Freedom Line Blog

In my column this week, I look at the controversy surrounding the VA scandal. As I note, it presents a problem for liberals, who can’t rationalize this failure on ideological grounds the same way that they did with Benghazi or the IRS. As the always astute Byron York notes today in the Washington Examiner, left-wing ideology may also play a role in whether or not VA Secretary Eric Shinseki loses his job over the debacle:

The retired general has for years been a particular hero to Obama’s supporters on the left for his conflict with the George W. Bush administration during the run-up to the war in Iraq.

In early 2003, as the U.S. was planning the invasion, Shinseki angered his superiors in the Pentagon and White House by saying he believed victory and post-war stabilization in Iraq would require far more U.S. troops than President Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld were planning to deploy. “Something on the order of several hundred thousand soldiers are probably, you know, a figure that would be required,” Shinseki told Congress in February 2003.

…

By [2007], Shinseki had become a legend to anti-war liberals, and all the more so by December 2008, when President-Elect Obama was choosing his cabinet. “By tapping Mr. Shinseki to run the VA, [Obama] has provided a sop to the left,” wrote the lefty blogger Steve Kornacki, now an MSNBC personality, when Shinseki’s appointment was announced. A poster at the leftist website DailyKos had a shorter reaction: “Hallelujah!” Even though Shinseki was not chosen for the military policy position some had hoped for him, the reaction to his appointment showed the enduring gratitude of many on the anti-war left.

This is, of course, an indefensible rationale for keeping someone in a position where they’re failing. Shinseki should be judged for present performance, not past positions.

That said, I’m ambivalent on the question of whether the VA Secretary should be given his walking papers. President Obama, like President Bush before him, is not inclined to reflexively fire people because of bad press. That can be a good instinct if it means you’re more concerned with actually solving problems than just creating the image of responsiveness for the press. But therein lies the problem.

Who serves as Secretary of Veterans Affairs is a lot less important than the makeup of the system they’re presiding over. Whether it’s Shinseki or someone else, they’ll still be responsible for managing a gargantuan single-payer health care bureaucracy. It’s a similar dynamic to the Department of Health and Human Services — don’t expect much to change because Kathleen Seblius is gone. The underlying policies and infrastructure remain the same. Whoever sits behind the desk is little more than a captive to the administrative behemoth.

Should Shinseki get the boot? I don’t know and I’m not sure it makes much of a difference. What would really help would be upending the entire process — for example, giving veterans vouchers for their health care, which would allow the federal government to still finance their treatment without actually providing it. John McCain recently suggested that step (as did Mitt Romney in 2012 — when he was pilloried for it). At the time, it was decried as inhumane. Anyone who wants to know what real inhumanity looks like ought to visit the VA in Phoenix.

Below is one of the latest cartoons from two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Ramirez.

View more of Michael Ramirez’s cartoons on CFIF’s website here.

Fed up with a dysfunctional health exchange operated by Xerox, Nevada officials voted to terminate the contract and transfer responsibility to the federal government.

Apparently, spending $75 million to enroll about one-fourth the number of people initially projected convinced Nevada to throw in the towel.

Nevada joins Oregon, Maryland and Massachusetts as states who have scrapped their original state-based exchanges because of exceedingly poor performance.

The next domino to fall may be Hawaii, whose ObamaCare exchange – the Hawaii Health Connector – has registered just 8,500 people but needs at least 150,000 enrollees to ensure the program is self-sustaining.

Not surprisingly, Hawaiian officials are already being pressured to shut it down.

Amid all the legitimate privacy concerns with ObamaCare’s regulatory apparatus – in particular the proposed data hub that allows agencies like the IRS, Social Security Administration and HHS to share reams of information about individual citizens with each other, states and insurance companies – it’s been taken for granted that the liberals in charge of this grand social experiment at least had the technical competency to build the necessary infrastructure.

But the facts say otherwise.

“Of the roughly 8 million Americans now signed up for coverage this year under the health care law, about 5.5 million are in the federal insurance exchange,” reports the Washington Post. “And according to internal documents, more than half of them – about 3 million – have an application containing at least one kind of inconsistency.”

The Post says the most frequent inconsistency is a discrepancy in the income reported on an ObamaCare application and the income reported to the IRS. This type of inconsistency is present on between 1.1 million and 1.5 million applications. To their credit, citizens have sent in “about 650,000 pieces of ‘proof’” to justify their asserted income.

Because of the level of detail required when filling out the 20-plus page ObamaCare application, it’s no surprise many people mistakenly enter something wrong; especially when considering that most people get help on their taxes from either a certified professional or software that easily finds all the right deductions. Neither option was readily available to the vast majority of ObamaCare applicants.

What is astonishing, however, is the federal government’s complete inability to process and verify corrections digitally. “Because the computer capability does not yet exist, the work will start by hand, according to two people familiar with the plans,” says the Post. (Emphasis added)

ObamaCare subsidies are the essential ingredient for claiming that ObamaCare insurance is “affordable” since they at least partially offset the increased cost of coverage. Failing to launch a website capable of verifying income claims that determine whether a person qualifies for subsidies is inexcusable.

If there is any silver lining to this latest blunder it’s that Serco – the federal contractor accused last week of billing HHS $1 billion while hiring employees literally to do nothing – is now on the hook for correcting the inconsistencies. Small comfort though, since apparently Serco gets paid based on the number of employees it hires rather than the efficiency of its work product. Requiring the company to sort paper applications by hand seems almost too awful to be true.

“According to a new report from S&P Capital IQ, 90 percent of American workers who receive health insurance from large companies will instead get coverage through ObamaCare’s exchanges by 2020,” writes Sally Pipes of the Pacific Research Institute.

Large companies are those that employ 10,000 workers or more. They cover 59 percent of the American workforce.

ObamaCare’s escalating barrage of mandates, fees and fines are estimated to extract “about $163 million to $200 million in additional cost per employer – or $4,800 to $5,900 per employee,” says Pipes. Compared to the $2,000 per employee fine for not offering health insurance, large employers will in effect be forced to dump workers on ObamaCare exchanges to stay profitable.

There are many aspects of ObamaCare that defy easy explanation, but this much is clear – Forcing large employers who want to provide health insurance to their employees to pay more than twice the price of compliance just doesn’t pencil.

The only financially sensible thing to do – from a company’s perspective – is to shove workers onto taxpayer-funded exchanges. That may keep the firm afloat, but it will only add to the federal government’s fiscal problems.

Join CFIF Corporate Counsel and Senior Vice President Renee Giachino today from 4:00 p.m. CDT to 6:00 p.m. CDT (that’s 5:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. EDT) on Northwest Florida’s 1330 AM WEBY, as she hosts her radio show, “Your Turn: Meeting Nonsense with Commonsense.”  Today’s guest lineup includes:

4:00 CDT/5:00 pm EDT —  Professor John Yoo, Boalt Hall UC Berkeley School of Law and former deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel at the U.S. Department of Justice: Point of Attack:  Preventive War, International Law, and Global Welfare;

4:30 CDT/5:30 EDT —  Marita Noon, Executive Director for Energy Makes America Great:  Environmental Shakedown;

5:00 CST/6:00 pm EDT —  Caitlin Poling, Director of Government Relations:  Boko Haram and Terrorism in Africa;  and

5:30 CDT/6:30 pm EDT —  Alexandra Aldrich, heir to the Astor legacy:  “The Astor Orphan: A Memoir.”

Listen live on the Internet here.   Call in to share your comments or ask questions of today’s guests at (850) 623-1330.

Remember that “War on Women” meme that Democrats keep throwing at Republicans?

Well, it turns out ObamaCare’s employer mandate – by requiring that businesses with 50 or more employees purchase medical insurance for everyone that works 30 hours or more – incentivizes shifting to a part-time labor force.

“This has a negative effect on women,” says Corie Whalen of Generation Opportunity, “because 57 percent of part-time workers are female. When companies are forced to cut hours and there’s more competition for part-time work, women, especially single mothers, suffer.”

ObamaCare makes it harder for single working mothers to support their families. How’s that for a War on Women?

It might surprise many people to learn that Switzerland has no minimum wage, as The Wall Street Journal reports:

Switzerland will decide Sunday whether the country’s workforce should get something it has never had before:  a minimum wage.  On May 18, the Alpine nation will vote on an initiative to introduce a minimum wage of 22 Swiss francs ($25) an hour, a level that would be the highest in the world.”

But note the remarkably low Swiss unemployment rate:

Switzerland has an enviably low unemployment rate of 3.2%, but Boris Zuercher, head of the Swiss labor office, said the proposal would hurt the people it is designed to help if it makes it too expensive to hire low-skilled job seekers.”

So no minimum wage, low unemployment, and a famously high standard of living.  The Swiss example is obviously something that domestic proponents of a minimum wage increase, including Barack Obama, should internalize.

Senik:  Liberal Insanity on Mental Health
Lee:  While IRS Scandal Deepens, Liberals Undertake a Rewrite of the First Amendment
Ellis:  ObamaCare Exchanges Wasting Huge Sums of Taxpayer Money

Video:  The Respect Our Veterans Deserve
Podcast:  Conservatism’s Disagreements with Progressivism
Jester’s Courtroom:  Here We Go Again 

Editorial Cartoons:  Latest Cartoons of Michael Ramirez
Quiz:  Question of the Week
Notable Quotes:  Quotes of the Week

If you are not already signed up to receive CFIF’s Liberty Update by e-mail, sign up here.

Below is one of the latest cartoons from two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Ramirez.

View more of Michael Ramirez’s cartoons on CFIF’s website here.

“Nearly one-third of California’s total population – roughly 11.5 million people – will be enrolled in Medi-Cal next year, according to Gov. Jerry Brown’s administration,” reports the L.A. Times.

“Enrollment is expected to exceed previous estimates by 1.4 million, and administration officials said it would cost the state $1.2 billion more than originally thought.”

Brown’s health policy czar calls the jump in enrollment part of the “woodworking effect;” meaning that the media’s attention on ObamaCare’s insurance exchanges enticed many people to sign up, only to find out they already qualified for Medi-Cal (California’s name for its Medicaid program).

Readers may recall that ObamaCare expands eligibility for Medicaid into higher income brackets. To get states to go along, ObamaCare pays for all of the new spending associated with covering these new enrollees (at least until 2017). But for those who would have qualified under the old system – where states contribute 50 cents to every dollar spent – the state gets no relief.

This is the scenario California finds itself in as officials head into the budget negotiation season needing to find an additional $1.4 billion they didn’t plan for.

Ever the populist, Brown is reframing Sacramento’s miscalculation as a case of voters needing to fund their good intentions. “I’m proud we did it,” referring to the expansion as “a huge social commitment on the part of the taxpayers of California.” “But we also have to take into account this thing is growing.”

In an interview with CFIF, Timothy Sandefur, Principal Attorney at the Pacific Legal Foundation, discusses the conflict between an individual’s right to freedom and the power of the majority to govern, economic liberty and his latest book, “The Conscience of the Constitution: The Declaration of Independence and the Right to Liberty.”

Listen to the interview here.

The U.S. Senate’s Tea Party caucus will soon get a lot of Sasse.

Ben Sasse, that is.

Last night the 42 year old president of Midland University won the Nebraska GOP’s U.S. Senate primary election with 48 percent of the vote in a four-way race.

In deep-red Nebraska, Sasse is expected to win the November general election easily, and take his persona as a conservative health policy wonk with him.

Running hard against ObamaCare, Sasse convinced Republican primary voters that his background in health policy (Assistant Secretary at HHS under George W. Bush), his stint as a top flight business consultant for McKinsey and his turnaround success at Midland qualify him to work alongside the likes of other conservative reformers like Mike Lee of Utah, Ted Cruz of Texas, Marco Rubio of Florida and Rand Paul of Kentucky.

And like most of these, Sasse has ruffled some establishment feathers along the way. He angered Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky by accepting the endorsement and financial support of the Senate Conservatives Fund – a political action group that is helping McConnell’s primary opponent.

Winning changes everything though. Yesterday as it became apparent Sasse would win, he pledged to support McConnell as Leader, and McConnell’s camp reciprocated with some mostly nice words of encouragement.

If both Sasse and McConnell make it to the Senate in 2015, expect them to work well together.

For those unfamiliar with Sasse, a profile some months ago in the Weekly Standard provides excellent background reading.

Even if Sasse wins and retains Nebraska’s seat for the GOP, Republicans still need to capture 6 Democrat-held seats to win control of the U.S. Senate.

If that happens, expect Sasse to be the most visible and vocal freshman since, well, his soon-to-be Senate Tea Party colleagues.

In last week’s Liberty Update, we debunked the claim by the Obama Administration, its Democratic Congressional apologists and the mainstream media that the Benghazi scandal is something about which Americans just don’t care.  According to a Rasmussen survey released last week, 51% say that the Benghazi affair merits further investigation, while just 34% disagree:

One can only imagine survey data on the matter if the media had bothered to cover it as it deserves.  Or, perhaps more to the point, if a Republican president presided over the attack and political coverup.  Nevertheless, it’s an encouraging sign that the American public not only expresses concern, but prefers continued investigation.  That should encourage Congressional leaders and media to get to the bottom of this important matter.”

Today, there’s more encouraging news in that regard.  Rasmussen also reports that a clear majority of Americans also say the ongoing IRS/Lois Lerner scandal merits further investigation:

Half of voters still believe the IRS broke the law when it targeted Tea Party and other conservative groups, and even more think the matter needs to be looked into further.  A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 57% of likely U.S. voters think the Obama administration’s handling of the IRS matter merits further investigation.  Just half as many (28%) say the case should be closed.  Fifteen percent (15%) are not sure.”

Both Benghazi and the IRS persecution of conservative groups are critical matters, and Americans shouldn’t allow the Administration to bury them.  Fortunately, that’s not the case, which should encourage the media and members of Congress to pursue the truth in both cases in a responsible, thorough, public manner.

By now you may have heard about Charlie Crist saying he left the Florida Republican Party because of racism.

The former Florida Republican Governor and one-time U.S. Senate candidate rationalized his switch to the Democratic Party this way: “I couldn’t be consistent with myself and my core beliefs, and stay with a party that was so unfriendly toward the African-American president, I’ll just go there. I was a Republican and I saw the activists and what they were doing, it was intolerable to me.”

In reality, what really pushed Crist into the Democratic Party was a 40 point swing in his poll numbers relative to a Republican state representative named Marco Rubio.  In the 2010 GOP U.S. Senate primary, Rubio pummeled Crist with the latter’s liberal gubernatorial record. Crist’s anti-conservative tendencies included voting to increase state spending, appointing liberal justices to the state supreme court and vetoing legislation to link teacher pay to student test scores. All this and Crist still claimed in a debate with Rubio that, “I think we can both agree we’re both good conservatives.”

As liberal pundit Chris Cillizza explains, Crist’s party switch was driven by the failure of his actions to align with GOP orthodoxy, not racism. And lest we forget, Florida Republicans voted for the Hispanic Rubio over the Anglo Crist; hardly the result one would expect if racial considerations dominate GOP thinking.

Fundamentally, Crist is dogged by skepticism that he has any core principles worth fighting for. That, and not some imaginary racial bias, is what made Florida GOP voters reject his bid to go to Washington. Now that Crist is seeking his old job as governor under the Democratic label, Sunshine State liberals should be equally as suspicious of statements that seem to align with their ideology. As Crist has proven time and again, he’ll say anything to get elected.

In an interview with CFIF, Allen Dickerson, Legal Director at the Center for Competitive Politics, discusses why the California Attorney General’s demand for the list of supporters to a non-profit organization damages freedom of association, violates the clear terms of a federal tax law and ignores the Supremacy Clause of the United States Constitution.

Listen to the interview here.

Lee:  New Poll: Majority Favors Further Investigation of Benghazi
Senik:  Are the Rich to Blame for America’s Problems?
Ellis:  California Considers Voluntary Per-Mile Tax Program on Motorists

Podcast:  Donor Disclosure Requirements Infringe on First Amendment Rights
Jester’s Courtroom:  Fan Files Lawsuit for Economic Discrimination 

Editorial Cartoons:  Latest Cartoons of Michael Ramirez
Quiz:  Question of the Week
Notable Quotes:  Quotes of the Week

If you are not already signed up to receive CFIF’s Liberty Update by e-mail, sign up here.

A CNBC report says that multiple states now operating an ObamaCare exchange could decide the costs are unsustainable and relinquish control to Healthcare.gov, the exchange run by the federal government.

The reasons are multiplying. Oregon decided to shutter its woebegone website after spending $248 million and failing to enroll a single person online. Massachusetts is abandoning its software program, but if its replacement isn’t ready to launch by the next enrollment period in November it plans to default to Healthcare.gov. Colorado and Rhode Island are trying to figure out how to make their exchanges financially viable once federal subsidies run out. And at least one expert thinks Nevada and Hawaii may also decide to let the feds be responsible for continuing IT updates and rules changes.

But it’s not like the once foundering Healthcare.gov is experiencing smooth sailing. Recent testimony before Congress confirmed the existence of duplicate enrollments that cast doubt on the Obama administration’s overall enrollment claims.

“Due to website glitches, some individuals may have enrolled multiple times,” explains the Illinois Policy Institute. “For example, if there are three people with one enrollment each and one person with two enrollments, the government will report this as five total enrollments. If the first three people paid for each of their policies and the fourth person paid for one policy, the insurer will report 100 percent payment. In this way, the government numbers may be further overstating enrollments.”

And with it, Healthcare.gov’s ability to handle the increased responsibility for processing many more people.

From the New York Times:

WASHINGTON — The House of Representatives voted on Wednesday to hold Lois Lerner, a former Internal Revenue Service official accused by Republicans of abusing power, in contempt, laying bare the bitter divide over which much of the midterm elections will be fought.

…

Separately, the House approved a resolution calling on Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate allegations that the I.R.S. targeted Tea Party groups.

Then there are the accusations of a cover-up. On Thursday the House is expected to approve a resolution to establish a select committee to investigate the fatal 2012 attack on American facilities in Benghazi, Libya. Republicans accuse the White House and Hillary Rodham Clinton, the former secretary of state, of repeatedly lying about what set off the killings and the United States’ response to them.

…

Democrats mocked their Republican colleagues. “It is a circus,” said Representative Jackie Speier of California. “Psychologists will tell you that when somebody says something is not, it clearly is.”

Before the vote on Ms. Lerner, Representative Elijah E. Cummings, Democrat of Maryland, listed what the investigation has yielded so far: $14 million spent by the I.R.S. responding to a stream of requests from Congress, and hundreds of thousands of pages of documents. “After all of that, we have not found any evidence of White House involvement,” he said. “I will not walk a path that has been treaded by Senator Joseph McCarthy.”

Now, put aside whatever suspicions you have about the White House for a moment and just deal with the facts. At a bare minimum, this is what we know: First, the IRS — violating the essential trust invested in it to be a neutral arbiter of the law —  went out of its way to shut a segment of Americans out of the political process during an election year on the basis of their convictions. Second, four Americans, including an ambassador, were murdered by terrorists and senior Administration officials continued to push a false narrative about what happened well after any confusion regarding the intelligence had been cleared up — also, by the way, in an election year.

You don’t need a conspiracy in either one of these cases — the facts, on their face, are damning enough. These are failures of the core functions of government. The idea that any elected official would mock efforts to understand what happened — or clutch their pearls in faux-distress — is appalling. (Though Rep. Speier’s quote is unintentionally hilarious given that her second sentence nullifies her first).

It’s also rich of Rep. Cummings — who himself seems to have been a player in the IRS scandal — to object to the cost and difficulty of the investigation. Since when does Cummings — a reliable vote for every spending increase and bureaucratic make-work project known to man — have compunctions about the cost or burdens of government? Millions for subsidies, but not one cent for justice!

Principled Democrats could do themselves and their party a favor by taking these investigations seriously, even if they are less suspicious of the Administration than their conservative colleagues. Serious matters of state are at stake. Instead, members of the party increasingly seem to be closing ranks around the White House. Voters should remember this allegiance to the powerful over the people come November.

Today, Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) unveiled his fourth cataloguing of the Obama administration’s abuses of power.

Among the 76 instances described, the Daily Caller spotlights eight that show the range and depth of the executive department’s dereliction of duty:

1.    “Obama implemented portions of the DREAM Act by executive action”

2.    “Ended some terror asylum restrictions”

3.    “Recognized same sex marriage in Utah despite a Supreme Court stay on a court order allowing the institution”

4.    “Illegally revealed the existence of sealed indictments in the Benghazi investigation”

5.    “Illegally delayed ObamaCare verification of eligibility for healthcare subsidies”

6.    “Ordered Boeing to fire 1,000 employees in South Carolina and shut down a new factory because it was non-union”

7.    “Terminated the pensions of 20,000 non-union Delphi employees in the GM bankruptcy”

8.    “Government agencies are engaging in ‘Operation Choke Point,’ where the government asks banks to ‘choke off’ access to financial services for customers engaging in conduct the Administration does not like – such as ‘ammunition sales.’”

As this partial listing makes clear, good luck finding an example where the Obama administration has flouted the law to favor conservatives and obstruct liberals.

Download the full report (pdf) here.