Gaza: What the Media Doesn’t Report

Netanyahu’s Human Shield Claim Goes Largely Unchallenged

Obamacare Will Head to Supreme Court Again

Last November we ran an article titled “
The Achilles Heel That Could Trip Up Obamacare” about court challenges to the Affordable Care Act “that the media has hardly touched on”. The law as written provides for only the state exchanges to offer subsidies to help deserving applicants pay for health insurance, but makes no mention of the Government exchange being allowed to do so.

Almost simultaneously in late July, two federal appeals courts issued completely opposite rulings in the separate cases that came before them &#0151 one stating that the letter of the law must be followed, the other saying the intent of the law was to treat all equally and the federal omission was a slip-up in the writing of the hugely complicated law.

If the former prevails, the subsidies will be denied to the insured in the 36 states that let the federal exchange handle the administration of the program rather than develop their own system. This would break Obamacare, which is the objective of the litigants. The Supreme Court will have a momentous decision to make. Which shall it be, the letter or the intent?

Congress Kicks Another Can Down the Road

In their rush to take their five-week August vacation (on top of their weeklong 4th of July break), the House finally voted the funds needed for roads, bridges and mass transit but only enough to last through May of next year, when they can look forward to arguing all over again the larger issues of a long-term transportation bill.

The Highway Trust Fund was about to run entirely out of money, putting in jeopardy some of the 117,000 projects and 700,000 construction jobs underway.

The federal government covers a quarter of the nation’s spending on roads and mass transit and has always paid for it with an excise tax on gasoline and diesel fuel first enacted in 1932. But in recent years the tax has fallen short of needs.

That’s because the gas tax was last raised in 1993. In that year it went to 18.4 cents a gallon (diesel 24.4 cents) and, lacking indexing to inflation, has remained unchanged since. But inflation has not remained unchanged, and the buying power of the tax has therefore plunged almost 40%. For the tax to have the same buying power today, it needs to be 30 cents a gallon. Congress refuses even to consider that fix. The elegantly symmetrical principle that the more one drives the more one should pay for the use of the nation’s roads is unclear to a House of Representatives lacking in such analytical acumen.

Actually, a raise to 30 cents that would still not be on a par with 1993’s 18.4 cents in yield. Americans are driving less and are driving more efficient cars, which means less gas consumed and tax paid per mile traveled. That’s Obama’s fault, says a The Wall Street Journal editorial: his “mandate for more fuel-efficient cars is already a major cause of falling highway fund revenue”. And an op-ed, which would have been approved by those editors, says, “By encouraging the use of vehicles that burn little or no fuel, the federal government has made its funding shortfall worse.” We should burn more hydrocarbons to raise taxes.

The result is that repair of our highways cannot keep pace with their wear and tear. The Department of Transportation gives the nation’s infrastructure a grade of “D”. We may individually be
driving less but there are far more of us. Since the tax reset in ‘93, 55 million more of us have been pounding on those roads, bridges and tunnels. Some 65% of roads in the U.S. are deemed as less than in good condition. There are about 63,000 bridges in need of repair. Evidently there need to be bridge collapses and loss of life to prompt Congress to move — although that is questionable, considering that school killings have failed to spur action on who should be permitted to buy guns.

diverse support for the tax

Governors from both parties had been “incredulous” that Congress hadn’t acted. They are of course for an increase in a tax that brings money into their states. But a spectrum of interests want the tax adjustment. The head of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a business lobbying group, said “Shippers are for it. Truckers are for it. The construction industry is for it. Labor is for it”. Apparently the word hadn’t gotten through to House Speaker John Boehner. “I’ve never supported raising the gas tax”, he said. It is an election year, and there is no priority greater for politicians than keeping their jobs by not upsetting voters with reality.

freeloaders

The chiefly Republican abhorrence of any form of tax has led to a wealth of avoidance schemes most of which are preoccupied with redressing the unfairness of hybrids and electrics enjoying the roads while paying less or not at all at the pump. Except that gas sippers and teetotalers account for only a little more than 3.% of vehicles sold per year and are a problem for which there is plenty of time before they become an actual problem.

Yet we read of ideas of changing to a tax on how many miles vehicles travel. With today’s miraculous technology we could follow their movements using GPS — a truly awful idea idea that makes privacy complaints about NSA’s phone metadata collection seem quaint, and is staggeringly impractical, as is any proposition that entails retrofitting our 250 million registered vehicles with any form of mileage meter or tracking device. Yet Oregon is about to test just that.

But those who hatch that idea realize they have a problem requiring another level of complexity. Heavier vehicles have a greater impact on roads; different types of vehicles must be charged more (which the gas tax handles well enough: heavier vehicles consumer more gas and therefore pay more gas taxes).

Let’s do this, says an op-ed in the New York Times: pay for highways and bridges from general tax funds instead, dedicating “part of the income tax revenue that corresponds to transportation’s contribution to gross domestic product”. Seriously? And who decides that?

The Wall Street Journal’s op-ed page proposes a mileage-based plan, but this one is based on tolls. “Electronic tolling technology would allow the change to be implemented without delay-inducing toll booths”. With variable pricing “motorists could save money by driving during off-peak hours or by choosing other travel means”, the latter being an option available to us now, incidentally. Again, it is the unfairness of the gas abstemious that rile the authors. Their system — which, even if they don’t mean all roadways, would call for retrofitting 47,000 miles of the federal highway system — would put an end to “offering a select few a free trip”.

All these fanciful schemes, ready only far in the future and at horrendous cost, are to swap out a gas tax mechanism that is in place, has been working for almost three quarters of a century, and addresses the need for infrastructure rehabilitation — which is right now.

the no-tax payment plan

As for the just-enacted stopgap. Republicans insist that everything be somehow paid for and the $10.8 billion patch for the next ten months is no exception. By labeling even the adjustment of the gas excise to repair inflation’s erosion as a forbidden tax increase, House members had to seek absurd funding alternatives. They were joined by Democrats, given the election year, who feared a backlash if they asked the public to pay for what they use. Instead, to pay the tab, House members hit upon “pension smoothing”, a term meant to deflect us from translating it as “let the future pay for it”.

The maneuver delays requirements for corporations to pay into their employees’ pension funds. Reduced payments result in higher profits. The higher taxes on those profits is what Congress expects will match about two-thirds of the cost of the highway funding. Of course, companies will need to make those pensions whole in future years, which will lead to reduced profits and lower tax collections. Hence, the future pays for today’s transportation funding.

The Senate wanted a funding band-aid that would run out in December to force this Congress to deal with the highway bill, rather than the incoming Congress. And its lesser fending didn’t need “pension smoothing”.President Obama, who has repeatedly urged Congress to fund infrastructure repair, showed his irritation at the House “kicking the can down the road” and “careening from crisis to crisis” but he’s short on political courage as well. In April he sent Congress a transportation proposal to spend $302 billion over four years that skirted raising the gas tax and instead proposed a hodgepodge of charges to fill the gap — tolls on the interstates, increased safety violation fines for automakers — and let’s go after those who are entirely uninvolved: “We pay for the transportation project [sic] in part by closing tax loopholes for companies that ship jobs overseas and avoid paying their fair share of taxes”.

fits and starts

Funding by last minute spasms demonstrates congressional ignorance of how actual work is performed. Roads and bridges are long-term projects entailing planning, engineering and years of work. Congress leaves states guessing until the last minute whether any infrastructure money will be forthcoming. States now know no further than next May what monies will be available (and that’s about when the fight over the debt ceiling will be rejoined). Beyond that date, states cannot plan, as they watch Congress endlessly punt problems down the calendar. They are left to lurch like a car out of gas.

Washington Is Flying Apart at the Seams

With two and a half years still to go in his presidency, Barack Obama has given up on a Congress that resolutely refuses to do much of anything, while House Speaker
John Boehner is suing the President for doing something.

Exasperated after another year of Congress refusing to confront the nation’s problems, Obama had given notice in his State of the Union that he would henceforward use “pen and phone” to get things done. Congressional Republicans were infuriated that he already had, especially his excessive tampering with the Affordable Care Act. The President had unilaterally made 30-odd changes to the law by their count, and has since used or threatened to use executive orders to issue whatever edicts he fancies without involving congress. “As long as they’re doing nothing, I’m not going to apologize for trying to do something”, says the President.

Obama implores the Congress to work with him. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Boehner implore the President to work with them. Neither side yields, the one spiting the other.

Republicans are equally angry over the disputatious Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s practice of blocking any of their amendments to legislation, most recently to a popular energy efficiency bill that otherwise would have passed.

And not to leave out the third branch, Obama and Democrats are outraged at the Supreme Court’s decisions, the one effectively eliminating a president’s right to make appointments when the Senate is in recess, the other taking yet another bite out of Obamacare. Republicans are gleeful that the “imperial president” has been dealt his comeuppance, and trumpet the Hobby Lobby decision as a victory for “religious freedom”. Senate Democrats are fighting back — working on a bill to overturn the Supreme Court’s ruling by restoring contraceptives to workers at religious corporations.

In other words, all three branches are at war with one another.

immigration canceled

The dog fight reached its current intensity over immigration and the flood tide of young immigrants flowing across the southern border. Immigration reform was to have been Obama’s chief second term achievement. When Boehner called him this summer to say, once again and finally, that the House would take no action this year, a disgusted Obama announced he will now use all means at his disposal to “fix as much of our immigration system as I can on my own, without Congress”. The two men show an intense dislike of one another at the nation’s expense.

Boehner, who evidently thinks his branch of government has no obligation to produce, is livid over Obama acting in its stead. He doesn’t mince words:

“The President has circumvented the American people and their elected representatives through executive action, changing and creating his own laws, and excusing himself from enforcing statutes he is sworn to uphold”.

The Speaker intends to introduce legislation that would allow the House to sue the President over his abuse of executive power.

“So sue me”, said Obama, sounding decidedly un-presidential. He calls it a “stunt”. “They don’t do anything but block me. And call me names. It can’t be that much fun”, he said in Minneapolis. He may have been playing it for laughs, but it comes across as whining. On the PBS NewsHour Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson quipped, “When Ronald Reagan said, ‘Go ahead make my day’, it was Clint Eastwood he was parroting. When you say ‘So sue me’, it’s like the annoying guy who takes your parking space and taunts you afterward”.

Having given up on any further overtures to Congress, Obama broadens the breach with snide remarks about Congress in public appearances. His flippancy squares with a Politico piece at the beginning of June that reports him spending more and more time playing golf and hanging out with celebrities, hosting “star-studded dinners that sometimes go on well past midnight”.

on the border

Honduras is called the world’s murder capital, thanks to it’s being a hub for drug trafficking. As in Guatemala and El Salvador the level of violence has become so dangerous that families hope to protect their young by sending them to the United States in the belief that they will be allowed to stay.

Republicans blame Obama for putting out the message that children will not be turned back. A 2012 executive order did say that, but only children brought here by parents, and before June 2007. But it pays politically for those on the right to overlook a rule exclusively for families living here for at least seven years to make it seem like Obama has broadcast an open door policy. The Wall Street Journal editorial page likes to keep it that simple by saying, “The President is…responsible for the current spectacle of federal incompetence at the border with Mexico”.

Compassion aside, why not just send them back? Because that would run afoul of a law passed in Clinton’s last year and renewed three times during the Bush administration to fight human trafficking. That law guarantees the youths an asylum hearing. It was passed by voice vote in the House and unanimous consent in the Senate. We now have 57,000 new arrivals herded into “detention facilities” with completely inadequate resources for processing them. There are 228 immigration judges and a backlog 375,000 cases pending. People have been waiting years.

So getting emergency funds from Congress should be a slam dunk, right? Obama is asking Congress for $3.7 billion; these are kids and this is a crisis. But objections surfaced immediately. As if joined at the hip, McConnell said on the Senate floor, “What he appears to be asking for is a blank check”, and Boehner echoed with, “We’re not giving the president a blank check”.

Only $50 million is for asylum-hearing judges whereas $1.8 would go to the Health and Human Services Department. That’s a red flag for conservatives. It’s money for placing the youths with families to act as guardians, says Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Az), and placing the children tells the smuggler networks to keep actively marketing to the fearful that if they get to the U.S. they will be allowed to stay. Why? Because once housed and dispersed, the youths are told to appear in court at some later date where their case will be adjudicated, but experience tells us that 90% do not show up.

It’s therefore the law that guarantees an asylum hearing before deportation that must be changed, says Flake and others. We will only stem the tide when those countries see a plane coming back with their kids and people spread the word that they paid $3,000 to a smuggler for nothing.

Incidentally, we might pause to consider whether those kids, who braved the roofs of box cars on their own for over a thousand miles to get here, just might have the right stuff that’s worth keeping here.

obama aloof

It would have been largely symbolic, but Obama handed his critics a plum by going to Texas for a fund raiser without making a visit to the border. “This isn’t theater”, he retorted. “This is a problem. I’m not interested in photo-ops.” But a photo-op would at least have suggested that he was on the job.

This latest crisis is yet another instance — like his unawareness that Obamacare would crash on launch, like his inattention to the mess at Veterans Administration hospitals until it blew up — where the president’s negligence has allowed events to take him by surprise. The flood of youth coming into the country because of the false belief that they can stay is hardly news. In fiscal 2012 there were 10,000 arrivals, in 2013 that number doubled, and now the 57,000 are on our doorstep with months still to go in the current fiscal year. He did nothing to head off the growing problem.

Nor did the House of Representatives. Right after the 2012 election, we, like so many, wrote a piece that expected immediate attention to immigration reform by Republicans in Congress because 71% of Hispanics had voted for Obama. George W. Bush had won 40% of their vote (he had espoused a path to citizenship for undocumented Latinos, which ran counter to most of his own party), whereas the Latin vote for Romney dropped to 27%. The demise of the Republican Party was even forecast if they failed to curry favor with this growing voting bloc by developing compassionate immigration legislation.

Well, silly us. No immigration reform. Actually, the Senate did pass a comprehensive bill a year ago (interesting that one provision called for 75 new immigration judges a year for three years). When it arrived on the House doorstep, Boehner’s imperious greeting was, “I’ve made it clear and I’ll make it clear again, the House does not intend to take up the Senate bill. The House is going to do its own job in developing an immigration bill.” Which it never did.

Even the dawning of this election year failed to spur Congress to action. In February, House Speaker John Boehner announced — rather incredibly one might say, with the entire year remaining — that nothing would be done about immigration in 2014 because it is an election year. His reason? President Obama can’t be trusted to enforce whatever law they might pass.

But isn’t that the same President Obama who has deported record numbers of Latinos — 370,000 in fiscal 2013 — breaking up families who have been in this country for years to the extent that members of his own party implore him to stop?

The real reason is that Republicans can’t go near the subject of immigration in an election year else be attacked by the Tea Party, which is 68% against, says a June Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll. Can’t say that, so blame the President.

So when Republicans blame Obama for the tsunami at border crossings, the administration makes the case that had Congress passed that immigration bill a year ago, it would have sent the people of Central American countries the clear signal to stay home, that entry to the U.S. would be denied. And yet we have Boehner saying, “This is a problem of the President’s own making! He has been president for 5½ years! When is he going to take responsibility for something?”. The Speaker wants us to forget that it is for Congress to make laws.

Corporations Are Now Persons With Religious Sensibilities, Says Supreme Court

On the last day of its current term, the Supreme Court chose to give closely-held family-owned businesses a special exemption from the Obamacare requirement that they pay for insurance coverage that covers contraceptives if they offend the religious beliefs of the corporation.

After a string of 9-0 verdicts, the Court once again split on its usual fault line, with the 5 conservatives siding with the corporations and the 4 liberals against.

In the infamous Citizens United case, the Court went beyond the original treatment of corporations as “persons” to allow them access to courts by deciding that corporations should be thought of as more like us, and therefore entitled to contribute unlimited amounts to organizations such as political action committees (PACs). Now the Court has expanded corporate personhood still further to mean that they are like sentient humans even to the extent of having religious sensibilities.

The ruling ignited a firestorm that soon deviated from the facts of the case. As if rehearsed, conservatives chanted “religious freedom”, which was never the issue — the right of the Green family of Hobby Lobby to practice their religion was never impaired, or are they celebrating the freedom to force one’s religious precepts on others — while liberals ranted that to give corporations the right to take away free contraceptives is a “war on women”.

A passel of of companies — 84 said The Wall Street Journal — had sued the government with the same religious claim against the Affordable Care Act’s mandate. The Supreme Court chose two — Hobby Lobby, a chain of arts-and-crafts stores based in Oklahoma City, and Conestoga Wood Specialties, a Pennsylvania manufacturer of kitchen cabinet doors — combining them into what is jointly referred to as the Hobby Lobby case.

It is the corporations that would pay for the insurance and therefore only the corporations that can bring the complaint, yet the Supreme Court has allowed the religious beliefs of the families to be transfused into the corporations. This is the same court that has so often said litigants lack “standing”, i.e., the right to sue as the damaged party.

The families are offended that they should have to violate their religious principles by having their businesses offer such insurance. Of the twenty government approved methods of contraception, they object to four that act, they say, as an abortifacient — a substance that induces abortion such as the “morning after pill” — although it is taken with no knowledge of whether conception took place the night before.

Members of these families are of course free not to use the contraceptives themselves, and even free to proselytize to their workforce not to, but instead they believe they should have the right to impose their religious rules on the lives of their 28,000 employees, depriving them of an insurance benefit available to everyone else under the Affordable Care Act.

“There’s no way we’re taking anybody’s rights away”, says David Green, CEO of Hobby Lobby. “It’s our rights that are being infringed upon”. A Wall Street Journal editorial calls this paternalism “the free exercise of religion”, as in the freedom of the few to impose their religious views on the many, evidently.

“I could live the way I do with ten stores. So why do we want 500 stores? So we can tell more people about Christ”, says Green. Six of the Supreme Court justices — and all who sided with Hobby Lobby — are Catholics. The liberal foil on Fox News “The Five” wondered how the justices would have ruled had it been a Jewish family company decreeing that employees not drive nor use electricity on Saturdays.

The justices needed law for this special dispensation and relied on 1993’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA, spoken of as “Rifra”) which ironically was enacted to overcome a Supreme Court decision that said exceptions to laws could not be made in deference to religious practices.

FRFA says that a government action “shall not substantially burden a person’s exercise of religion” unless it is “the least restrictive means of furthering a compelling government interest”. The justices tipped us what their ruling would be when the case was heard in March. Sharp questioning of Solicitor General Donald Verrilli, who argued for the government, showed a sympathetic tilt toward the corporations’ (i.e., the families’) “burden”. Little regard was paid to Verrilli’s emphasis on the burden on their employees. And the Court’s decision seems to have paid no heed to the “compelling government interest” in preventing the rise in abortions that will be the consequence of low-income women foregoing the $600 a year cost of contraceptives — 40% of unwanted pregnancies result in abortions.

The justices suggested that the government pay for the pharmaceuticals. Thus would the religious self-absorption of these families be sending the bill to the rest of us as taxpayers.

We will now get to watch whether Justice Elena Kagan’s prediction will prove true, that the ruling in Hobby Lobby’s favor will bring religious objectors “out of the woodwork”.

High Court Has Reversed What Presidents Have Done Throughout Our History