A Repeal and Replace Plan That Works

For more than six years, the one constant in every single Republican campaign was a promise to repeal Obamacare. Presidential candidates said it. Prospective senators and congressmen said it. Gubernatorial candidates, too, said that if elected they would do everything in their power to fight the Affordable Care Act’s many encroachments on state power. Given the chance, even Republican mayors and county councilmen would loudly proclaim how opposed they were to Obama’s signature legislative achievement.

In return, Republicans were given the House in 2010. They were given the Senate in 2014, and, against all odds, the White House in 2016. And what do they do with their newfound power to finally repeal and replace Obamacare, a day many believed would never come?

They introduce the American Health Care Act, a bill whose first sentence begins, “the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act… is amended.” A fitting summary of the contents of the bill.

The individual mandate is repealed—and replaced with a new mandate, a requirement for insurance companies to charge extra those who allow their insurance to lapse. Such a measure is just more government overreach, and of doubtful constitutionality.

Medicaid is reformed—but not until 2020. And those reforms are clumsy and unnecessarily complicated, far short of the simple block grant program that many have argued for.

Some taxes are repealed—but others are kept, including the ridiculous Cadillac tax on “deluxe” health plans.

And the Independent Payment Advisory Boards, or “death panels”, remain in place.

Without a doubt, this is better than the current Obamacare framework. But it should not be enough for Congress to merely pass a bill where the best thing that can be said about it is that it is better than a disaster. We can and must do better.

The first step should be to repeal Obamacare outright. Ideally, this would consist of a one-sentence bill: “The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is hereby repealed.” Unfortunately, such a bill would have been feasible only in the early years following the ACA’s initial passage. Measures have already been implemented that cannot be easily taken away without disrupting the lives of millions.

Instead, Congress can merely repeal the individual and employer mandates, taxes, and all other assorted regulations, along with halting all further Medicaid expansion. Repeal, too, the requirement that insurance companies must allow young adults to stay on their parents’ plans until age 26. Whether there would be some kind of staggered end to this provision, or a grandfather clause, could be up for discussion and debate.

Don’t worry about anything else in the repeal legislation. Stop Medicaid expansion, but don’t reform the program just yet. Don’t worry about the familiar cries of “But what will you replace it with?” The American health care system circa 2009 may not have been ideal, but there weren’t hordes of starving people dying in the streets. And the gap between the end of Obamacare and the beginning of a new kind of health care system need not be long, because Republicans could already be working on a replacement while the repeal bill was passed and implemented.

That replacement bill, that vision of a new health care system, would be radically different from both Obamacare and House leadership’s own proposal. It would put the marketplace and the individual first by offering true choice and competition, and eliminating all government mandates. It would dramatically expand Health Savings Accounts, far more than the AHCA proposes, and allow insurance companies to compete across state lines. It would address badly-needed tort reform head on. All of these are classical GOP beliefs on health care policy that, somewhat surprisingly, get little mention in the tepid proposal put forth by Congressional leadership.

Yes, Speaker Ryan and the rest say that additional legislation will be forthcoming, once the AHCA has been passed. But given the milquetoast nature of that proposal, coupled with leadership’s long history of proclaiming their intent to “fight another day”, how likely does it seem that radical health care reform legislation is imminent?

Because that is exactly what we need: radical reform. Reform that places individual choice, not government coercion, at the forefront of the health care policy debate. Accordingly, the American Health Care Act should represent the opening salvo of negotiations, not a final product.

Spacing Out: We Could Be Looking at a Space Age Revival

The eight years of the Obama administration were dark days for a number of reasons (Obamacare, increased federal spending, and the expansion of the administrative state chief among them), but also because of what was essentially a gutting of the U.S. space program. The Space Shuttle program was retired, and the program that was to have replaced it, Constellation, was scrapped. Ambitious plans to return to the Moon and send the first astronauts to Mars by the 2020’s were quietly retired, replaced by a retooled NASA mission philosophy that placed more emphasis on combating climate change. American astronauts were left unable to even reach the International Space Station without hitching rides with the Russians.

Now that may be changing.

In both of President Trump’s two major speeches since taking office, he has hinted at a renewed space program, saying in his joint address to Congress on February 28 that “American footprints on distant worlds are not too big a dream” by 2026. Members of the Trump administration in general seem to be more favorable toward space exploration than their Obama-era predecessors, including Attorney General Jeff Sessions. And just this week, a bill sponsored by Sen. Ted Cruz, which would provide NASA with a robust budget and amends its mission statement to more prominently push for the exploration of other planets, passed the House.

These are all obviously early steps, and actually putting a person on Mars, or even returning to the Moon, is still years away. But it highlights a newfound seriousness in Washington toward the goals of space exploration and colonization, and refocusing NASA away from climate change activism and back toward its original mission.

As I’ve said before, private enterprise and commercial exploration should be an important part of America’s long-term space missions, but this is also an area with calls for more robust government involvement, particularly in the early stages. Finally, others in Washington are waking up to that fact.

Is This Really Going To Be The Next Four Years?

Donald Trump has only been in office for six weeks, but it already seems much longer. The frequency of the leaks, pseudo-scandals, angry Tweets, and assorted controversies have left many watchers feeling exhausted.

The question is how much longer this pace can keep up, with regard to both Trump and his critics. Will liberals continue to manufacture outrage at this same level, over every little thing Trump does or says, for the next four years? Will Trump be able to keep saying outrageous things?

The answer to the second question is a self-evident “of course!” Whether he will, or will instead become “so presidential [we’ll] be bored,” is a different question. But I can’t imagine that the next four years will be the same as the last month. The pace of the controversies and outrage, from both sides, just seems too frenetic, outpacing even the infamous Bush Derangement Syndrome on the left.

Something has to give. Either Trump will grow in office, liberals will tire of complaining about every single perceived slight, or some combination of the two. More likely the last option.

But either way, the past few weeks should not be a harbinger of the next several years. It certainly can’t get any more bitter, divisive, and just plain exhausting.

Can it?

Affirmative Action: Government-Approved Discrimination

There has been abundant research, over the several decades since affirmative action was first widely instituted, to show that it demonstrably does nothing, over the long term, to improve the fortunes of individual members of minority groups. One of the more controversial arguments states that artificially elevating individuals to a level they are not sufficiently prepared to excel at does little to improve those individuals' lives.

Justice Clarence Thomas, only the second black justice in the history of the Supreme Court, is perhaps one of the strongest and most capable critics of affirmative action. He has many times argued that these programs serve to, in effect, taint the achievements of even the most deserving and qualified members of minority communities.  The programs cheapen their achievements and causing others to wonder whether they had merely been given an inside track to college admittance or job hiring because of their race, doubts that in turn serve to inhibit the very cause of racial integration, and elimination of historical racial preferences as a stigma, that affirmative action was supposed to help achieve.

However, all of the many varied arguments against affirmative action make a key distinction, treating individuals exactly as that—individuals, rather than as members of a homogenous, communal group. The primary arguments in favor of affirmative action, meanwhile—corrective, to make up for a general lack of opportunity in minority communities; compensatory, in order to pay some form of group reparation directly to the black community to make up for a history of slavery and discrimination; and diversity, to facilitate a more representative and inclusive environment, whether in colleges or in the workforce—do exactly the opposite, treating individuals as merely members of a group.

Furthermore, the debate regarding the policy merits of affirmative action avoid the tougher moral and constitutional questions, since affirmative action, by its very nature, treats individuals differently based solely on their race. Throwing to the wind Martin Luther King Jr.'s wish for future generations to be judged “not on the color of their skin but on the content of their character,” as well as the clear text and intent of the modern Constitution as a "color-blind" document, modern affirmative action programs do exactly the opposite.

As Chief Justice Roberts wrote in one of the last affirmative action cases to reach the Supreme Court, “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”

Mandating Employee Benefits is a Terrible Idea

“My administration wants to work with members in both parties to make childcare accessible and affordable, to help ensure new parents have paid family leave, to invest in women's health, and to promote clean air and clear water, and to rebuild our military and our infrastructure.”

--President Donald Trump, address to Congress, February 28, 2017

The issue of requiring employers to provide paid sick leave and family leave benefits is, quite simply, complicated. Supporters of the policy have done a good job of portraying themselves as the defenders of the working class, thereby casting conservative opponents as only concerned with helping big business. The narrative is compelling and can be hard to break.

But requiring employers to provide paid family leave, sick leave, and similar benefits is a manifestly bad idea. This extends from broader arguments about liberty and the role of government in the private sector economy, to the point that requiring paid sick leave is simply bad policy. Like proposals to increase the minimum wage, it hurts employers of all stripes, particularly small businesses, and ultimately hurts the very employees Democrats claim to be trying to help.

By requiring paid sick leave or other benefits, the government would force small businesses to expend greater resources for the same number of employees. Ultimately, those businesses would be forced to choose one of two options, in order to absorb rising costs: lay off some employees, or pass the added costs on to the consumer--or both. In the first scenario, employees, many of whom are likely low-income workers, would lose their jobs. In the second, everyone who patronizes a particular business would be forced to pay more—likely including at least a few workers who lost their jobs due to the same policy of mandatory paid sick leave.

When the government attempts to mandate employee benefits, whether in the form of an elevated minimum wage, paid sick leave, or the employer mandate in Obamacare, it is ultimately small businesses and workers who must pay for it. Higher wages and paid leave are great—but let businesses reach those decisions on their own, with the help of natural market forces and without government interference.

Birthright Citizenship Needs To Go

Under the current interpretation of constitutional law, every individual born within the United States is automatically entitled to full U.S. citizenship. This applies equally to the children of American citizens, legal immigrants, and illegal immigrants. If aliens landed in Montana and had a child, that child would presumably be entitled to birthright citizenship, as well.

This is a profoundly bad policy. More importantly, despite liberal arguments to the contrary, birthright citizenship is nowhere mandated in the Constitution. Formally changing the policy would therefore require nothing more than a simple act of Congress.

Arguments that birthright citizenship is constitutionally mandated can be traced back to a single section of the Fourteenth Amendment: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” Sounds pretty straightforward, right? If you’re born here, you’re a citizen.

But it is the qualifying phrase, “and subject to the jurisdiction thereof”, that liberals routinely forget about or ignore outright. Merely being born in American territory, according to the Fourteenth Amendment, is not enough. You must also be in compliance with federal law. Illegal immigrants, by definition, are in the country illegally and are therefore in violation of federal immigration law. Hence, their children are not constitutionally required to receive citizenship upon birth.

This is not to say the current regime of granting citizenship to every child of illegal immigrants is unconstitutional. The Fourteenth Amendment sets a mandatory minimum, as it were, for citizenship. Congress, if it wanted to, could pass a law granting full U.S. citizenship to every person on the planet. But just because something is constitutional does not make it good policy.

Furthermore, the Supreme Court has several times held that birthright citizenship, of the kind currently encoded in federal law, is not constitutionally mandated. In 1884, the Supreme Court held in Elk v. Wilkins that Indians could not claim birthright citizenship as the tribes were considered independent political entities not "subject to the jurisdiction" of the United States, thereby requiring additional passage of the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924. In 1898, the Court held in U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark that a child born to immigrant parents in the United States was automatically conferred citizenship under the 14th Amendment, a fact often cited by modern proponents of birthright citizenship—however, what those proponents fail to mention is that the parents in that case were legal immigrants, “subject to the jurisdiction” of both the United States and California, a fact expressly cited in the Court's opinion.

Birthright citizenship was not discussed again by the Supreme Court until 1982, when Justice William Brennan used a single sentence in an opinion footnote to state his belief that birthright citizenship was constitutionally required.

Birthright citizenship as it is currently defined is bad policy, granting blanket U.S. citizenship privileges to thousands of illegal immigrants who have no respect for American institutions or ideals of liberty and limited government. If Congress wants to solve the problem, the time is now. Enough blaming other branches of government for the current mess.

The Irony of Democratic Women Honoring Suffragettes

One of the lesser-noted events from Trump’s Tuesday night address to Congress was the spectacle of many Democratic women wearing white, apparently in an attempt to show solidarity with the early suffragettes—as well as outfits like Planned Parenthood.

Set aside the grandiosity of claiming the mantle of the “next generation of suffragettes. No one, to my knowledge, is threatening to take away women’s right to vote. But obviously, these Democrats don’t know the history of the very movement they praise and attempt to emulate at every turn, or they would see the hypocrisy of standing in support of Planned Parenthood and the suffragette movement at the same time.

Susan B. Anthony considered abortion one of society’s great evils, running in her newspaper columns critical of the practice. As Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the pro-life Susan B. Anthony List, wrote in National Review earlier this year, Anthony would often reference “the newspaper reports every day of every year of scandals and outrages, of wife murders and paramour shooting, of abortions and infanticides, are perpetual reminders of men’s incapacity to cope successfully with this monster evil of society.”

Her colleague, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, also decried abortion and “the murder of children, either before or after birth… We believe the cause of all these abuses lies in the degradation of women.”

And another early feminist, Victoria Woodhull (who was the first woman to formally run for president), said, “Wives deliberately permit themselves to become pregnant of children and then, to prevent becoming mothers, as deliberately murder them while yet in their wombs. Can there be a more demoralized position than this?”

Hard to imagine any Democrat in the House chamber Tuesday night saying something like that.