What’s important to understand about the Supreme Court, however, is
that it has almost always acted as a malign force in American history —
and the brief period from the mid-1950s through the mid-1970s that
liberals now look back upon with nostalgia was both an anomaly and the
culmination of several historic accidents. Two other factors also create a significant risk that the Court’s
future could look a great deal like the dark moments of its past. The
first is that the Republican Party has largelyrejected
the cries for judicial restraint that dominated its rhetoric during the
Nixon, Reagan, and both Bush administrations. And this shift towards
conservative judicial activism is being cheered on by powerful elements within the legal profession.
The second factor is that the Court’s membership could change rapidly
in just a few years. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg recently celebrated
her 82nd birthday, only a few days after Justice Antonin Scalia
celebrated his 79th. Justice Anthony Kennedy is 78 years-old, while
Justice Stephen Breyer is 76. The next president, in other words, could
replace nearly half of the Court’s members in a single presidential term
— potentially filling the Court with justices eager to relive the
Court’s excesses from nearly a century ago. The Good Scalia
It’s not hard to remember a time when conservatives feared a Supreme
Court run amok at least as much as liberals. President Ronald Reagan
promised to appoint judges who embrace “judicial restraint.”
President George W. Bush warned that judges who “give in to temptation
and make law instead of interpreting” engage in “judicial lawlessness”
that is a “threat to our democracy.” Chief Justice John Roberts told senators during his confirmation hearing that he would “prefer to be known as a modest judge.”
One of the most articulate spokespersons for this fear of a
too-powerful judiciary used to be Justice Scalia. A judge’s power,
Scalia warned in a 1998 book,
can consist “of playing king — devising, out of the brilliance of one’s
own mind, those laws that ought to govern mankind.” The power of judges
to reason their way to a desired result, Scalia archly explained,
“would be an unqualified good, were it not for a trend in government
that has developed in recent centuries, called democracy.”
Indeed, as a younger man, Scalia built a judicial philosophy around
the belief that judicial discretion must be constrained. In a 1989
lecture entitled “Originalism: The Lesser Evil,” Scalia argued that “the
main danger in judicial interpretation of the Constitution — or, for
that matter, in judicial interpretation of any law — is that the judges
will mistake their own predilections for the law.” To combat this
danger, Scalia embraced originalism — the theory that a legal text’s
true meaning must be determined by examining how it would have been
understood at the time of its enactment — because he believed that
originalism “establishes a historical criterion that is conceptually
quite separate from the preferences of the judge himself.” The strongest case for Scalia’s avowed approach to the law has always
been that it will enable judges to base their decisions on neutral
principles separate from their own desires. The Bad Scalia
In practice, however, Scalia’s proved quite incapable of living up to
his own ideal of judicial decision-making untainted by personal
preferences. In his 2005 opinion in Gonzales v. Raich, for example, Scalia offered an expansive interpretation of congressional power — an interpretation that was clearly expansive enough to permit the Affordable Care Act. Yet Scalia was one of four justices who voted to repeal this act in its entirety just seven years later.
Similarly, Scalia co-authored a 2012 book which explains that “no
interpretive fault is more common than the failure to follow the
whole-text canon, which calls on the judicial interpreter to consider the entire text” when interpreting a statute. Yet, at oral arguments in another case seeking to gut the Affordable Care Act, Scalia appeared determined to repeat this “interpretative fault” himself.
Scalia is, in many ways, a microcosm for the conservative movement as
a whole, which has grown increasingly comfortable with aggressive
judicial activism as the Supreme Court has moved to the right.
I argue in Injustices
that the ethic of judicial restraint that dominated conservative
judicial thinking in the late Twentieth Century was an anomaly. In the
middle part of that century, the Supreme Court consistently moved the
law in a more liberal direction for the first and only time in the
Court’s history. Decisions like Roe v. Wade gave the American
right a taste of what it is like to fear the judiciary, and they found
that experience so painful that they spent decades devising reasons to
constrain judicial power.
Now, however, Roe is more than 40 years old and the Supreme
Court has grown more and more conservative with each passing decade.
Conservatives and Republicans no longer have much to fear from the
judiciary. Indeed, outside the area of gay rights, the worst
conservatives can expect from the Roberts Court is a decision which maintains the status quo instead of moving the law to the right.
This means that conservatives and Republicans no longer have much
motivation to seek out ways to prevent judges from reading their own
preferences into the law. “I’m A Judicial Activist”
Indeed, asking judges to second-guess decisions made by the elected
branches of government may now be the GOP’s first line of defense
against laws and executive actions they disapprove of — especially when
those actions have President Obama’s name on them. More than two dozen
Republican officials signed onto NFIB v. Sebelius, the first Supreme Court case seeking to repeal Obamacare. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) described King v. Burwell, a more recent suit seeking to gut Obamacare, as an “opportunity presented to us by the Supreme Court” to get “a major do-over of the whole thing”
on health reform. When President Obama announced a new immigration
policy that most Republicans disapprove of, they quickly found a
Republican judge with a history of opinions calling for harsher treatment of immigrants
who was willing to block the new policy. Just about the only thing
President Obama’s managed to accomplish without being sued for it is
pardoning a Thanksgiving turkey.
Among the GOP’s likely presidential candidates, no one has more
wholeheartedly embraced this shift towards legislation-by-judiciary than
Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY). “I’m a judicial activist,”
Paul proudly announced at at event sponsored by the conservative
Heritage Foundation last January, before launching into a defense of the
Supreme Court’s 1905 decision in Lochner v. New York. Lochner, which struck down a New York law prohibiting
bakeries from overworking their bakers, has historically been held up by
liberals and conservatives alike as symbolic of an entire era of
judicial overreach. Indeed, the period in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth century when the Court barred minimum wages laws, stripped workers of their right to organize and condemned countless young Americans to spend their childhoods working in coal mines, cotton mills and other factories is commonly referred to as the “Lochner Era.”
Paul has been as explicit as he can possibly be that he wants to
bring back this era, and there should be little doubt that he would
appoint justices who share the same values if given the chance.
Meanwhile, though the GOP’s other candidates have not spoken as openly
about a desire to restore the kind of judicial activism that defined the
Lochner Era, they are likely to seek counsel on judicial
nominations from a segment of the bar that shared values very similar to
Paul’s. The Incubator
The conservative Federalist Society is arguably the most powerful
legal organization in the country. The keynote at its annual black tie
dinner rotates among Justices Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito.
Senators and other members of Congress typically fill up much of the
audience at this annual event. Federalist Society Executive Vice
President Leonard Leo shaped much of the second President Bush’s judicial nominations strategy, and many of Bush’s most high-profile appointments to the bench were themselves members of the Society.
More than just a group that convenes conservative attorneys, the Federalist Society is an incubator for lawsuits such as NFIB and King,
and its meetings offer a window into the concerns that animate the
kinds of lawyers who would be candidates for a judicial appointment in a
Republican administration.
Once upon a time, when calls for judicial restraint were ascendant on
the right, the Federalist Society was also an incubator for this more
restrained vision. In 2006, for example,
federal-judge-turned-cabinet-secretary Michael Chertoff claimed that “in large part because of the work that the Society and others have done,
the claim for judicial modesty is sufficiently well-established that
everybody understands, even the critics of that claim, that they have to
take it seriously and they have to address it.” President Bush made his
comparison between judicial activism and “judicial lawlessness” at a
Federalist Society conference one year later.
Last fall’s convening of the Federalist Society’s annual lawyer’s convention, by contrast, featured one panel questioning the wisdom of anti-discrimination laws
— panelist Gail Heriot, a professor at University of San Diego School
of Law, claimed that America needs to “take a hard look at some of the
ways in which” anti-discrimination laws “have backfired, doing no good
or more harm than good” — and another panel questioning the wisdom of the minimum wage.
These concerns are likely to influence — and may even drive the
decision-making of — the next Republican who has the opportunity to name
federal judges. Should that president wish to return to an era where
the minimum wage and bans on private discrimination were considered
unconstitutional, they will already have at least one powerful ally in
this fight. Justice Clarence Thomas has, in multiple opinions, embraced a
narrow reading of the federal government’s constitutional powers which
would forbid child labor laws, minimum wage laws, and the ban on whites-only lunch counters.
On the day that the next president takes office, Justice Breyer will
be 78 years-old — and he will only be the fourth oldest member of the
Court if no other justice departs before that date. Should these four
justices be replaced with judges who think like Justice Thomas, that
will mean that the Court will have enough votes to repeal much of the
twentieth century.
The Obama administration is requiring companies
that drill for oil and natural gas on federal lands to disclose
chemicals used in hydraulic fracturing operations.A final rule
released Friday also updates requirements for well construction and
disposal of water and other fluids used in fracking, a drilling method
that has prompted an ongoing boom in natural gas production.
The
rule has been under consideration for more than three years, drawing
criticism from the oil and gas industry and environmental groups. The
industry fears the regulation could hinder the drilling boom. The groups
worry that it will allow unsafe drilling techniques to pollute
groundwater.
Americans continue hearing that the Republican path to prosperity for
all is enacting harsh austerity and trickle-down economics that work
fabulously for the uber-rich, but produce mammoth deficits, kill jobs,
and increase poverty for the masses. It is not, by any means, an
unintended consequence that Republican economics are tailored for their
donors, slash revenue, and transfer wealth to the rich; it is by design.
As Americans have witnessed over the past three decades, every time
Republicans are in power and trash the economy whether in states or
nationally, it takes electing a Democrat to clean up the GOP
trickle-down mess, pay off their debts, create jobs, and put the economy
back on track.
It is likely that one of the best recent examples
(Barack Obama is not recent) of a Democrat cleaning up an economic
disaster and outperforming a red state is Minnesota’s Democratic
Governor Mark Dayton. Now, what is unique about Dayton is that besides
being a politician, he is a certified member of the one-percent and a
billionaire; albeit one with conviction to serve the people.
When he took office, Dayton inherited a $6.2 billion budget deficit from Republican Tim Pawlenty who claimed and prided himself as being the “first truly fiscally-conservative governor in modern history;”
a title economic failure Sam Brownback of Kansas now proudly claims as
his own. Pawlenty’s claim to fame, like Brownback et al, and greatest
source of pride, was that he never ever raised state taxes; he also
never created more than 6,300 jobs
in eight years, or ever displayed his fiscal conservative bona fides
(see $6.2 billion deficit) when dealing with the state budget.
Enter billionaire Mark Dayton who raised the state’s income tax on the rich by 1%, guaranteed equal pay for women, and raised the minimum wage. The results speak for themselves. In less than four years, Governor Dayton added 172,000 new jobs
to Minnesota’s economy; 165,800 more his first term than Pawlenty added
in two terms combined. Republicans claim higher income taxes kill jobs,
and Minnesota’s tax rates are the 4th highest in America, but the
state’s unemployment rate is 5th-lowest in the nation at 3.6%. The
state’s median income is also $8,000 higher than the national average
that is a major contributor to economic growth and perpetuates
down-stream job creation; something Republicans reject out of hand and
claim is impossible.
As of last year, higher state taxes and higher
government spending has Minnesota’s private sector job growth higher
than pre-Republican Great Recession levels, and the state economy is the
5th fastest growing in the nation. It is the kind of a statistic that
inspired Forbes to rank Minnesota in the top ten best states for
business. Gallup says economic confidence in Minnesota is the highest in
the nation, and it is a result of doing exactly the opposite of what
Republicans and the Koch brothers convinced states like Kansas,
Illinois, New Jersey, Louisiana, and Wisconsin to do; cut taxes for the
rich, cut education, and impose harsh austerity measures.
For a comparison with a neighboring state with Republican governor, Koch employee Scott Walker’s famous “Wisconsin Open for Business” agenda has Wisconsin sitting at a distant 32nd
on the Forbes top states for business list, Wisconsin’s job creation is
38th in the nation, and Wisconsin is tied with Iowa for last place
in the Midwest for creating private sector jobs. Where Dayton’s tax
hikes on the wealthy have Minnesotan’s income $8,000 higher than the
national average, Walker drove his state’s median income down to $900
below than the national average; a result of imposing ‘right to work’
laws and abolishing workers’ collective bargaining rights. Remember that
Walker equated eliminating worker rights with crushing violent
extremists and murdering terrorists; all he crushed was economic
prosperity for Wisconsin residents.
It was not an easy ride for Governor Dayton’s
economic agenda, and except for typical Republican opposition, Dayton
did not have to resort to heavy-handed pressure for support. In typical
GOP style, state representative Mark Uglem did precisely what
Republicans at the state and national level always do when Democrats
propose raising taxes on the rich; fear monger that businesses would
flee the state en masse, kill jobs, and wipeout the economy. The same
economy Republicans and Pawlenty spent eight years destroying.
Uglem issued a stern warning to Governor Dayton saying prior to the 1% tax hike on the wealthy and guaranteed that “the job creators, the big corporations, the small corporations, they will leave. It’s all dollars and sense to them.”
It is a tired, worn-out warning that Republicans parrot by rote
regardless they are always wrong and the opposite is always true.
Despite the Republicans’ claim that an agenda that
includes raising taxes and the minimum wage would eviscerate the state’s
businesses, kill jobs, wipe out revenue, and deny workers the wealth
Republicans promised tax cuts for the rich would produce, the results
speak for themselves. Dayton’s results, like any Democrat’s results,
were that within one year of his tax hikes an additional 6,230
Minnesotans filed in the top income tax bracket, and that higher
revenue provided the state with a $1 billion budget surplus that Dayton
pledged to reinvest over a third back into the public schools.
Where Dayton accomplished enacting his agenda was
through gaining electoral support from the people the right way;
actually making it easier to register to vote by creating an online voter registration
system. The reason Gov. Dayton was able to radically transform
Minnesota’s economy into one of the best in the nation was also not
unique and utilized a very simple accounting scheme and basic arithmetic
California Governor Jerry Brown used; not some magic theory or voodoo
economics to enrich the wealthy. Dayton increased revenue by raising
taxes on the wealthy that always turns a deficit into a surplus just
like raising the minimum wage will increase the median income every
time. It is a typically Democratic practice and the polar opposite of
Republican governors such as Scott Walker, Sam Brownback, Chris
Christie, Piyush Jindal, or any GOP governor piling on debt and deficits
and cutting services to preserve tax cuts for the rich.
Republicans claim businesses love and demand the
conservative economic agenda, but according to states like California
and Minnesota that is a blatant lie. In any state where education is a
high budget priority coupled with economic growth leading the nation, no
businesses wants to leave the state. What is curious indeed, is why
voters continue electing Republicans to increase deficits, cut services,
and kill jobs just to give the rich more wealth. What is even more
curious, is why voters fail to see that every stinking time Republicans
are in charge at the state or federal level, they squander surpluses,
pile up crushing deficits, kill jobs, and retard economic growth;
something a Democrat has to spend time repairing.
Perhaps with so many Republican failures at the
state level, one would think red state voters can look to their blue
state neighbors, come to their senses, reject stupidity, and get a clue.
In the case of imbeciles in Wisconsin, they should be capable of seeing
that yet another blue state, one on their Eastern border, is
outperforming their typically Republican governor’s red state failure.
A scam is a fraudulent business scheme, or a swindle, and a deliberate
ploy to defraud ignorant, naïve, and stupid people out of their money or
assets. There are many reasons idiots fall for obviously dubious
“deals,” and stupidity aside, greed is often the culprit. But fear of
losing something certainly plays a role. Republicans have had a thirty
year run convincing stupid poor people looking to get rich, and morons
terrified of other Americans taking their “stuff,” that giving up
everything they have to the wealthy will magically transform a dirt-poor
imbecile into a billionaire, save Americans’ liberty in the process,
and teach the government who’s boss.
Republicans only know one approach to economic
policy; the abject failure and scam known as trickle down with a healthy
dose of Draconian austerity. Those features epitomize the most recent
budget proposal Nobel prize-winning economist Paul Krugman officially
and accurately labeled as a “trillion dollar con job.” The only purpose of the GOP’s con-job, as Krugman and conscious Americans are aware of, is to “make the rich richer and ordinary families poorer” and increase the deficit by trillions of dollars.
The GOP House and Senate budgets are typically “deficit hawk” con jobs because they duly blow up the nation’s deficit to the tune of “several trillion dollars in just the first decade”
according to Krugman. It is the 2001-2008 Bush Republican economic
agenda on steroids and a neo-con machination to economically rape the
masses out of everything they have, transfer it to the rich, and break
the federal government once and for all.
Now, the reason Paul Krugman’s assessment of the
Republican budget proposal is prescient is not just because he is a
Nobel-winning economist, although that is important, but because he is
not a politician. He also is not a devotee of the conservative method of
scoring economic proposals known as ‘dynamic scoring.’ Dynamic scoring is a conservative trick of ‘assessing‘
a budget on the basis of what they say it will magically do; not
according to mathematics and reality. Of course, Republicans understand
their budget is a con job; the created it that way. They also know
Americans are inherently stupid and have fallen for the same scam for
thirty-plus years and will give up everything to preserve liberty,
eviscerate the government, and magically become millionaires.
Krugman noted that there are two specific “trillion-dollar magic” asterisks in the latest House and Senate Republican budgets; one on spending, and one on revenue that the real economist says is “actually an understatement.” What is missing in each proposal are specific and revenue enhancements Republicans claim produce “mysterious savings and untold new revenue.”
The lack of any specifics was well-planned and a deliberate ploy
because Republicans knew in advance if anything was clearly explained,
even the stupidest American would not support their diabolical scam;
particularly a scam devised last year by neo-conservative groups like
the Senate Conservative Fund and Heritage Foundation. The intent of both
conservative groups was “to make the rich richer and ordinary people much poorer” and decimate the government as a value-added bonus.
Since Republicans took control of the House in 2011,
each and every one of the Heritage Foundation budgets Ayn Rand acolyte
Paul Ryan submitted were advertised as “courageous efforts to eliminate
deficits and pay down debt.” Naturally, the one-time bipartisan
Congressional Budget Office and anyone with a brain understood Ryan’s
budgets included “trillions of dollars in imaginary, unexplained savings
and new sources of revenue.” It is why when the Koch brothers bought
the Senate, Republicans immediately installed a trickle down devotee as
the new head of the CBO to produce the same “dynamic scoring”
projections Kansas Governor Brownback utilized to send the state into
debt and deficit Hell. It is no surprise then that the House and Senate
budgets dutifully follow the Kansas, Wisconsin, and Louisiana economic
models of crushing deficits, tax cuts for the rich, and dire cuts to
healthcare, education, transportation, and social programs.
All the while, the rich and corporations received
tax cuts that no Republican is ever going to rescind no matter the
damage to their state or its residents any more than a Republican
Congress will ever raise taxes on the richest one-percent. It is
important to remember that even as Kansas economy began drowning in debt
and hemorrhaging revenue due to Brownback’s trickle down madness,
Senator Mitch McConnell told Brownback Republicans would do “the exact
same thing in Washington” as soon as they gained control of Congress. It
is likely the one time in McConnell’s career he was not lying and
Republicans in the House and Senate followed through on his word.
What both the House and Senate budgets do is produce “huge transfers of income”
from the poor and working class through “severe benefit cuts” to the
rich who will get huge tax cuts. As Krugman says in his column, both the
House and Senate budgets “are deliberately intended to do what they would, in fact, actually do; make the rich richer and ordinary people much poorer;” crushing deficits according to Republicans “just don’t matter” if the wealthy take everything.
None of these Republican cuts are typical even for inhumane conservatives; they are “beyond horrendous.”
In fact, they are so drastic that even an economist aware of the
Republicans’ typical economic deceit noted the “modern G.O.P.’s raw
fiscal dishonesty is something new in American politics.” By now, most
people are aware of incredibly drastic cuts to food stamps, Medicaid,
education, and infrastructure. But there is also an immediate end to the
Affordable Care Act health insurance subsidies Republicans devised to double the number of Americans without healthcare insurance.
There are many more unbelievable cuts Republicans concealed from the public under the guise of ‘unspecified savings‘ such as drastic cuts in Social Security and Medicare, and completely abolishing the Affordable Care Act. Another mystery of ‘unspecified savings‘
in the GOP budgets is how abolishing Dodd-Frank financial reform
produces deficit reduction and new revenue, but dynamic scoring says it
does…magically.
Krugman noted that “It’s very important to
realize that this isn’t normal political behavior. The George W. Bush
administration was no slouch when it came to deceptive presentation of
tax plans, but it was never this blatant. And the Obama administration
has been remarkably scrupulous in its fiscal pronouncements.”
Republicans have never been scrupulous about anything so it is
inherently necessary to assume anything they say is a blatant lie and
when it involves economic policy, it is a con job. It is also why the
Obama Administration’s fiscal pronouncements have delivered as
advertised; they are based on facts and not magic or scams.
It is a pity that many, many Americans are either
disinterested or too lazy to examine what Republicans intend to impose
on them. Obviously, the results of the midterm elections mean that when
Republicans campaigned that budget deficits were destroying freedom,
religion, and preventing America from being a population of
billionaires, even though deficits are falling, the idiots believed the
scam.
Krugman
did not pull any punches and said of the Republican con job budget;
“Does this mean that all those politicians declaiming about the evils of
budget deficits and their determination to end the scourge of debt were
never sincere? Yes, it does.” Krugman should tell it like it really is;
Republicans are just dirty filthy liars and most Americans are too
stupid to see it even as they lose everything they have. If the media
did its job, it would not be left to just a Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth
Warren, or Paul Krugman to inform Americans and that is precisely why
Republicans continue conning the American people.
President Obama issued a statement celebrating the
fifth anniversary of the Affordable Care Act that told Republicans to
embrace reality while he debunked some of the biggest lies about
Obamacare.
In a statement, President Obama said:
On the five-year anniversary of the Affordable Care Act, one thing
couldn’t be clearer: This law is working, and in many ways, it’s
working even better than anticipated.
After five years of the Affordable Care Act, more
than 16 million uninsured Americans have gained the security of health
insurance – an achievement that has cut the ranks of the uninsured by
nearly one third. These aren’t just numbers. Because of this law,
there are parents who can finally afford to take their kids to the
doctor. There are families who no longer risk losing their home or
savings just because someone gets sick. There are young people free to
pursue their dreams and start their own business without worrying about
losing access to healthcare. There are Americans who, without this law,
would not be alive today.
For Americans who already had insurance before this
law was passed, the Affordable Care Act has meant new savings and new
protections. Today, tens of millions of Americans with pre-existing
conditions are no longer at risk of being denied coverage. Women no
longer have to worry about being charged more just for being women.
Millions of young people have been able to stay on their parents’ plan
until they turn 26. More than 9 million seniors and people with
disabilities have saved an average of $1,600 per person on their
prescription medicine, over $15 billion in all since the Affordable Care
Act became law. More than 70 million Americans have gained access to
preventive care, including contraceptive services, with no additional
out-of-pocket costs. And the law has helped improve the quality of
health care: it’s a major reason we saw 50,000 fewer preventable patient
deaths in hospitals over the last three years of data.
The cynics said this law would kill jobs and cripple
our economy. Despite the fact that our businesses have created nearly
12 million new jobs since this law was passed, some still insist it’s a
threat. But a growing body of evidence – actual facts – shows that the
Affordable Care Act is good for our economy. In stark contrast to
predictions that this law would cause premiums to skyrocket, last year
the growth in health care premium costs for businesses matched its
lowest level on record. If premiums had kept growing over the last four
years at the rate they had in the last decade, the average family
premium would be $1,800 higher than it is today. That’s $1,800 that
stays in your pocket or doesn’t come out of your paycheck. And in part
because health care prices have grown at their slowest rate in nearly 50
years since this law was passed, we’ve been able to cut our deficits by
two-thirds. Health care costs that have long been the biggest factor
driving our projected long-term up deficits up are now the single
biggest factor driving those deficits down.
The Affordable Care Act has been the subject of more
scrutiny, more rumor, more attempts to dismantle and undermine it than
just about any law in recent history. But five years later, it is
succeeding – in fact, it’s working better than even many of its
supporters expected. It’s time to embrace reality. Instead of trying
yet again to repeal the Affordable Care Act and allowing special
interests to write their own rules, we should work together to keep
improving our healthcare system for everybody. Instead of kicking
millions off their insurance and doubling the number of uninsured
Americans, as the House Republican budget would do, we should work
together to make sure every American has a chance to get covered.
Five years ago, we declared that in
America, quality, affordable health care is not a privilege, it is a
right. And I’ll never stop working to protect that right for those who
already have it, and extend it to those who don’t, so that all of us can
experience the blessings of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness
in this country we love.
President Obama knocked down all of the major
Republican ACA lies. Obamacare hasn’t killed jobs. It hasn’t destroyed
the economy. The ACA hasn’t sent health care costs spiraling out of
control. The ACA hasn’t cost Americans more money. Republicans are, have
been, and will continue to be wrong about the Affordable Care Act.
Republicans will never embrace reality. The GOP is
“bitterly clinging” on to the myth that Obamacare has been bad for
America. What Republicans have never been willing to admit to themselves
is that the American people want access to affordable healthcare.
President Obama and Democrats have fought for years for the ACA. The
Affordable Care Act has saved lives. The law hasn’t killed anyone with
“death panels.”
Obama
rarely takes credit for his accomplishments, but on the ACA’s fifth
birthday, the president and all of those who fought for this law deserve
to take a victory lap.
Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) has had just about enough of the BS
coming out of Republicans in regards to them trying to sneak Hyde
Amendment language...
America may someday get a 51st state and it will all be because the
southern half of Florida is absolutely embarrassed to be associated with
the top half.
Thanks...
Is Germany liable to Athens for loans the Nazis forced the Greek
central bank to provide during World War II? A new study in Greece
could increase the pressure on Berlin to pay up.More...
Strelkov claims to have convinced Russian President Putin to start
the war in eastern Ukraine. The right winger is seen as a hero by the
Russia's extremist fringe. And he is continuing the fight to return his
country to its past glory. More
On Wednesday, March 25th, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear
arguments in a critical case involving mercury and other toxic air
pollution from coal-fired power plants.At stake are up to 11,000 lives a year, and a very dangerous precedent that industry profits are more important than people.
In late 2011, after an 11-year process, the U.S. Environmental
Protection Agency issued the first-ever standards for mercury and other
toxic air pollution from power plants.
Simply by requiring the
worst-polluting plants to match the performance and technology of their
more responsible competitors, the standards will save between 4,200 and
11,000 lives every year.
These public health protections were
already years overdue because the coal industry and its allies have been
trying to derail them from the beginning.
In this case they
claim that EPA cannot decide whether to protect the public and the
environment from toxic air pollution without first considering the
effect on the industry's bottom line.
Last year, the D.C.
Circuit Court rejected this argument. Industry-in a last-ditch attempt
to overturn these protections-appealed, and the U.S. Supreme Court
agreed to hear this case.
But Earthjustice, on behalf of Sierra
Club, Clean Air Council, Chesapeake Bay Foundation and the NAACP, will
be there to defend these health safeguards.
