Courts and Public Policy

ThinkProgress with an interesting post noting that 87% of U.S. counties have no abortion provider; with Mississippi moving toward having no abortion provider.

I wonder if Roe v. Wade had not been decided in the 1970s, and states had continued to muddle through on abortion if we would have a similar epidemiology of abortion provision that we have today, but with less political toxicity around the issue? Getting a “win” for your side via a court ruling can sometimes be the only way (Brown v. Board of Education, Civil Rights cases, for example, in my opinion). In other cases, a court win could actually harm your “sides” ability to make the case politically and culturally.

This is an important consideration generally in public policy.

Duke Statement on Amendment One

Screen shot of email sent to all employees this morning. If you click it the resolution is better. Here is Duke web link on the topic.

I Love North Carolina

I am a proud North Carolinian, who has lived in this state for 40 of my 44 years (I was born on an Air Force Base in Mississippi, and did a post-doc in England). I am not surprised that Amendment 1 has passed tonight, since polls have shown this was going to occur for some time. However, as it has occurred, it makes me feel not angry, but sad, in the “we can do better than this” sense.

It is also the first time I have seen my kids be interested in politics, and my 11th grader especially has been passionately opposed to Amendment 1, and she is disappointed. It is hard to see her first interest in politics end in disappointment, but that is a part of life.

I wrote my reasons for voting against Amendment 1, and some gave me feedback that it was too nuanced. For my daughter it was a simple matter of being opposed to denying a particular groups’ human rights; no nuance whatsoever. That leads me to believe that the Amendment and its result won’t last very long.

As I reflect on recent politics in North Carolina, I realize that by far the more shocking election result was Barack Obama winning this state in 2008 (by ~14,000 votes out of over 4 Million cast). I was a late adopter of President Obama, in part because I viewed Hillary Clinton as inevitable, but mostly because I didn’t think a Black man with a funny name could be elected President, and I wanted my side to win.

Four years ago tonight, the North Carolina primary essentially put the President over the top, but even as I went to a celebration party that night, I was worried that he could not win. Even as I started going door-to-door canvassing in the Summer of 2008 for the Obama campaign, I just didn’t really believe that he could win in North Carolina. Of course he did, and I felt so proud of North Carolina on election night 2008 because I felt like we as a State voted our hopes, and not our fears.

Tonight I think it is just the opposite, and I feel sad, but I still love North Carolina. I know we can do better, and I think we eventually will.

 

 

Stephen Carter on SCOTUS role

Stephen Carter’s op-ed on the role of the SCOTUS is the best, most nuanced take I have read.

What the flip flops on the individual mandate mean

Governor Mitt Romney is just four years too late. If he had beaten Senator McCain for the 2008 Republican nomination, the individual mandate would  have been front and center in the campaign; a ‘make the trains run on time’ corporatist approach to pooling health insurance risk that could save the country from the wild-eyed liberal schemes that Senator Obama would surely impose, yada yada. I am sure Gov. Romney would have taken tremendous glee in saying something like this over and over: “even Hillary Clinton has embraced the individual mandate that we successfully implemented in Massachusetts; only Senator Obama remains committed to a government takeover of health care that was rejected when Hillarycare was defeated.”

Of course, the ACA (aka Obamacare) with the individual mandate front and center came to not only be called a government takeover, but an assault on liberty and freedom itself. The Supreme Court will have their say in a bit, but it is worth asking what do the flip flops on the individual mandate mean more broadly?

The President did attack the individual mandate during Democratic primary, and it was about the only substantive issue that was different between the President and Sec. Clinton. However, in choosing to support the individual mandate he choose to embrace a practical strategy to pool risk that appeared to have bipartisan support and could therefore be passed. In doing so, the President demonstrated the commitment of progressives and their most closely allied political party to move toward universal coverage, even if it couldn’t be totally achieved in the ACA.

Conservatives, and their most closely allied party, the Republicans, showed that they have no overriding vision for health reform by their widespread flip flop on what had long been the conservative, responsible way to achieve reform. They have many ideas, but they are mostly used to argue against the advances of the other side. In short, they are great on defense, but seem to have no offense. Offense implies having an overall grand vision for health care, and a practical strategy to move toward this vision that includes the willingness to use political capital to achieve large or small victories moving toward an overall goal. The overarching vision for progressives is universal coverage. For conservatives, I have no idea what it is. Do you?

There are two requirements to ever having anything near a balanced budget again: an increase in taxes over historical levels, and some way of slowing health care cost inflation while also dealing with coverage and quality issues. The Democratic party and progressives are not perfect, but they have embraced the first and passed a beginning step toward the second. Without a cogent health reform plan, the Republican party has no plausible route to a sustainable budget. They need a deal on health reform terribly.

Is the individual mandate constitutional?

Great post by Jim Hufford on the Fourth Circuit’s hearing this week.