Tuesday’s Election and the Future

The Republicans are going to win big on Tuesday, especially in the House. They may even end up with a majority in both chambers of Congress. It will be the Tea Party fueling much of the turnout and propelling the GOP back into any majority. Say what you want about the Tea Party, but it has been and will be a major force in this election, to the detriment of Democrats and even some incumbent Republicans.

The Democrats have countered with disdain for voters and with attempts to scare voters about going back to where we were before Obama’s election. Insulting voters is a terrible political strategy, and only shows how out of touch so many politicians are. The Democrats are correct, however, that voters by and large do not want to return to the road we were on before November, 2008. That’s largely why the Tea Party exists and has been finding candidates to unseat both Republicans and Democrats.

Tea Party or not, it is unlikely that a Republican majority would be able to return us to the old path in 2011 even if the GOP wanted to. The reason is simply because they won’t have the numbers while President Obama is in office with a veto.  And the outsiders being elected to unseat incumbents on both sides will still be in minority, so we can’t expect significant change in the next two years. The best that anyone who is frustrated with both parties can hope for the next two years is gridlock.

It will be 2012 when people can really change the direction of the country. As Charles Krauthammer writes, the next two years will probably be less about big legislation and more about regulatory implementation. Many people may be frustrated with this, but isn’t change supposed to be difficult in government? Don’t we want Congress to slow down instead of rushing complex laws that will take years to understand? Many people want Congress to work together to pass legislation that works for most of us, but with two very different general views in Congress for how to move the country forward, that’s just not realistic.

With the partisan gridlock we’re likely to see taking place the next two years, the two big questions will be whether the Tea Party or groups like it will continue to hold politicians accountable by finding strong primary challengers for incumbents, and if the left will address these people. So far, the left has mostly downplayed and mocked the Tea Party, which is going to cost the Democrats politically in this election. The left will continue to lose at the polls if they don’t acknowledge the Tea Party’s concerns, and it could cost the Democrats in 2012, when voters can really change the country’s direction.

UPDATE: At Contentions, Peter Wehner offers predictions for the election and the next few years. While he might be a little optimistic about the election, I think his predictions for the next two years will be accurate, as I also don’t see President Obama moving to the center, and I don’t think a new Republican majority would have much incentive to compromise with the president. I also agree with what he says about the rise of Paul Ryan, Marco Rubio, and some Republican governors.

Bomb Found on Flight from Yemen

Ed Morrissey has been doing a nice job of summarizing the news as it comes, and you can follow the story there. The government thinks al Qaeda is behind the plot, and if that’s true, then it makes any claims downplaying AQ’s threat sound ignorant.

It will be interesting to see what the full story is and how the plot was uncovered. We know that the Obama administration wants to avoid linking any terrorism to Islam, and that they want to do anything they can to convince us that the law enforcement approach to stopping terrorism is sufficient. We’ll see how those efforts hold up.

Andy McCarthy comments on President Obama’s statement and on the situation with Yemen.

With most eyes probably on the economy heading into election Tuesday, this news should be a reminder of the threats we face and the choice we have in our approach to national security.

The Media and the Left Have Ignored the Tea Party Like They Ignored Obama

Back in 2008, Tom Brokaw and Charlie Rose talked about Barack Obama, and Brokaw admitted that he didn’t know much about Obama. Few would deny that the media was willfully blind to Obama and gave him a relatively free pass during the campaign. Not only did the MSM not want to know who he was, it had created its own narrative and was going to ignore almost anything that contradicted it. Now, see the results: a president who is nothing like the image of him that was marketed, and a painful price for buying what was being sold.

The media and the left have largely ignored the Tea Party as well. They decided what the Tea Party was before taking the time to understand it, and they’ve mostly avoided adjusting to reality. Even as the Tea Party has gained ground and signaled major defeat for the left this November, many on the left side still choose to ignore who the Tea Party is, instead opting to believe in a false narrative that makes the Tea Party out to be a fringe, extremist group. Their denial will cost them politically.

Howard Kurtz picked up on picked up on the mistake that the media has made of blaming voters for the tide that is about to sweep away Democrats. He notices inconsistency from the media, who praised voters for supporting Obama, but is now criticizing the electorate for not appreciating the president. He suggests that the campaign coverage of Obama was the media’s biggest mistake:

The biggest media blunder, in my view, was the walk-on-water coverage that Obama drew in 2007 and 2008. The only real debate was whether he was more like FDR (Time) or Lincoln (Newsweek). The candidate obviously played a role in creating his own myth, but it was the breathless media that sent expectations soaring into the stratosphere. Once Obama had to grapple with two wars, a crippled economy and reflexive Republican opposition, he had no place to go but down. The press has long since fallen out of love with the president, but the overheated hyperbole did him no favors.

The Democrats are not only facing disappointment due at least partly to those expectations, but they are facing real opposition from the Tea Party. Peggy Noonan wrote today that the Tea Party is saving Republicans. I think a better way of saying that is that the Tea Party opposition will benefit Republicans in this election cycle, but I caution against saying that the movement saved the GOP, since the Tea Party has little allegiance with the Republican party and has shown it will challenge Republicans in the primaries.

Hugh Hewitt wrote a column expressing the need for Republicans to act quickly on the priorities of voters who will bring change this election. Republicans cannot take time to celebrate regaining power, and they cannot go back to doing what they did before, otherwise Tea Parties will be right there to provide primary challengers in the next election cycle.

This election may be about Obama’s agenda, but that doesn’t mean that once it is over that the Tea Parties will disappear. Both parties should take notice. Many Republicans already have. What will it take for the media and the left to accept what they are dealing with, and address it? Obama’s disastrous performance and obvious contradiction to what the media promised hasn’t worked. Would a landslide defeat be enough?

Boeing Is Latest High-Profile Victim of ObamaCare

Boeing became the latest on the list of employers who have announced significant changes to its employee health insurance. Boeing says that 90,000 nonunion workers will see higher costs, citing the looming Cadillac insurance plan tax of ObamaCare.

Coons and Reid Know Their Opponents Are Reasonable

There is a quote in the movie Frost/Nixon said by Nixon’s friend and post-resignation chief of staff Jack Brennan, played by Kevin Bacon, where Brennan describes the opening moments of the interviews when Frost realizes who he is up against:

Well, in boxing, you know, there’s always that first moment, and you see it in the challenger’s face. It’s that moment that he feels the impact from the champ’s first jab. It’s kind of a sickening moment, when he realizes that all those months of pep talks and the hype, the psyching yourself up, had been delusional all along.

For months, Democrats Harry Reid and Chris Coons have painted Tea Party and Republican challengers Sharron Angle and Christine O’Donnell as right wing kooks in their respective Senate campaigns. But if they didn’t already realize it before their recent debates with Angle and O’Donnell, they surely realized during their debates that they were not up against extremists, but people with reasonable views that they articulated quite nicely on several issues. Take this response from Angle in a recent debate, after Reid says it’s his job to create jobs:

Once again, Harry Reid, it’s not your job to create jobs, it’s your job to create policies that create the confidence for the private sector to create those jobs. And they have lost confidence because of things like Obamacare. There’s a, a business in Reno, where he wanted to hire twenty-four – five – more employees but instead laid of five, just because of the provisions in Obamacare.

We’re seeing those kinds of policies actually crush our economy over the last 20 months.

Is that distinction she made extreme? Most certainly not, and Reid not only knows that, but he knows that Angel’s words resonate with a lot of smart voters. And how about O’Donnell’s comments during her debate with Chris Coons, when pressed on her position on evolution?

What I will support in Washington, D.C. is the ability for the local school system to decide what is taught in their classrooms and what I was talking about on that show was a classroom that was not allowed to teach creationism as an equal theory as evolution. That is against their constitutional rights and that is an overreaching arm of the government.

Extreme? No, and Coons knows that.

So why are O’Donnell and Angle being pushed on issues like evolution and Thomas Jefferson’s perpetually misquoted idea of a separation of church and state (which indeed does not appear in the First Amendment, as Angle and O’Donnell both point out)? Why are Democrats like Coons and Reid pushing these issues and starting legal theory debates over how the First Amendment has been interpreted over time when that issue is nowhere near the top of the list of important ones that voters are concerned about?

It’s because they know what they are up against, which are two women who comfortably articulate conservative ideas and principles that connect with enough voters that at least Angle has a very good shot at winning in Nevada. Coons has a more comfortable lead on O’Donnell, but he knows that his best chance at being defeated is to allow the debate to be over the economy and the Democrats’ economic record. Coons even admits during the debate that the use of Thomas Jefferson’s “separation” was employed as an interpretation of the First Amendment, and is not found in it. So what are we debating?

A red herring, that’s what. And it’s obvious that the media and debate moderators are happy to highlight that red herring in order to distract voters from the reality of the economy, and the role of Democrats like Harry Reid in creating the current conditions.

Lefties will keep telling us that Tea Parties are crazy extremists, and many will be steamrolled by the Tea Parties because they refused to seriously address them. There’s a good shot that at least one of Reid or Coons will face political losses for doing this, but make no mistake, Reid and Coons know their opponents are far from crazy.

UPDATE: Reid probably doesn’t want to fight Angle on the economy, but he can’t completely avoid the issue. So, he tells us that he helped save the world from a depression:

Florida District Court Allows ObamaCare Challenge to Proceed

The lawsuit filed by 20 U.S. states against ObamaCare’s individual mandate was allowed to proceed this week, and the ruling signals trouble for the new law. At Volokh, Ilya Somin summarizes two key points of the ruling:

1. The mandate is not a tax, and
2. The judge didn’t rule on the Commerce Clause and Necessary and Proper Clause arguments, but did raise doubts about those arguments.

The ruling suggests the challengers do have standing, and it is expected that this issue will reach the Supreme Court. This begs the question of why Democrats like Nancy Pelosi wouldn’t even take these challenges seriously when asked about ObamaCare’s constitutionality. I’d like to hear a follow-up question posed to her and others who didn’t think there was any constitutional problem with the law.

Latest Terror Trial Developments Suggest Problems

The latest developments in two terror trials are highlighting concerns that many people have about the use of civilian trials in some of these cases. First, Ahmed Ghailani, who admitted to bombing the U.S. embassy in Tanzania, may benefit significantly from a decision about what kind of evidence could be used in the trial:

Clearly, however, the prosecutors in New York do not want the trial to devolve into theater over the CIA interrogation methods. Were the government to try to prove Ghailani’s statements to the FBI, defense lawyers would have latitude to summon the CIA interrogators. They would argue that the CIA’s earlier, rough tactics tainted Ghailani’s subsequent, seemingly voluntary confession. The Justice Department is determined to steer clear of that controversy, and of any criticism that it exploited Bush-era tactics, even indirectly. But there’s a trade-off: The jury won’t learn that Ghailani admitted to planning the bombing, buying the TNT, and being celebrated afterward as an al-Qaeda hero.

The Justice Department figured it could roll those dice because it has a witness, Hussein Abebe, who is prepared to testify that he sold Ghailani the TNT. Not so fast, say Ghailani’s lawyers. They argue that the government learned about Abebe only because of Ghailani’s confession. By their lights, having agreed not to use it, the government implicitly concedes that the confession is toxic; therefore, the argument goes, it is no more proper for prosecutors to call a witness discovered because of the confession than it would be to use the confession itself.

Ghailani was reportedly subjected to CIA interrogation techniques, and what Andy McCarthy is suggesting is that the government wants to avoid having to discuss those on trial. Instead, the government wants to use a witness that Ghailani’s side claims was only discovered because of Ghailani’s confession that was arguably damaged by the interrogation. As McCarthy notes, the judge is siding with the defense, so the government’s key witness may not be allowed to testify against Ghailani. Such standards of evidence could be avoided with military trials, but the Obama administration has taken a stubborn stance on these cases.

Another reason that such a stance to use civilian trials is a concern for some is that these trials can be used as propaganda. The trial of Faisal Shahzad, the Times Square bomber, supports that concern. When Shahzad was sentenced to life in prison last week, he was not remorseful, he admitted he was lying when he swore allegiance to the U.S., and he claimed that he is defending his religion. The merits of civilian trials aside, we should not overlook the opportunity for propaganda and legitimization of terrorists. That’s why many advocate the use of military commissions, and possibly the reform of those commissions to meet contentious standards.

Pretending that these trials work fine without any downside is insulting to our intelligence and overlooks serious problems that could even hurt the government’s cases.

UPDATE: McCarthy updates us on the Ghailani trial and what the government’s approach is.

Michigan Federal Judge Upholds ObamaCare’s Mandate

A federal judge in Michigan ruled in favor of ObamaCare in one of the challenges to the law’s mandate to buy insurance. While the case will likely be appealed, there are still several other big cases challenging the law, such as the ones in Florida and Virginia. The decision to uphold the mandate was based on the Commerce Clause of the Constitution.

The question some are now considering is what the government could not regulate if the Commerce Clause could allow the government to regulate “economic decisions,” which include the choice to not participate in a particular “economic activity.”

Read some of the various analysis at Volokh here, here, here, and here. One thing that seems to be agreed upon is that the district courts will not make the ultimate decision on this issue. It’s likely that circuit courts will take on these cases, and that the Supreme Court might have the final judgment. Also, it is becoming clear that the challengers to the mandate indeed have standing in these lawsuits.

ObamaCare Means More Politics Determining Healthcare

Remember the story we picked up on about Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats pulling strings for a donor to get access to an unapproved drug? It highlighted how politics could trump the typical rules and regulations in healthcare decisions. With the government’s role in healthcare growing, thanks to ObamaCare, we can probably count on more political decisions.

Take the compliance with new insurance regulations, for example. I have pointed out recent problems with meeting the Medical Loss Ratio of ObamaCare, and specifically mentioned the high-profile McDonald’s case. It turns out that the Obama administration is granting plenty of waivers already for employers and insurers who are warning about dropped coverage. Is it because the rules and criteria have been carefully crafted and these particular employers meet that criteria? The article explains:

Nancy-Ann DeParle, the director of the Office of Health Reform at the White House, acknowledged that the concessions given to companies and insurers reflected attempts to avoid having people lose their current coverage before the full law goes into effect while meeting the aim of improving that coverage.

That’s a no. The reason these waivers are being granted is to avoid the damaging political stories about companies dropping insurance coverage, especially during an election year. This means that insurance decisions are being made based not on who is able and willing to pay, but based on politics.

Expect more of this.

ObamaCare’s Bad News for Doctors, Employers, Employees, Insurers, Students, Medicaid, and Medicare

As ObamaCare is implemented and new rules have recently come into effect, there has been bad news across the board. Name the stakeholder, and the story is bad. Let’s go down the line:

• A study reported last week says that the doctor shortage will increase by 50% by 2015 thanks to ObamaCare.
• A report about a McDonald’s memo made waves last week, as the memo suggested McDonald’s is considering dropping insurance plans for low-wage employees due to ObamaCare’s Medical Loss Ratio requirements. There have been several conflicting reports about McDonald’s plans, but the story highlights the trouble of MLR compliance and the lack of clarity about the rules.
• One large insurer announced it is dropping its Medicare Advantage plan, and another is dropping health insurance altogether. Both have to do with healthcare reform, and the latter is evidence of how smaller insurers will be squeezed out of the market because of new regulations, therefore decreasing competition, which could then increase prices.
• Medicaid spending growth for fiscal year 2010 has reportedly exceeded forecasts. Part of that is due to the recession, but don’t forget that Medicaid has been expanded by the Democrats, and ObamaCare will only increase the burden with further expansion.
• Colleges are unsure if they will be able to continue to offer low-cost plans to students, since those plans may not comply with ObamaCare’s rules.
• A Washington Post article suggested that Medicare prescription drug subsidies for the doughnut hole could lead to higher drug prices.
• While the government is claiming that Medicare premiums will drop, we’re finding out that the reason is that benefits are being cut and cost is simply being shifted from premiums to co-pays and deductibles. Pressure on insurers has many people predicting that more insurers will drop coverage in coming year.

So where is the good news? I guess we could keep telling ourselves that millions of uninsured will gain coverage, but it’s obvious that even such a gain as that does not tell the full story. The news is so bad that even popular West Virginia Democrat Governor Joe Manchin is calling for partial repeal of the law as part of his Senate campaign. About the only bipartisan consensus for ObamaCare these days is that it’s bad medicine.