The Obama Doctrine bids us welcome our new ally Iran…

The New Neo Posted on by

…and our new enemy, Israel.

I get tired sometimes of writing “this is no surprise” about what the Obama administration does. But: this is no surprise.

The word “historic,” which has been used in many articles about the deal with the Iranians, has no particular valence—no relation to good or bad or indifferent. It merely means something of significance to history. And when the Iranians are happy about something and hail it as a “new era,” and the Israelis are furious, condemning it as a “historic mistake,” you better believe it’s not of significance in a good way.

Unless, of course, you’re on Iran’s side. Which, sadly enough, it’s been clear for some time that the Obama administration is. That or the alternative, which is that Obama and company are naive dupes. It’s the old “knave or fool” dilemma, and I suppose there’s room (as there often is with this administration) for the answer to be “both.”

John Bolton doesn’t mince words:

This interim agreement is badly skewed from America’s perspective. Iran retains its full capacity to enrich uranium, thus abandoning a decade of Western insistence and Security Council resolutions that Iran stop all uranium-enrichment activities. Allowing Iran to continue enriching, and despite modest (indeed, utterly inadequate) measures to prevent it from increasing its enriched-uranium stockpiles and its overall nuclear infrastructure, lays the predicate for Iran fully enjoying its “right” to enrichment in any “final” agreement. Indeed, the interim agreement itself acknowledges that a “comprehensive solution” will “involve a mutually defined enrichment program.” This is not, as the Obama administration leaked before the deal became public, a “compromise” on Iran’s claimed “right” to enrichment. This is abject surrender by the United States.

In exchange for superficial concessions, Iran achieved three critical breakthroughs. First, it bought time to continue all aspects of its nuclear-weapons program the agreement does not cover (centrifuge manufacturing and testing; weaponization research and fabrication; and its entire ballistic missile program). Indeed, given that the interim agreement contemplates periodic renewals, Iran may have gained all of the time it needs to achieve weaponization not of simply a handful of nuclear weapons, but of dozens or more.

Second, Iran has gained legitimacy. This central banker of international terrorism and flagrant nuclear proliferator is once again part of the international club. Much as the Syria chemical-weapons agreement buttressed Bashar al-Assad, the mullahs have escaped the political deep freezer.

Third, Iran has broken the psychological momentum and effect of the international economic sanctions. While estimates differ on Iran’s precise gain, it is considerable ($7 billion is the lowest estimate), and presages much more. Tehran correctly assessed that a mere six-months’ easing of sanctions will make it extraordinarily hard for the West to reverse direction, even faced with systematic violations of Iran’s nuclear pledges. Major oil-importing countries (China, India, South Korea, and others) were already chafing under U.S. sanctions, sensing President Obama had no stomach either to impose sanctions on them, or pay the domestic political price of granting further waivers.

Bolton goes on to suggest that this agreement makes Israel’s position even more difficult than before, but its position was already extremely difficult to begin with. His entire piece is well worth reading.

I happened to catch a minute or so of Obama, and then Kerry, hailing and describing their agreement: what it does, what it doesn’t do. I noted that, although both have long been difficult to listen to (Kerry for well-nigh forty years), now both seem to have lost whatever shred of credibility that had still clung to them until now. In particular, Obama passed some turning point with his repeated “If you like your health plan…” pronouncements that showed unequivocally and forever more how cool and how sincere he can sound when he’s lying through his teeth. Once the American public has seen that, how can they ever believe him again?

I wonder how many people in this country are with him on this one. Oh, the far left is, and Valerie Jarrett. But even Congress seems unhappy, since they may vote for increased sanctions on Iran in some sort of probably unenforceable move:

But the announcement, after months of secret face-to-face talks between the United States and Iran, left many U.S. lawmakers deeply doubtful of the most significant agreement between Washington and Tehran in more than three decades of estrangement. The chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez of New Jersey, said Sunday he would work with colleagues to have sanctions against Iran ready “should the talks falter or Iran fail to implement or breach the interim agreement.”

Such distrust that Iran was negotiating in good faith ran across political parties that are otherwise deeply divided. And ready-to-go sanctions seemed to have rare bipartisan support across both of Congress’ chambers.

Why the difference between the president and Congress? Well, members of Congress still have to answer to the American people, whereas a second-term president does not. Would it not be ironic if one of the very few bipartisan bills passed in Congress were to be one where the parties united against Obama? It would be interesting to see whether Obama would veto it, or would just go around it in some administrative manner, if it were to be passed. And if he vetoed it, it would be interesting to see whether Congress would have the votes to override his veto. I doubt there are that many profiles in courage around.

[NOTE: Gabriel Malor at Ace’s points out that the new agreement was praised by Syria, Iran, Russia, China, and the EU, which certainly should tell you something. I’ve been looking for some words of praise from Democratic politicians in this country who are on Obama’s side, and all I’ve found so far from Obama’s strongest allies are tepid declarations of hopeful first steps combined with concerns.]

On the Democrats and the nuclear option: why now?

The New Neo Posted on by

If you want to understand what happened Thursday when the Democrats jettisoned 200 years of precedent and exercised the nuclear option, a good start would be this WSJ piece by James Taranto, who points out (among other things) that the Senate’s move not only diminishes the power of the minority party in that legislative body, it diminishes the power of the Senate itself vis a vis the president and the House:

The end of the filibuster entails a serious diminution of the Senate’s power vis-é -vis the president and the House. As we observed this July, the Senate’s power consists largely in its ability to withhold consent from both House-passed legislation and presidential actions (nominations and treaties). Thus majority rule enhances the power of the majority party at the expense of every individual senator, regardless of party.

As the Senate has become more partisan, and members elected during an earlier age have retired or died, concern for the Senate’s institutional power has diminished. Yesterday’s third Democratic dissenter, Carl Levin of Michigan, is one of only three remaining Democratic senators first elected before 1984.

Taranto doesn’t mention it, but another long-timer—Montana’s Max Baucus, who was originally elected in 1978 as a moderate Democrat—voted with the majority Democrats to pass the move the killed the filibuster. Why did Baucus do it? Well, this is what he said:

After talking to Montanans, it was clear to me this was the right thing to do,” said Sen. Max Baucus. “The people we work for are sick of gridlock keeping Congress from doing its job and it was time to stand up and do something about it.”

However, I can’t imagine anyone (much less Baucus) believing that the people of Montana, who went for Romney in 2012 by a 14% margin, actually feel this way about giving Obama and the Democrats in the Senate far more power. I would postulate that Baucus actually did it because he could: he already was no longer seeking re-election, because the people of Montana had decided that they’d had enough Baucus for a lifetime and withdrew enough support that polls last spring showed he would probably lose his next race. So what better way to stick it to them than to vote for the nuclear option?

Taranto points out another point about the vote by Democrats, which is that in some ways it would appear self-destructive:

What’s peculiar about the timing of the Democrats’ decision is that it comes just when the partisan risk of abolishing the filibuster has been heightened…The abject failure of ObamaCare has made the prospect of a Republican Senate in 2015 and a Republican president in 2017 much likelier. Thus even from a purely partisan standpoint, rational Democrats would have been more cautious about invoking the nuclear option when they did than at just about any other time in the past five years.

Taranto goes on to explain the action in terms of what’s called “prospect theory,” which postulates that:

…people will take bigger risks in the hope of minimizing a loss than in the hope of maximizing a gain. The psychological impact of the loss itself clouds one’s thinking about the risks of magnifying the loss. That explains why the Democrats went nuclear just as the perils of doing so multiplied.

That may be true, but I disagree that the perils of an action such as this have multiplied for the Democrats, if you look at it from their point of view.

Here’s why: Democrats may know they’re on their way out, but they’re playing the long game and in any event they may think the loss inevitable and therefore unstoppable. By doing this now, Obama gets to play out his very liberal agenda to much greater effect, and will be able to institutionalize changes in the judiciary that will benefit the Democrats in the long run.

But even more important than that may be something I haven’t seen talked about too much, which is the fact that the Democrats may have believed (whether it’s true or not) that if they lost the Senate in 2014 it would be the Republicans who would then go for the nuclear option at that point. So why not do it now themselves, when Democrats would be the beneficiaries for over a year?

But why didn’t they go even further and abolish it for other types of votes, too, not just judicial appointments of the non-SCOTUS type? I firmly believe that the Democrats would have done just that if they thought it would have benefited them right now, but I think they calculated that at the moment it wouldn’t have because they don’t control the House. Therefore it would be hard to pass much legislation even with the nuclear option in the Senate for regular bills. They will extend it to apply to SCOTUS appointments, however, if within the next year something happens to any SCOTUS Justice and there’s an appointment of a new member to the Court; no way the Democratic majority in the Senate would allow the Republican minority there to block such an all-important approval.

They would also extend the nuclear option to apply to regular legislation if there is a chance of some of their pet legislative projects getting through the House. But until then they will act as “moderate” as possible by limiting the scope of the majority rule, leaving it up to the Republicans to go further (and incur lots of criticism for doing so) if they ever get into power.

The Democrats also realize that most people don’t really understand how cloture or the filibuster works, and may not understand the significance of the move the Democrats have made and just how hypocritical they are being. The Democrats sometimes underestimate the American public, but sometimes they get it just right, and I don’t know which it is this time.

In sum, I just don’t think the Democrats thought this move was all that risky considering their position prior to it, and considering what they thought Republicans were poised to do if and when they got to power. I wonder whether the GOP actually would have had the cojones (and the disrespect for precedent) to do that; I have my doubts, although they may have.

But rest assured that if they do come into power and extend the nuclear option to SCOTUS appointments and/or to ordinary bills, the Democrats will then excoriate them for their extreme and evil partisanship. You can bet on it.

The British educational thought police…

The New Neo Posted on by

…have the power to label children “racist” on their permanent records if they don’t attend a workshop on Islam.

Let’s put aside the fact that Islam is not a race (I suppose it’s an honorary race in Britain) and note that in Britain they’re not going to need re-education camps. Apparently the schools are already performing that function—by law:

According to the letter sent last Wednesday, the visit is part of the National Curriculum for religious education and also reflects “the multi-cultural community in which we live.”

It went on: “It is a statutory requirement for primary school children to experience and learn about different cultures…”˜Refusal to allow your child to attend will result in a Racial Discrimination note being attached to your child’s education record, which will remain on this file throughout their school career.”

The note caused such a hue and cry that it was followed the next day by another saying, Emily Litella-like (actually, Obama-like), “”˜On reflection, disregard a section from the earlier letter” and apologizing for “inaccuracies.”

I would imagine one could write an entire blog populated by this sort of “PC run amok in school” story. And in a few years such an effort by a school may not even be considered the least bit remarkable or out-of-the-ordinary, if the entire PC campaign succeeds still further.

How very tolerant we have become.

Obama changes the rules—again—to benefit Democrats in next year’s election

The New Neo Posted on by

The imperial president whose party is nevertheless subject to those pesky little formalities known as “elections” changes the ACA rules again in order to delay 2015 insurance enrollments until after the election.

However:

…[T]his misses the real risk for the White House, which isn’t in the individual market in 2015.The people in that market will have been battered all year with higher premiums and ridiculous deductibles, and another round of escalation in both will only have a limited shock value. The risk is in the employer-provided group market, where costs will either skyrocket or employees will get kicked out of their coverage and forced into the individual market. Those decisions will come in the late summer or early fall, as businesses have to prepare 2015 budgets in those time frames. By the time the standard October 1 open enrollment date hits for those consumers, the enormous impact of ObamaCare will be well known ”” even if they can’t access price information in the individual exchanges. When tens of millions of Americans get handed huge price increases or get pushed out of their group coverage altogether at that point, the outrage and political meltdown will dwarf whatever pricing changes take place in the individual markets.

Still, Obama must think it’s worth a try, and that the risk is minimal or non-existent. After all, who except the right will squawk about what he’s done or even pay attention to it at all? And every little bit of delay helps; it certainly helped in 2012 because he probably could not have been re-elected if the election were to happen today.

The only thing is—it may not help nearly enough.

The nuclear option: Senator Obama has a bone to pick with President Obama

The New Neo Posted on by

And Senator Feinstein has some harsh words for Senator Feinstein, while Senator Harry Reid disagrees with Majority Leader Harry Reid, Senator Joe Biden begs to differ with Vice President Joe Biden, Assistant Minority Leader Dick Durbin counters Majority Whip Dick Durbin, and—oh, you get the idea:

By the way, this is one of the issues on which both parties switch sides regularly, depending on who’s in power. The difference is that, in the GOP, enough RINOs bonded with Democrats to stop it from actually happening.

So now we have this successful and strategically-timed Democratic power grab [emphasis mine]:

Whatever the merits of filibustering judicial nominees, it was obvious that the Democrats would end the practice as soon as they had both the power and the need to do so. Now they have.

Predictably, no bipartisan “Gang” stepped up to prevent this. Bipartisanship runs only one way in these matters.

Thanks to [Lindsay] Graham, Democrats were able to use the filibuster to block nominees like Jim Haynes and Peter Keisler. If Graham hadn’t played the stooge, the Fourth Circuit would be more conservative today and, with fewer vacancies to fill on the D.C. Circuit, Obama would not be about to flip it his way.

More here from Bill Otis, who points out that the rule changed yesterday had stood for about 200 years. Again, we have the interesting situation (as with Obamacare) where only one party, Democratic, voted for the bill. It was the opposition that was bipartisan.

I mentioned that the timing was strategic. Otis explains that this is all about Obama doing an end run around Congress through the regulatory process:

The Administration has an ambitious regulatory agenda it can’t get through Congress because the opposition party controls the House. It thus plans to push through what it wants via executive orders and administrative agency rules, all of which will be challenged in court. And the court that will decide those challenges will be none other than the DC Circuit…

The reason the Senate filibuster has its pedigree, and has been maintained by both parties for such a very long time, and through administrations of wildly differing outlooks, is the recognition that what seems like a good idea right now might later, with more time to examine its long term unforeseen effects and unintended consequences, seem less appetizing than it did at first…

The ability to entertain that sort of thinking depends, of course, on a certain reasonably high degree of maturity. With pugilist Harry Reid in command, that was only going to last so long, and today it went bye-bye.

…[T]his is somewhat personal to me, because two friends of mine, Peter Keisler and Miguel Estrada, were denied seats on the federal courts of appeals because of filibusters or the threat thereof, and were turned away even though they were universally known to be brilliant lawyers and honorable men. Those filibusters were eagerly, indeed belligerently, supported by Harry Reid.

…[T]his power-grabbing spasm is astoundingly short-sighted. With Obama’s approval ratings now in the 30’s and cratering, and the worst failures and deceptions of Obamacare yet to land on the American public, Democrats are looking for the tall grass. But there will be little tall grass to be found when the election rolls around in less than a year. Their margin in the Senate is thin (five seats) as it stands. Harry Reid thus stands an excellent chance of having fashioned a weapon he’ll have for a year or two or three, and his opponents will have for the indefinite future thereafter.

I am reasonably certain that Harry Reid isn’t really so very short-sighted, he just fails to see the future Otis’s way. He is counting on holding onto the Senate in 2014, and he may well do so. But even if he doesn’t succeed on that score, he is banking on the fact that, with the DC Circuit safely in friendly hands, the court will give the stamp of approval to whatever Obama wants to do (in the regulatory sense) for the next three years. That can be an awful lot, and a great deal of it will probably be geared to solidifying and institutionalizing Democratic control of the voting public.

[NOTE: That clip of the Democrats waxing eloquent about the value of preserving the filibuster and minority rights would make a nice campaign video, wouldn’t it, contrasted with their stance now that they’re the ones in power?]

JFK’s assassination: fifty years

The New Neo Posted on by

The assassination of JFK has been fading slowly from memory, becoming ever more the stuff of legend because no one under fifty personally remembers anything about it, and everyone over fifty has probably said almost all there is to say (much of it false) over and over and over again.

But the anniversary is here nevertheless, and in remembrance of the occasion I’m re-posting this contemporaneous description of the immediate aftermath of the assassination. It was written by John Updike and appeared originally in The New Yorker. For me, it conjures up the jumbled surreal quality of the horror and the riveting fascination of the non-stop television coverage (something quite new in our experience) very well:

It was as if we slept from Friday to Monday and dreamed an oppressive, unsearchably significant dream, which, we discovered on awaking, millions of others had dreamed also. Furniture, family, the streets, and the sky dissolved, only the dream on television was real. The faces of the world’s great mingled with the faces of landladies who happened to house an unhappy ex-Marine; cathedrals alternated with warehouses; temples of government with suburban garages; anonymous men tugged at a casket in a glaring airport; a murder was committed before our eyes; a Dallas strip-tease artist drawled amiably of her employer’s quick temper; the heads of state of the Western world strode down a sunlit street like a grim village rabble; and Jacqueline Kennedy became Persephone, the Queen of Hades and the beautiful bride of grief. All human possibilities, of magnificence and courage, of meanness and confusion, seemed to find an image in this long montage, and a stack of cardboard boxes in Dallas, a tawdry movie house, a tiny rented room where some shaving cream still clung to the underside of a washbasin, a row of parking meters that had witnessed a panicked flight all acquired the opaque and dreadful importance that innocent objects acquire in nightmares.

I’ve written before about my rejection of Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories, and the reasons I came to that conclusion (here and here). I’ll repeat a quote from Vincent Bugliosi that I featured in one of those posts:

It is remarkable that conspiracy theorists can believe that groups like the CIA, military-industrial complex, and FBI would murder the president, but cannot accept the likelihood, even the possibility, that a nut like Oswald would flip out and commit the act, despite the fact that there is a ton of evidence that Oswald killed Kennedy, and not an ounce showing that any of these groups had anything to do with the assassination.

It is further remarkable that these conspiracy theorists aren’t troubled in the least by their inability to present any evidence that Oswald was set up and framed. For them, the mere belief or speculation that he was is a more-than-adequate substitute for evidence. More importantly, there is a simple fact of life that Warren Commission critics and conspiracy theorists either don’t realize or fail to take into consideration, something I learned from my experience as a prosecutor; namely, that in the real world – you know, the world in which when I talk you can hear me, there will be a dawn tomorrow, et cetera – you cannot be innocent and yet still have a prodigious amount of highly incriminating evidence against you”¦

”¦[T]he evidence against Oswald is so great that you could throw 80% of it out the window and there would still be more than enough to prove his guilt beyond all reasonable doubt”¦

The Warren Commission critics and conspiracy theorists display an astonishing inability to see the vast forest of evidence proving Oswald’s guilt because of their penchant for obsessing over the branches, even the individual branches. And, because virtually all of them have no background in criminal investigation, they look at each leaf (piece of evidence) by itself, hardly ever in relation to, and in the context of, all the other evidence.

And to bring us up to date, the NY Times was ready for this week’s anniversary by pretending that righties in Dallas were somehow responsible for killing Kennedy because they “willed” it. Vulcan mind-meld, anyone?

It’s never been easy for the left to admit that a Communist killed JFK. So, as the event recedes into the ever-more-distant background, why not recycle the tired old tried-and-untrue narrative that it was the fault of the right? The mechanism this time was a NY Times op-ed by James McAuley, entitled “The City With a Death Wish in Its Eye: Dallas’s Role in Kennedy’s Murder.” It begins:

For 50 years, Dallas has done its best to avoid coming to terms with the one event that made it famous: the assassination of John F. Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963. That’s because, for the self-styled “Big D,” grappling with the assassination means reckoning with its own legacy as the “city of hate,” the city that willed the death of the president.

How about a rewrite? If I were the editor of the paper, I might say:

For 50 years, the left has done its best to avoid coming to terms with the one event that made it famous: the assassination of John F. Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963. That’s because, for the self-styled “progressives,” grappling with the assassination means reckoning with its own legacy as the “people of hate,” the group that wills the death of anyone they don’t agree with.

McAuley seems to be working out some Dallas family demons of his own in the article (you have to read the whole thing to see what I’m talking about). But the “Wanted” posters in Dallas that day fifty years ago that McAuley mentions (put out, by the way, by General Edwin Walker’s group) were mild compared to what the left would generate forty-odd years later on a daily basis against George W. Bush, and the famous ad in the Dallas paper that day was likewise a relatively ordinary series of questions highly critical of his policy, its black border only taking on an especially ominous significance afterward.

It’s hard to believe the Dallas right was an inspiration for the actual killer, the Communist Lee Harvey Oswald, who in another strange coincidence had tried unsuccessfully to assassinate Walker himself just a few months before Oswald’s successful attack on Kennedy. As for the influence of Dallas on Oswald, he had only lived there (or in nearby Fort Worth) for the years from first to sixth grade, spending the bulk of his youth in New Orleans, with a two-year stay in New York (the Bronx, to be specific) and then back to New Orleans: “By the age of 17, he had resided at 22 different locations and attended 12 different schools.”

Oswald had dropped out of school and joined the Marines, then defected to the USSR and lived there for nearly three years. He came back to Dallas because he had family there, attempted to kill General Walker about ten months later, almost immediately moved back to New Orleans for about five months, and then tried to get to Cuba through Mexico, and only returned to Dallas in early October 1963. He got the Texas School Book Depository job in mid-October, and started living in a Texas rooming house during the week and visiting his wife (who was living with friends in nearby Irving) on weekends.

A little over a month later, Kennedy visited Dallas—the motorcade route having been published in the newspaper just a few days earlier—and the rest, as they say, is history. But it’s hard to see Oswald as a product of Dallas in any meaningful way, much less of the right in Dallas.

Of course, none of this matters to the Times and writers like McAuley. They have their own bones to pick and their own fish to fry and their own use to make of the 50th anniversary of the assassination.

President Obama gives Pravda…

The New Neo Posted on by

…its talking points:

President Obama held an off-the-record meeting with MSNBC hosts and liberal pundits on Thursday, POLITICO has learned.

Present at the meeting: MSNBC’s Ed Schultz and Lawrence O’Donnell, Washington Post economics blogger Ezra Klein, Mother Jones Washington bureau chief David Corn, Talking Points Memo editor and publisher Josh Marshall, ThinkProgress editor-in-chief Judd Legum, Atlantic senior editor Garance Franke-Ruta, Salon political writer Brian Beutler and Fox News contributor Juan Williams…

The White House did not respond to a request for comment regarding the meeting.

And I am not making up that “talking points” idea:

As I reported earlier this month, Obama has held several meetings with thought leaders from across the political spectrum during his presidency. The liberal confabs are seen by the White House as an opportunity to shape talking points and shore up support from the base.

And here I thought President Obama had only one press secretary. Dummy me.

Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches…

The New Neo Posted on by

…are racist. Against somebody, somewhere:

Apparently, it’s because people in some cultures don’t eat sandwich bread. Verenice Gutierrez, principal of Harvey Scott K-8 School in Portland explained to the Portland Tribune:

“Take the peanut butter sandwich, a seemingly innocent example a teacher used in a lesson last school year,” the Tribune said.

“What about Somali or Hispanic students, who might not eat sandwiches?” Gutierrez asked. “Another way would be to say: ”˜Americans eat peanut butter and jelly, do you have anything like that?’ Let them tell you. Maybe they eat torta. Or pita.”

”¦The Tribune noted that the school started the new year with “intensive staff trainings, frequent staff meetings, classroom observations and other initiatives,” to help educators understand their own “white privilege,” in order to “change their teaching practices to boost minority students’ performance.””Last Wednesday, the first day of the school year for staff, for example, the first item of business for teachers at Scott School was to have a Courageous Conversation ”” to examine a news article and discuss the ”˜white privilege’ it conveys,” the Tribune added.

I assume Gutierrez has never heard of the Cuban. Although I assume the Cuban is racist:

cuban

But whether PB&J sandwiches are racist or not, I think they’re mean. To me. Because I can’t eat peanut butter; it gives me migraines, even though I love it.

So when I’m queen I will ban all talk of them.

School discipline: affirmative inaction

The New Neo Posted on by

Somehow I missed this story when it first came out almost a year and a half ago, but let’s take a break for a moment from Obamacare and re-visit another travesty:

President Barack Obama is backing a controversial campaign by progressives to regulate schools’ disciplinary actions so that members of major racial and ethnic groups are penalized at equal rates, regardless of individuals’ behavior.

His July 26 executive order established a government panel to promote “a positive school climate that does not rely on methods that result in disparate use of disciplinary tools.”…

The progressives campaign for race-based discipline policies also won a victory in Maryland July 24.

The state’s board of education established a policy demanding that each racial or ethnic group receive roughly proportional level of school penalties, regardless of the behavior by members of each group.

The board’s decision requires that “the state’s 24 school systems track data to ensure that minority and special education students are not unduly affected by suspensions, expulsions and other disciplinary measures,” said a July 25 Washington Post report.

“Disparities would have to be reduced within a year and eliminated within three years,” according to the Post.

The state’s new racial policy was welcomed by progressives, including Judith Browne Dianis, a director of the D.C.-based Advancement Project. “Maryland’s proposal is on the cutting edge,” she told the Post.

Dianis’ project is also a law firm that litigates race-related questions, and it gains from laws and regulations that spur race-related legal disputes.

Equality of outcome has become the new religion. I use the word “religion” ironically, of course. But I chose it because this particular movement rests on the belief (or the pretense) that, any time members of a race or group defined as disadvantaged exhibit lesser achievements or undesirable behavior in some area, it must by definition be due to bigotry and discrimination, and that the situation needs to be rectified not by changing the behavior but by changing how that behavior is measured or judged. The goal is to equalize the outcomes for the races in the statistical sense.

It hurts society as a whole. But perhaps the ones who are the most damaged by it are the members of the disadvantaged group themselves.

Speaking of which, here’s another phenomenon that is no surprise.

A Republican fix?

The New Neo Posted on by

Holman Jenkins has a suggestion for a Republican “fix” for Obamacare:

What can be done is Congress creating a new option in the form of a national health insurance charter under which insurers could design new low-cost policies free of mandated benefits imposed by ObamaCare and the 50 states that many of those losing their individual policies today surely would find attractive.

What’s the first thing the new nationally chartered insurers would do? Rush out cheap, high-deductible policies, allaying some of the resentment that the ObamaCare mandate provokes among the young, healthy and footloose affluent.

These folks could buy the minimalist coverage that (for various reasons) makes sense for them. They wouldn’t be forced to buy excessive coverage they don’t need to subsidize the old and sick…

Because such a move could be sold as expanding the options under ObamaCare and lessening the burden of an unpopular mandate, it always had potential to draw Democratic support…

And, yes, this would also blow up the disingenuous financial engine of ObamaCare. This is a feature not a bug.

The ObamaCare exchanges would devolve into refuges for those who are medically uninsurable. But this seems increasingly likely to happen anyway. The federal government, having assumed the job of subsidizing these people, should do so honestly and openly.

So, what Jenkins seems to be proposing is not to repeal Obamacare (which probably wouldn’t be politically feasible anyway—yet) but to add a catastrophic insurance option free of the mandatory coverages such as maternity and newborn care, mental health and substance use disorder services, pediatric oral and vision care, and a host of others, that have raised the cost of Obamacare and which many people don’t want or need. He realizes that a lot of people would gravitate towards that catastrophic option instead of the plans Obamacare now offers, and the exchanges would basically become subsidized high-risk pools—somewhat like the ones the vast majority of states had to begin with before Obamacare led to those pools’ cancellation.

There’s an excellent argument to be made, though, that the GOP should hold fast to a repeal rather than a fix. There’s also some doubt as to whether the Senate would pass anything the GOP proposed, even now that the political climate has become far more hostile to Obamacare. And of course one must always remember that Obama has veto power, and it’s hard to imagine him not using it on a bill like this one. But there’s something to be said for Republicans taking charge and actually designing and passing a remedy that could help people with the problems they are now facing in the health insurance markets.

Republicans have been demonized for a long time as not caring about those without health insurance, although some Republicans have been suggesting a number of solutions for years that have been ignored. Actually passing something concrete would go far towards getting the public to realize that conservatives do have solutions to these things; they are just different solutions than liberals have come up with.

However, I’m not sure that Jenkins’ suggestion would do anything to solve the problem connected with the mandatory coverage of those with pre-existing conditions combined with the weakness of the penalty for not buying insurance (or the penalty’s possible unconstitutionality, despite whatever Justice Roberts might think). That problem is inherent in Obamacare, or in any scheme that mandates coverage of pre-existing conditions. Either penalties are weak (or non-existent) and premiums rise, or penalties must be strong. The first wrecks havoc with the health insurance market premiums and the second with liberty, especially if instituted at the federal level.