John McCain

More later after I ruminate on it, but it's striking the differences and similarities of the national observance of the passing of John McCain with the first televised observance of a national leader, John F Kennedy's funeral and observances 55 years ago.

Differences are perhaps more stark. JFK's death was unexpected, even startling. McCain's was long awaited following announcement of its probable inevitability one year earlier. McCain left a retiring hero who had accomplished about all he could be expected to accomplish. JFK was taken early in his Camelot-like first term of his presidency while it was still very unclear how successful he might be and while he was not perceived as particularly bipartisan. McCain was a politician who could straddle the partisan divide like none of his contemporaries.

But there are also similarities. The world wondered how things might have been different if JFK had not been taken when he was. Similarly, many ponder what might have transpired had McCain lasted another year. The nation sat and watched the unfolding events of the funeral and burial and return to “regular order” in the political world in the winter of 1963. Late August of 2018 all network channels and basic cable news stations simultaneously carry the memorial services and funeral for McCain and fill in the time gaps with prognostications of a return to “regular order” in the political world this Fall.

More after Sunday when it's all over.

Term Limits

TERM LIMITS

It sounds reassuring and comforting to hear that term limits would be more good than bad. One can believe that limiting terms would allow us to return to a time of “citizen legislators”, people who take a brief sabbatical from their chosen career to contribute to society in guiding how the ship of state should steer its course. Arguments are that this would rid us of power grabbing “career politicians”, possibly “promote new ideas”, and “eliminate corruption”. Nice work if we could get it, but it ain’t that easy. 

Two of those goals are elusive and, in my mind not necessarily fulfilled with a mere return to simpler more honorable times. Term limits will not eliminate all those who wish to grab and hold power, who want to have their way. Nor will term limits eradicate corruption in the public sphere. And thirdly, I don’t deny that the odds are good that new and different people could produce “new ideas”. However, the fact that things like public policy change slowly hasn’t necessarily been due to a lack of new ideas. The vast majority of new ideas just never survive the labyrinth of all the competing goals and wishes of the general body politic.  

But more on “career politicians” and “eliminating corruption”. To say that elected officials quickly or invariably become power hoarders is first of all unfair to so many of them. There are many modest, thoughtful members of the Senate and the House as well as most state legislatures who serve to improve the lives of their constituents, not to build an empire. Yes, there are some who do act as the poster children for the cliché. And most op-ed essays and letters to newspapers spend most of their time describing the exceptional horror stories of those who do game the system. But that doesn’t make it so. I believe we are mostly well served by the true “public servants” who devote their lives to doing good, or trying to.

As for “corruption” by elected officials, there are just too many safeguards and checks and balances for corruption to be as rampant as term limits advocates assert occurs. Yes, the occasional elected office holder is caught accepting a bribe or promoting favoritism within the sphere of their power. But percentagewise, such “corruption” is miniscule. Would we prefer it be zero? Of course! But we also tend not to want to pay for the higher cost of control and prevention. So again, we get what we want to pay for.

But I’m torn. Too many Americans like and want to keep their Senator or Congressman. They also want to term limit yours. They believe the villain is the Speaker of the House or the Senate minority leader. They wonder how the voters in those districts or states keep voting them back in. Wouldn’t term limits solve “the problem”?

There are two strong arguments against term limits. One is that such a restriction would take away the franchise, the choice from voters in the district or state that would, given a chance, returned them to office. It is un-American to restrict my freedom to vote for whom I wish. The other argument addresses institutional continuity. Do we really want to take away the imbedded memory of how and why laws were passed as they were? This would seriously skew the playing field in favor of the lobbyists and Executive Branch bureaucrats who are not term limited. Do Fortune 500 companies term limit their boards of directors? Their top management staff? Mostly no.

I am unaware of any studies addressing what has been the impact on state governments of specific states giving term limits a try. But I have yet to see a report that the voters of any state have stepped up and declared adopting term limits to be the best, wisest decision they ever made.  

Shinseki Falls on Sword

Not a huge surprise that Eric Shinseki took one for the team and tendered his resignation as secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs.  Either he knew or he should have known that his minions were not stretching their budgets far enough to satisfy everyone and provide the level of service the American public thinks it has promised our veterans.  What remains to be seen is whether or not some of the heads of VA hospitals in various states also admit they were in on the concealment and inability to cope.

But what I'm waiting for is the mass resignation from Congress of all legislators who repeatedly voted against sufficient resources so that the VA could, in fact, comply with the expectations of the American public and veterans.  Will the lackeys of the Koch brothers publicly admit they fully understood the VA had no chance of providing the levels of care they were demanding with the budgets that were being approved?    Pretty sure I'll have a long, long disappointing wait.

Armageddon by Leon Uris

I just finished reading Leon Uris’s 1964 work, Armageddon. It described post-WWII Germany, the Berlin Airlift and the Marshall Plan. It makes me believe that the type sacrifice and clear headed statesmanship that allowed the Air Lift and the Marshall Plan to succeed would likely not be possible today. There is no way the two major American political parties could agree cooperatively to pay the costs, seek the solutions to our challenges the way Americans did (and British and French) in 1946-48.

AFFORDABLE CARE ACT

I must be missing something, maybe several somethings. Why do so many of my peers & friends detest and oppose the Affordable Care Act? Many people who are either Medicare eligible or federal retirees or both have, if they will admit it, benefited from aspects of “socialized medicine” for significant portions of their professional lives. Yet they now lambast the decisions taken by the country in 2009 and subsequently to extend the availabililty of medical care to large portions of the populace. Why? I do regretfully understand the position taken by some in the 20s – 30s age groups who prefer to roll the dice on their current state of good health and avoid the cost of insuring that it continues. That is and should be their “right”, perhaps. Except that the whole concept of insurance has always been that resources are produced by large portions of a population for concentrated use by isolated individuals when unplanned needs arose. And while a person may choose to go without automobile insurance coverages that address replacement or repair of their car if damaged, they cannot likewise decline liability coverages for dealing with what happens if their wreck damages someone else’s car and injures others. In this vein, I could agree with the libertarians that people should be free to pay or not pay for health insurance. If . . . and only if the hospitals and “the people” were free to decline to treat the uninsured. I also am totally missing the argument in the news the last few days that the ACA represents such a huge “tax”. Which specific taxes are set to rise?? And by how much? The “penalty” or “tax” for those who opt out of the “mandatory” coverage would affect a fairly small segment of the population. But what other taxes besides that will be exploding?

COMPROMISE_Concluded

Well it only took 14 months from inauguration to final passage of what is now touted as "Health Care reform". And to my mind it represents almost a textbook example of compromise. Want proof? Advocates on both sides hate it. The Republicans are screaming for "repeal" and vowing to defeat at the polls all Democrats as a result of it. Left-wing Democrats, especially pro-choice ones, held their nose and finally accepted that this bill was better than no bill, but not much.

Don't look for a "Second verse, same as the first" any time soon. I got a feeling Obama will tell himself and others that he gave bipartisanship a try but the Republicans don't intend to play fair. Some other template will be sought for the next contentious issue.

COMPROMISE _ Continued

I first posted on this back in Nov/Dec. But if I go back and stick this as a mere comment on that thread, it'll be basically buried. So a new post is in order.
Almost three months later, the Democratic Party in Congress is now lumbering toward possibly passing some form of health care reform legislation. And as of today it still remains to be seen if they can keep their eye on the ball long enough to actually get a hit here. After the initial bills passed their respective chambers the ideologues and caucuses on both ends of the spectrum declared that compromise was probably not possible since their pet issue couldn't be sacrificed on the altar of passing any bill.
Now, however, they are talking as if they realize a partial or "bad" bill would indeed be preferable to no bill. And they are seemingly realizing that if the Republicans are going to hide behind the Senate's filibuster cloture rules (which means 60 vote minimum to pass anything) then perhaps the Democrats can use a parliamentary procedure to thwart this, namely "reconciliation". Reconciliation would allow the Senate to vote on the bill on an up or down, simple majority basis instead of the super majority.
But all this has yet to transpire in the coming couple of weeks. So we'll see. If compromise is indeed struck and some bill is passed it will indeed represent one of the first important such events in Congress in several decades.

Health Care "Summit" at White House

I watched as much of today's spectacle as I could stomach. And in recent days I've read several Op-Ed columns on various aspects of the topic. It kinda all runs together in my pea-brain.
One pundit had mentioned that to date the Republicans have prevailed in their strategies over Obama and the Democrats. To wit: They have found that if they refuse to compromise one bit, one iota, on any point, that the Democrats will move toward them and say, "OK, your turn". And in this way the Democrats have moved or given in four or five times and the Republicans not once.
The primary two "ideas" offered by Republicans, if I may simplify and summarize, are as follows:

1. One change that would be beneficial would be to allow health insurance to be sold "across state lines".
2. The other big ticket item would be to address medical malpractice tort reform, thereby supposedly eliminating expensive "preventive" medicine in the form of unnecessary tests that are performed only to indemnify the physicians from liability.

I have questions about these two notions that that is all that is needed to take large portions of cost out of health care. If these questions were answered today it was after I had tuned out in disgust or was not one of the soundbites covered by the media. The questions are as follows:

1. Doing #1 above would involve a federal mandate overruling states' control of "their" insurance industries. This sounds to me the opposite of the kinds of trends states righters (Republicans) normally advocate. How do conservatives square proposing this with their normal preference for allowing states to control as much as they wish to control?
2. The poster child for how #2 above would be wonderful for the nation is the state of Texas, which enacted medical malpractice tort reform some 4 yr. ago. John McCain trumpeted it today in some of his televised remarks. He offered impressive sounding statistics about how the outflow of physicians from the state had been reversed and that Texas was supposedly attracting all the doctors it needs now. But if all that is true, then why does Texas rank something like 48th in #s of uncovered children and very high in numbers of Texas residents who have no health insurance coverage?? If medical tort reform is the silver bullet, why isn't Texas a state where medical care is excellent and cheap?

I would welcome the opportunity to be enlightened as to how I am so far off the reservation on all this.

Reform rules in US Senate_Revisited_Compromise

The announcement by "moderate" Dem. Evan Bayh that he's leaving the Senate cause the mainstream and 24hr cable news channels to wonder what it all meant. Without consuming myself with that controversy, I did arrive at something of an epiphany with regard to finding "a way out" of the wilderness. And it harkens back to my prior post advocating a Senate rules reform lowering the threshhold to 55 votes for blocking filibusters. How? and why?, you wonder. I shall attempt to explain.
I believe, and given a burst of energy and time I'm sure I could find polls that back this up, that the nation is basically more moderate than either of the major political parties and certainly than the Congressional delegations representing each state. The Republicans in Congress are much more conservative than the average American voter or citizen. And the Democrats in Congress are more liberal than the average American. What's worse, the "moderates" in the House and Senate are a vanishing species. Each party is tending to elect only ideologues rather than moderates. This means, among other things, that any chance for meaningful compromise between the two parties in Congress grows less likely each successive session. And this would help explain the explosion in the use of filibusters in the Senate the last two presidential administrations.
So now for my soloution. If the Senate backed off of the 60 vote mandate for cloture, dropped it to 55, then the "no man's land" between the two parties would be a much smaller chasm. Particularly in competitive states the voters would find it in their interest to select more moderate Senators, who would be in position to cast "winning" votes more often. This could produce a resurgence of moderates and more accurately reflect the national electorate.
Who knows, then maybe even a moderate leaning news network might rise from the ashes of the failed prior networks. Or maybe somebody can find a way to make NPR and CSPAN interesting to Nascar fans.

Reform rules in US Senate

Good thing about having a blog that nobody reads (and/or comments on) is that my private musings remain quite private. And this often nudges me to daydream about topics that nobody in the "mainstream media" seems to be addressing at all. Two of these are as follows:

1. Major modifications to presidential election procedures, making the "Electoral College" more fairly reflective of actual popular votes cast across the country. The biggest aspect here is abolishing the "unit rule" whereby states cast all their votes for whoever wins a bare plurality of popular votes in that state ( a rule employed by 48 states). More on this musing later.
2. The majority party in the US Senate (at present time would be the Democrats) deciding to revise Senate rules at the start of their legislative session each January (or is it every other January?) specifying that the required "super majority" for defeating a filibuster is 60 votes. This one is my topic for today.

The Senate rules are not mandated by the Constitution. The Senate could set the "super majority" at any number they wished, or even do away with it entirely if they wished. I start by acknowledging that Americans in general seems to like the notion of Congress only taking actions endorsed by a "substantial" majority of citizens. And in pursuit of that, the idea of the Senate needing a super majority to proceed to votes on important bills is generally approved. But how "substantial" does this gap need to be? If 60 is good, wouldn't 90 be great? No! Ninety or eighty, or even I would argue 60 are too tall a requirement. Why should a clear minority be allowed to prevent the majority from moving forward?

The Senate rules have not been changed, even though changing them would be fairly easy to do. It would only take a simple majority vote in January to create new, revised rules. So why doesn't the majority party change them. Inertia and fear. If they changed these rules and subsequently lost control of the Senate, the other party might also relax or scrap the "super majority". That is why Democrats have been reluctant to act.

The only recent episode that generated any national debate on modifying the 60 vote cloture rule was last administration when Republicans talked publicly about changing Senate rules to a simple majority for judicial confirmation votes. They wanted to be able to get a justice approved with a bare majority vote, which they had at the time. But that ole fear of the other party, them wascally Democrats, getting in power and doing likewise prevented Republicans from going down this road. Instead they came up with a "Gang of 14" Senators, 7 from each party deemed "Moderates", to reach consensus on judicial nominations and take the filibuster and cloture issues away. Bottom line: Republicans were almost ready to stick their big hairy toe over the line they'd previously honored.

My thinking and suggestion is that some degree of "super majority" is wise. It gives the country comfort that the issues that get passed are not razors' edge divisive. But I think 60 votes is "a bridge too far". Why should the majority be required to scrounge for 50% more votes than the minority party? Doing so gives perhaps too much power to the moderate "swing voters". (See Nebraska's Senator Nelson). And in recent years as Republicans have purged their legislative bodies of moderates, all the moderates that are left are Democrats. (Yes, I'm not forgetting about the two Maine Senators, but when push comes to shove, they vote with the conservatives way too much of the time.)

So, keep the "super majority" rule. But modify it down to 55. This would still require that the majority party elect 10 more reliable votes than the minority party. That seems to me to be enough. In fact it is a threshhold that Republicans rarely reached during the almost 8 years they controlled the Senate.

That's my opinion. What you think?