebuild[ ing] the 6th Fleet, ” a part of the U.S. Navy that conducts operations in Europe and Asia. But as Vox’s Ezra Klein points out, the 6th Fleet doesn’t actually need rebuilding. In fact, most of what Fiorina has promised to do regarding Russia in her first 100 days, including starting military exercises in the Baltic States and putting more troops in Germany, are things the Obama administration is doing or has already done.

Balance the budget, by sheer force-out of will.

Never fear! Amid all the flurry, Kasich has promised he’ll was also able to balance the budget, using … methods.

“I spent my entire lifetime balancing federal budgets, growing tasks, the same in Ohio. And I will go back to Washington with my plan. And I will have done it within 100 days, and it will pass, and we will be strong again, ” Kasich said during an October GOP debate. “Thank you.”

No, governor, thank you.

Actual Strategy From A Leaked GOP Memo — We Didn’t Make These Up

Actual Strategy From A Leaked GOP Memo — We Didn’t Make These Up

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