Greg Corombos of Radio America and Charlie Cooke of National Review discuss the considerably better poll numbers for George W. Bush as he prepares to open his presidential library. They also cringe as Paul Ryan becomes the latest conservative to become a staunch supporter of the latest version of immigration reform. And they’re happy an innocent man appears to have been freed in the ricin investigation but now worry we’re back to the beginning in this probe.
Baucus to Blame for ‘Train Wreck’
Less than a week after declaring the health care law he largely wrote a “train wreck”, Montana Democratic Sen. Max Baucus says he will not seek a seventh term in 2014.
The news comes as a surprise to many, given that Baucus was actively fundraising until very recently. However, Baucus has dipped significantly in popularity, due in part to his prominent role in authoring and helping to pass the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.
“He really does live with this around his neck,” said Galen Institute President Grace-Marie Turner, one of the leading health care policy analysts in the nation. “He was to have been up for re-election in 2014 for the first time since shoving this through. He has five million dollars in his campaign treasury, which in Montana should be plenty of money.”
Baucus is chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. Last week, the panel heard from Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and Sebelius heard plenty from Chairman Baucus about concerns with the implementation of Obamacare.
“Small businesses have no idea what to do, what to expect. They don’t know what affordability rules are. They don’t know when penalties may apply. They just don’t know,” said Baucus to Sebelius. “I just see a huge train wreck coming. You and I have discussed this many times and I don’t see any results yet. I just see a huge train wreck.”
Turner doesn’t have much sympathy for Baucus when he can’t tell small business owners what to expect.
“Well, maybe like Nancy Pelosi, he should have read the bill before he passed it so they can find out what was in it and see why people are so unhappy,” she said. “It’s coming home. He’s finally having to say, ‘I can’t face the voters, having been instrumental in getting this miserable law enacted.'”
Turner says the law was doomed from the start, noting that the Baucus bill was never supposed to be the final product.
“That was never supposed to have been the final bill. This was supposed to have just been anything they could cobble together, literally a Christmas tree to try to get 60 votes in the Senate and they’d work on it with the House version and put it together,” she said.
That plan blew up when Scott Brown won the U.S. Senate seat in Massachusetts and Democrats no longer had 60 votes to push a final version through the chamber. That’s when the House passed the Senate plan and added changes which the Senate then approved through reconciliation on a simple majority vote.
Now, Turner says the nightmare of implementation is showing more inherent flaws in the system.
“What this hearing was about last week was about implementation. A lot of the Senate Democrats who are facing the voters for the first time since voting for this law are very worried that the implementation is going to be a train wreck. It is monstrously complex. They don’t have the resources. They don’t have the people. They don’t have the expertise. They virtually cannot be done right. And they’re going to try to slap it together, and a lot of them are very worried that it’s going to be a sloppy mess,” she said.
Turner says the application process for joining one of the new health care exchanges is a microcosm of the bureaucratic nightmares to come.
“One component of that is gathering information from people so that they can then run that information past half a dozen different organizations – Homeland Security to make sure they’re a citizen, the IRS, their employer, the Department of Treasury to figure out what their subsidies are going to be, the state Medicaid and S-CHIP rolls. There’s no system that can aggregate all that data for 20 million people that are going to be figuring out how to file a 21-page application that has a 61-page appendix. How is that even possibly going to work,” said Turner.
Meanwhile, Turner is defending House Republicans for moving to shore up funding for Americans who had previously been denied coverage due to preexisting conditions. The new health care law allotted five billion dollars to help cover higher premiums for those patients but the cost estimates came in far too low. Many conservative activists blasted the GOP for what they believe is aiding and abetting Obamacare, but Turner says it’s the right move.
“The administration said we can’t take any more enrollees. We’re going to stop enrollment now and only take care of the people who are enrolled. The House said, ‘Well, you’ve got this other slush fund over here that’s called preventive care but it really can be used for anything by the secretary and let’s redirect that money to help people so that the people that could enroll by the end of the year can continue to get coverage.’ The administration, instead, wants to use this money to advertise all the benefits of Obamacare and to hire what I’m sure will be a lot of community organizers to help enroll people in this coverage,” said Turner.
Turner says the money would only run through this year and would not be an ongoing program, so she says it’s simply a choice between Obamacare activism and advertising or helping people get the coverage they need.
Three Martini Lunch 4/23/13
Greg Corombos of Radio America and Jim Geraghty of National Review are encouraged that Montana Democratic Sen. Max Baucus is retiring in 2014. They also recoil as an obscure singer writes a poem that seeks to empathize with accused Boston bomber Dzokhar Tsarnaev. And they find it curious that MSNBC’s Chris Matthews is suddenly uninterested in what motivated the Tsarnaev brothers to engage in terrorism.
Miranda, Immigration & Boston
Surviving Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzokhar Tsarnaev was formally charged with two crimes in connection with last week’s terrorist attacks that left three people dead and more than 180 injured. If convicted, Tsarnaev could face the death penalty.
According to the Justice Department, Tsarnaev was arraigned in his hospital room on one count of using and conspiring to use a weapon of mass destruction resulting in death and one count of malicious destruction of property by means of an explosive device resulting in death.
The charges come as no surprise but the timing is a bit odd, according to Andrew C. McCarthy, the lead U.S. prosecutor in the case against Omar Abdel Rahman and his collaborators in connection with the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.
“It would have been good to keep him out of the criminal justice system for as long as they could have,” said McCarthy. “There was no question he was going into the civilian criminal justice system. I would have held him out for as long as it took to get effective intelligence , an effective interrogation of him. I have no way of knowing what information they actually got from him. I wouldn’t have been in a rush to bring him into the system, but I don’t think there was any question that he was going to be in the system.”
McCarthy who also rejected calls for Tsarnaev to be quickly labeled as an enemy combatant. He says it’s not a clear case, given the definition of that term dictated by Congress in the wake of 9/11. But McCarthy is puzzled by all of the hand wringing over whether Tsarnaev was read his Miranda rights, something he assumes happened at Monday’s arraignment so long as the accused was lucid enough to understand those rights.
“I think the people in the public debate are a lot more concerned about Miranda in this instance than I am,” said McCarthy. “I really don’t think that they need a statement for him, and as (former) Attorney General (Michael) Mukasey has pointed out publicly, if they wanted to question him they could question him for national security reasons whether he’s got a lawyer or not.”
McCarthy says the apparent mountain of evidence against Tsarnaev makes the Miranda debate even more inconsequential since prosecutors likely won’t need his own statements to obtain a conviction. Nonetheless, he says government prosecutors will be very diligent in making sure they have the strongest possible case in such a high-profile matter.
Boston Mayor Thomas Menino has publicly declared that the plot does not extend any further than the Tsarnaev brothers. Other observers are convinced that radical elements in Chechnya are involved and some insist the Saudi national questioned shortly after the bombing was highly involved. McCarthy urges everyone to let the course play out on this.
“All pronouncements about who’s involved and who’s not involved that are made within days of the event have almost always been wrong. People who have been through this kind of a process before know that you have to roll up your sleeves and start doing real, comprehensive investigative work. Remember, we didn’t even know who these guys were. We didn’t know their names until Friday,” said McCarthy.
The Boston case is also reverberating in the immigration debate as well, with both sides claiming the details prove their side is right. Members of the Gang of Eight contend this story is proof that the system is broken and needs reform. Critics of the Senate bill argue that giving legal status to those who slipped in the country and may wish to harm us only makes us more vulnerable. So does McCarthy see one side having a much stronger argument than the other?
“Yeah, the people who think reform is crazy, who were right the day before yesterday and are right today. The Gang of Eight, it’s kind of dizzying to listen to their argument because up until five minutes ago, it seems, they were saying the system is broken. Now, after this massacre that we had last week, they’re saying the system worked this time and they have provisions in there to make sure it continues to work. I can’t understand where there coming from, whether it works or it doesn’t work,” said McCarthy.
“What doesn’t work about it is that we don’t enforce the law. You don’t need a comprehensive reform to do that. You can start enforcing the law. I know that’s a radical idea, but maybe they want to try it,” he said.
“The other thing that I think is clear is that before you even think about 12-20 million illegal aliens, as John Fonte from the Hudson Institute argues in an important new research paper, our patriotic assimilation system is broken even for legal aliens. That’s obviously a problem that needs to be addressed before you start talking about increasing the legal alien population by 10 or 12 million people,” said McCarthy.
The FBI is coming under scrutiny following reports that Russia tipped off the U.S. about Tsarnaev. The bureau did investigate the elder brother but closed the case after finding nothing overly alarming. McCarthy says some changes definitely need to be made on that front.
“We really need a major rethinking of the FBI’s protocols that say we’re not going to take any notice of the straight line nexus between Islamic supremacist ideology and terrorism committed by Muslims, which is a terrible mistake. They basically take the position that unless you’ve gone from radical ideology to radical activity, they don’t have any right to continue investigating you,” said McCarthy.
Three Martini Lunch 4/22/13
Greg Corombos of Radio America and Jim Geraghty of National Review are tentatively pleased to see the vast majority of airports operating on time despite dire warnings of delays coming as a result of sequestration cuts at the FAA. They also discuss how news that the Tsarnaev brothers obtained guns illegally will impact the gun debate. And they groan as misspelling Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s name may have stopped investigators from finding his radical ties.
Inside the Senate Gun Fight
Gun control opponents won a major victory this week when the Manchin-Toomey bill to expand background checks failed to advance, but a leading lobbyist says the behind-the-scenes wrangling was far more dramatic than the final vote suggested.
The final vote was 54-46 in favor of Manchin-Toomey, but 60 votes were needed to advance the bill. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid changed his vote at the last moment in a parliamentary move that gives him the right to bring the bill up for consideration again. That leaves a five vote margin, but Gun Owners of America Chief Counsel Mike Hammond says it was actually much closer.
“We didn’t win it by six votes. We won it by one vote. Had the Republicans not provided 41 votes in opposition to that, Heitkamp, a North Dakota Democrat, Baucus, Montana Democrat, Begich, Alaska Democrat, and Pryor, an Arkansas Democrat, would have all provided the deciding vote to pass it,” said Hammond.
In previous interviews, Hammond insisted the the biggest vote was the motion to proceed because once that happened Democrats could add other amendments with less resistance. He had been confident gun control opponents would win that vote as well, but the motion to proceed easily advanced 68-31 once Toomey-Manchin was introduced. So what happened?
“There was an eruption in the senators’ luncheon, which was precipitated by Sen. Sue Collins, who was whining because gun groups were running commercials against her in Maine. As a result, there was just an imbroglio and a lot of senators decided that they were going to show the gun lobby and vote to go on to the bill,” said Hammond.
He says the damage may have already been done, however, because the bill is now on the Senate calendar and Reid can bring it back anytime he wants.
So how did we go from 68 senators voting to proceed with the bill to only 54 actually supporting it?
“I think (Collins) was able to convince them to vote wrong on cloture on the motion to proceed but not throughout the process. I can tell you that as a result of what happened as a result of moving to proceed to it, we had a week of nail biting, of excruciating fear as we worked senator by senator to put together the votes necessary to win that,” said Hammond.
Hammond is also firing back at President Obama for suggesting that the gun lobby blatantly lied to lawmakers and the public about Manchin-Toomey leading to a national gun registry.
“That’s called projection in psychological terms. That means he accuses other people of being guilty of what is in fact his own moral deficiencies,” said Hammond. “This group of people traveling with Barack Obama were up in Hartford, Connecticut, the day before, smiling and waving as Gov. (Dan) Malloy signed into law a statewide gun registry and a statewide gun ban which came only precipitously short of confiscation. So having endorsed and loved and claimed victory over gun registration and gun confiscation, they then fly down to Washington, D.C., and the next day they say, ‘Oh, no one is talking about confiscation and registration.’ I mean, do they think we’re stupid?”
The text of Manchin-Toomey contained no explicit language on registration, but Hammond says close scrutiny raised major red flags with him.
“The bill would require a very large number of people, anyone who published an intent to sell a gun. And we all know what “published” means. In libel-slander terms, it means communicated to a single other person. Does it mean published in a newspaper, church newsletter, put up a sign? No one knows. And you can bet it’ll be interpreted as broadly as it can conceivably be interpreted,” said Hammond.
“So anyone who now comes under the rubric of this has to have a 4473. That’s the little file card the gun dealer is going to keep on you when you buy that gun. What the Obama administration is doing is going around from dealer to dealer and copying the content of those 4473’s, so they have a list of all the gun owners who bought a gun through that dealer, which from here on out will basically be all gun owners. So if they have that list sitting in regional offices, guess what the slimy Toomey-Manchin language says. You can’t consolidate it,” said Hammond.
“They don’t know anything about computers. The way computers work is it doesn’t matter whether the data is sitting in Tucson or whether it’s sitting in Washington, D.C. If it’s accessible by the push of a computer stroke, it’s a national gun registry. So they don’t call that a national gun registry, I think for the same reason Satan doesn’t like the word sin, but it is,” said Hammond.
Amnesty Disaster
The U.S. Senate Gang of Eight unveiled its immigration reform legislation, promising stronger border security, much-need reforms on visas and legal immigration practices and a path to citizenship. But Iowa Rep. Steve King says the only thing guaranteed in this bill is a reward for those who came here illegally.
“The big comprehensive amnesty plan is a disaster and a big mistake,” said King. “What are we trying to fix here and why? We have an executive branch problem, not a legislative branch problem. The President of the United States has refused to enforce immigration law with which he disagrees. So he’s seeking to write his own by executive edict.”
King says Obama’s approach to border enforcement has been infuriating, but the likelihood of Republicans getting behind this legislation leaves him baffled.
“Now I’m hearing Republicans say, ‘Well, if we’re ever going to have enforcement of the border, we have to make this agreement with the president and the Democrats or we’re never going to have border security.’ When I read this bill, I wonder what’s the point in having border security if you’re going to legalize anybody that can come into America that is here and send an invitation to those that have been deported to apply to come back in,” said King.
The congressman is also not impressed by the severe penalties the Gang of Eight is promising to impose on those willing to go through the legalization process.
“In the bill, they have to pay a fine. That’s supposed to be the penalty for unlawful entry into the United States or a visa overstay. That’s a $500 penalty fee that’s good for six years. You can renew it for another six years for another $500. So the cost to stay in the United States to get legalized is $83.33 a year. That’s one of those onerous provisions that they point out,” said King.
King says the criminal background checks are also a Gang of Eight fantasy. He says the only way to review the backgrounds of illegals is to have trained investigators interview them or get the fingerprints of everyone unlawfully in the country. King says those who have committed crimes simply won’t step forward to become legal and they’ll stay here anyway. He also says America’s experience with amnesty in 1986 foreshadowed the mess that would come in the Gang of Eight plan.
“In the ’86 amnesty act, only about half of the people who were eligible came forward, but a whole lot of people that weren’t did and there was about 70 percent fraud in that system. Eight hundred thousand to a million people became three million people,” said King. “This bill simply opens it up even more. It doesn’t tighten down. It doesn’t learn from our mistakes in the past. It doubles down and triples and quadruples down on the mistakes of the past. For me, I’m not speechless, but I’m having a hard time explaining how it is that otherwise smart people could come to these conclusions.”
King’s first step towards solving our immigration problems would be to enforce the border security laws that the Obama administration, and others, refuse to execute.
“If I had (Homeland Security Secretary) Janet Napolitano’s job and I wasn’t tied down by a leash from the president, I could give you something like 98 or 99 percent operational control of the border. I could do that with the resources we’re spending now. If I can tell you that, then I don’t know what we’re trying to accomplish here. Why don’t we utilize the laws that we’ve passed and the resources that we have,” said King, who says most of the border fence is still not done despite Congress passing legislation to do so.
“This is a political battle that’s going on and so far the rule of law side hasn’t been winning,” he said.
This immigration push seems to have more momentum than previous efforts, with the Republican National Committee specifically saying in its 2012 campaign report that the GOP needs to get behind immigration legislation in order to win back some of the Hispanic vote. King says that logic is deeply flawed.
“That 44 percent of the Hispanic vote that in that report they claimed George Bush got in his 2004 election, he did not receive that. Any objective scrutiny of that number takes you down to no more than 40 percent, most likely between 38-40 percent of the Hispanic vote,” said King. “Could George Bush receive 44 percent of that vote today? That answer is probably and very likely no. They leap to a conclusion and build a generalized case around it.”
King says most Republicans have been quiet on the issue as they waited for the Gang of Eight to come up with a bill. He says he took a leading role against the plan when no one else stepped up and House leadership seemed to deride their position.
“It even went so far as one of the leadership’s voices almost taunted the conservatives in that we wouldn’t do anything or speak up and they specifically mentioned myself and (Texas Rep.) Louie Gohmert. So I decided, ‘Lets meet. Let’s talk. Let’s plan. Let’s take action, because we can’t let this thing sneak through unopposed,'” said King.
Since then, the congressman says many GOP members have quietly encouraged him but are not yet ready to publicly oppose the Gang of Eight plan.
King admits the strong advocacy of Florida Sen. Marco Rubio hurts the efforts of conservatives to raise concerns about the bill. He says he has great respect for Rubio but fears the senator got in too deep with the likes of New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, New Jersey’s Bob Menendez and Dick Durbin of Illinois to figure out how to get out of the bipartisan alliance.
The House would be unlikely to take up the same version of immigration legislation as the Senate, but King fears that any tiny House reforms could lead to the Senate version becoming law.
“I’m worried that the House might pass a single piece of legislation that does make sense that does make sense, like mandatory E-Verify. But it becomes the conference vehicle for a Senate amnesty plan. And as the leadership of the House and Senate appointed a conference committee, there’s a risk that they would send us back a comprehensive amnesty plan for an up-or-down in the House, where every Democrat would vote for it. A handful of Republicans would. It would go to the president’s desk and it would be an irreversible thing,” said King.
Iowa will have an open U.S. Senate seat in 2014, as Democratic Sen. Tom Harkin is retiring. King is carefully considering the race but has not decided whether to join the race.
“It looks like there’s a relatively open path to the nomination at least today. I have done statewide polling and gotten a look at it. I’ve said from the beginning it’s a slight uphill battle. I know that. I know what it takes to win. I can see the path to victory,” said King. “There’s some significant components that we need to put together to say yes and they all seem to be doable. On the other hand, all of the systems aren’t go. So now it’s a 50-50 and unknown on when the decision would be, but hopefully it’s sooner rather than later because many others need to have that kind of information so they can make their plans.”
Three Martini Lunch 4/19/13
Greg Corombos of Radio America and Jim Geraghty of National Review are thrilled to see one of the suspected Boston bombers taken out and one more likely to be apprehended soon. They also groan as another push to legalize illegal immigrants is unveiled – this time with a staunch conservative as the leading spokesman. And they shake their heads as Obamacare architect Sen. Max Baucus suddenly realizes Obamacare is a “train wreck”.
Torture, Guns and A Governor?
Former Arkansas Rep. Asa Hutchinson is throwing his hat into the ring for next year’s open gubernatorial race, but only after finishing up his role in leading an investigation into detainee treatment and crafting policies designed to boost school security.
Hutchinson was tapped by the Constitution Project to lead what he calls a non-partisan probe into how detainees were treated at various known and classified sites. He was also the point man for the National Rifle Association in it’s recent push to enhance security in every school in America. Hutchinson recently wrapped up work on both major projects and he says that work led to his decision to seek the governor’s office in Arkansas once again.
“The engagement on these public issues just rekindled the fire for public service that I have. We love the state of Arkansas and we think there’s a great opportunity here. We had to finish these projects of the detention task force. It’s been two years in the works. This was so important after Sandy Hook with the school safety,” said Hutchinson. “Now I can devote attention to this important opportunity. We’re learning that the governors is who are really shaping national policy and helping, whether it’s health care policy or whether it’s education. They’re really the leading indicators and that’s exciting to me.”
Hutchinson lost the 2006 Arkansas governor’s race to Democrat Mike Beebe, who is term-limited and cannot seek a third term in 2014.
As for the the work he recently completed, Hutchinson admits that the NRA’s goals on improving school security, including a push towards more armed security, were not implemented into the unsuccessful gun legislation in the Senate. But he says the effort has still made great strides.
“The good news is that it’s being considered by every local school district in our nation. This is a local issue. They are driving the train. They are improving security. They are taking steps. States are addressing it. What happens in Washington is not going to make a big difference in the safety of our schools. They have a pittance of money that’s looked at school safety and the rest of their initiatives on the gun control side really does not have an impact on the safety of our schools. As we’ve seen demonstrated, whether it’s whether it’s a knife or whether it’s a legal firearm, there’s always a risk in our society today. Until we get those problems solved, you’ve got to improve safety.”
In his work with the Constitution Project, Hutchinson and his team of two retired generals and “distinguished public servants”, the task force concluded that the rights of detainees were regularly violated.
“Our forces did engage in what would generally be accepted as torture. So it’s really indisputable that that’s what happened. As to how that happened, you had everything from lawyers’ opinions to messages being sent down to take the gloves off. All of these things combined for an an environment in which torture was committed,” said Hutchinson. “This is strictly against what our nation stands for. It’s a violation of the Convention Against Torture which was signed under Ronald Reagan as president.”
Hutchinson says the report also makes several recommendations for future policy, including changing the role of medical personnel with respect to detainees and making sure that the Uniformed Code of Military Justice and the Geneva Conventions are closely followed.
Hutchinson says the issue became widespread because it became formal U.S. policy. The report concludes legal experts were misled on what enhanced interrogation techniques would entail and the lawyers then misinformed President George W. Bush.
“I can understand fully the post-9/11 environment because I was there and our objective was to prevent the next terrorist attack. We didn’t want this to happen again. But we can make bad decisions even with the best of intentions,” said Hutchinson.
Three Martini Lunch 4/18/13
Greg Corombos of Radio America and Jim Geraghty of National Review are thrilled to hear a suspect has been arrested in the ricin attacks on President Obama and Sen. Wicker. They also scold President Obama for his rant following his defeat on background checks and for Obama’s hypocritical politics on the issue. And they discuss the embarrassing media mistakes surrounding the supposed arrest of the Boston Marathon bomber.