Well, my “legal mind” hasn’t done too well on predicting that issue’s progress. My first take on it was that the basic claim was foreclosed by case law: Wickard v. Filburn, a WWII era case, basically set the bar regarding Commerce Clause jurisprudence, and even with some slight limitation in the past 20 years, the basic law remains that Congress can link a whole bunch of pretty tenuous things to the Commerce Clause and still be safe. I didn’t see, or credit, the precise argument that’s developed, which might be summarized as “Even if Congress can regulate any economic activity, they can’t penalize economic NON-activity.”
As a matter of public policy, I like that idea; as a matter of constitutional law, it seems inconsistent with Wickard.
And I have no idea what the courts will do.
So my finely tuned legal mind hasn’t much in the way of actual insight.
The 1099-MISC provision is part of the funding mechanism which requires businesses to report payments of over $600 to any one vendor. The business community hates it calling it “a compliance nightmare” and in May a bill was introduced to repeal it. I assume that bill went no where.
Stupak-Pitts would be posturing only to the Religious Right wing. That’s not where the fire is right now.
The “litigation assault” will proceed and come to whatever outcome it comes to on its own timetable and will still be in process as Congress spends time spinning its wheels. I can’t see any way that any ruling that may or may not occur sometime in the future will effect what Congress does or does not do right now. They really seem to be separate prongs of attack. The Congressional action being one of no chance to change anything; the “litigation assault” one being at least a Hail Mary pass of a chance. (And I obviously have less knowledge of what the courts may do than do you.)
And yeah, putting that “Job Killing” name calling actually IN the proposed legislation is embarrassingly childish. Is his next proposal going to be entitled the “Neener neener you’re a poopyhead Act”? Sheesh.
It’s nothing more than cynical political posturing on the part of the GOP. This will gain no traction in the Senate and even if it did, Obama would veto it in a heartbeat.
But their base has complained that during the Bush years when they had control of both houses, they did nothing about abortion, gay marriage, cutting the deficit or other issues near and dear to their hearts. This gives them an opportunity to say, “Hey, we kept our promise, we voted to repeal HCR, but those wily democrats bucked the will of the American people and kept it from being officially enacted.”
Joe Pitts is the chairman of the Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Health now. He’s said that adding back the stupak/pitts measure that was taken out of the version that initially passed the house last year will be one of his first priorities.
Bricker, I doubt Congress cares how the legal challenges are going. Absent the HCRRA being overturned by a court with teeth, there’s no particular reason for them not to try to repeal it.
The GOP has made it clear that its priority is to ensure Obama is not reelected. The first step is repealing the health care reform law.
It’s not unusual in the case of bills which the sponsors know have no chance of passage, and if it did pass committee the short title would certainly be changed to something less lame in the mark up sessions.
Keweenaw, Oh I am not saying that there won’t be an attempt to do so. Just that no good for them will come of it. Putting back Stupak-Pitts obviously won’t become law and the animus in the GOP base against the healthcare reform package is not going to be sated by failed attempts on a provision that the business community feels is too much paperwork or on a provision that some of the Religious Right want to see but that doesn’t address the issues that most of those of the Right against the package have.
My point remains that at the end of the day this will fail as “red meat” for the base, annoy the middle that the GOP is posturing when there is real work to be done (especially after they saw what compromise can accomplish in the lame duck session), convince some of the middle that the plan is not as bad as they thought, and rally some left of the middle to Obama as he has a chance to show a spine after all.
The repeal attempt is nothing but a sop to the tea party minded people, who like it or not were influential in the last election. There’s a reason the bill is only 2 pages long and Republicans are already making plans on what to do when that fails…
Beyond that, it all depends on how much of a ‘we won, suck it’ attitude republicans take. I could see them working with democrats to make some adjustments to health care. Which is probably good, few from either party think the thing was perfect. As long as it’s negotiated so both parties have a say, it’s possible decent changes get passed.
Making only a token attempt to repeal may actually be a good sign. It could indicate that Republicans know they gotta suck up to their extreme base, but they’re getting it out of the way early and aren’t going to waste much time or effort on that type of shit before working with democrats.
OTOH, I can easily see republicans spinning their wheels for two years with pointless posturing that has no chance of passing the Senate or avoiding an Obama veto. Plus expecting either party to act even semi-sane has always been a sucker bet. Republicans would have to realize the last election wasn’t the nation endorsing them, it was the nation rejecting democrats. Politicians aren’t known for having a whole lot of humility.
Basically, the repeal is just pointless and even republicans know it. We won’t have a good idea how republicans will act, or how that will play out for their popularity, until we see what they do after the repeal dies.
That’s the core mantra of the GOP and I think it’s clever cause it really seems to work. Their basic message is government is inefficient and ineffectual and should be in charge of as little as possible. Best case scenario the GOP does nothing and at worst they slow any change or progress down, proving government shouldn’t be in charge and they should be elected again to get rid of the rest of government.
The CBO has determined that it will increase the deficit by $230 Billion to eliminate Obamacare. Republicans are sidestepping their pledge not to increase the deficit by saying that they think the CBO is wrong. :rolleyes::dubious:
They are advancing the kill obamacare bill without hearings or opportunity for amendments on the basis that “this is different”
They have pledged to replace the health care bill but they’ll let us know what they are going to replace it with sometime after they repeal the bill (i.e. they have no ideas).
My friend was in a car accident when we were kids and he was in a coma, the doctors did everything they could while we were waiting outside his hospital room someone saw the doctor flirting with another doctor and went over there to give him a peice of their mind. There was literally nothing more the doctors could do for my friend but wait but it just pissed some people off to see the doctor spending so distracted with other things.
You feel so fucking helpless and desperate and the guy thats supposed to be helping you is off doing something that you would have no problem with if he just took care of first things first.
That CBO score is a joke. To get a deficit-negative score, the Democrats had to set up the CBO’s assumptions to include a ten-year window in which taxes would be collected for ten years but benefits only be paid out for seven. In addition, the Democrats framed the scoring by assuming they would find $500 billion in cuts to Medicare that they could use to pay for it. The CBO is required to do its scoring based on assumptions given to it, but the CBO director is on record as saying the proposed spending cuts were highly unlikely.
All the Republicans would have to do is to tell the CBO to re-score the health care bill without those assumptions. Tell them to pick a 1o-year window after the benefits have started being paid out, and to assume that the Medicare cuts won’t happen (or to assume a scenario where the cuts could have been applied directly to the deficit instead of being used to pay for a new entitlement).
They can also tell the CBO to ignore the supposed revenue enhancement from the 1099 clause (or to balance it against the cost of compliance by the private sector), and to factor in a reasonable amount of unforseen cost bloat by looking at the average bloat of previously scored programs after they were implemented.
Also, the first parts of the health care bill were now obviously under-funded. The temporary health care pool set up before the exchanges are in place was under-funded by half. The Republicans could tell the CBO to factor that in as well.
And if they really want to play the game the way the Democrats did, they can start baking in their own unwarranted or speculative assumptions. For example, they could tell the CBO to factor in the cost of jobs lost because of increased employer taxes and penalties, or to factor in the interest charges on the debt from not applying the Medicare cuts directly to the debt instead of new health care spending.
They could easily set up the scoring so that the CBO comes back and says that the health care bill will add hundreds of billions of dollars to the debt in the next ten years.
Because the bill also disintermediated non-value-added private sector leeching on student loan processing and Medicare Advantage.
The CBO scoring is easily derided by those with an ideology, or partisanism, that is inconsistent with it, sure. But then they take on the burden of providing a different scoring that has more credibility to the nonbelievers, hmm?
Look at the chart that Ezra Klein shows here. The ACA racks up a good bit of savings in 2013 and 2014, less so in 2015, then goes slightly in the red for 2016 and 2017, then starts to increasingly save money after that.
I’m pretty sure that the standard practice is to look at the next ten years. The CBO is less willing to say anything after that with much authority. And scoring bills by removing their payment mechanisms would make doing absolutely anything look bad. The Democrats want something that would help people, and the Republicans insist that they have to pay for it. Then the Democrats find a way to pay for it, and the Republicans can just say “nuh-uh, doesn’t count.” Sure, the Republicans can get the CBO to score things that way, but it’s not terribly honest. In any event, having laws that save money on the books certainly raises the probability of saving money compared to not passing them in the first place, assuming they’re going to get repealed before then.
Like, for example, Paul Ryan’s Roadmap budget plan, which really only starts saving money after 2030. Why don’t we score that as if the massive tax cuts go into effect, then we repeal the parts where we dismantle Social Security and Medicare as we know them, because we don’t think that’s going to happen? That would probably turn the whole thing into a disaster.
Or they could do what they did, and not score anything, and then make up crap about why the CBO score is a joke. Or they could do what Paul Ryan did last year, and have them include the Medicare Doc Fix as part of the ACA. Even though we’d be spending that money anyways.
What unwarranted and speculative assumptions? Where is the honest CBO report that the GOP could have asked for without the Democrats’ unwarranted assumptions?
Also, there’s the little matter of the 32 million people that wouldn’t have insurance if the Repeal Act were to pass.
I agree about the public getting pissed off about the amount of time they sound like they are going to put into trying to repeal it. But I do not agree that the public will find it not a bad thing.
For the present we are stuck with it, get over it. And try to do something effective. If the new congress wastes a lot of time then there will be another new congress. Idiots.
They won’t be sated by failed attempts, but reform of the 1099 item has some chance of passing. The Stupak-Pitts language has longer odds, but it was approved by the previous congress. I think Obama would have signed it had it made it into the Senate bill previously. He’s stated that nothing in Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act should confilct with the Hyde Amendment, and signed an executive order affirming such. And the GPO did gain ground in the Senate. The question is, are there enough pro-life Democratic Senators left?
In my mind those are at least in the realm of possibility. Unlike the political theater of the repeal bill.
:rolleyes::dubious: