Taming the Security State: Picking up Eisenhower’s challenge

Presidents aren’t moral leaders and don’t even run Washington. Obama has killed people in the line of duty and is doing things now that he scorned as a Senator 6 years ago. Furthermore, whistle-blowers as well as the President’s best intentions are driving the debate. Nevertheless, this may be the right time and Obama may be the right President to respond finally in a significant way to Dwight Eisenhower’s warnings about the growth of the security state in his remarkable Farewell Address of January 1961.

Obama has plenty of political capital to spend on taming the security state and ending what he’s called disdainfully the “borderless war on terror.” Far more than he spent boldly in his first term nationalizing GM and Chrysler, supporting gay marriage, and, by executive order, creating a path for young illegal immigrants eventually to become American citizens.

Three and a half years before his own Farewell Address, Obama has already formally acknowledged that he’s uncomfortable with the emergency powers he’s inherited. He has set down the warrior mantle that served so many presidents too well. Now, Obama—with vigorous allies on both the left and right—had better make sure that he doesn’t end up meekly passing them on to the next president, whomever that may be.

It is not clear whether Edward Snowden's leaks have compromised US intelligence effectiveness. (Conceivably, there’s an international terrorist cell out there that actually thought it was operating outside the reach of US and allied government surveillance.) What he has done, however, is clear.  

We now know what we can’t un-know: All three pillars of the US constitution—with allied cooperation—have constructed the necessary technical infrastructure to monitor discreetly all our associations, and our personal, political, and business utterances.

It is beside the point to say that the Executive Branch presently is not using this awesome machinery unilaterally and that Barack Obama is only concerned with potential terrorist activities. Presidents come and go. And Congress has a terrible record of going along whenever the Executive invokes national security concerns.

Washington is awash with people who think they’re at war with political extremism as well as political terrorism.

The US Constitution wouldn’t have separated the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government if the Founding Fathers believed that only prudent, civil people would get their hands on power. Furthermore, they never envisaged that those three power centers would only be independent of one another in public, and that in private they could act as one.

It’s ironic: Obama wins on the economy and gets a Nobel Prize for peace, a constitutional lawyer overseeing the creation of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan.

Obviously, Obama will take his time before responding to Snowden, libertarians, civil rights advocates, Senator Rand Paul, and probably others. After all, he has to run as well as tame the security apparatus. Nevertheless, his government has diminished our freedom to think and associate freely. Unless he takes action—ideally, along with a decision from the Supreme Court—he will end up legitimizing the accumulation of a rainy day file on everything we do.

This wouldn’t harm vacuous, harmless people or their pursuit of happiness. However, those with new things to say, with grievances, with extreme views and rude opinions would lose their privacy to the brutes and nervous bureaucrats listening in.

Supreme Court’s mandate: protect individuals, not other politicians

Except for burying the lead on page 2 of his statement, last week’s decision by Chief Justice John Roberts and four other judges on the Supreme Court to not stop Obamacare was impeccable television news. It happened in one place, on time, and mid-day. It looked like one sane man was making history.

The big story is more complex and scarier.

Half of America’s elected leadership—congressional and state Republicans—asked five lawyers to legislate their political vision for the future of a universal social service, over one sixth of the US economy. Rather than try to sweep the fall elections with the proposition that health reform should be turned over to the states holus bolus, they asked five judges to enshrine that proposition in the US constitution.

Reformers are wondering whether five judges are really enough, whether a super-majority would be best, whether judges should be retired well before they're too old to absorb new, complex ideas. Conspiracy theorists and pop psychologists wonder about Roberts' motives. Was he actually worried about what others might think?

 

Jamal Greene in the New York Times makes a compelling case for term limits along Canada’s lines, and David Dow in the Daily Beast outlines a number or legislative measures to explicitly limit the Supreme Court’s powers.

Click on: www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2012/07/08/another-stab-at-the-us-constitution/revisiting-the-constitution-we-need-term-limits-for-federal-judges

Click on: www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/07/08/after-health-care-ruling-time-to-reconsider-supreme-court-s-power.html

These reforms, however, will likely have to wait until after the bigger problem is addressed. It’s become reflexive for American conservatives to turn to the US constitution, as written in 1787, to settle arguments with their political opponents.

The point of contention before the Supreme Court was not about infringing the freedoms of individuals. The 26 state Republican supplicants were speaking for the prerogatives of state governments. They were saying that on the issue of health insurance and free riders, reformers must not go to Washington for a solution.

They can debate their ideas in Mississippi and Massachusetts but not, all at once, across America in a nation-wide election.

There is great merit to the argument that the states are underperforming as instruments of social reform. However, using a constitutional court to prevent the federal government from solving social problems the states can’t or won’t fix is a radical challenge to America’s popular democracy.

The American and Canadian federations have bills of rights to protect individuals from ruthless and careless majorities. We don’t ask individuals to wait for popular remorse to correct popular government excesses. That’s the best reason for having accessible independent courts.

However, American conservatives as well as liberals should re-acquaint themselves with an old fashion conviction about their old federal democracy: the electorate and its representatives will, in good time, get around to correcting excessive federal interference—and passivity—in the federal government’s dealings with other democratically elected governments.

Republicans bet the farm on repealing Obamacare

Barack Obama hasn’t transformed the Democratic Party but he’s making history by driving Republicans crazy. 

For 40 years, Republicans worked brilliantly to sell the Republican Party as more than assembly of rich white protestants who play electoral politics to keep their lessers out.

The moderns in the Republican Party stopped trying to re-fight the New Deal or market their own ideas about how to make the poor upper-middle class, too. Essentially, they promised better times and found things to attack that the average guy worries about as well—like other countries, run-away government spending, street crime, foreign influences, and white-collar officials and other snobs who don’t talk common sense.

In these hard times, campaigning against Obama as an incompetent would be good enough for these Republicans. Nevertheless, no-drama Obama has excited his opponent to go extreme.

Thanks to Republican staging by 26 Republican states, congressional votes, billionaire PACs, and dozens of primaries across the country—Americans are now four months away from an election with a vivid choice.

Obama, temperamentally and visually a liberal, will defend a conservative record and a half a dozen new universal rights and benefits for individual Americans.

Romney, temperamentally and visually a conservative, will call for radical change, promising to repeal new health consumer rights, and make government poorer and business more profitable.

By going to the Supreme Court, Republicans declared that what middle-class families in other successful democracies can claim as a right as citizens—guaranteed nation-wide access to basic and preventative health services—is impermissible in the United States.

Yesterday, the Supreme Court added “constitutional” to the various selling points of Obamacare.

A strong, as well as smart, Republican presidential candidate would stand back and think. He’d look at options, including amending the legislation and claiming to have the necessary experience to make the reforms truly affordable. Mitt Romney, however, doubled down simply promising to repeal the legislation.

In effect, he’s asking for a filibuster-free sweep. In tax, and social policy, he’s inviting individual Americans to break the government rather than do anything more to make life more secure and more comfortable—beyond what they can win for themselves in the market.

No doubt it will “galvanize” the Republican base. The Charge of the Light Brigade was vehement as well. 

Obama Care Decision: Silver linings in tomorrow’s clouds?

It’s just too tempting to say something optimistic when conventional opinion can’t find anything positive to say. The prospect of the US Supreme Court—nine lawyers—determining the fate of the biggest health care reform in US history, and quite possibly the fate of the incumbent president, is irresistible.

Two positive propositions have emerged: the political center will get more concerned about the extraordinary powers of the court, and Democrats will again get more radical about fundamental health care reform.

On judicial reform, Ross Douthat well expresses the vision of a possible consensus in his column “The Liberal Embrace of Judicial Restraint.”

“But one can disagree with the specifics of the liberal brief against the Roberts Court and still welcome liberalism’s conversion to the cause of judicial restraint. It should be a point of bipartisan consensus that the judiciary is a political body rather than a panel of Platonic Guardians, and it’s a healthy thing for our democracy to have the other branches of government ready to push back when the high court seems to overreach. This pushback can and should include the possibility of reforming the way the court does business: Term limits and supermajority requirements, for instance, are both plausible responses to the weirdness of having our great controversies settled by the timing of an aging justice’s final illness, or the idiosyncrasies of Anthony Kennedy.”

Click on: http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/26/the-liberal-embrace-of-judicial-restraint/?hp

On health care reform, former Chair of the National Democratic Party Howard Dean sees the possible elimination of “individual mandates”—the centerpiece of Obama’s universal private insurance model—as the last best chance to get the single-payer model back into the Democrat’s platform.

Click on: www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/19/howard-dean-individual-mandate_n_1609171.html

Both propositions rely on a more sympathetic political climate in the country and, in particular, in the US congress. The former, however, does have potential appeal to Republicans, independents, and Democrats. The later has no prospect of success without a decisive take-over of the Democratic Party and, then, the US Congress by old-style New-Deal liberals.

Howard Dean may not “give a damn” about Obama’s liberal-conservative health insurance compromise. However, he doesn’t offer any credible way to get a better reform out of a disaster for Obama in the court.

To replace Obama-Romneycare with a nationalized single-payer insurance scheme would require the financial surpluses of Bill Clinton, the left illusions of the 30s, and Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 electoral sweep—with conservatism in disrepute and without such “distractions” as the civil rights movement and the War in Vietnam.

There have been 15 presidential elections and 30 congressional elections since Harry Truman first proposed universal health insurance.

Only Obama’s plan—with its universal consumer mandate—has made it into law. It is the product of trial and error, liberal and conservative economic, health and management ideas. The mandate isn’t “arbitrary.” Broccoli won’t be next. It’s the only instrument 60 years of discussion and votes have found to realize a massively popular idea—assured and reasonably equal access to the full range of essential health services.

The Canadian federation to the north doesn’t have a national single-payer system. Mr. Dean’s federation is 10 times bigger and its national government is extremely unlikely to create one either.

If the Supreme Court throws out the mandate tomorrow, the only alternative for reformers is to propose a significant, broad-based health insurance tax. That will not be realized in the next four years, whoever wins in November. 

For the good of America, eat your broccoli

If liberals didn’t scare so easily, they’d have savored the pure nuttiness of US Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s slippery slope affection for the case against making individuals pay in advance for necessary future health services.

“The argument got going when Justice Antonin Scalia asked Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr. if the government could compel Americans to buy health insurance, could it also mandate that they eat healthy food, like broccoli. “Could you define the market — everybody has to buy food sooner or later, so you define the market as food, therefore, everybody is in the market; therefore, you can make people buy broccoli?”

“Mr. Verrilli tried to put the question behind him, saying, “No, that’s quite different. The food market, while it shares that trait that everybody’s in it, it is not a market in which your participation is often unpredictable and often involuntary.” But the justices returned to the example again and again.”

“Click on: http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/27/day-two-updates-on-the-supreme-court-hearings-on-the-health-care-law/

Let’s, for a moment, take broccoli as seriously as the US Constitution takes Antonin Scalia.

Imagine a Supreme Court case on Affordable Broccoli-Care.

Let’s assume that Scalia was using broccoli as a broadly reasonable substitute for nutritious food, rather than candy or colored wood pulp. And let’s assume that there was widely accepted evidence that millions of Americans—including thousands of pregnant women—were not eating/buying adequate amounts of broccoli/nutritious food to sustain life.

If Congress passed legislation to interfere in the broccoli/nutritious food market to favor life over immediate pleasure or the perfect operation of the price system, would Scalia and Roberts as easily ask: Will bicycles be next?

Would Republicans just as easily side with Pro-choice advocates or Pro-life advocates—who, on this question, might recall regrettable but widely accepted state interventions like food stamps and ration books?

The Court isn’t being asked to liberate seniors from socialized medicine or the destitute from socialized medicine when they show up at emergency wards. The Justices are being asked to worry about a precedent—to protect bicycles and automobile consumers from state interference.

Surely, this slippery slope argument can be entrusted to the good sense of the electorate and the desire of politicians to get re-elected. Surely, the government doesn’t have to socialize the entire medical industry to ensure universal access while avoiding a dangerous precedent for other markets.

Incidentally, no one’s taken the Patriot Act to the Courts suggesting that Congress will soon mandate that Americans install picture windows on all new housing.

Health Care and the 2012 Election

Economic conditions will heavily influence the campaigns and outcome of next year’s presidential election. However, even the most blinkered followers of Homo economicus know that rational economic arguments cannot long hold people’s imagination, crowd out other issues, or counter the big one—who looks like the right one to lead.

(Otherwise, Canada’s Bob Stanfield would have beaten Pierre Trudeau, Jimmy Carter would have won a second, and Bill Clinton’s eye-popping insight that “It’s the economy, stupid” would just be rattling around safely in Arkansas.)  

Kevin Drum goes one step further and dares to argue that Obama’s Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act could be the election issue:

“That's really what the 2012 election is about. All the shouting aside, neither party is going to end up doing anything very different about the economy. Nor is there really all that big a difference between the parties on foreign policy these days. No, the single biggest accomplishment of the past decade has been the passage of Obamacare, and the single biggest difference between the parties going forward is whether or not it gets repealed, ending health care reform for another decade or two. In the end, that might not be enough to get the liberal base fired up, but it should be.

Front page image: TalkRadioNews/Flickr

Click on: http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2011/10/healthcare-and-2012-election

Other than winding down his predecessor’s wars and climbing out of his predecessor’s recession, health is Obama’s defining project. If Obama wins and universal health care survives, he will be judged as a great president, rather than a gracious black footnote.

The economy is the issue, the steadiest strategists say, because it’s bad. As important, the politicians think they know what to say about it, how to be angry or sell good times in 10- to 30-second commercials.

Pollsters ask and the people reply: it’s Obama and Bush’s fault. Mitt Romney once ran a profitable business and, so, he feels that he’s free to claim he knows how a president can create jobs. Yet, there’s more superstition than substance behind these arguments. Democrats and Republicans today are both sloppy Keynesians, and neither can make tax reform politically sexy without pandering to extremes. The presidents who presided over periods of exceptional economic growth had no business experience. Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Reagan, and both Roosevelts were exclusively public men.

Health reform is complicated, but so is economics. Furthermore, a bad healthcare system, like a bad economy, gets people’s attention.

The choice between making universal health care work verses relieving the federal government of any responsibility for fixing the problem is as significant, as straightforward, and as truly presidential as anything the contestants will say about economic recovery.

If, by next summer, the Supreme Court rules that Obama’s ACA does have authority to compel Americans to participate in a universal health insurance scheme and Romney wins the Republican nomination, it’s quite possible that healthcare will be a decisive issue.

The Republican must make sense of being for universal compulsory health care for Massachusetts, but not for America; the Democrat must argue that another nation-wide entitlement can work as well as the others—and can be paid for.