Replacing Obamacare Would Be Tough

Dougherty urges the GOP to come up with a real Obamacare alternative:

If Republicans want to avoid the fate of other center-right parties in Europe that become mere budget-fixers on national health systems, they have to be much more united on their strategy than they are now. A gigantic GOP-led reform could lead to the same electoral disasters that befell Democrats after they passed the ACA, and fear of losing power could easily translate into a drift towards single-payer. ObamaCare required the incredible courage of President Obama, as well as many of his more awkward and embarrassing legislative buyouts, like the Cornhusker Kickback and Louisiana Purchase. Republicans are going to need a president and legislative leadership with at least as much mettle as he had.

But Ezra doesn’t think Republicans are up for it:

[U]pheaval in the health-care system typically makes for terrible politics. Democrats learned that the hard way with the Affordable Care Act. Republicans would likely learn it double if they made a serious effort to repeal, replace, or overhaul Obamacare. This is the central problem for conservative health reformers: because Republicans don’t care that much about health reform and because so much of what health reform demands offends conservative sensibilities or constituencies, the party doesn’t want to make the sacrifices necessary to unite behind an alternative to Obamacare, much less actually pass and implement it.

Why I’m Jittery About SCOTUS On Marriage, Ctd

A reader quotes me:

You have here a Burkean defense of federalism – something that will very much appeal to Anthony Kennedy, it seems to me. The problem, however, is that the pace of change has quickened so much after Windsor that Sutton is already out-dated. It’s now 36 states, not 19, representing 70 percent of the population, not 45. So his analogy to sodomy laws rather evaporates. If sodomy was upheld as a legitimate zone of privacy, when only 13 states retained such laws, why could not marriage for all couples be upheld as a constitutional right, when only 14 states ban it?

However, you ignore the critical qualifier in Sutton’s formulation: “Freed of federal-court intervention, thirty-one States would continue to define marriage the old-fashioned way.”  The nineteen states got to marriage equality through actions of their citizens, their legislatures, their state courts or some combination of those bodies. As for the “change after Windsor,” the 17 other states that now observe marriage equality do so because federal courts have imposed it on them by extrapolating (primarily from Windsor) to determine what they thought SCOTUS would say. Now, apparently, SCOTUS will speak for itself, and we will find out how heavily Kennedy weighs the concept of federalism in relation to the other factors involved.

Agreed. But civil marriages have already occurred in those seventeen other states, facts on the ground that will be impossible to move. That’s a tough one to suddenly reverse. Several other readers lend their commentary:

I have to chime in here and go back to first principles.

I am well aware that the cultural shift in attitudes about gay marriage is going to be a huge factor in how the Court thinks about this issue, but it really is irrelevant.  If a majority of states are already on board, it certainly makes it easier for the Court, but it’s not properly part of the analysis.  This is a straight-forward equal protection issue.

The whole idea that States have historically defined marriage and so it’s an issue that properly belongs to the States to regulate misses the entire point.  The fact is, States don’t need to be issuing marriage licenses at all.  But if a State is going to regulate marriage (and it doesn’t have to), it must do so in accordance with the Equal Protection Clause.  Full stop.

What other states are doing, how popular the issue now is, how Americans in general feel about it is all irrelevant.  When two Americans walk into a government office and ask the State to issue them a license, they must be treated the same as all others who might walk in and ask for the same license.  There are relatively few legitimate bases to make Equal Protection distinctions built on gender, and so far, no court that has actually addressed that issue has found that those distinctions are justified here.  “We’ve been doing it this way forever” is simply not a legitimate excuse. (I’m looking at you, slavery.)

I say it goes 6-3 (although it should be unanimous).  Scalia is just an intellectually dishonest fraud and always has been and won’t vote for this based on a ludicrous originalist analysis.  And Alito won’t vote for it because his personal commitment to conservative positions simply won’t allow him to exercise proper judicial independence.  And Thomas?  Pffft.  I say Kennedy and Roberts are on board, and Roberts authors it because he knows full well history will judge it as one of the most important cases to come out of the Roberts Court, if not the most important.

And if Roberts is smart, it will be a crisp 7-10 page opinion that will make Scalia’s unhinged, caterwauling, 40-page dissent look like the deranged drivel that it is. If there is anything to be worried about here, it’s the little nuggets Roberts tucks into the opinion that actually restrict Equal Protection that he and the conservatives will plan to rely on in future cases.  I fully expect some of that here.  It’s just part of the judicial backroom deal making that goes on in any appellate court.

I sure hope our reader is right. Another quote of mine:

But what about the states’ rights argument? If public opinion is moving so fast, why not let federalism take its course? That’s my worry. Could Kennedy fashion a ruling that keeps marriage equality in those states that already have it, allow the minority to retain bans, but insist that any valid civil gay marriage in one state be recognized in any other? I don’t know how constitutionally you could do this – but I don’t doubt figuring out a balance between federalism and civil rights is what Kennedy (and maybe Roberts) will be assessing. A non-Fourteenth Amendment decision that nonetheless insisted on recognition, if not celebration, of same-sex marriages in every state might be a tempting middle way.

There is ample precedent for this “middle way” (this is not an endorsement, BTW).  The different states have long had different laws concerning age of consent, degree of kinship, and amount of formality needed to enter into or dissolve marriages.  Some states permit first cousins to marry, others do not.  Some states allow minors to marry, others make you wait until you are 18.  In some states you need a blood test, others have far less paperwork, and some still recognize common-law marriages.

But once you get married in one state (assuming an opposite sex relationship), you’re considered married in all; Oregon would not tell a pair of first cousins who married in California that their marriage is no longer valid when they cross Siskiyou Pass.

Divorce has been handled in the same way.  No matter how much New York State despised divorce during the mid 20th century, they were powerless to prevent their residents from travelling to Nevada (the first state with no-fault divorce laws) and getting their marriages dissolved, and then returning to the Empire State as two single persons.

This has long been the default position with marital law, and a big reason why the Defense of Marriage Act was passed in the first place: to nullify the effect of Full Faith and Credit Clause (which Congress has the power to regulate) when it comes to same-sex marriages.  Much as Windsor threw out the other half of DOMA (barring federal recognition of same sex marriages in states where it is legal), I could see the Court striking the rest of it, even if it lets states decline to perform such marriages directly.  The Court has already held that Congress was acting with animus to gays when it passed DOMA, and the Act is pretty explicit in targeting gays, so for the Court to preserve it in the face of a direct challenge would be a big surprise.  And could be done without attacking “federalism”, any more so than the Full Faith and Credit Clause already burdens states rights.

Well, we’ll see soon enough.

The Data Behind Radicalization

Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux passes along an effort to better understand the roots of extremism:

They’ve amassed a data set of more than 1,500 people radicalized to violent and non-violent extremism in the United States since World War II and put them into three categories: Islamist, Far Right, and Far Left. The database — which hasn’t been released publicly — has detailed information about the terrorists’ lives and backgrounds, including criminal records, social networks and histories of abuse. The researchers believe it’s among the first of its kind.

The results:

The preliminary findings of the study already have yielded some basic demographic patterns about which extremists in the U.S. are most likely to resort to violence.

Compared to violent domestic terrorists on the Far Left and Far Right, Islamists stand out. They’re more likely to be young (between 18 and 28 years old), unmarried and unassimilated into American society. They are also more likely to be actively recruited to an extremist group.

But in other important ways, Islamist extremists in the U.S. as a whole — violent and nonviolent — are not so different from other extremists. People in the three groups were equally likely to have become radicalized while serving time in prison — complicating the narrative that Muslim prisoners are unusually likely to commit to extremism from behind bars — and to be composed of individuals who have psychological issues, are loners, or have recently experienced “a loss of social standing.”

“Social networks are incredibly important to radicalization, but that’s not unique to Islamists at all,” [researcher Patrick] James said. “There’s almost always a facilitator — a personal relationship with a friend or family member who’s already made that leap.”

Throwing More Money At Students Won’t Help, Ctd

School Spending

Or at least not much, according to McArdle: 

That black bar represents total spending, and as you can see, we spend more on education than most of our peers, not less. To be sure, that is partly driven by our very high spending on tertiary education, aka college. But we spend more than most of our peers at most levels, not just on college.

She admits that “there is obviously an inequality problem in our schools”:

Should we fix the issues with those schools? Absolutely – and doing so might mean spending more money. But that doesn’t mean that we need to increase the overall level of educational funding. It means that we need to identify ways to improve those underperforming schools, then find out how much more it would cost to implement those programs. It is just as likely that improvements will come from changing methods and reallocating resources as that they will require us to pour more money into failing institutions.

However, Max Ehrenfreund flags new research indicating that more funding does make a significant difference:

Beginning 40 years ago, a series of court rulings forced states to reallocate money for education, giving more to schools in poor neighborhoods with less in the way of local resources.  … A new study on those who went to school during the school-finance cases a few decades ago found that those who attended districts that were affected by the rulings were more likely to stay in school through high school and college and are making more money today.

The authors, Kirabo Jackson and Claudia Persico of Northwestern University and Rucker Johnson of the University of California, Berkeley, released a revised draft of their as-yet-unpublished paper this week. The benefits were most obvious for students from poor families. They found that a 10 percent increase in the money available for each low-income student resulted in a 9.5 percent increase in students’ earnings as adults. A public investment in schools, they wrote, returned 8.9 percent annually for a typical pupil who started kindergarten in 1980.

Previous Dish on the subject here.

How Netanyahu Is Harming Israel

Michael Koplow spells it out:

It’s one thing to blame Netanyahu for bad relations with a president who will be out of office in two years; one can argue that this is a problem that will resolve itself with no residual effects. But if you view Netanyahu’s machinations in a larger context, by constantly and openly favoring the Republican Party – either himself or through Ron Dermer’s actions in Washington – he is putting Israel itself at long term risk by helping make it a wedge issue in American politics.

I constantly argue that Israel’s primacy of place in the U.S. is due to popular opinion, but the caveat there is that this only works when it is bipartisan popular opinion. Netanyahu’s actions, where he sides with the Republicans in a very exaggerated manner, are having a serious effect and eroding traditional cross-spectrum popular support for Israel, and once that passes a point of no return, Israel is going to have serious problems. I don’t place the blame for wavering support in the Democratic Party for Israel solely at Netanyahu’s feet by any means, but he is a big part of the problem and has stoked the fires at many points. The GOP has an obvious political interest in making Israel a full-fledged wedge issue and using it as a cudgel to hammer the Democrats as often as it can. The burning question for me is why Netanyahu is so willing to allow himself to be used in furthering this outcome when it is so obviously not in Israel’s interests.

What The Hell Is Happening In Yemen, Ctd

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IbU2rW37zKU&start=6&end=132]

Yesterday the Yemeni government resigned after essentially being under siege by the Houthi rebel group. Jamie Dettmer catches us up:

The straw that broke the camel’s back was the rebels’ failure to hand over one of the president’s senior aides, who had been snatched over the weekend and whose release was a key provision in the deal. The collective resignation came after days of turmoil in the Yemeni capital, Sana’a, where rebels stormed the presidential palace and then bombarded and surrounded the house [President Abdu Rabu Mansour] Hadi had taken refuge in. …

The stage now seems set for the outbreak of full-fledged sectarian civil war, one that al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the terror network’s most dangerous and capable affiliate, is likely to exploit for its advantage.

Adam Baron delves further into the chaos:

In the formerly independent South, longstanding calls for secession have grown even louder. Across the country, frustration seems mounting – both at the country’s power brokers and at the international actors that, until recently, had hailed the country’s political process as a model transition to democracy.

The next few days will unquestionably be crucial.  At writing time, Houthi fighters reportedly have the homes of many members of the now-resigned cabinet under siege. All eyes are set on Sunday’s meeting of the two houses of the Yemeni parliament, which could very well reject the president’s resignation, sending the country into further uncertainty. Indeed, little remains clear at the moment, except for the fact that the country is likely facing its most crucial juncture since the overthrow of the Mutawakkilite Monarchy on 26 September, 1962.

Nader Udowski points at Iran:

[I]t is not clear if the Huthis can be regarded as an Iranian proxy in the same way as Shia militias in Iraq and Syria. But they now depend on Iran to solidify their position in the country’s capital.

Events in Sanaa could most likely send the country into a full-fledged civil war, threatening a Syria-like disintegration of Yemen with different sects, tribes and groups fighting each other. The Zaydis, now in power in Sanaa, constitute only a third of Yemen’s population of 24 million, which is majority Sunni Muslim, in a predominantly tribal society. The Quds Force is expected to implement its successful Syrian and Iraqi tactics in Yemen: significant arms shipment; financial assistance; deployment of advisers and senior officers; providing training and strategic planning; and transforming some 50,000-strong Huthi fighting force into semi-official Shia militia to take the lead in military and security operations in the coming civil war.

But Bruce Riedel points out “the Zaydis are not Iranian pawns nor partners like Hezbollah. They are an independent force”, and Jeremy Scahill and Casey L. Coombs remind that Iran is a routine boogeyman in the region:

For years, the Yemeni government attempted to inflate Iran’s influence over the Houthis in the hopes of winning U.S. permission to use counterterrorism funds and assistance to fight the Houthis. According to diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks, senior Bush administration officials consistently rebuffed such requests from the Yemeni government, saying the U.S. government saw the battle against the Houthis as a domestic issue.

Complicating things further, Adam Taylor argues that the conflict isn’t so easily defined along sectarian lines:

Analysts say that the popular appeal of the Houthi insurgency can’t entirely be put down to sectarian factors. In a 2010 RAND Corporation report, the authors noted that “it is a conflict in which local material discontent and Zaydi identity claims have intersected with the state center’s methods of rule and self-legitimation.” That analysis was echoed by Silvana Toska, a Middle East researcher, last year, who noted that the Houthis were supported by “vast numbers of Yemenis who view them as a real opposition to the elites that is untainted by corruption.”

Unsurprisingly, Max Boot believes Obama should have done more to prevent the crisis:

The administration’s policy can be characterized as general lethargy and disengagement punctuated by periodic outbursts of carefully targeted violence. This is a policy that cannot possibly work, and it hasn’t. The administration hasn’t created the chaos that is gripping the Middle East — chaos that is a Petri dish for extremism — but it certainly hasn’t done much to stop it.

But Barbara Slavin reports the US might already be adapting:

[Senior US intelligence official Michael] Vickers, in response to a question from Al-Monitor, stated, “The Houthis are anti al-Qaeda, and we’ve been able to continue some of our counterterrorism operations against al-Qaeda in the past months.” Asked after the public event whether that included lines of intelligence ​to the Houthis, Vickers said, “That’s a safe assumption.”

She also spoke with Yemen expert Charles Schmitz, who elaborated on the potential for US-Houthi cooperation:

Many observers of the Houthis have been taken aback by their Iranian-style anti-US and anti-Israel slogans, which Schmitz rattled off: “Death to America, Death to Israel, Curse the Jews and Long Live Islam.” He said the slogans as voiced by the Houthis date to the 2003 US invasion of Iraq and their efforts to embarrass then-President Saleh by tarring him as an agent of the United States and Saudi Arabia. In fact, Schmitz said, the Houthis have generally not attacked Americans, although State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki confirmed reports that Houthi gunmen at a checkpoint in Sanaa had fired on a US diplomatic vehicle Jan. 19. There were no injuries, she said.

“They are not terrorists,” Schmitz said. He called the Houthis’ backing of US attacks on AQAP “an alliance of convenience.”

On Swearing, Ctd

Prospero peruses the subject:

Taboo words can survive underlying social change. Church attendance has plummeted over the past few decades in Quebec, but a distinctive clutch of swear-words in the local variety of French are still some of the roughest words in the language: chalice (calisse!) and “host” (hosti), for example. The words remain powerfully charged partly because they are simply learnt as taboo words, and serve a special function divorced from their original context.

Swearing activates a bit of the brain that is used for other kinds of emotional responses like shouting and crying. The reason it is so hard not to swear in front of a child when you stub your toe is that you haven’t consciously processed the words through the same part of the language engine that you would use to explain a maths problem. Studies have even shown that swearing makes physical pain more bearable. …

A last class of words, though not quite as powerful, fill out the picture.

Retarded in America, and spastic in Britain, once respectable medical words, are now unutterable in polite company. Throw in complaints against gay and lame as all-purpose negative adjectives, and the picture is complete. Taboo words have moved from the religious through the sexual and excretory. But in the modern West, the last truly shocking words are those that refer to disadvantaged groups: women, gays, members of racial minorities and those with disabilities. Those liberal newspaper editors who proudly reprinted offensive Muhammad cartoons from Charlie Hebdo out of solidarity with the slain cartoonists would never dream of using the words that slur people from Muslim countries: towelhead, camel jockey, Paki or (take a slow breath) sand nigger. Western taboos now respect neither god nor sex, but they do respect individuals. And this is as it should be.

Except for barbra streisand:

Previous Dish on swearing here and here. Update from a reader:

Prospero didn’t mention Quebec’s finest churchly swear word, Tabarnac (Tabernacle). It has the virtue that it can be drawn out into three long syllables, in the same manner as Muuuu tha fuk. Read all about swearing in the Distinct Society at Wikipedia.