Senate Finance Chairman Runs Screaming from Obamacare

by Larry Huss 

In a recent column Doug MacEachern was describing how President Barack Obama’s Five Pillars of economic recovery were, in fact, crushing employment and America’s small businesses. It’s a column worth reading because it basically cries BS on the extraordinary lies Mr. Obama told to promote his agenda. http://www.azcentral.com/insiders/dougmace/2013/04/18/obamacare-the-fifth-pillar-in-an-economic-revival-that-never-was/ .  And if they aren’t lies, then they are proof positive that Mr. Obama understands less about business, jobs and the economy than any person who has ever held public office.

But it was a series of comments in the article about a different politician that caught my eye and rekindled my recollections of another politician. MacEachern noted: "Another of the pillars was health-care reform, about which the president that day said: ‘Major American corporations are struggling to compete with their foreign counterparts, and small businesses are closing their doors. We cannot allow the cost of health care to strangle our economy any longer.’ Four years later we now see one of the president’s top reform architects, Sen. Max Baucus, D- Montana, describing his fears of the approaching introduction of the Affordable Healthcare Act. In a recent hearing, Baucus described the Act to a stone-faced Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of Health and Human Services, as a ‘huge train wreck.’"

I remember Max Baucus from the early 70’s when he came back to Montana from Washington, D.C. for the specific purpose of running for public office. Max was like many Montana rivers – a mile wide and inch deep. He was uncertain whether to run as a Republican or Democrat but after he purchased his lumberjack plaid shirt and his hiking boots he opted for the Democrats because they were the dominant force in the area of Missoula he then called home. Three decades in Congress and chairmanship of the powerful Senate Finance Committee have not made Mr. Baucus any smarter or any more principled. Chairmanships of Senate committees are based on seniority, not on skill.

Baucus was the primary sponsor of Obamacare, though he had little, if anything, to do with writing it.  The man has difficulty stringing together three sentences, let alone 2000 pages. He almost certainly didn’t read it, nor would he have understood much of it if he had. But as chairman of the Senate Finance Committee he was one of the congressional leaders who assured his colleagues and the American public that all of what the president promised, his bill would make reality:  Everyone would be covered, healthcare costs would go down, small business would be relieved of the tremendous burden of healthcare under the current system, job creation would abound, and all of this would miraculously occur—in defiance of all known laws of economics—without raising a single tax.

But as usually turns out to be the case with matters arising in D. C. after a few rocks are overturned, the folly and monkey business run even deeper. George Ochenski, a columnist for Baucus’ hometown newspaper, The Missoulian, tied the can to Mr. Baucus’ tail in a recent article: “(T)he law, which is more than 2,000 pages long, was actually authored by Liz Fowler, formerly his top Senate staffer on health care who came to that position after serving as Vice President of Public Policy and External Affairs at WellPoint, a multi-billion dollar health insurance corporation. That explains why the measure mandates that all Americans buy health insurance or pay a penalty to the IRS, which is easily the most odious part of the law. But it’s a huge boon to the insurance industry and would force as many as 32 million citizens to purchase health insurance – with or without government assistance.” 

Ochenski continues:  "What’s even more puzzling is why Baucus would criticize the implementation of the law when Fowler left his Senate staff, went through yet another D. C. revolving door, and was hired by the Obama administration specifically to implement the law as the deputy director of the Office of Consumer Information and Oversight at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Apparently Fowler, who had no problem writing a bill to massively enrich the health insurance industry, somehow can’t figure out how to spin that simple and inescapable truth to the public who must now live under that mandate." 

He concludes:  "Baucus is right, a "train wreck" lies ahead. But remember it was Baucus who laid the tracks, built the corporate-friendly locomotives, and sent them barreling into the lives of every citizen nationwide. Suddenly he realizes the bridge to his re-election is out – and try as he might, pulling on the whistle won’t avert the impending disaster."

So, what is it that Baucus proposes to do about this train wreck? As chairman of the Finance Committee, He presided over the writing of Obamacare. He has the same resources available to him to correct its flaws. But what he is going to do about it is precisely NOTHING. Having expressed his dismay that the creature he helped create is a monster, Mr. Baucus is now washing his hands of any responsibility by retiring.  Would that he had done so at the end of his last term.

Baucus is but one of the hallelujah chorus of snake oil salesmen who inhabit Congress. They will say anything, do anything, and repeat anything to gain and hold power. They will ignore the obvious while staring wide-eyed at the camera and stating, "Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?" And when the obvious proves to be true, they are the first to denounce that which they created, or else run from it as from a burning house.

Can there be worse human beings on this planet than those who inhabit Congress?  Max Baucus, take a bow.

“(E)vil acts committed in the name of religion in no way impugn the truth of the faith; they instead impugn the nature of human beings, those rusty containers into which the pure water of that truth has been placed."

–Francis S. Collins

Clingers On

"Somehow it became a conventional view in contemporary American politics that it is non-urban conservatives who in every case have to accommodate their beliefs to a national culture created by people who live somewhere else. 'They' must adjust on abortion, guns, school prayer, sexual mores and all the rest of it. Liberals, meanwhile, not only feel no need to concede anything but use the commanding heights of the press and academia to define anyone who dissents from their ever-evolving national culture as a political fringe obsessed with people, one might say, who aren't like them."

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323309604578428900867620018.html

“How long must we all marinate in the angry resentment of black people?  We treat blacks like children, constantly talking about their temper tantrums right in front of them with airy phrases about black anger.  As a post-racial American, I do not believe ‘the legacy of slavery’ gives black people the right to be permanently ill-mannered.”

 - Ann Coulter

My social suicide

Okay, fine–I’m agin’ it!

There, I said it!  I didn’t want to jump into the raging, spittle-slinging, maelstrom of indignation that is this debate, but it’s been forced upon me by a week of Facebookers apparently incapable of talking about anything else.  I’m against gay marriage!  Let the verbal assaults and un-friendings begin in earnest.  I wasn’t put on this earth to be popular, that much is apparent. 

For starters, I shouldn’t even have to be writing this.  I resent the very notion of having to explain myself.  See, the way this ordinarily works is that the proponent of upending something that has been more or less static in its nature and definition for centuries, if not millennia, has the burden of proof, not the defender of the status quo.  But that’s not the way this debate has been framed.  Nope–they’ve thrown down the gauntlet, and anyone fool enough to take a run at it is immediately called upon to defend the apparently radical notion that a well-settled, perfectly defined, altogether firmly established institution ought to stay the way it is.

I should also say that this is not a position I arrived at lightly.  In many respects, it runs against the grain of my (almost) uniformly libertarian impulses, and I certainly understand the feel-good seduction of wanting to let people live any old way they want to.  There are people of good will on both sides of this debate, although it seems the proponents are far less apt to grant that basic charitable nicety to the opponents and far more inclined toward churlishness and name-calling.  One also sees a great deal of moral preening/exhibitionism going on, where the latest on the bandwagon appears far more transfixed with “Look at what a hip, tolerant, inclusive and, gosh darnit, just plain wonderful person I am!” than with anything actually having to do with the issue at hand.  

In his most recent book (The Joy of Hate–buy it and read it), Greg Gutfeld recalls that he spent adolescence, as most do, as a liberal, became a conservative as a result of hanging around a lot of liberals in college, then became a libertarian after hanging around conservatives.  My ideological history follows a similar, though distinct, trajectory.  I was never a liberal, always considered myself a libertarian, but became conservative on a handful of issues after spending some time pondering some of the zanier manifestations of libertarianism.  One problem with purist libertarians is that they share the liberals’ deconstructionist nihilism, which refuses to recognize that some institutions have intrinsic, inherent value simply because (1) They’ve been forged, by trial and error over a very long time, and (2) They’ve withstood the test of time.  I believe they do, because they transcend individuals and their whims, limitations, and short memories and life spans.  The “wisdom of ages” has, at least in my experience, actual value and meaning.  And only a willfully blind fool would deny that frivolous experimentation with the social fabric has consequences, which are negative more often than not.  See divorce, no fault and fatherless, 72% of African American children.  But to hear both liberals and the more extreme libertarians tell it, we must question everything as though we’re alien beings examining all aspects of the human condition afresh, and must take nothing as given, fundamental, axiomatic or sacred.  This is a deranged mental state I like to refer to as “perpetual adolescence.”  

Moreover, I don’t have the least antipathy toward gays.  I don’t believe someone “chooses” to be gay, and they have a right to love who they want to in whatever way works for them.  I just don’t think they have any more right to call their relationship a “marriage” than I do to call myself a North Korean figure skater.

 

Where the debate has, I feel, been fundamentally misframed is in the insistence that a person’s attitude about gay marriage defines his attitude about gays.  Is it not every bit as plausible, if not more so, that what it truly defines is his attitude about marriage?  If I revere marriage as a cornerstone institution that’s had its meaning and significance too far eroded already, I will be naturally resistant to further redefining it regardless of my attitude, positive, negative or indifferent, toward gays.  Conversely, even if I didn’t particularly care for gays but was indifferent to marriage, why would I care in the slightest if they availed themselves of it?  Sure–let them have it.  Knock yourselves out!  Marry your pet rock for all I care.  This isn’t some theory I’ve conjured from the ether; it’s actually lent credence by most of the people I’m personally acquainted with who are the most vocal in their support of gay marriage.  While there are plenty in happy, functioning marriages, I can safely say the majority have either (1) foresworn marriage after having made a hash of their own marriages, (2) never been married, or (3) openly stated that they don’t believe in marriage.  Got that?  We don’t care a damn for marriage, but we insist that those of you who have strong convictions about it include these people we happen to like, and whose cause we’ve chosen to champion this particular week.  If this ain’t chutzpah, the word might as well not exist.  The only significance marriage holds for these people is as a platform upon which to grandstand and parade their hip enlightenment.  Charlise Theron and her partner, Mr. Charlise Theron, have made a big noise about how they’ll be holding off on marriage until everyone can marry.  I’d be willing to bet my Bacon of the Month subscription and half my whiskey that if gay marriage were legalized in all 50 states tomorrow, they would find another excuse not to marry.  They don’t believe in marriage, don’t give a crap about it, yet want to force their idea of what it should be on the rest of us.  Simply stunning.

More specifically, there are at least 4 reasons I’m opposed:

1.  You can't change the meaning of a thing without changing the thing itself, and potentially destroying it.  So why the reluctance to jump on the (unquestionably hip, fashionable, heavy-to-skinny-jeans) bandwagon hell-bent on whimsically redefining marriage or, as some may frame it, to let the definition “evolve” to “suit the times”?  Besides the obvious (I can't wear skinny jeans), the short answer is that if something can mean whatever certain individuals think it should mean, as opposed to what it means in the much broader and more objective context of history and the layered, intricate web of significance it has to the society and culture that begat it, it might as well mean nothing.  As Exhibit A, I give you the word “unsustainable.”  Odd as it may seem as we near the end of the first quarter of 2013, this word used to have a fairly unambiguous meaning: “An adjective describing an activity incapable of being carried on in perpetuity.”  Now it means “an adjective describing anything its user–usually a left-wing malcontent–doesn’t like.”  At whatever inexact point in time this happened to the word unsustainable, it stopped “evolving” and simply became meaningless.  And I don’t want marriage to become meaningless.  What do you think when you hear someone say, “It could mean anything”?  I think most of us, quite reasonably, automatically make the translation: It means nothing.

Any two people who have taken a fancy to each other aren’t necessarily spousal material.  They may have a relationship, exclusivity, a union, a liaison, a connection, or perhaps even be kindred spirits.  Their relationship may be perfectly deserving of respect.  But it does not a marriage make.  Those who think it does, or ought to, embrace the “hedonistic” view of marriage.  This is not a term I coined; social scientists have ascribed different modeling terms to marriage, such as “companionate,” “co-dependent,” the “partnership marriage,” and so forth.  The hedonistic model of marriage posits that whatever makes two individuals happy, gives them love, pleasure, comfort, joy, etc., should be the only defining factors.  Marriage, then, is what they make of it, and has no definitions or relationships to anything extrinsic to the two individuals involved.

Except that isn’t what marriage is.  Among other things, it’s a compact both between two individuals and between the two of them and the wider world.  It is a commitment to merge two into one and form a family.  The unit formed has duties, relationships and responsibilities contained within it, but also has obligations to the group outside of it.  It’s also an arrangement for the rearing of children in a stable environment, which only heterosexual couples are biologically equipped to do without outside assistance.  Moreover, in the rearing of children, countless studies have confirmed the benefits of two parents, one of each gender, to the development and ultimate success of the children.  Show me a maladjusted mess of a woman who is promiscuous, constantly in and out of dysfunctional relationships, probably struggles with addiction and is in every meaningful sense a train wreck, and I’ll show you a woman with daddy issues.  Show me a man who is boorish, inconsiderate, self-absorbed and completely insensitive, and I’ll show you a man who was none-too-tight with his mother.  

Marriage is also about sacrifice, the subordination of our individual whims and desires to the good of our family, and being a part of something larger than ourselves.  According to the hedonistic model, once a marriage no longer pleases us at the ecstatic level that existed when the relationship was new (talk about “unsustainable”), we should be able to abandon it with minimal consequence.  Again, see divorce, no-fault.

It is for these reasons that those of us who believe in traditional marriage, and that it has an inherent value to the fabric of our society and culture, feel that forcing us to accept a homosexual union on equal terms is an affront. Those of us who are in devoted, committed marriages of the traditional sort feel that such unions are special, and deserving of special status.  They are defined by partnership in all things–finances, the running of a household, the rearing of children.  Granting the same status to every sort of relationship, no matter how “loving,” misappropriates something to which those of us in traditional marriages have single-mindedly been devoting ourselves throughout our married lives.

 

And while ex-Senator Rick Santorum may have been greeted with howls when he raised the point, as many others have, there is a great deal to the “Why stop there?” argument.  If two males or two females in a loving, committed relationship ought to be recognized by law as “married,” where exactly do you draw the line?  Man and two women?  Man and sheep?  Man and underage boy/girl?  Man and his sister/mother/aunt? Do we really want equivalency in all things and in all relationships?  Now a funny thing happens when someone puts the Santorum line of questioning to a proponent of gay marriage: Nothing.  I mean, there might be a derisive rolling of the eyes as though the question is so self-evidently ridiculous that it doesn’t warrant a response, but I’ve yet to see an earnest attempt to meet the argument on its own terms and take it down.  If marriage means whatever the two individuals immediately involved want it to mean, with absolutely no weigh-in from the standards, norms and traditions of the culture in which those two individuals dwell, how can there be any limiting factors to the definition?  This isn’t a mere example of a slippery slope, it’s the very essence of what a slippery slope is.  Anything that can be defined solely by the individuals immediately involved, and purely on a case-by-case basis, must inevitably end up becoming something with no definition at all.  Once something can mean anything, then, it ends up meaning nothing.  Something that means nothing must, in turn, become nothing–a nonentity.  And at the risk of becoming a broken record, as one who cares deeply for the institution of marriage and would like to see it not only preserved, but restored to prominence, I’m not ready to see it relegated to meaninglessness.

2.  I don't believe they really want it.  I believe, and will probably never be convinced to the contrary, that the push for gay marriage is far more about forcible mainstreaming than anything else.  Gays want their relationships to have the same recognition and be granted the same legitimacy by the broader society as all loving relationships.  I get that.  It’s a perfectly understandable impulse.  But marriage is, among other things, a traditional institution expressive of traditional values.  Exactly how hung up on traditional values is the average homosexual?  We’ve already seen, in countries such as Denmark, which have long granted a marriage-equivalent status to homosexual couples, that the rate of “marriage” among gays ends up being quite low.  In Canada, about a third of a percent of marriages are same-sex couples, and a large percentage of those are actually Americans who have come north for the purpose.  Once they’ve got it, it turns out they didn’t really want it.  It’s symbolic. It’s a temper tantrum which, once assuaged, ends up being exposed as having been utterly beside the point.  I may be wrong about this, but I seriously doubt it.  Oh, and I’ve actually heard from a few honest gays who admit they don’t give a damn about it, although most are afraid to say as much.

3.  Proponents are obnoxious bullies, and it's THEY who are imposing!  We are not “imposing” our beliefs on others; it is they who have created the imposition on us by insisting on coopting an institution that has been unquestionably ours for as long as it has existed.  They are demanding that we let them call the shots and set the rules and definitions for something already well-established.  How is it the traditionalists that are imposing in this instance?

I have to admit that I react to all of this with the most bemused incredulity. If someone hadn’t thought of gay marriage, I’d be willing to bet that its most devout proponents wouldn’t have thought of it themselves, no matter how otherwise committed they were to gay rights.  It just never would have occurred to them.  As a concept, its origins are amazingly recent.  Yet traditionalists are looked upon as crazy if they don’t instantly accept this thing that’s been sprung upon society as an invented, contrived political machination perhaps (in historical terms) about 30 seconds ago.  Five years ago I could have been less circumspect in my comments about it than I’m forced to be today–it’s THAT recent of a teapot tempest.  All this proves, for perhaps the millionth time, that the political left is tolerant of dissent and values diversity of opinion right up until the moment they’re actually confronted with either.  A little self-examination and honest introspection into what a shrill and, yes, intolerant bunch of pitchfork-wielding trend whores you’ve all become would be appropriate, but I’m not holding my breath.

4.  Most of the "disadvantages" cited from being unable to wed are either made-up or wildly exaggerated.  Most of the complaining from the gay community about all of the things they supposedly cannot do because their relationships aren’t recognized as marriages is a bunch of empty air.  They can already bequeath property to one another or own it jointly, maintain joint accounts, grant medical care directives and powers of attorney to one another, and do just about everything else that a married couple can do other than file joint tax returns.  Much of the claimed hurdles they face are shams and fabrications.  

Hospital visits?  My cousin was in the ICU several years ago hanging on the edge of death after a horrific car wreck.  The elaborate hurdles I had to jump through in order to go in and see him consisted of getting in the elevator, pushing the right button, and walking into his room.  Not only are we not married (he’s totally not my type), I’m not even in his immediate family.  There were no goons at his door blocking entry and demanding that I state my business.  This is just a bunch of hooey.

I do agree that gays should be able to will property to their partners without any estate tax liability, same as heterosexuals can to their spouses.  But I’ve always believed this, because I don’t believe ANYBODY should have to pay estate taxes.  I’m against them, at all times, in all places, for all people.  So I guess we’re in agreement there, but all that means to me is that gays should be lobbying against estate taxes rather than for the right to marry.  They could even use an equal protection argument in their favor, but only if they give up on the crusade for the right to marry.  The legal theory would look something like this:  Heterosexual spouses can inherit tax-free, so it violates equal protection for gay partners to have to pay estate taxes.

And now the heretic quietly submits to his stoning.