OBAMA CALLS OUT REPUBLICAN RADICALISM: In an impassioned and detailed speech on Tuesday, President Obama called out the Republican budget plan, authored by Paul Ryan, as the radical, extremist vision for our country that it is. For a century, Obama said, “we have been having the same argument with folks who keep peddling some version of trickle-down economics.” “Now, the problem for advocates of this theory is that we’ve tried their approach -- on a massive scale. The results of their experiment are there for all to see.” Obama pointed to the slashed tax cuts on the wealthy over the Bush years: The rich got richer, for sure, but we had the slowest job growth in 50 years and average Americans saw their income fall. “So we tried this theory out,” Obama said. “And you would think that after the results of this experiment in trickle-down economics, after the results were made painfully clear, that the proponents of this theory might show some humility, might moderate their views a bit.” Of course, that’s not what happened: Instead, the GOP “doubled down” and passed a new budget that “makes the Contract with America look like the New Deal.” Obama then methodically laid out what Ryan’s budget would actually mean for America: Financial aid to students cut. Medical research slashed. Investment in clean energy eliminated. Head Start reduced to crumbs. Food assistance for women with young children demolished. The FAA dismantled. (It should be noted that I came up with all of those verbs without the assistance of a thesaurus!) Obama didn’t mince words:
[The Republican budget] is a Trojan Horse. Disguised as deficit reduction plans, it is really an attempt to impose a radical vision on our country. It is thinly veiled social Darwinism. It is antithetical to our entire history as a land of opportunity and upward mobility for everybody who’s willing to work for it; a place where prosperity doesn’t trickle down from the top, but grows outward from the heart of the middle class. And by gutting the very things we need to grow an economy that’s built to last -- education and training, research and development, our infrastructure -- it is a prescription for decline.
And he reminded the audience that Mitt Romney -- the now-essentially-official GOP nominee -- has fully and wholeheartedly embraced this plan.
Obama used the speech not only to call out the GOP for its radicalism, but to reclaim the middle ground. “I think it's important to remember that the positions I'm taking now on the budget and a host of other issues, if we had been having this discussion 20 years ago, or even 15 years ago, would have been considered squarely centrist positions. What's changed is the center of the Republican Party.” Full video here. Full text here.
MARRIAGE EQUALITY IN THE COURTS: This week, the odious Defense of Marriage Act is in the news and in the courts. On Wednesday, the First Circuit hears appeals from a case in which a federal district judge struck down DOMA’s bar on benefits going to legally married same-sex spouses of federal employees. Earlier this week, another anti-DOMA lawsuit was filed, this time by legally married bi-national couples, where, because of DOMA, the non-US citizen cannot gain citizenship by virtue of her same-sex marriage. “when it comes to gays and lesbians, we have no recognized family under federal law since DOMA, and therefore bi-national couples are literally strangers to one another in the law,” Andrew Sullivan explained (a British-born subject, Sullivan was legally married to an American man a few years ago, and just got a green card this past year, without his marriage granting him one automatically). Thousands of couples literally face the choice: Your country or your spouse. In the First Circuit, it is up to the House of Representatives, paying TWIPN-favorite Paul Clement, to defend the law, as the Obama administration announced last year that it would not appeal Judge Tauro’s stirring decision striking down DOMA. Clement’s argument will offer an almost perfect Bizzaro-Land mirror image of the case he presented last week at the High Court, as Andrew Cohen brilliantly points out:
Congress has no constitutional authority to punish people who don't want to have health insurance, Paul Clement argued last week before the United States Supreme Court. This week? The heralded attorney is arguing, to another panel of federal judges, that Congress has plenty of constitutional authority to punish people who don't want to marry someone of the opposite sex. Last week, Clement defended states' rights and labeled as "unprecedented" the federal health care policy. This week, he says that Congress can dictate terms of a federal marriage policy over the objections of states which have legalized same-sex marriage. […]
If you were explaining the past week's arguments to an alien -- and by alien, I mean someone from Outer Space -- it would be hard to get around the contradictions here. In America today, a federal law designed to reshape the health care market breaches some "fundamental" right to be free from federal oppression. But a federal law that punishes people who want to marry their same-sex partner is worthy of obeisance from the judges. An economic law that does not discriminate is supposed to be given less judicial deference than a moral one which does. I know the standards and precedents are different. But on every level, this is crazy.
A WORD ON WHAT’S AT STAKE IN OBAMACARE SUIT: A final word (until June, of course) on the health care suit that was argued before the Supreme Court last week. A loss for the Obama administration would obviously be both a political and policy disaster. Those who argue that a loss could help Obama in the 2012 elections are, I believe, delusional: In what world is the erasure of Obama’s signature (and, in the minds of many, only) significant achievement a boon to his electoral prospects? How does it make him look like anything other than a failure who squandered the enormous good will of his election and came out, four years later, with a bitterly divided political system and populace, and nothing to show for it? But a loss at the Court would be much, much worse -- and have much broader consequences -- than any potential effects on Obama’s political fortunes. It would call into question our country’s capacity for self-government, and our government’s ability to address the largest and most intractible structural problems we face.
If you look at what Paul Clement, who represented the states challenging Obamacare, argued with respect to severability, its wide-ranging and dire consequences become clear. He argued that, without the individual mandate, the entire health law was unworkable (and thus the whole thing needed to be scrapped). The mandate was the only way to make the other parts of the bill -- the parts guaranteeing equal rates for all and coverage for those with preexisting conditions, along with every other provision of the bill -- function, he said, and so without the mandate, the whole law must fall. The day before, of course, he argued that the individual mandate was beyond the scope of Congress’s powers. If the Court buys these two arguments, it is buying the idea that the very thing that is necessary to address the enormous problem of the uninsured and skyrocketing health care costs in this country is itself outside the bounds of Congressional power. It would in effect be saying that Congress does not have the power to solve serious, national problems, problems that cross state lines and wrek substantial havoc on state and federal budgets, problems that states cannot solve themselves.* What is at stake in this case, then, is not simply the fate of Obamacare but the fundamental question of whether our federal government can address national problems and solve them with reasonable means. A loss at the Court would give us a plain answer: No.
*Note: I know that single-payer would still be a constitutional option to address the problem of the uninsured. But it would be an extremely radical position for the Court to take to say that Congress may use only one particular method to solve an admittedly national problem with obvious and uncontested effects on interstate commerce. No one contests that regulating the health care market is within Congress’s power. A loss for Obamacare at the Court would be saying that the federal government cannot use reasonable means to address issues clearly within its constitutional ambit.
GOP UPDATE -- MITT IS IT: On Tuesday, Mitt Romney all but made it official when he swept the Maryland, D.C., and WIsconsin primaries, all by healthy margins. There’s really not that much exciting new stuff to talk about here, but I will point you to this blog post highlighting Romney taking both sides of a single issue in a matter of 6 sentences. I also want to highlight a speech he made this week in which he accused Obama of hiding his true intentions for his second term: “[Obama] does not want to share his real plans before the election, either with the public or with the press. … He is intent on hiding. You and I will have to do the seeking. … He wants us to re-elect him so we can find out what he will actually do.” A pretty absurd claim, but a fairly standard one on the right. What makes this absolutely, mind-blowingly hilarious/pathetic/facepalm-inducing is that this critique is coming from a man -- Mitt Romney -- who is on the record as saying that he will not specify the cuts he plans to make because it would be used against him in the election. As he very, very recently told the Weekly Standard, “One of the things I found in a short campaign against Ted Kennedy was that when I said, for instance, that I wanted to eliminate the Department of Education, that was used to suggest I don’t care about education. … So will there be some that get eliminated or combined? The answer is yes, but I’m not going to give you a list right now.” Rachel Maddow has taken to referring this as the “I’m Rubber You’re Glue” strategy, and it’s apparently the only idea Romney has to turn his massive liabilities into strengths lesser liabilities.
Holy S**t Moment(s) of the Week: Arizona legislators declare that you can be legally pregnant up to two weeks before you have the sex that makes you pregnant. And in an unrelated but equally Say What?! moment, the Supreme Court ruled this week that jail officials can strip search anybody arrested for any reason (no matter how minimal the crime), who is going to be put into the general jail population.
Must Read of the Week: In 2006, State Department advisor Philip Zelikow told Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that the Bush administration’s “enhanced interrogation” techniques amounted to felony war crimes, a memo obtained this week by Spencer Ackerman through a three-year-old FOIA request reveals. You can read the memo here.
Fun Video of the Week: Meet Edith Childs, the woman behind Obama’s “Fired Up, Ready to Go” chant.
Awesome Thing of the Week: First, look at this totally awesome photo of HIllary Clinton. Then, enjoy the tumblr it inspired.
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