Tag Archives: case

Supreme Court Takes Up Yet Another Challenge to Obamacare

by WendyHaddad Posted on November 7, 2014

Mother Jones

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It looks like the Halbig challenge to Obamacare is a go:

The justices on Friday say they will decide whether the law authorizes subsidies that help millions of low- and middle-income people afford their health insurance premiums. A federal appeals court upheld Internal Revenue Service regulations that allow health-insurance tax credits under the Affordable Care Act for consumers in all 50 states. Opponents argue that most of the subsidies are illegal.

In case it’s slipped your mind, this is the case that hinges on whether a typo in one sentence of the Affordable Care Act should wipe out health care subsidies in every state that uses the federal exchange. If the challengers win, subsidies will be available only in states that run their own exchanges.

Given the facts of the case, I’d normally say the whole thing is laughable. The intent of the law is, and always has been, crystal clear. But the current Supreme Court really doesn’t seem to care much about laughable. If they want to cripple Obamacare, they’ll do it. The shoddiness of the argument doesn’t much matter to them.

So this is going to be a nail-biter. If it goes the wrong way, 6 million people or more will lose access to affordable health care—and half the country will cheer giddily about it. Because there’s just nothing more satisfying than denying decent health care to millions of your fellow citizens.

UPDATE: Although this challenge is the same as the one in Halbig, the actual case the Supreme Court agreed to hear is King v. Burwell. Sprry for the mistake.

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Supreme Court Takes Up Yet Another Challenge to Obamacare

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Harry Reid’s Hubris? Not So Fast.

by DebbraCranwell Posted on November 5, 2014

Mother Jones

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This cracks me up. Via Andrew Sullivan, here is Cato’s Roger Pilon cackling over the chickens coming home to roost for Harry Reid:

How sweet it is. Less than a year ago—on November 21st, to be exact—Harry Reid went nuclear….He ended the availability of the filibuster for most executive branch nominations, not by the two-thirds vote that Senate rules had long required but by a simple majority.

….And where will those remaining Democratic senators who voted for Harry Reid’s nuclear option be sitting? Why on the minority side, watching Republicans enjoy their newly acquired power to block controversial Democratic nominees by the vote of a mere majority—all because of Harry’s hubris.

Republicans are now able to block Obama’s nominees by a mere majority! Imagine that!

Just to state the obvious, the nuclear option merely removed the ability for a minority to block presidential appointments. Under every version of Senate rules in history, a majority could always block them. So nothing has changed and Reid is paying no “price” for his hubris.

(Technically, I suppose the price Reid is paying is the ability to filibuster his own president’s nominees. But I’m pretty sure that was never a big part of his playbook.)

There’s something about the institutional filibuster that drives men mad. Over time, it somehow makes “mere majorities” seem almost totalitarian. But mere majorities are the very stuff of democracy, and they’ve always been allowed to block action. That was the case on November 21st of last year, and it’s still the case today.

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Harry Reid’s Hubris? Not So Fast.

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To Beat Obamacare, Opponents Resurrect an Old Birther Argument

by WilliamBeaurega Posted on October 31, 2014

Mother Jones

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Obamacare opponents outside the Supreme Court in March, 2014 Jay Mallin/ZUMA

The Supreme Court today is considering whether to hear a challenge to Obamacare that could deprive 8 million people of their newly acquired health insurance. If the court does decide to take the case, though, it will be buying into a legal argument that is frequently deployed by a different group of anti-Obama litigants—those who are trying to challenge the president’s citizenship.

The case, King v. Burwell, is one of a pair of lawsuits (the other is Halbig v. Burwell) seeking to strike a blow to the heart of the Affordable Care Act. As I explained last year:

The argument goes something like this: When Congress wrote the ACA, it said that premium subsidies would be available for certain qualifying citizens who were “enrolled through an Exchange established by the State.” (Emphasis added.) The law doesn’t say that those subsidies are available to people in the 34 states that declined to set up exchanges, where residents must utilize the now-infamously buggy Healthcare.gov, the federal exchange.

That’s where Obamacare opponents see a fatal flaw in the law. The plaintiffs in Halbig claim that they won’t be eligible for tax credits because their states didn’t start an exchange, so they won’t be able to afford insurance. As a result, they argue that they’ll be subject to the fine for not buying insurance, or to avoid the fine, they’ll have to pay a lot for insurance they don’t want. They want the court to block the IRS from implementing the law.

It’s a pretty audacious claim from a bunch of people who are, in fact, being helped quite a bit by Obamacare. One of the plaintiffs in Halbig is actually complaining about being forced to buy insurance that, with the subsidy, costs him $21 a year.

Putting those issues aside, though, the question for the Supreme Court today is whether to take up the King case. Obamacare opponents lost this case in July after it was argued before the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Va. The court found that the issues raised by the plaintiffs were indeed serious, and that the statute is vague because of what is essentially a drafting error in the text. But Supreme Court precedent, the judges said, requires them to give deference to regulatory agencies’ interpretation of laws passed by Congress. Those agencies, namely the IRS, have taken the view that Congress intended for everyone to be able to access subsidies, regardless of which exchange they use to buy insurance. (Most of the law’s drafters have endorsed that argument in amicus briefs.)

The Halbig case, however, was heard by a three-judge panel from a different appellate court, in Washington, DC. That panel, which included two conservative GOP appointees, rejected the IRS’s interpretation of the law by and ruled, in a 2-1 vote, that Congress’ screw-up makes the federal health care subsidies unlawful. Generally speaking, when appellate courts disagree in similar cases like this, it’s up to the US Supreme Court to resolve the conflict, and that’s exactly what the King plaintiffs have asked the Supreme Court to do.

But not long after the decision in Halbig, the full DC Circuit set aside the panel decision and agreed to hear the case en banc—meaning that every judge on the circuit will will have a vote. The case is set to be argued in December, and many observers believe the full court, which now includes several Obama appointees, will overturn the lower court ruling and agree with the 4th Circuit that the subsidies are permissible. So technically, there is no circuit split at the moment for the high court to resolve—an argument the government has made in its briefs to the court opposing a high court review.

But the King plaintiffs are arguing that the Supreme Court should take up the case now anyway—because, well, they think it’s really, really important to stop health care reform from moving forward in case it eventually turns out to be illegal. (They’re also arguing that the original DC Circuit panel decision creates a circuit split, but plenty of lawyers disagree with them.)

In their petition to the Supreme Court, the King plaintiffs write, “Given the self-evident enormous importance of the IRS Rule to the ongoing implementation of the ACA, to the immediate economic decisions of millions of Americans and thousands of businesses, and to the currently flowing billions of dollars in expenditures that the D.C. Circuit ruled illegal, the need for this Court’s review is plainly and uniquely urgent.”

That dire language, though, bears some resemblance to the legal rhetoric frequently employed by some of the nation’s most dogged litigators: the birthers—those people who’ve spent the past six years filing lawsuits trying to prove that President Obama is not an American citizen. In years of legal filings, they’ve repeatedly begged the court to rule on Obama’s “legitimacy”—even though every lower court has rejected their claims—because, you know, if it turns out that he’s not really a citizen, that’s a problem the court should fix right away.

Here’s just one example, from the Supreme Court petition in Charles Kerchner v. Barack Hussein Obama II:

If the President and Commander in Chief is ineligible for those offices, both our civilian and military sector need to know that as soon as possible. The President is the Commander in Chief of our military forces. Whether he is legitimate is also vital in maintaining the proper chain of command in our military and in giving legality to all military orders that emanate from him.

Since the President signs all acts passed by Congress into law, it is vitally important that the President be legitimately in power so as to give those laws domestic and international legality.

Ian Millhiser, a constitutional policy analyst at the Center for American Progress, says this sort of argument is common among not just birthers, but also tax protesters and other fringe litigants looking to kill off government programs. The Halbig and King plaintiffs, he says, are essentially saying, “Because we have created this crisis whereby filing this lawsuit we have raised the possibility that all of this disruption has happened, it is therefore imperative that you, Supreme Court, take this case to end all this disruption we have created.”

The problem with this line of argument, of course, is that it could be applied to any lawsuit, no matter how frivolous. That’s why Millhiser doesn’t think the Supreme Court is likely to take up the case, at least not until the full DC Circuit delivers its own ruling. A case doesn’t become worthy of Supreme Court review, he says, simply because the plaintiffs have cooked up a legal attack strategy that, if successful, “could lead to catastrophic consequences.” He’ll likely find out if he’s right on Monday, when the court could announce whether it’s taking the case.

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To Beat Obamacare, Opponents Resurrect an Old Birther Argument

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What Can the Developer of the Polio Vaccine Teach Us About Ebola?

by Sylvest1344 Posted on October 30, 2014

Mother Jones

This story was originally published on BillMoyers.com.

Had he lived, Dr. Jonas Salk would have turned 100 this week. Salk was a young man when in the spring of 1955 he announced his discovery of a vaccine that could prevent polio. He was hailed as a modern miracle worker. He went on to lead scientists from from around the world in studies of cancer, heredity, the brain, the immune system and AIDS at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California.

In this age of Ebola, it’s enlightening and inspiring to hear Salk talk about the lessons he learned in developing the polio vaccine, and how they might be applicable to the AIDS crisis, which was raging at the time of this interview with Bill Moyers recorded in 1990.

Salk died five years after this interview was broadcast. His memorial at the Salk Institute reads: “Hope lies in dreams, in imagination and in the courage of those who dare to make dreams into reality.”

TRANSCRIPT

SALK: What we’re doing now is trying to think like nature, in the sense that we are aware that species that have gone before us have disappeared from the face of the Earth. We’d like to use our intelligence and our creative capacity to prolong our presence on the face of the Earth as long as possible. It requires, therefore, that we develop the kinds of tactics and strategies amongst ourselves so as to assure that this can occur, to assure that we will not destroy ourselves or the planet, to make it uninhabitable and to allow the fullness of the potential of the individual to be expressed, to flower. That is—

MOYERS: What is—

SALK: —awfully ideal. The question now is how can we translate this, how can we make this operative? If you want me to give you an example—

MOYERS: Yeah.

SALK: —of how people can solve problems for themselves? When the problem of polio confronted this nation, confronted the world, there was an organization that formed in this country called the March of Dimes. Volunteers. They were not government-directed or -led. They didn’t ask the government to do anything. They did it themselves. That’s just a small illustration of what has happened in the past and can happen again and is happening continuously now here and, I think, in other parts of the world.

MOYERS: I read the other day, coming out here, in fact, that by the year 2000, which is not very far from now, there will be some 20 million people in the world carrying the AIDS virus. Is that a comparable challenge to what you faced with polio 50 years ago?

SALK: Well, it’s an even more difficult challenge, but that’s what evokes a response on the part of those who want to solve the problem, who are addressing themselves to just that question and philosophically, in approaching it. The virus, if it prevails, then we will lose. But if we are able to reduce the damage caused by the virus and, at the same time, try to enhance the immune response to the virus and establish a more favorable balance between the two, then we will be doing in relation to that problem what we want to do in relation to the world and that is to reduce the negative and enhance the positive at one and the same time.

MOYERS: The good news would be that there is a vaccine that protects us and immunizes us, against the AIDS virus. Are we going to have that good news, do you think, in your time and mine?

SALK: My expectation is that we will solve the problem. It’s just a matter of time and just a matter of strategy. Now, why do I say that this is the case? It’s because I think solutions come through evolution. It comes through asking the right question, because the answer pre-exists. But it’s the question that we have to define and discover, to discover and to define.

MOYERS: You mean, when you asked the question about how to defeat polio, the answer was already there?

SALK: Mm-hmm, in a way. If you think of David and Michelangelo, it was in the stone, but it had to be unveiled and revealed. You don’t invent the answer. You reveal the answer.

MOYERS: From nature.

SALK: From nature.

MOYERS: From the life process.

SALK: Yes.

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What Can the Developer of the Polio Vaccine Teach Us About Ebola?

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Chris Christie Needs to Rehearse His Lines Better

by CQZRaymonr Posted on October 30, 2014

Mother Jones

Paul Waldman comments on Chris Christie’s latest outburst against a heckler:

My favorite part is how Christie keeps calling him “buddy” (reminded me of this). Now try to imagine what would happen if Barack Obama shouted “Sit down and shut up!” at a citizen. Or almost any other prominent politician, for that matter; commentators would immediately start questioning his mental health. But even though it’s been a while, shouting at people was how Chris Christie became a national figure talked about as a potential presidential candidate in the first place….If you standup at a town meeting and ask him an impertinent question about something like the state budget, he’ll shout you down (to the cheers of his supporters).

Here are a few ways to explain this pattern of behavior:

  1. This is a calculated way of showing that he’s a Tough Guy, which Christie knows Republicans love
  2. This is just who Christie is, and if nobody was around he’d still be picking fights with people
  3. Both 1 and 2

I lean toward number 3. It isn’t just play-acting, because Christie obviously gets sincerely pissed off when he’s challenged by people he thinks are beneath him. At the same time, he’s a smart enough politician to know that the cameras are on, and there’s some benefit to reinforcing the persona he has created.

I admit that this is mostly just curiosity on my part, since Christie’s act long ago got nearly as stale as Sarah Palin’s. But take a look at the video. Unlike Waldman, I vote for No. 1. To me, Christie appears entirely under control. I don’t doubt that there’s some real annoyance there (even a Vulcan would get annoyed at your average heckler), but overall Christie’s response gives the impression of being practically scripted. There are even a couple of instances where Christie seems like he forgot his lines and hurriedly tosses them in before heckler guy goes away and ruins his chance to get off his best zingers.

So vote in comments. Is it real anger, or has it just become a well-rehearsed schtick by now? In this case, at least, I vote for schtick.

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Chris Christie Needs to Rehearse His Lines Better

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Another Black Teenager Fatally Shot by Police, Just Miles from Ferguson

by JillianSnelling Posted on October 9, 2014

Mother Jones

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Nearly two months to the day after 18-year-old Michael Brown was shot and killed by police in Ferguson, another black teenager was fatally shot by a white officer in nearby St. Louis on Wednesday.

According to police, the yet-to-be named off-duty officer was chasing the teenager, later identified by family as Vonderrick Myers Jr., when the two began firing at each other. Police say Myers got off at least three rounds before the officer returned fire. They also say that a weapon was recovered at the scene, but witnesses including Myers’ family are disputing the police account.

“He was unarmed,” said Teyonna Myers, apparently the victim’s cousin. “He had a sandwich in his hand, and they thought it was a gun. It’s like Michael Brown all over again.”

The officer, a 6-year veteran, fired at Myers 17 times.

The news triggered fresh riots in St. Louis, where roughly 200 people took to the streets overnight in protest. Police chief Samuel Dotson said several police cars were damaged.

The latest shooting comes as Ferguson prepares for renewed unrest in the case a grand jury chooses not to indict Darren Wilson, the officer who shot and killed Brown in early August.

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Another Black Teenager Fatally Shot by Police, Just Miles from Ferguson

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One Weird, Nobel Prize-Winning Trick That Could Halve America’s Lighting Bill

by Tamera4915 Posted on October 8, 2014

Mother Jones

On Tuesday, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced the winners of the Nobel Prize in Physics. In the first of the prestigious awards to be handed out this week, Japanese scientists Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano, and Shuji Nakamura were honored for their invention of the blue light-emitting diode commonly known as an LED. The $8 million prize “rewards an invention of greatest benefit to mankind”—and LEDs have crossed the bar.

Invented just twenty years ago, blue LEDs paved the way for many now-common devices, like television LCD-screens, Blu-ray discs, and laser printers. But more importantly, they give off white light in a new, more efficient way, reducing energy consumption the world over.

Johan Jarnestad/The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences

“I (was) not too sure whether I could win a Nobel Prize,” Shuji Nakamura said in a telephone interview after he was informed of the award. “Basically physics, it means that usually people was awarded for the invention of the basic theory. But in my case, not a basic theory. In my case just making the device, you know?”

In traditional electric lighting, most of the energy is lost when it is converted to heat. But LEDs convert electricity directly to light.

The invention was based on over three decades of work and research. And since their discovery in the early ’90s, the technology has rapidly improved: state of the art LEDs are now over four times more efficient than florescents and almost 20 times more efficient than regular light bulbs. Because they last so much longer, LEDs are also less wasteful.

Lighting accounts for about a quarter of the world’s energy consumption. The Climate Group, a nonprofit pushing LED use worldwide, reports that illumination is responsible for over 1,900 million tons of CO2 emissions every year. They calculate that number could be reduced by up to 70 percent, just by replacing traditional streetlamps with LED powered versions.

Created by The Climate Group

Last year, the US Department of Energy released a report saying LEDs could halve the country’s usage of electricity for lighting by 2030. The savings would equal the output of fifty 1,000 megawatt power plants, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions as much as taking 40 million cars off the road—not to mention cutting energy bills by $30 billion.

Of course there are still technical developments and obstacles to be overcome before this vision is realized. But it is not far fetched or far off, thanks to the latest Nobel laureates. To learn more about the science behind their world-changing invention (or to send them a quick congratulatory note!) you can head to the prizes’ site.

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One Weird, Nobel Prize-Winning Trick That Could Halve America’s Lighting Bill

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Everyone Please Calm Down About the White House Jumper

by Iris56Cyosfzby Posted on September 22, 2014

Mother Jones

In response to the fence-jumper who got inside the White House before being apprehended, the Secret Service is considering the possibility of creating a larger “buffer zone” around 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue:

One proposal is to keep people off the sidewalks around the White House fence and create several yards of additional barrier around the compound’s perimeter. Another is to screen visitors as far as a block away from the entrance gates.

Petula Dvorak is outraged:

Now the Secret Service — which hasn’t exactly covered itself in glory the past few years — wants us to pay for its mistake, to once again intrude on more public space and make suspects out of millions of visitors, residents and office workers who come near the White House every day. To further encroach on the country’s most important values: our openness and our freedom.

The security gurus think they might want to keep people off the sidewalks around the nation’s most famous residence. Or maybe screen tourists a block away from the White House. They want to Anschluss even more public space to expand The Perimeter around 1600 Pennsylvania, amping up the feeling of hostility, fear and paranoia that already pervades the heart of our nation.

Dvorak speaks for me, and I hope she speaks for plenty of others too. This crap has just got to stop. We simply can’t continue this endless series of insane overreactions every time something bad happens. Sometimes an incident is just an incident. In this case, the Secret Service needs to examine its procedures and probably tighten up a thing or two. That’s it.

This is a case where no-drama Obama really needs to step in. For God’s sake, let’s dial down the drama on this whole affair. It’s nowhere near as big a deal as it’s being played up to be.

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Everyone Please Calm Down About the White House Jumper

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Unredacted Court Docs Reveal Yahoo’s Name and Other Top-Secret Stuff

by Jeff Howard Posted on September 12, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Yahoo has just released 1,500 pages of previously classified documents relating to its legal challenge to the government’s warrantless wiretapping program. Yahoo lost the case in 2008 and was ordered to cooperate with National Security Agency or face a $250,000 fine for every day that it withheld its customers’ data. The ruling in Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which was released to the public only in heavily redacted form, became a legal precedent for the warrantless wiretapping program that was later revealed by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

Today, based on a successful appeal by Yahoo, a slightly less redacted version of that court ruling finally became public.

Below, I’ve posted the more lightly redacted version released today as well as the redacted version of the ruling released in 2008. A side-by-side reading of the two documents may offer some insight into how the government has sought to cover up the true nature of its surveillance activities, or it might just be an example of how little has changed.

The new version of the ruling is notable for what it doesn’t disclose: Key evidence presented by the government. A block of text that had previously been removed from the ruling still does not fully explain why warrantless searches are necessary to thwart terrorists:

Scanning the 1,500 pages of newly unsealed documents will take a while. Here are few examples of new information contained in the partially unredacted ruling:

The name of the plaintiff (Yahoo) and its law firm
A footnote defining the term “surveillance” to mean “acquisitions of foreign intelligence information.” But part of the definition of the term still remains redacted.
The date when the government moved to force Yahoo to comply with the order (November 21, 2007)
A mention of “linking procedures” (defined as “procedures that link redacted targets.”) as a one of the safeguards against unreasonable searches

You can help us out by pointing out any other interesting tidbits in the comments; we’ll note additional highlights here if we find anything worth noting.

The slightly less redacted ruling released today:

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width: 630,
height: 800,
sidebar: false,
text: false,
pdf: false,
container: “#DV-viewer-1301184-11-yahoo702-fisc-merits-opinion-1”
);

The original redacted court ruling:

DV.load(“//www.documentcloud.org/documents/1300547-fiscr082208-2.js”,
width: 630,
height: 800,
sidebar: false,
text: false,
pdf: false,
container: “#DV-viewer-1300547-fiscr082208-2”
);

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Unredacted Court Docs Reveal Yahoo’s Name and Other Top-Secret Stuff

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Former Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell Convicted on Corruption Charges

by Kandace86G Posted on September 4, 2014

Mother Jones

A jury found former Republican Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell guilty on 11 counts of corruption on Thursday, ending a bizarre trial that featured bad shrimp, a broken marriage, and non-FDA approved dietary supplements. McDonnell’s wife, Maureen, was found guilty on eight charges.

The charges stemmed from the couple’s relationship with Johnnie Williams, the former CEO of Star Scientific, Inc., a pharmaceutical company. Williams, dubbed the “tic-tac man” by the governor’s staff, was pushing two new drugs, Antabloc and CigRx, and needed help getting the pills into doctors’ offices. He lavished gifts on the McDonnells, paying for their daughter’s wedding, taking Maureen on shopping sprees, and letting the couple borrow his “James Bond car”—an Aston Martin—for vacations. At one point, he bid against himself at a charity auction to win a free weekend with Maureen. In turn, the McDonnells became Star Scientific boosters. Maureen went so far as to pitch Antabloc to prospective first lady Ann Romney, telling her it could help her MS.

What’s there to say about the trial? BuzzFeed‘s Katherine Miller has the fullest summation of what happened, but let’s just call it a mess, a soap opera, the world’s worst “Modern Love” column in legalese. It was also a useful corrective to the facade politicians sometimes present when they trot their families in front of the cameras before trying to legislate yours. McDonnell, whose master’s thesis at Pat Robertson’s Regent University made the case for covenant marriage and subservient roles for wives, built his defense on the theory that his own union was too much of a failure for him and his wife to mount a conspiracy. According to the governor, his wife was a paranoid loon who had a crush on the businessman who bought her nice dresses.

At one point, a former aide to Maureen McDonnell—who called the former first lady a “nutbag“—testified that she had received a text message from the governor’s wife alleging that the couple’s chef was attempting to ruin Christmas by serving them bad shrimp. Fed up with the McDonnells (who had accused him of stealing food), the chef, Todd Schneider, handed a trove of documents to federal investigators in 2012 that led to the probe. The lesson, as always, is to be nice to the people who prepare your food.

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Former Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell Convicted on Corruption Charges

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