Supreme Court on the Health Care Reform Law & the Ryan (Republican) Budget

In my last post "Control of the Weather (Discussion II)," I said that I would postpone my discussion entitled “It’s All About Race” because the comments on my previous post were still coming in, and I wanted to share that discussion. Now I feel I have to postpone the discussion on race again, because there have been developments that I cannot ignore.

On the politicized and run away Supreme Court I concluded in my last post with the following observation:

When we know how a justice will rule by which party appointed him/her, then it is an extension of the party, and no longer a judicial forum.

The seriousness of the politicalization of the Supreme Court is now put into the bright spotlight by President Ronald Reagan’s Solicitor General, Charles Fried, who makes these cogent observations. To get the full import of these observations one needs to read the whole interview, which can be found here. But here are some telling quotes:

Justice John Marshall said in 1824 is that if something is within the power of Congress, Congress may exercise that power to its fullest extent. So the question is really whether this is in the power of Congress. 

Now, is it within the power of Congress? Well, the power of Congress is to regulate interstate commerce. Is health care commerce among the states? Nobody except maybe Clarence Thomas doubts that. So health care is interstate commerce. Is this a regulation of it? Yes. End of story….

The other thing is I think it’s Justice Kennedy who said this fundamentally changes the relationship of the citizen to the government. That’s an appalling piece of phony rhetoric. There is an important change between the government and the system. It was put in place in 1935, with Social Security. And it said everyone has to pay into a retirement fund, and an unemployment fund. It was done when Medicare came in the ’60s. That’s a fundamental change. But this? This is simply a rounding out in a particular area of a relation between the citizen and the government that’s been around for 70 years…. 

Politics, politics, politics. You look at the wonderful decision by Jeff Sutton, who is as much of a 24-karat gold conservative as anyone could be. He is a godfather to the Federalist Society. Look at his opinion. Or look at Larry Silberman’s opinion. I don’t understand what’s gotten into people. Well, I do I’m afraid, but it’s politics, not anything else. 

And so the Supreme Court has gone from anointing the President of the United States in Bush v. Gore, to throwing out all restraints on the influence of money in politics in Citizens United v. FEC, to deciding that Congress my not legislate anything that its Party doesn’t want.

Is this the end of Democracy, as we have known it? I hope not, but I fear that it may be.

But this is only one area where the extremity of the Tea Party-dominated Republican Party can be surmised.

The Ryan budget, which has been endorsed by Republican Congressional leaders and by the presumptive nominee, Mitt Romney, clearly tells us where they want to take the country. It is the most radical and dishonest budget ever proposed by a major party.

First unlike the first Ryan budget, which by its own figures never approached any attempt to balance the budget. “Mr. Ryan's (first) plan added (by its own claims) $6 trillion to the national debt over the next decade…” See here and here.

This new one, which passed the House with 10 Republican defections and not a single Democratic vote, does claim to balance the budget. But it is not clear when or how. I have spent hours searching the web for this information. Those discussions I have been able to find charge that the Ryan budget would add trillions to the debt. 

The only place I have been able to find an analysis is in a 98 page document put out by Ryan in PDF format, which for those who want to read all or part can be found here. The most relevant page in that document is page 75 which you can find here. It states: “The non-partisan CBO estimates that this budget will balance and begin to produce annual surpluses by 2040, and it will start paying down the national debt after that.” But this is an outright lie!!! I cannot find any CBO evaluation of this budget. Nor could they evaluate it, since the budget talks about eliminating many tax expenditures (also known as tax exemptions) but does not set forth what they are to be. How a bill can even call itself a budget, when it has no specificity on where and how money is to be raised, is a mystery. But they call it a serious budget. It says: “Relative to the President’s budget, this Budget shows more than $3 trillion in lower deficits over the next ten years.” Where does the money to be obtained from elimination of tax deduction exclusions, or exemptions to come from? Which are to be eliminated. The so-called budget doesn’t say.

What it does say are generalized claims that are not backed up by any specifics. But specifics are what the CBO and the American Public are entitled to. Where will the money from deleting tax expenditures come from. Which budget items are to be reduced and by how much, and what would the real world consequences of such cuts be? Does it provide money for our space program? What happens to future generations of people, who are not yet 55, my children and yours, my grandchildren and yours? What does it do to our infrastructure – of the needed bridge repairs to bridges that are falling down? What does it do to education? What happens to early childhood education, to Pell Grants for College students? What about Medicaid? Ryan says we can’t afford to pay for these things. Instead of raising more revenue, he says, we need to reduce revenue, to make sure that we can’t afford these things. Our present taxes are way below where they were under Ronald Reagan. Why don’t we return to the Reagan tax system? They laud Reagan, but will they adopt his level of taxation?

Let us take page 17 which you can find here. This deals with defense. Item one on this page is not controversial, but the security of the US is provided for by many factors not only by the size of the defense budget. Item two “…defense is not the driver of the debt burden.” This is kind of strange – it seems self evident that any expenditure as well as any cut in revenue adds to the debt. It is absurd to say that an expenditure, whether desirable or not, does not add to the debt. In the next paragraph he (Ryan) states the “The President … imposes nearly $500 billion in defense cuts over the next decade.” “The President imposes”? Just as Romney can’t repeal laws passed by Congress, the President can’t impose defense cuts. Congress does that. See here.

The $500 billion sequester in the Defense appropriation was provided for in the Budget Control Act of 2011, which passed the House by a vote of 269-161 with 147 Republicans voting for it. It passed the Senate by a vote of 74-26 with 55 Republicans voting for it.

The Romney/Ryan axis seeks to gut the present and the future of the United States, in order to increase the wealth of the wealthiest at the expense of everyone else. What kind of a future will we have for our economy without an educated work force, and with consumers too poor to provide the purchasing power that drives the economy. Are we going to attempt to be an export economy? But even that isn’t going to work without enlarging our ports to service the large ships that are becoming the future vessels of the world.

But how radical is the agenda. It repudiates not just Franklin Roosevelt; it repudiates past Republican Administrations. This is a whole new kettle of fish. Listen to a representative of the Cato Institute talk about past Republican Administrations. See here where you can get both the video and the transcript. 

Judy Woodruff: “(Obama) is suggesting that what Paul Ryan is suggesting is much farther right than even these other Republican presidents, what they've done."

Daniel Mitchell: "Well, that's because both Nixon and Bush were both big-government interventionists."

If these Republicans were both big-government interventionists, what about Eisenhower who built our Highway system, or for that matter Reagan who did not hesitate to increase taxes to deal with our then deficit and who saved Social Security instead of ending it for those under 55.

This Republican Party has little in common with the policies of past ones. It is a wrecking crew.

As for the claim of class warfare, is it class warfare to resist polices that would enrich the upper-upper classes at the expense of the middle classes and the poor, a trend already underway, but which the Ryan/Romney policies would expedite.

It should be remembered that the last time class was mentioned it was when Franklin Roosevelt was accused of “Being a traitor to his class.” Isn’t’ that class-warfare? But the real class warfare is the insistent demand that we keep re-distributing wealth upward.

Last, but not least, I recommend to the reader an article which appears in The New Yorker titled "Call That A Budget?" 

Comments, questions, or corrections, are welcome and will be responded to and distributed with attribution, unless the writer requests that he/she not be identified.