We begin today’s roundup with Paul Krugman at The New York Times and his analysis of how Democrats should continue to focus on health care, especially at the state level:
[J]ust by capturing the House Democrats achieved one big goal — taking repeal of the Affordable Care Act off the table. True, the G.O.P. lawsuit against the act’s protection of pre-existing conditions is still awaiting a ruling — the long silence of the Republican-leaning judge in that case is getting increasingly strange. But there won’t be any more legislative attempts to dismantle the law. [...]
the importance of state-level action has only increased in the past two years, as the Trump administration and its congressional allies, unable to fully repeal the A.C.A., have nonetheless done all they can to sabotage it. They eliminated the individual mandate, which pushed people to sign up while they were still healthy; they eliminated reinsurance that helped insurance companies manage their own risk; they cut back drastically on outreach.
All of these measures acted to drive premiums up and enrollment down. But states can, if they choose, fill the Trump-size hole.
Catherine Rampell at The Washington Post explains why Medicaid work requirement experiments have failed:
As noted in an earlier column, Arkansas’s first-in-the-country, first-in-history Medicaid work requirements have been backfiring.
The state has already purged 12,000 from the Medicaid rolls over the past three months. These Arkansans are not necessarily being booted because they’re failing to work, however. Some have lost their insurance because the state has made it so ridiculously complicated for them to prove they’re working.
Then, perversely, getting kicked off insurance can also make it harder for poor Arkansans to keep their jobs. Some people — such as Adrian McGonigal, a Medicaid recipient with a severe lung disease — need medication and other care in order to be productive, healthy workers.
Over at The New Yorker, John Cassidy examines the rare public rebuke Chief Justice Roberts gave Trump this week:
In addition to standing up for individual judges, a move that will be warmly greeted in courthouses throughout the country, the larger purpose of Roberts’s intervention may well have been to defend the independence of his own court, which is increasingly threatened by Trump’s efforts to politicize everything and anything. With his pressuring tactics and relentless attacks, the President has already threatened the independence of the lower courts, the F.B.I., and the Justice Department. Just this week, we learned that he wanted to prosecute Hillary Clinton and James Comey. As the White House prepares for a possible legal battle with the special counsel, Robert Mueller, it may be only a matter of time before the Supreme Court itself gets drawn into the Trump maelstrom.
Jay Michaelson at The Daily Beast:
While many have treated the entire give-and-take as some kind of political spat, in fact it is a confrontation of historic proportions about the very nature of American democracy—and a taste of what is to come. [...]
The opening battle lines are being drawn for a terrifying test of our nation’s constitutional principles. Some on the left bandy words like “fascist” about rather carelessly, but Trump has already acted in numerous ways that are anti-democratic in the extreme: delegitimizing any judge who rules against him; pardoning Joe Arpaio, who racially profiled and imprisoned people in brutal conditions; and we have just learned, ordering his own White House counsel to prosecute Hillary Clinton.
That’s not just some gutsy political move. It is using the legal and police machinery of the state against a political adversary. That is what dictators do. And only former-White House Counsel Don McGahn’s judgment stopped it from happening.
One policy that’s sure to make its way through the courts is the latest blatantly unconstitutional order allowing military at the U.S.-Mexico border to use lethal force. Heather Hurlburt breaks it down:
It has been very settled law for more than a century that active-duty troops may not be used for law enforcement functions within U.S. borders. That law, the Posse Comitatus Act, was passed just after the Civil War and Reconstruction, specifically to protect state governments from having policies they didn’t like enforced by federal military personnel on their soil. The exceptions are extreme: the president can “use military force to suppress insurrection or enforce federal authority,” per the Congressional Research Service. It’s worth noting that servicemembers always have the right to use force for self-defense – but the idea is that troops are not to be used in roles where they might choose to use force for other reasons.
There are several strange things about this document that immediately jump out. It was called a “Cabinet order,” but the Cabinet has no constitutional authority to make orders, and certainly not of the military. Sometimes in past administrations, the White House has sent “Cabinet memos” – but those merely enumerated explicit presidential guidance. This memo, instead of invoking the president’s authority, was signed by Chief of Staff John Kelly – but chiefs of staff have no authority to command anyone except White House employees. (And in my experience from the Clinton White House, that’s certainly not a group you would want to put in charge of crowd control.) The fact that Kelly is a retired four-star general is irrelevant; no chief of staff fits anywhere in the military chain of command.
On a final note, make some time to read this excellent piece by historian Kevin M. Kruse on America’s loaded phrases:
Throughout America’s postwar era of relative peace and prosperity, this balance remained. “America First” was the relic of a discredited cause, while the “American dream” appeared to soar higher and higher. When economic security and prosperity began to falter, first in the stagnant economy of the late 1970s, and again after the housing bubble burst and the stock market crashed in the late 2000s, this dream appeared to be more and more of a mirage. By the end of the 20th century, things seemed to have gone back to where they were at its start.
The end of the Cold War also prompted a reconsideration of America’s place in the world, bringing the impulses of “America First” back into vogue just as the decades of economic decline forced many Americans to rethink their views of the American dream at home.
New thoughts are still formed with old words, of course. Once again, “America First” and the “American dream” have been revived and put to use in the current moment. But as Churchwell reminds us, these are loaded phrases. Even if the man pulling the trigger today doesn’t fully understand them, the rest of us surely should.