The Supreme Court will hear King v. Burwell!

The Supreme Court has decided that they will hear King v. Burwell. When two different appellate courts originally ruled in opposite ways on the language in the Affordable Care Act that says subsidies can only be paid in states that have established their own exchanges, it looked as though the Supreme Court would get to rule on it. But then the court that had ruled against the Administration's interpretation, in Halbig v. Burwell reversed itself in an unusual procedure where the decision of a three-judge panel was overruled by the full court, there was no longer a diversity of appellate court decisions, so the Supreme Court might not have heard the case. However, the Supreme Court announced yesterday that the King v. Burwell case will be taken up.

How anyone can believe that words as specific as “exchange established by a State” can include an exchange established by the Federal Government because a State chooses not to do so escapes me. The original decision in Halbig makes sense; its overruling — and the King decision — was simply an attempt by partisan judges to save the Act no matter what. And the Supreme Court is acting sensibly here, and I compliment the Justices who chose to take up the case.

The governors

One big surprise in Tuesday's election was how many Democratic governors were replaced by Republicans, and not just in Maryland where I happen to be located (though that one, as I said, made me particularly happy). Some of the recent polling actually showed the Democrats picking up seats, but in fact it looks as though the GOP gained at least three governorships (a loss in Pennsylvania being balanced by one of the other gains, of course). Hopefully, this will be seen as a triumph for New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who as chairman of the Republican Governors' Association had a lot to do with the good performance of the GOP's gubernatorial candidates. Gov. Christie, of course, has been very modest, not claiming a big role. However, the efforts he exerted should stand him in good stead in achieving the nomination in 2016. And I am happy about this, because I still feel Gov. Christie is the best choice for the 2016 nomination.

Will he be willing to compromise?

Yesterday President Barack Obama addressed the nation at a news conference. He said some good things about how he has heard the message of Tuesday's election and how he wants to work with the Republican leaders in Congress to get things done. If he acts as he spoke, good. I wonder, though, whether he will really be able to work with Congressional Republicans. Certainly, he has not shown any willingness to address Republican concerns in the past six years.

One thing that I think was apparent is that Pres. Obama is more willing to work with Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell — he even referred to sitting down for a drink of Kentucky bourbon with him — than with Speaker of the House John Boehner. He never issued a word of praise for Boehner, and only referred to him in conjunction with McConnell as leaders of the Congress. It has become clear over the years that both Obama and Boehner dislike each other immensely, and McConnell will have the major role of finding something they all can agree on.

But again, the question is how much common ground can they find. The President already ruled out some of the changes to Obamacare that the GOP obviously wants. How much more has he ruled out? We can only wait and see.

Election results -- I'm very happy

When I went to vote yesterday, I was certain that nobody I voted for would win — I'm in such a blue state that I didn't really think Larry Hogan would win the Governorship even in such a Republican year. But at least it looked good for the chances of people in other states voting in new Republican Senators, and I was eagerly awaiting the Senate results.

I woke up today to find that my expectations for the Senate were fully met — it looks like the GOP will have at least 52 Senators, and the three states which are undecided could all go Republican as well, so we might end up with 55. (In Alaska, though 100% of the votes are in, for some reason they haven't called the state, though Dan Sullivan seems to have a clear plurality there. Louisiana had a plurality for the Democrat, Mary Landrieu, but their law calls for a runoff when there is no absolute majority, and Bill Cassidy could still pull it off. Only Virginia seems a close call, with Democrat Mark Warner leading Republican Ed Gillespie, so that seat was likely to end up with the Democrats.) When all is said and done, it looks like a 53- or 54-member Republican caucus. And the President is forced to settle for only those accomplishments in his last two years that he can accomplish by executive order. Unfortunately, he does have the negative power to veto, so Obamacare will not be replaced by a more sensible approach to health care reform in the short term. But his ability to further wreck the economy and hurt the country's direction will be restricted.

But the icing on the cake for me was that Larry Hogan won! I have been conceding that Anthony Brown would be our next Governor whether I wanted him to be or not, so seeing Hogan win was a pleasant surprise. It seems that whenever the Maryland Democrats nominate for the Governorship a sitting Lieutenant Governor after a Governor is term limited, then the Republicans can win. I strongly supported Hogan's bid, but never expected it to be successful. So this has been a happy election result for me.

Media bias

The writers of so many of the stories coming out about the shooting in Ferguson seem to feel it necessary to add “unarmed” to the description of Michael Brown, attempting to get the reader's sympathy. If instead he had been described as someone who was fleeing a convenience store that he had just robbed, the readers' sympathies might not be so much on Brown's side. Or if he had been described as 6′ 4″, nearly 300 lb., and it was included in the story that he had just slugged Officer Wilson in the face, breaking bones around his eye-socket, before Wilson pulled the trigger!

Clearly, media bias is giving a lot of people a distorted picture of the events in Ferguson. To me it is clear that Wilson did not shoot unprovoked, but in self-defense. And he deserves better treatment than the media are giving him.

The mess in Ferguson, Mo.

It is clear that the media, at least initially, took sides in the Ferguson shooting that made it hard to decide properly what to think. To read the first reports I saw, Michael Brown was an angel, about to start college, shot down for no reason at all.

The first thing I found out that made a difference was when the name of the "college" was put in some story. It was no real college, but a for-profit institution that, I am sure, accepts anyone who can come up with the tuition money. But if it were just that, Michael Brown could at least be favorably viewed as someone trying as best he could to improve himself.

Then along came the news that he wasn't just walking from his apartment to his grandmother's; the last place he'd been was a convenience store, where he had just committed a robbery. Obviously, not such an angel as he'd been presented.

In fact the original story I had seen seemed to imply that it was Brown's friend who got into an altercation with the policeman, and Brown was an innocent victim. Later information puts the friend in a better light than Brown — it seems that when Brown robbed the store, he took some cigars and offered one to his friend, who declined, saying he was no thief. So I suspect that Brown, and not his friend, was the perpetrator of any act that the policeman might have seen as a provocation.

And would it be hard to fathom that a person who had just committed a robbery might act nervous in the presence of a policeman, even so nervous as to move in ways that the policeman might perceive as a threat?

All that said, it does seem that the policeman overreacted. At that point, he did not know about the robbery of the convenience store and all he knew was that these two young men were walking in the middle of the street. This hardly calls for a “shoot-to-kill” action. I am sure there were alternative procedures he could have taken, to protect himself from any perceived threat, without shooting Brown in the head.

Really, there is fault on both sides.

Shifting "progressivism"

When I was younger, I lived in a district that was one of the few in New York City represented by a Republican, Jacob K. Javits. Javits later got elected to the Senate, representing the whole state. And Javits liked to call himself “progressive.” (He eschewed the term “liberal,” though he happily accepted the Liberal Party's endorsement when it was given to him.)

The progressivism of Jacob Javits was something I could easily support. During much of the time I am talking about, I was unable to vote: you had to be 21 then, and I became 21 in 1963. Javits served in the House from 1947 to 1954; when I moved into his district, in 1951, I was 9. He was elected to the Senate in 1956, so even when he ran for re-election in 1962 I could not yet vote for him — I was 20 and 18-to-20-year-olds didn't get the vote until 1971. So it was not until his third term as Senator that I could give him my vote, but I did enthusiastically. I had been supporting him for years before that.

But I doubt that if Jacob Javits were alive today, he would be called, or would call himself, “progressive.” I see the term applied to such Senators as Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. I could never imagine Javits, or his political allies like Governor Nelson Rockefeller, supporting the ideas such are espoused by Warren or Sanders. “Progressivism” has shifted a long distance from Javits' day.

Thoughts about a candidate: Jeb Bush

I don't know everything that Jeb Bush did as Governor of Florida. I do know that when it looked that Chris Christie was too seriously damaged to be nominated, Bush was the person a lot of his supporters gravitated to, and that is for me a plus: if the kind of Republican who supported Christie also found Bush a good choice, I probably ought to think along those lines too.

At present, Christie seems to be recovering — Bush and Christie were tied in the most recent poll I saw — so Bush becomes more a rival than a fallback candidate, though right now he still seems like my #2 choice.

Thoughts about a candidate: Ben Carson

He is not mentioned in most of the polls I see, but apparently Ben Carson is considering a run for the Presidency. Whether he actually does become a candidate or not, I cannot predict, but I do have some thoughts about him.

First, other than Obamacare, about which he has spoken up loud and clear (even with President Obama in the room!) I don't know where he stands on the issues. It's clear to me that he might make a great Secretary of Health and Human Services in a Republican administration, or perhaps Surgeon General. I'm less sure about what he would be in the Presidency. He has no background in foreign policy, military affairs, or economic policy. Can he lead in those areas? I have no idea.

I'm not excluding him. And it might yet be that once I've heard him campaign I might like him. But right now I have serious questions about his qualification for the office.

Thoughts about a candidate: Rand Paul

It should be clear to anyone who regularly reads this blog that Chris Christie is my preferred candidate for the presidency in 2016. But I thought it appropriate to discuss some of the other possible candidates to express my thoughts about them. And I'll start with one who has led in some of the recent polls and has gotten more attention than most first-term Senators generally do: Rand Paul.

Sen. Paul does not seem to be quite as extreme as his father is, and is therefore a more reasonable choice. I like some of his ideas — it is a good thing to pull both the GOP and the nation as a whole in a libertarian direction, and he is attempting this — but Sen. Paul is certainly not a good friend to Israel, and his foreign policy ideas in general are too isolationalistic for my taste. Still, if he were the nominee against Hillary Clinton, he'd get my vote, unlike Mike Huckabee, who would drive me to a third party candidate.

Basically, I'd rather see him somewhere other than the presidency, where his ideas can help advance freedom in domestic policy, but not affect our foreign-policy activity.

The "Obama was re-elected" argument

I was reading a discussion on the Web today justifying President Obama's failure to enforce various laws on the basis that “Obama was re-elected, so the American people were happy with what he did in his first term.” Let us be honest, rather than politically correct. Obama was re-elected for one reason and one reason only: the fact that he was half African.

Normally, African Americans are strongly Democratic, but still they divide about 83-17. In 2012 they divided 93-7. The turnout was also much greater among African Americans than it normally is. They were obviously simply voting for one of their own, not in approval of Obama's policies. If African Americans had divided along their normal partisan lines, and come out to vote in their normal numbers, Mitt Romney would be in the White House today. And there is no way of challenging this assertion.

A follow-up to yesterday's post

After reading Dean Obeidallah's post that prompted mine of yesterday entitled “The “Palestinians’ — who are they?” I wrote an e-mail to him, challenging his claim that simply because there was, for less than thirty years, a place named “Palestine” on the map (a name given by colonizers and never adopted by its residents freely), there is truly a “Palestinian” people. He actually responded rather quickly, which was perhaps better than I expected. But he seemed to think my note was a joke:

…are you a comedian because you are making me laugh? (or were you being serious - if you were than Im laughing at you) In any event thanks for the laugh. Are you Sarah Palin's foreign policy advisor by any chance?

Perhaps his whole post was a joke, not just the comment about his father being an inventor, which I saw as one. In that case, I apologize for not seeing the humor. My post was intended as serious discussion. If anyone can show any real justification for considering the term “Palestinian” as meaningful, I really would like to see it.

The "Palestinians" -- who are they?

There is a post on The Daily Beast by Dean Obeidallah entitled “Do Palestinians Really Exist?” which attempts to answer this question in the affirmative. But it is clearly based on a fraudulent argument. It starts:

Palestine. My late father, Abdul Musa Obeidallah, was born there in the 1930s. When I say Palestine, that’s not a political statement. It’s just a statement of fact. When he was born, there was no state of Israel. There was no Hamas. No PLO. There were just people of different faiths living together on the same small piece of land called Palestine.

What is true in ths statement is that “When he was born, there was no state of Israel.” What is unsaid is that the Palestine mandate was given that name by British colonizers. And, going back to Roman days, the name was first applied to this piece of land by Roman colonizers. There never has been a group of people living there who, of their own free choice, called this territory “Palestine.”

In the 1930s, the Japanese created a puppet state called Manchukuo, separate from China, which nobody but the Japanese accepted. Did the citizens thereby take on a new nationality, distinct from Chinese? Very few of them would have answered “yes” to that question. The same is true of “Palestine.” The name was an outside creation. People of Arab heritage, in “Palestine” in the 1920s and 1930s, asked their nationality, would certainly not have called themselves “Palestinians” — they were probably “Syrians,” if not merely “Arabs.” Obeidallah can refer to “Palestine” when he says:

When I ask these people what the land where Israel is now located was called before 1948, they tend to stammer or offer some convoluted response. The answer is simply Palestine. Not a big deal, really.

But “Palestine” was not the name anyone would call it as an independent nation. Jews were seeking to create a Jewish State of Israel. The Arab inhabitants wanted a Greater Syria (or in some other cases other names corresponding to neighboring countries, but certainly not a nation of “Palestine”). An interesting article points out that:

The word “Palestine,” originally used by the Romans, had been in disuse for centuries, but the British revived it. “Palestinian” described Muslims, Jews and all others living in the region. And land east of the Jordan River, which they had also acquired, they called Transjordan (to be renamed Jordan in 1949). The word “Arab” referred more to those who spoke Arabic than to people purely Arabic, and included Christians. Previous to the arrival of the British, the Arabs in Palestine had thought of themselves as Arabs rather than as Palestinians.

So when Obeidallah says:

After all, there are more than 5 million Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza, and Israel alone. Of course, that didn’t stop Newt Gingrich from commenting during his failed 2012 run for president that the Palestinians are an “invented” people. Here, I thought for years my father had been a cook, but apparently he was an inventor.

he is clearly joking. Later in the same paragraph, he continues:

he would have found that most historians mark the beginning of the Palestinian Arab nationalist movement as happening in 1824, when the Arabs there rebelled against Ottoman rule.

In fact, I can't find any trace of an 1824 revolt in “Palestine,” but there was one in what is now Saudi Arabia. So I wonder what Obeidallah is talking about. In any case, I am certain that any participants in whatever 1824 revolt he is describing called themselves “Arabs,” and not “Palestinians.”

Impeachment? Hardly an option

Some people have been talking about impeaching Pres. Obama. But this is totally impractical. And it's not for the reasons that such as Charles Hurt of The Washington Times give. Yes, impeaching Obama is really a scheme that can't be done. And Speaker John Boehner is right to dismiss it out of hand, even if such as Sarah Palin have called for it. (In fact, most of the impeachment talk comes from Democrats these days — trying to use this as a way of rallying their base!) But Hurt's reason — that the GOP is very bad at getting its ideas accepted by the American public — is not the real reason.

The real reason is that our Constitution makes it impossible to impeach a president and win, unless you can get substantially unanimous agreement. To get two thirds of the Senate to agree to convict a president like Obama, who still retains a lot of popularity, is an impossible task. The Senate would not remove Bill Clinton, who lied before a grand jury, and it is very clear that no Democratic Senator (and right now they are a majority, and even the most optimistic polls for the GOP do not expect the Democratic numbers after November's election to be reduced below the middle forties, certainly not below 33, which would be necessary to get an impeachment through!) will vote to convict Pres. Obama.

So even if the House voted to impeach, all that would do is get some Obama supporters to be angry. It would not actually remove the President. So what good would that do?

Walter Russell Mead hits it right on the head

A post dated yesterday on Walter Russell Mead's blog, “The American Interest,” is of great interest. When we compare all the media condemnation of moves by George W. Bush with the absence of comments on Barack Obama, the contrast is amazing:

The reckless and thoughtless Libya intervention just keeps looking worse. But don’t read the critics to see how horrible things are: as the government announces that the U.S. has officially evacuated its embassy in Tripoli this morning, the latest State Department travel advisory for the country says it all:

The security situation in Libya remains unpredictable and unstable. The Libyan government has not been able to adequately build its military and police forces and improve security following the 2011 revolution. Many military-grade weapons remain in the hands of private individuals, including antiaircraft weapons that may be used against civilian aviation. Crime levels remain high in many parts of the country. In addition to the threat of crime, various groups have called for attacks against U.S. citizens and U.S. interests in Libya. Extremist groups in Libya have made several specific threats this year against U.S. government officials, citizens, and interests in Libya. Because of the presumption that foreigners, especially U.S. citizens, in Libya may be associated with the U.S. government or U.S. NGOs, travelers should be aware that they may be targeted for kidnapping, violent attacks, or death. U.S. citizens currently in Libya should exercise extreme caution and depart immediately.

Sporadic episodes of civil unrest have occurred throughout the country and attacks by armed groups can occur in many different areas; hotels frequented by westerners have been caught in the crossfire. Armed clashes have occurred in the areas near Tripoli International Airport, Airport Road, and Swani Road. Checkpoints controlled by militias are common outside of Tripoli, and at times inside the capital. Closures or threats of closures of international airports occur regularly, whether for maintenance, labor, or security-related incidents. Along with airports, seaports and roads can close with little or no warning. U.S. citizens should closely monitor news and check with airlines to try to travel out of Libya as quickly and safely as possible.

The status of the country’s interim government remains uncertain. The newly elected Council of Representatives is scheduled to convene by August 4, but political jockeying continues over where and when to seat the parliament. Heavy clashes between rival factions erupted in May 2014 in Benghazi and other eastern cities. In Tripoli, armed groups have contested territory near Tripoli International Airport since July 13, rendering the airport non-operational. State security institutions lack basic capabilities to prevent conflict, and there remains a possibility of further escalation.

Throw in the resulting civil war in Mali and the scattering of insurgents and weapons to the four winds, and you have a classic exhibition of reckless incompetence—of American arrogance, ignorance, carelessness and moralism combining in a toxic stew to sink a fragile country we never understood.

Luckily for America’s self-esteem, it was liberal Democrats that produced this particular shambles. If Republicans had done this, the media would be on the administration non-stop, perhaps comparing Samantha Power to Paul Wolfowitz—a well-meaning humanitarian way over her head who wrecked a country out of misguided ideology. There might also be some pointed questions for future presidential candidates who supported this fiasco. But since both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have their fingerprints all over Libya, there isn’t a lot of press hunger for a detailed, unsparing autopsy into this stinking corpse of policy flub.

The key to all this ignoring of the foreign policy debacle follows:

If Obama were a Republican, the press and the weekly news shows would be ringing with hyperbolic, apocalyptic denunciations of the clueless incumbent who had failed to learn the most basic lessons of Iraq. Indeed, the MSM right now would be howling that Obama was stupider than Bush. Bush, our Journolist friends would now be saying ad nauseam, at least had the excuse that he didn’t know what happens when you overthrow a paranoid, genocidal, economically incompetent Arab tyrant in an artificial post-colonial state. But Obama did—or, the press would nastily say, he would have done if he’d been doing his job instead of hitting the golf course or yakking it up with his glitzy pals at late night bull sessions. The ad hominem attacks would never stop, and all the tangled threads of incompetence and failure would be endlessly and expertly picked at in long New Yorker articles, NYT thumbsuckers, and chin-strokings on all the Sabbath gasbag shows.

Why, the ever-admirable tribunes of a free and unbiased press would be asking non-stop, didn’t this poor excuse for a President learn from what happened in Iraq? When you upend an insane and murderous dictator who has crushed his people for decades under an incompetent and quirky regime, you’d better realize that there is no effective state or civil society under the hard shell of dictatorial rule. Remove the dictator and you get chaos and anarchy. Wasn’t this President paying attention during the last ten years?

Mead concedes that there is some reason to withhold criticism:

Some of the criticism would be exaggerated and unfair; the Monday morning quarterbacks never really understand just how complicated and tragic this poor world really is, not to mention how hard it is to make life and death decisions in real time in the center of the non-stop political firestorm that is Washington today. And the MSM attracts more than its share of deeply inexperienced but entitled, self-regarding blowhards who love to pontificate about how stupid all those poor fools who have actual jobs and responsibilities actually are.

But the key to the whole point being made follows:

But luckily for Team Obama, the mainstream press would rather die than subject liberal Democrats to the critiques it reserves for the GOP. So instead, as Libya writhes in agony, reputations and careers move on. The news is so bad, and the President’s foreign policy is collapsing on so many fronts, that it is impossible to keep the story off the front pages. “Smart diplomacy” has become a punch line, and the dream Team Obama had of making Democrats the go-to national security party is as dead as the passenger pigeon. But what the press can do for the White House it still, with some honorable exceptions, labors to accomplish: it will, when it must, report the dots. But it will try not to connect them, and it will do what it can to let all the people involved in the Libya debacle move on to the next and higher stage of their careers.

Of course, Hillary's march to the Presidency cannot be impeded. And Obama's greatness must me proclaimed to the world.

Moral equivalence?

Rick Bayan is the owner of a blog called "The New Moderate," with which I often agree and, even when I disagree with him, which I appreciate for his attempts to find a “moderate” position. Today he put out a post entitled “Itching for Another World War” which discusses a number of things, but a large piece of it discusses the fighting now going on between Israel and Hamas. And unbelievably, his conclusion is rather hard to take:

For now, let’s focus on Israel and its implacable adversaries. Both sides have been going at it with alarming gusto, and of course both sides claim to be victims. Hamas militants have been firing away at Israel mindlessly and persistently, like mosquitoes tormenting a sweaty horse, giving Israel a perfect excuse to fire back. Israel, no longer the plucky underdog of its early decades, has been spilling mostly-innocent Arab blood in the Gaza Strip, an Arab-occupied, Hamas-dominated patch of real estate the size of Philadelphia.

So who’s to blame? The obvious answer, at least from The New Moderate’s perspective, is both sides.

He correctly identifies the problem, I think, when he writes:

Hamas, like all Islamic terror groups, is guilty of refusing to accept the validity of Israeli statehood. What will it take for these Muslim militants to stop begrudging the Jewish people, dispersed and oppressed for nearly two thousand years, a New Jersey-sized slice of turf occupying roughly half their ancestral homeland, with a little extra desert thrown in for good measure? Where were the Jewish survivors of Nazi depredations supposed to establish a modern state for their people – Antarctica? The Jews earned their right to Israel through a combination of land purchases, grit and perseverance, and they’ve successfully defended it three times against staggering odds. The people we call Palestinians are simply Arabs who lived in an artificial state created from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire. After the establishment of Israel in 1948, they were free to stay put or find a new home within a vast Arab dominion that stretches from Morocco to the Iranian border. Israelis have only Israel. This much is certain: if terror groups like Hamas stopped putting Israel in their crosshairs, the bloodshed in the so-called Holy Land would stop tomorrow.

He even recognizes the artificiality of the “Palestinian nationality.” But yet, he proceeds to write:

And what about Israel, now widely vilified (especially on the multiculti left) as a world-class imperialist oppressor of indigenous peoples? First of all, Israel must plead guilty to creating a caste system that relegated its resident Arabs to second-class status. Yes, Israel was founded as a Jewish state, and you can’t blame Israel’s Jews for wanting to keep it that way. But Israel can be shockingly, almost gleefully ruthless in lashing back at its enemies; that ruthlessness has been amply displayed during the ongoing blockade and siege of Gaza. You’d think a civilized people who endured centuries of persecution at the hands of ethnic majorities would show a little more sensitivity toward the minorities in their midst – at least toward the civilians who suffer most from Israeli overkill. I’ll never forget the chilling words of an extremist rabbi who declared that “a million Arabs aren’t worth one Jewish fingernail.”

Now first of all, he refers to “a caste system that relegated its resident Arabs to second-class status.” I really wonder what he means there. There are Arabs in the Israeli Knesset (Parliament), and Arabs in the highest court of the land. By what measure are they “second-class”? On all matters where religion matters, the Jews run their own affairs, and Christians and Muslims run theirs. It's not like Saudi Arabia, where public celebration of Christmas can get you in trouble with the law. As for that rabbi who said “a million Arabs aren’t worth one Jewish fingernail,” this was one extremist — it hardly represents the views of the Israeli government.

So how can Rick Bayan say there is guilt on both sides? Hamas is killing innocent civilians, deliberately. Israel is firing back at the enemy, and, yes, killing innocent civilians, but warnings have been given in advance so they could have left, and they didn't. This is hardly a case of equally sharing the blame. I see not a single thing that Israel is doing in this war that they aren't forced to do, and that any other country would do in a similar situation.

How can a “moderate” criticize Israel in this battle?

A great day for foes of Obamacare

The Court of Appeals for the D. C. Circuit has issued a ruling in the case of Halbig v. Sebelius, which says that the subsidies in the Affordable Care Act (a. k. a. Obamacare) can only apply in states that have created their own exchanges, a clear interpretation of the plain language of the Act, which makes total sense. Meanwhile, the 4th Circuit, in the case of King v. Burwell, has ruled the opposite way. When two appeals courts have issued rulings so sharply in conflict, this guarantees that the Supreme Court will get to settle this. If Halbig is sustained by the Supreme Court, many other parts of the Act will fail to apply in all those states which use the federal exchange. So this could send Obamacare crashing down.

It's a case of bad drafting, because the Congress and President Obama were in such a hurry to force this down the throats of the American people. If they had been willing to work things out, and not dismiss the Republicans' efforts to change the plan, perhaps a clearer bill would have passed, but it might not have met Obama's demand to give health care that covers certain things to everyone whether they want it or not. Of course, that would have been a better bill, though Obama would not have liked it as much. But now he may be left with such a mess that the Act will have to be repealed and the government will start over. And that is good news.

Uncertainty is scary

Polls I have seen recently show the Republican Party leading in exactly enough states to win 51 seats in the Senate — a bare majority. But they are going up and down. Just a day or two ago, the total predicted was 52. By November, it could go up and down some more. And if the Senate divides 50-50, Vice-President Biden gets to vote, so the Democrats win on anything that divides strictly on party lines. With a Democratic Senate, President Obama can appoint whomever he wants to courts and other agencies; with a Republican Senate, he can be stopped. So it is scary that the totals are so close. If the polls had predicted a 55-45 Senate, we could know what we might expect — even a couple of states going the other way from the prediction would not make a difference. But we are up in the air for a few more months. (Of course, this is counting as Democrats the two independents who caucus with them. Sen. Bernard Sanders is a self-declared Socialist, so he's not going to come over to the GOP side. But Sen. Angus King might be persuaded. If the Senate does divide 50-50, you can be sure both parties are going to make a big play to get Sen. King to join their caucus!)

I just wish November would come already!

The Ukraine war

Unfortunately, with the downing of a Malaysian airliner over Ukrainian airspace, the Ukraine war is beginning to affect the lives of many people who have no connection with Ukraine or Russia. It is really a senseless war. Ukraine was given a set of boundaries that include a number of people whose language is not Ukrainian, but Russian, and whose cultural loyalties are to Russia, not to Ukraine. There is far less of a difference between Czechs and Slovaks, and they agreed to separate peacefully. It would seem that the same solution should have been pursued in Ukraine. But Ukrainian nationalism, a feeling for “integrity of borders,” and Vladimir Putin's ego have all been allowed to enter into this dispute. Clearly, this war will have to play itself out now. But it is too bad it had to start.

Hobby Lobby, mandates, and the right way to do insurance

The big problem that led to the Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores case is the decision by the authors of the so-called Affordable Care Act, a. k. a. “Obamacare,” to rely on compulsion, rather than assistance, to achieve its goal — and, of course, having the wrong goal: universal coverage, rather than coverage for all who want it. Since it mandated employers’ provision of insurance, it had to determine what was required to comply, and having some people set up minimum requirements that conflicted with others’ religious scruples is what caused the conflict that Hobby Lobby was all about.

Now, suppose that the goal was, as I think it should be, coverage for all who want it rather than universal coverage. Then nobody would be penalized with fines, either for failure to provide coverage or for failure to enroll. If a person’s employer did not provide coverage, or the person was unemployed, the government would provide a subsidy that can only be used to purchase health insurance. The amount of this subsidy could be keyed to income, of course. If a person’s employer provided coverage, but this coverage did not include something the government deemed essential, the government would provide a subsidy to enable the person to buy a supplemental policy that would cover those conditions and products that the government deemed essential but the employer-provided insurance policy did not cover. (Thus none of the Hobby Lobby-type conflicts.)

Some raise the argument that with the elimination of limitations on coverage for pre-existing conditions, people will decline to buy insurance until they are sick. There is an easy fix to this, which does not involve fining people. Simply use a rule similar to the one that parts of Medicare have: If you were eligible for insurance but did not choose to buy it, when you do buy it you will be liable for an increased premium.

Can anyone find fault with this way of doing it?