Tea Party activists gathered in Washington today to protest health-care reform.

(The Washington Independent/Dave Weigel)

As Latoya Peterson notes for TAP, addressing the pay gap doesn't adequately address the difference in wealth, or assets minus debts, between women of all races and their male counterparts. Still, the pay gap is one of the causes of the almost total lack of wealth experienced by women of color. A bill called the Paycheck Fairness Act that would close some of the loopholes in the Equal Pay Act, which passed the House and is now sitting in the Senate. It would be better if it passed soon, in order to give families some recourse during the recession. Fatima Goss Graves, a vice president of the National Women's Law Center, says the bill is well-placed to move, and a hearing on the act last week was well attended.

The act would make it easier to discover pay disparities and to make claims against the businesses who discriminate them. The more studies published on how poorly women do financially, the more urgent and uncontroversial passing the bill seems.

-- Monica Potts

Ironically, Holder sounded least confident when defending the Obama administration's continued use of military commissions, noting that the commissions allow hearsay evidence but that “it doesn’t mean that you’re being unfair to the defendant; you’re simply looking at the particular forum that suits the particular facts of each case.” Nothing says "legitimacy" like forum-shopping for where you'll get the best result.

Classified information: Holder noted (as Spencer Ackerman reported last week) that the procedures for handling classified information in military commissions are based on the Classified Information Procedures Act, or CIPA, which governs the disclosure of such information in federal court. “The system that is in place in the military commissions is actually based on CIPA,” Holder noted.

Using trials as a platform: Holder noted that Aafia Siddiqui, who was recently tried in New York on terror-related charges, was removed from the courtroom after the first day because of her outbursts. “Article III Judges are used to dealing with people like this and know how to deal with them,” Holder said, adding that judges in military commissions "don’t feel as comfortable clamping down on a defendant who’s trying to do that.”

Civilian Trials for terrorists are a radical departure from Bush: Texas Rep. John Culberson asked Holder why one of the alleged Tanzania bombers, Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, was getting a civilian trial when he was a foreign national. Holder's response was to point out that the other conspirators had already been tried in civilian court, during the Bush administration.

Federal Courts mean terrorist defendants are being "coddled": Holder said this presumption got his "blood boiling," adding that “they have the same rights that a Charles Manson would have, any other mass murderer ... those are the comparisons people should be making, not to average citizens who have done no harm and committed no crimes.”

Culberson didn't like this answer and asked Holder whether Osama bin Laden would also have the same rights as Manson. Holder seemed to joke that they were "comparable people" at which point Culberson accused Holder of not realizing that the nation was at war. The hearing hinted at the intellectual influence National Review writer Andy McCarthy has on the GOP's national-security policies. Rep. Frank Wolf entered several of McCarthy's screeds into the record, and Culberson practically quoted McCarthy verbatim when he accused Holder of wanting to "clothe Osama bin Laden in the rights of the U.S. Constitution.”

After a lengthy exchange, Holder told Culberson the debate over bin Laden getting rights was an academic one.

“We will be reading Miranda rights to the corpse of Osama bin Laden; he will never appear in a U.S. courtroom -- that is the reality,” Holder said.

The GOP opposition to a trial for bin Laden is bizarre. As I've said before, complaining about a trial for bin Laden would be like winning the lottery and then complaining because the money was given to you in euros.

-- A. Serwer

They should also remember the political lessons of history. To paraphrase Mark Twain, history doesn’t repeat itself but it does rhyme. As the White House and the House Democratic leadership try to line up 216 votes to pass health-care reform — and as Republicans, aided by the National Association of Manufacturers and abetted by fierce partisans like Newt Gingrich, try to kill it – I can’t help thinking back to 1994 when the lineup was much the same.

I was serving in the Clinton administration at the time. In the first months of 1993 it looked as if Clinton’s health-care proposal would sail through Congress. But the process dragged on and by 1994 it bogged down. We knew health care was imperiled but none of us knew that failure to pass health care would doom much of the rest of Clinton’s agenda and wrest control of Congress out of the hands of the Democrats. In retrospect, it’s clear Republicans did know.

More after the jump.

--Robert Reich

In early March 1994, Senate Republicans invited Newt Gingrich, then House minority leader, to caucus with them about health care. Gingrich warned against compromise, a view echoed by Sen. Phil Gramm. A few months later, at a Republican meeting in Boston, Bob Dole, then Senate minority leader, promised to “filibuster and kill” any health-care bill with an employer mandate.

By then Gingrich had united House Republicans against passage of health reform and told The New York Times he wanted “to use the issue as a springboard to win Republican control of the House.” Gingrich predicted Republicans would pick up 34 House seats in the November elections and half a dozen disaffected Democrats would switch parties to give Republicans control.

By August, it was over. It didn’t matter that Democrats outnumbered Republicans in the Senate by 56 to 44 and in the House by 257 to 176. Health care was a lost cause. Republican Sen. Bob Packwood boasted to his colleagues “We’ve killed health-care reform.”

In early September, William Kristol of the Project for the Republican Future spelled out the next stage of the Republican battle plan: “I think we can continue to wrap the Clinton plan around the necks of Democratic candidates.” And that’s exactly what they did. On Nov. 8 voters repudiated President Clinton. They brought Republicans to power at every level of government. Democrats went from a controlling majority of 257 seats in the House of Representatives to a minority of 204, and lost the Senate.

I remember how shocked we were the morning after the votes were counted. I asked one of Clinton’s political advisers what had happened. “It was health care,” he said, simply. (That adviser, by the way, is now in the Obama White House.)

Today’s Republican battle plan is exactly the same as it was 16 years ago. In fact, it’s been the same since President Obama assumed office. They never were serious about compromise. They were serious only about regaining power. From the start, Republicans have remembered the lesson of 1994. Now, as they prepare to vote, House Dems should remember the lesson as well.

Undecided Democrats appeared unconcerned by the flap. Rep. Bart Gordon (D-Tenn.), a retiring lawmaker who opposed the original House bill and is undecided on the new package, mocked Republican criticism of the process. Ultimately, he said, voters will hold lawmakers responsible for any changes in law.

"I don't think anybody's going to say that we didn't vote for the bill," he said.

Indeed, they won't; Republicans will saddle any and all Democrats as "Obamacare" supporters, no matter what they do -- at least until 2012. As has been observed before, Democrats are going to pay the price for voting for the House bill in any case, so actually voting to pass the bill (no matter what the procedural high jinks, that's what House members are being asked to do) and receiving its many benefits is a very smart idea indeed.

-- Tim Fernholz

The supposed purpose behind this is to allow members who don't like the Senate bill to avoid casting a vote directly on the Senate bill. The idea that they would somehow insulate themselves from attacks on the particulars of the Senate bill is pretty ridiculous, and if there's even the tiniest chance that it could produce a constitutional problem, it should probably be avoided. But let's not get too worked up over this, because in the end it won't matter.

Let's acknowledge what a terrific education we've all gotten in the arcana of Congressional procedure through the health-care debate. Three cheers for civic learning! But we should keep in mind that once this bill passes, all of this will be forgotten. The Gang of Six, the Tri-Committee Bill, the Manager's Amendment, the Louisiana Purchase, the Cornhusker Kickback, reconciliation, self-executing rules -- it will all fade into the past. What remains will be the law itself.

The White House seems to get that, as you can see by the talking points they distributed to Democrats on the issue. Nearly all are about substance not process, including the suggested responses to Republican arguments about process. Republicans say they're going to extend this debate into the fall campaign, but which side of this argument would you rather be on:

Republican candidate: "My opponent's party resorted to parliamentary tricks to pass a big-government health care plan."

Democratic candidate: "My opponent thinks insurance companies ought to be able to deny you coverage because of pre-existing conditions and kick you off your insurance when you get sick. Thanks to the reform we passed, they can't do that anymore."

The process has been ugly, it's true. But the process is almost over.

-- Paul Waldman

Regular readers will recall that the key distinction between the Volcker rule, as proposed by the Obama administration, and similar provisions in the House bill, was that the Volcker rule was mandatory: It required regulators to ban proprietary trading, hedge and private-equity funds from commercial banks, and would offer specific limits on the size of a bank's liabilities. The House bill, on the other hand, would simply give regulators the authority to limit a firm's size and scope however they pleased if they determined it was necessary. While the House authorities were more powerful, they are also less likely to be implemented; the Volcker rule provides definitive, hard and fast lines.

Well, no more. The new method is that the Systemic Risk Council will have six months to study how and why to implement the size and scope rules, and then recommend how to write those rules, or even if they should be written at all. Basically, it's regulatory discretion with a time limit: The council has six months to do the research and nine months after that to write rules that could be either totally cosmetic or, less likely in my view, actually effective.

This is ostensibly because drawing careful lines around proprietary trading and determining the correct size of a financial institution are too complicated to legislate. I'm somewhat sympathetic to that argument, but I see no reason why Congress couldn't at least draw outer boundaries to guide regulators rather than putting nearly the whole package in its hands. With the right appointees, this could still be a useful rule, but it's supporters shouldn't pretend it is much different from what the House already passed into law. That doesn't mean that the rule can't be changed further down the line, but I think Dodd is sending a pretty clear signal on this one.

(For junkies, we're talking Sec. 619. [PDF])

-- Tim Fernholz ]]> tag:blog.prospect.org,2010:/blog/weblog//2.118887 2010-03-16T16:55:57Z 2010-03-16T16:58:00Z

In Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Welsh rebel Glendower tells his co-conspirator Hotspur: “I can call spirits from the vasty deep.” Hotspur responds, “Why, so can I, or so can any man; But will they come when you do call for them?”

"Will they come when you do call for them?" is another way of saying that all the good policy proposals in the world don't mean all that much if there's not a good strategy behind bringing them into being. Is this long-awaited document going to call AT&T, Verizon, and wireless-ISPs-of-the-future into action, and actually provide a strategy for bringing more and better broadband choices to Americans? I registered my initial skepticism yesterday. If you'll bear with me, let's take a deeper look at the ideas contained within the actual plan.

For starters, the National Broadband Plan includes a proposal to require ISPs to do a better job disclosing how fast and stable a hook-up they're promising. The plan recommends that the FCC invest more in broadband data collection. There's also a proposal to have the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) develop a flexible standard of what "broadband" even means. Those are basic, straightforward proposals that should, in a sane world, be the starting point for the broadband conversation.

Other, more creative proposals include repurposing the Universal Service Fund charge on our phones to apply to broadband, hooking up Defense Department installations with high-speed broadband to (somewhat cleverly) push broadband further into the realm of a national-security necessity. There's talk of freeing more of the wireless spectrum for unlicensed innovation. There's a slightly odd bit about putting the federal government in the position of spearheading a push for national online ID management. Then there are proposals to create special funds to increase coverage: one for 3G networks, and a "Connect America" fund to make the math work in places where there are no or few broadband choices.

Something like "Connect America" could be promising, but it would have to be a lot more robustly structured than it seems to be to actually counter the current broadband regime. Telecom companies provide services where they think it makes financial sense for them to do so. The hope of many advocates was that the FCC would challenge that dynamic with this proposal. But to simply advocate the creation of a special fund for problem cases doesn't go nearly far enough. To pay for the National Broadband Plan's collection of proposals, the FCC says that an auction of some 500 MHz of wireless spectrum reclaimed from broadcasters will cover all of the proposed costs -- which seems a little crazy, when you consider that we have no idea which of the plan's proposals would be accepted by the FCC, or, where necessary, seized upon by Congress.

To be fair, the FCC had a tough job here. America is big, and where we're not spread out, we live in old cities. Any "national" plan has to contend with a mix of federal, state, and local authorities, not to mention the tremendous economic and political power of the telecom industry in this country.

So that, more or less, is what's in the National Broadband Plan as written. I'm beginning to think that maybe eight months wasn't long enough for those within the FCC to come up with a game-changing broadband strategy.

I'm also beginning to wonder whether the FCC's tactic of holding countless public workshops and meetings was the best way of going about this. "To an extraordinary extent ... the author of this plan is America itself," the National Broadband Plan reads. Once the FCC understood what America wanted, it probably should have spent more time figuring out a strategy for actually providing it.

--Nancy Scola