Even polls that use the term Affordable Care Act show higher opposition than support, even when done by arms of the Democratic Party such as Public Policy Polling. Yes, there is support for elements of the ACA, but people disapprove of the way it was passed, and of the way those elements were put together in it. The Affordable Care Act was passed in a manner which has reduced the legitimacy of the U.S. government (I was going to write "perceived legitimacy" but I realized that a government that is perceived as illegitimate by the people it governs IS illegitimate). The way that the current Administration has handled the government shutdown causes me to not just dislike the ACA, but to fear it.
I am not sure what you mean by saying that the strong opposition is unfounded. Are you saying the opposition is not from a large portion of the population? Or are you saying that their opposition to this expansion of government power into people's personal lives is unfounded? If the first, you are wrong and merely need to look at various polls taken on the subject, those who oppose the ACA outnumber those who support it in every poll I have seen. If the latter, I am sorry you have such a low opinion of your own decision making ability.
The framers of the Constitution intended that if one group of people (in this case the leaders of the Democratic Party) managed to force a change to the government with strong opposition from a large percentage of the populace, the House of Representatives would be able to stop the change from going into effect by denying funding to implement the change.
What was intentional was that if some group managed to get the majority to back something which a significant minority of the voters opposed, there would be a recourse to stopping the majority from imposing its tyrannical will on the minority. The Democrats used procedures to pass the ACA in the first place that are very similar to the techniques which the Republicans are now using to attempt to derail it. If the Democrats had waited until they had the clear support of the American people to pass something like the ACA rather than forcing it through against the clear opposition of the American people, we would not be in the situation we are in now.
And yes, John Boehner could break the Hastert rule, of course, he would very shortly after that stop being the Speaker of the House, and if you think Boehner gums things up, the person who succeeded him would be much worse (whoever that was).
Sorry, I do not see anywhere in there where it says that they do not pay any taxes...for that matter at least one of them implicitly says that they do indeed pay taxes "Exxon's U.S. operations alone earned $7.5 billion after taxes in 2012." (emphasis added). So would you like to try one more time to offer a citation which supports your claim that the oil companies pay no taxes in the U.S.? The citation which you quote conflates small time independent oil producers with the big multinationals. Since it does not actually give us the name of an oil company that pays no federal taxes, there is no way for me to check the veracity of their statement. It is not an actual citation, since it gives no reference. It is merely an article which asserts that such is the case.
OK, the last report I saw indicated that, unlike GE, the oil companies all pay significant taxes. So, unless you can produce some citation from a credible source to back up your claim, I am going to have to consider you part of the nutjob fringe.
Because it does not have the support of the majority of the Republicans in the House. The CR which the Senate passed includes funding for the ACA. I did not say that the Democrats did not have the votes to pass a CR with funding for the ACA. I said that the Republicans had the votes to take funding for ACA out of the budget. That means they currently have the votes to prevent the passage of any CR that allows the implementation of the ACA to be funded. They have even passed several bills to fund portions of the government that are non-controversial (National Park Service, NIH, Veterans Affairs) but the Senate has refused to vote on those because it is more important to the Democrats to fund the ACA than that these other portions of the government keep functioning.
One of the things which John Boehner promised in order to get the votes to be re-elected Speaker of the House was that he would not bring up for a vote any legislation that did not have the support of the majority of Republican representatives in the House. The CR passed by the Senate does not have the support of the majority of Republicans in the House. The fact of the matter is that what is going on right now is going on exactly as the framers of the Constitution intended.
Well, yes, but the law specifically says that the employer mandate goes into effect in January of 2014. It does not give the President (or anybody else)the option of delaying the implementation date of the employer mandate. The way laws in the U.S. are supposed to work is that if there may be reason to delay implementation, Congress is supposed to write clauses into them giving the executive the option to make such a delay. The ACA has no such clause, which means that the President does not have the legal authority to delay implementation. This action by the Republicans in Congress to not fund the ACA is more legitimate than delaying the employer mandate.
With zero support from the opposition party and over the strong objection of the American people. The Democrats lost a "safe seat" in the Senate in what was an effort by the voters of Massachusetts to stop the passage of the ACA. There was significant voter objection to the passage such that the Democrats had to resort to tactics that are in the same class as what the Republicans are now doing in order to get ACA passed in the first place.
Only because they already had enough representatives in the state legislatures to accomplish that fact when it came time to redistrict, otherwise the OTHER party would have gerrymandered the districts for the opposite result. The very word is derived from a politician who was part of the political party which morphed into the Democratic Party.
The problem is that our government was not actually set up to work like that. Our government was set up intentionally for things like what is happening right now to happen when laws like ACA are passed the way it was passed. The people who originally wrote the Constitution wrote it so that nobody would try to pass laws the way that the Democrats passed the ACA. And if they did what the Democrats did, they wrote the Constitution to allow those who opposed the law to do exactly what the Republicans are doing right now.
Until there are no longer enough people opposed to the law for it to be an issue. And yes, if you can elect enough people who agree with your position, you can shutdown the government until they agree to defund the NSA. That is how our government is designed to work.
dude, politics is messy and there are always games to get laws passed. but regardless, this one passed and is law of the land. so, you can file a suit and get it to the supreme court so they nullify it, or you can vote for legislative representatives who will promulgate a law repealing it, or you can vote for a president that will support the repeal process and make use of executive orders for additional effect. now stfu, seriously.
Or you can elect enough members to the House to remove funding for it. This has been done before. BTW, the Volsted Act was the law for awhile too. Also, if this is such an important, inviolable law, how come Obama gets to unilaterally decide that part of it will not go into effect for a year longer than what the law specifies?
Actually, an unconstitutional provision usually DOES render a whole Act void, unless said Act contains a provision called a "severability clause". A severability clause is one which Congress usually includes in an Act which states that all provisions remain in effect even if some portions are found to be unconstitutional. Absent such a clause, the courts have traditionally found that they do not have the authority to leave the rest in place, since Congress passed the law as a whole and clearly dd not intend portions of it to go into effect without the whole being in place.
Actually they do have the votes to take ACA out of the continuing resolution, since there is no point in passing a budget right now (the Senate won't vote on a budget as long as the Democrats control it). The problem is the Senate won't pass such a continuing resolution. Of course, since the Senate can't initiate a spending bill (as the Constitutional provision on revenue bills is currently interpreted), they can't do anything about it.
And yes it does feel like the final days of the Roman Republic. Of course, I was thinking more along the lines of Julius Obama myself. After all, when the President unilaterally suspends portions of a law that he himself pushed for, it makes you wonder if there is any point to Congress anymore.
Umm, they did not need the murder attempt to "squash an annoying web site". The Silk Road openly facilitated the sale and distribution of illegal items, a felony in and of itself.
NO, what this means is that since it was passed by a single Party using every trick they could come up with to pass it, even after the voters made it clear they didn't want it. You should not be surprised when the other Party uses every trick they can come up with to put a stop to is. Especially when you consider that the law as passed is so badly flawed that the President who pushed it through has unilaterally made changes to the law that it contains no provisions for.
Additionally, while I do believe that the Supreme Court was wrong, that is not the gist of my argument. The Supreme Court ruled on one aspect of the law. That was the only aspect that was being argued in front of them and the courts, especially the Supreme Court, almost never make rulings on aspects of a law that are not being argued in front of them. One of the results of the Supreme Court's ruling on the Affordable Care Act is that it calls into question the whether it is constitutional on the basis of which house of Congress originated it. The Supreme Court did not rule on that because no one has made the case in front of it that the law is unconstitutional on that basis. There is currently a case making its way through the court system which makes that argument, but it has not yet made it to the Supreme Court. There are one or two other aspects of the law which are also being challenged in court and the Supreme Court has not ruled on those either. The origination challenge is particularly unique because, until the Supreme Court ruled that the individual mandate penalty was a tax, no one considered this bill a tax bill.
They passed a bad law, using parliamentary procedures that were not designed to pass this type of law and were never used before for such a law. They got the Supreme Court to uphold it by the Supreme Court saying that the individual mandate penalty was a tax, when those who wrote the law said it was NOT a tax. In addition, there is a case winding its way through the courts now challenging the law (a case which could not start until AFTER the Supreme Court said the individual mandate was a tax, because before that it was not a tax) on the basis of the fact that the bill which became the Affordable Care Act started its life in the Senate, contrary to the Constitution, which says that all tax laws must start in the House. The Democrats claim that because they replaced the contents of a House bill with the Affordable Care Act that the bill was just an amendment to a bill that started in the House (even though the only thing that did not change was the number of the bill).
Well, you know, you would have a case if the President had not already unilaterally amended the law. Of course, maybe if the Democrats had not passed this law in an overtly partisan manner. I mean, good grief, Massachusetts elected Scott Brown to the Senate for the explicit purpose of trying to stop it from getting passed! As a result, those who oppose the law are going to try any means at their disposal to undo it (after all the Democrats used any means at their disposal to get it passed in the first place). What we have going on is what happens when you pass a law the way this one was passed.
Well, you are right, they don't NEED to talk to the Republicans...unless of course they want to fund government activities. See, the Republicans in the House have said, "We will fund the government, on the condition that the Affordable Care Act's individual mandate is legally delayed one year (unlike the employer mandate which was ILLEGALLY delayed one year)."
And the thing about that is that the majority of the House gets to decide whether or not the government gets funded. We can have this conversation EVERY year if enough voters send enough people to Congress who want to have it. You know, the Democrats tried this "THE DISCUSSION IS OVER" bit once before. They even went to war over it. The Republicans defeated their defense of slavery and now we all say that was a good thing.
Good luck getting that passed. I am pretty sure that it would be possible to get my idea passed. I am overwhelmingly confident that it would be impossible to get yours passed. In addition, it is almost always a mistake to pass laws which make drastic changes to existing law because of unintended consequences.
Actually, it was in 1964. One can trace the change from medical care costs rising at the same rate as inflation to rising much faster to 1965 when Medicare and Medicaid went into effect.
Up until the year after Medicare and Medicaid went into effect, health care costs in this country rose at the rate of inflation. Starting at the point where both of them were fully in effect, health care costs began to rise much faster than inflation. Before Obamacare was enacted, the rate at which health care costs were rising had begun to slow. Since Obamacare was enacted, health care costs have resumed rising at a steadily increasing rate.
Your basic idea is sound, but to be possible it needs to be less drastic. The first step is that any new buildings do not get subsidies for flood insurance (and it does not matter how far it is from the coast). Part of that is that if you re-purpose a building, the flood insurance subsidy is the lesser of what would be available for the original purpose or the new purpose. That goes into effect immediately. After a short length of time(2-5 years), any residential building that is not the primary residence of the owner loses the flood insurance subsidy (although someone who was renting the place would be eligible for flood insurance subsidies if those exist as part of renter's insurance). Five years after that, we could re-examine the issue and decide if there is still a problem.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you really want your health care managed by a government that shuts down parks out of spite?
Even polls that use the term Affordable Care Act show higher opposition than support, even when done by arms of the Democratic Party such as Public Policy Polling. Yes, there is support for elements of the ACA, but people disapprove of the way it was passed, and of the way those elements were put together in it. The Affordable Care Act was passed in a manner which has reduced the legitimacy of the U.S. government (I was going to write "perceived legitimacy" but I realized that a government that is perceived as illegitimate by the people it governs IS illegitimate). The way that the current Administration has handled the government shutdown causes me to not just dislike the ACA, but to fear it.
I am not sure what you mean by saying that the strong opposition is unfounded. Are you saying the opposition is not from a large portion of the population? Or are you saying that their opposition to this expansion of government power into people's personal lives is unfounded? If the first, you are wrong and merely need to look at various polls taken on the subject, those who oppose the ACA outnumber those who support it in every poll I have seen. If the latter, I am sorry you have such a low opinion of your own decision making ability.
The framers of the Constitution intended that if one group of people (in this case the leaders of the Democratic Party) managed to force a change to the government with strong opposition from a large percentage of the populace, the House of Representatives would be able to stop the change from going into effect by denying funding to implement the change.
What was intentional was that if some group managed to get the majority to back something which a significant minority of the voters opposed, there would be a recourse to stopping the majority from imposing its tyrannical will on the minority. The Democrats used procedures to pass the ACA in the first place that are very similar to the techniques which the Republicans are now using to attempt to derail it. If the Democrats had waited until they had the clear support of the American people to pass something like the ACA rather than forcing it through against the clear opposition of the American people, we would not be in the situation we are in now.
And yes, John Boehner could break the Hastert rule, of course, he would very shortly after that stop being the Speaker of the House, and if you think Boehner gums things up, the person who succeeded him would be much worse (whoever that was).
Sorry, I do not see anywhere in there where it says that they do not pay any taxes...for that matter at least one of them implicitly says that they do indeed pay taxes "Exxon's U.S. operations alone earned $7.5 billion after taxes in 2012." (emphasis added). So would you like to try one more time to offer a citation which supports your claim that the oil companies pay no taxes in the U.S.? The citation which you quote conflates small time independent oil producers with the big multinationals. Since it does not actually give us the name of an oil company that pays no federal taxes, there is no way for me to check the veracity of their statement. It is not an actual citation, since it gives no reference. It is merely an article which asserts that such is the case.
OK, the last report I saw indicated that, unlike GE, the oil companies all pay significant taxes. So, unless you can produce some citation from a credible source to back up your claim, I am going to have to consider you part of the nutjob fringe.
Because it does not have the support of the majority of the Republicans in the House. The CR which the Senate passed includes funding for the ACA. I did not say that the Democrats did not have the votes to pass a CR with funding for the ACA. I said that the Republicans had the votes to take funding for ACA out of the budget. That means they currently have the votes to prevent the passage of any CR that allows the implementation of the ACA to be funded. They have even passed several bills to fund portions of the government that are non-controversial (National Park Service, NIH, Veterans Affairs) but the Senate has refused to vote on those because it is more important to the Democrats to fund the ACA than that these other portions of the government keep functioning.
One of the things which John Boehner promised in order to get the votes to be re-elected Speaker of the House was that he would not bring up for a vote any legislation that did not have the support of the majority of Republican representatives in the House. The CR passed by the Senate does not have the support of the majority of Republicans in the House. The fact of the matter is that what is going on right now is going on exactly as the framers of the Constitution intended.
Well, yes, but the law specifically says that the employer mandate goes into effect in January of 2014. It does not give the President (or anybody else)the option of delaying the implementation date of the employer mandate. The way laws in the U.S. are supposed to work is that if there may be reason to delay implementation, Congress is supposed to write clauses into them giving the executive the option to make such a delay. The ACA has no such clause, which means that the President does not have the legal authority to delay implementation. This action by the Republicans in Congress to not fund the ACA is more legitimate than delaying the employer mandate.
With zero support from the opposition party and over the strong objection of the American people. The Democrats lost a "safe seat" in the Senate in what was an effort by the voters of Massachusetts to stop the passage of the ACA. There was significant voter objection to the passage such that the Democrats had to resort to tactics that are in the same class as what the Republicans are now doing in order to get ACA passed in the first place.
Only because they already had enough representatives in the state legislatures to accomplish that fact when it came time to redistrict, otherwise the OTHER party would have gerrymandered the districts for the opposite result. The very word is derived from a politician who was part of the political party which morphed into the Democratic Party.
The problem is that our government was not actually set up to work like that. Our government was set up intentionally for things like what is happening right now to happen when laws like ACA are passed the way it was passed. The people who originally wrote the Constitution wrote it so that nobody would try to pass laws the way that the Democrats passed the ACA. And if they did what the Democrats did, they wrote the Constitution to allow those who opposed the law to do exactly what the Republicans are doing right now.
Until there are no longer enough people opposed to the law for it to be an issue. And yes, if you can elect enough people who agree with your position, you can shutdown the government until they agree to defund the NSA. That is how our government is designed to work.
dude, politics is messy and there are always games to get laws passed. but regardless, this one passed and is law of the land. so, you can file a suit and get it to the supreme court so they nullify it, or you can vote for legislative representatives who will promulgate a law repealing it, or you can vote for a president that will support the repeal process and make use of executive orders for additional effect. now stfu, seriously.
Or you can elect enough members to the House to remove funding for it. This has been done before. BTW, the Volsted Act was the law for awhile too. Also, if this is such an important, inviolable law, how come Obama gets to unilaterally decide that part of it will not go into effect for a year longer than what the law specifies?
Actually, an unconstitutional provision usually DOES render a whole Act void, unless said Act contains a provision called a "severability clause". A severability clause is one which Congress usually includes in an Act which states that all provisions remain in effect even if some portions are found to be unconstitutional. Absent such a clause, the courts have traditionally found that they do not have the authority to leave the rest in place, since Congress passed the law as a whole and clearly dd not intend portions of it to go into effect without the whole being in place.
Actually they do have the votes to take ACA out of the continuing resolution, since there is no point in passing a budget right now (the Senate won't vote on a budget as long as the Democrats control it). The problem is the Senate won't pass such a continuing resolution. Of course, since the Senate can't initiate a spending bill (as the Constitutional provision on revenue bills is currently interpreted), they can't do anything about it.
And yes it does feel like the final days of the Roman Republic. Of course, I was thinking more along the lines of Julius Obama myself. After all, when the President unilaterally suspends portions of a law that he himself pushed for, it makes you wonder if there is any point to Congress anymore.
Umm, they did not need the murder attempt to "squash an annoying web site". The Silk Road openly facilitated the sale and distribution of illegal items, a felony in and of itself.
NO, what this means is that since it was passed by a single Party using every trick they could come up with to pass it, even after the voters made it clear they didn't want it. You should not be surprised when the other Party uses every trick they can come up with to put a stop to is. Especially when you consider that the law as passed is so badly flawed that the President who pushed it through has unilaterally made changes to the law that it contains no provisions for.
Additionally, while I do believe that the Supreme Court was wrong, that is not the gist of my argument. The Supreme Court ruled on one aspect of the law. That was the only aspect that was being argued in front of them and the courts, especially the Supreme Court, almost never make rulings on aspects of a law that are not being argued in front of them. One of the results of the Supreme Court's ruling on the Affordable Care Act is that it calls into question the whether it is constitutional on the basis of which house of Congress originated it. The Supreme Court did not rule on that because no one has made the case in front of it that the law is unconstitutional on that basis. There is currently a case making its way through the court system which makes that argument, but it has not yet made it to the Supreme Court. There are one or two other aspects of the law which are also being challenged in court and the Supreme Court has not ruled on those either. The origination challenge is particularly unique because, until the Supreme Court ruled that the individual mandate penalty was a tax, no one considered this bill a tax bill.
They passed a bad law, using parliamentary procedures that were not designed to pass this type of law and were never used before for such a law. They got the Supreme Court to uphold it by the Supreme Court saying that the individual mandate penalty was a tax, when those who wrote the law said it was NOT a tax. In addition, there is a case winding its way through the courts now challenging the law (a case which could not start until AFTER the Supreme Court said the individual mandate was a tax, because before that it was not a tax) on the basis of the fact that the bill which became the Affordable Care Act started its life in the Senate, contrary to the Constitution, which says that all tax laws must start in the House. The Democrats claim that because they replaced the contents of a House bill with the Affordable Care Act that the bill was just an amendment to a bill that started in the House (even though the only thing that did not change was the number of the bill).
Well, you know, you would have a case if the President had not already unilaterally amended the law. Of course, maybe if the Democrats had not passed this law in an overtly partisan manner. I mean, good grief, Massachusetts elected Scott Brown to the Senate for the explicit purpose of trying to stop it from getting passed! As a result, those who oppose the law are going to try any means at their disposal to undo it (after all the Democrats used any means at their disposal to get it passed in the first place). What we have going on is what happens when you pass a law the way this one was passed.
Well, you are right, they don't NEED to talk to the Republicans...unless of course they want to fund government activities. See, the Republicans in the House have said, "We will fund the government, on the condition that the Affordable Care Act's individual mandate is legally delayed one year (unlike the employer mandate which was ILLEGALLY delayed one year)." And the thing about that is that the majority of the House gets to decide whether or not the government gets funded. We can have this conversation EVERY year if enough voters send enough people to Congress who want to have it. You know, the Democrats tried this "THE DISCUSSION IS OVER" bit once before. They even went to war over it. The Republicans defeated their defense of slavery and now we all say that was a good thing.
Good luck getting that passed. I am pretty sure that it would be possible to get my idea passed. I am overwhelmingly confident that it would be impossible to get yours passed. In addition, it is almost always a mistake to pass laws which make drastic changes to existing law because of unintended consequences.
Actually, it was in 1964. One can trace the change from medical care costs rising at the same rate as inflation to rising much faster to 1965 when Medicare and Medicaid went into effect.
Up until the year after Medicare and Medicaid went into effect, health care costs in this country rose at the rate of inflation. Starting at the point where both of them were fully in effect, health care costs began to rise much faster than inflation. Before Obamacare was enacted, the rate at which health care costs were rising had begun to slow. Since Obamacare was enacted, health care costs have resumed rising at a steadily increasing rate.
Your basic idea is sound, but to be possible it needs to be less drastic. The first step is that any new buildings do not get subsidies for flood insurance (and it does not matter how far it is from the coast). Part of that is that if you re-purpose a building, the flood insurance subsidy is the lesser of what would be available for the original purpose or the new purpose. That goes into effect immediately. After a short length of time(2-5 years), any residential building that is not the primary residence of the owner loses the flood insurance subsidy (although someone who was renting the place would be eligible for flood insurance subsidies if those exist as part of renter's insurance). Five years after that, we could re-examine the issue and decide if there is still a problem.