Motley Moose – Archive

The President’s Weekly Address post is also an Open News Thread. Feel free to share other news stories in the comments.

From the White House – Weekly Address

In this week’s address, the President continued his call for our nation to rally around an economic patriotism that says rather than protecting wasteful tax loopholes for a few at the top, we should be investing in things like education and job training that grow the economy for everybody.

The President highlighted the need to close one of the most unfair tax loopholes that allows companies to avoid paying taxes here at home by shifting their residence for tax purposes out of the country. The President has put forth a budget that does just that, and he has called for business tax reform that makes investment in the United States attractive, and creates incentives for companies to invest and create jobs here at home. And while he will continue to make the case for tax reform, the President is calling on Congress to take action and close this loophole now.

From the White House:

Over the past couple years, administration officials have picked up a marker and taken to our “White House white board” to explain how to fix our immigration system, break down how health reform helps your day-to-day life, and outline exactly what our budget’s paying for.

Today, Vice President Joe Biden is taking the pen, and he’s talking about something he knows like the back of his hand:

The current state of our country’s crumbling roads and bridges — and exactly why it’s so important to invest in them right now.

Our roads and bridges do far more than get people and goods from Point A to Point B.

A high-quality transportation system keeps jobs here in America, allows our businesses to grow, and keeps down the prices of household goods.

Our country’s infrastructure crisis isn’t a far-off problem: 65% of our major roads are rated in less than good condition. 25% of our bridges require significant repair or can’t handle today’s traffic.

It looks like Congress is going to act soon to pass a short-term resolution that would continue to fund the projects fixing our roads and bridges — but we need to solve the problem, not just kick the can down the road.

Found on the Internets …

Two Hours After A Court Strikes Down Obamacare Subsidies, Another Appeals Court Upholds Them

A little after 10am Tuesday morning, two Republican judges on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ordered much of the Affordable Care Act defunded. Just two hours later, another federal appeals court, the Fourth Circuit, issued a unanimous opinion upholding the same subsidies that were struck down in the DC Circuit’s order.

As we explained this morning, both cases hinge upon a glorified typo in the Affordable Care Act. Obamacare gives states the option to run a health insurance exchange selling coverage to their residents, or they may elect to have the federal government run this exchange. If read in isolation, one line of the Affordable Care Act suggests that only “an Exchange established by the State” can offer subsidies to help people pay for health insurance in the exchange. The DC Circuit’s opinion relied on that line to conclude that federally-run exchange subsidies must be defunded.

The plaintiff in the DC case is a woman who worked in the Bush Administration in his Office of Faith and Community. Apparently, nothing says “love thy neighbor” like litigating to deny health care to people. The plaintiff in the 4th Circuit case is a man in West Virginia angry that his freedumbs were taken away when he was forced to get health insurance at a cost of $21 per year.  

The entire DC Circuit has been asked to rule on the case and the split on that court is 7-4 Democratic appointees to Republican appointees.

How The White House Could Still Save Obamacare Even If It Loses In Court

The D.C. federal appeals court initially appeared to throw a stunning legal blow to Obamacare with its decision to invalidate financial subsidies offered through HealthCare.gov. The loss of those subsidies could affect 4.7 million people and send premiums skyrocketing. But the ruling was quickly tempered by a separate appeals court ruling that upheld the subsidies in another case.

[Experts told TPM] that the mechanics of how the workaround could be done aren’t completely clear, but the crux would be this: States could continue using HealthCare.gov but pass a bill or otherwise indicate that the website functions as their state-based insurance exchange.

[Additionally, ] HHS Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell “could make it much easier for a second generation of state exchanges to be established now that the federal government has a viable IT platform for both state and federal exchanges to use.”

Or we could win back Congress and pass a fix to the technical language of the law.

More …

From Detroit Michigan:

“He wound into a conclusion by talking about how his son, an environmental geologist, told him about how, if he ever got lost, Barber should climb to the highest ground he could find because, above a certain altitude, snakes cannot survive.

‘They call this The Snake Line,’ Barber said. ‘We have got to get America back above The Snake Line.’”

~ Charlie Pierce

“…  if you want to be inspired to build a fusion movement that takes our political discussion above the snake line to the moral high ground, I suggest you find the time [to watch this video]. Lordy…this man is just what our spirits need these days!”

~ Smartypants

Link to transcript below the fold.

Welcome to The Moose Pond! The Welcomings diary series gives the Moose, new and old, a place to visit and share our words about the weather, life, the world at large and the small parts of Moosylvania that we each inhabit.

The President’s Weekly Address post is also an Open News Thread. Feel free to share other news stories in the comments.

From the White House – Weekly Address

In this week’s address, the President discussed the importance of ensuring that the economic progress we’ve made is shared by all hardworking Americans. Through his opportunity agenda, the President is focused on creating more jobs, educating more kids, and working to make sure hard work pays off with higher wages and better benefits.

This week, the President will visit a community college in Los Angeles to highlight the need to equip our workers with the skills employers are looking for now and for the good jobs of the future, and he will continue looking for the best way to grow the economy and expand opportunity for more hardworking Americans.

From Bernie’s Buzz:

Senate Republicans on Wednesday blocked a bill that would have protected women’s right to make their own health care decisions. In the 56-43 vote – four short of the 60 needed – only three Republicans supported this basic protection for women.

Although the vast majority of American women use birth control at some point in their lives, many women without insurance could not afford the method that would work best for them. The Affordable Care Act guaranteed that health insurance would fully cover the cost of contraception. A recent Supreme Court decision took back that guarantee, telling women they could only be covered if their bosses said it was ok.

“The court was wrong and the Senate Republicans are wrong,” Sen. Bernie Sanders said. “Bosses should not be able to impose their religious beliefs on their employees. Bosses should not be able to deny insurance-covered birth control to their female employees. Women should make their own health care decisions, not their employers.

“At a time when tens of millions of women use birth control, there is no valid reason to restrict a woman’s access to safe, widely-used preventive services simply because her employer does not approve of what should be her private medical decisions.”

The Protect Women’s Health from Corporate Interference Act would have ensured that employers cannot interfere in their employees’ decisions about contraception or other health services.

Welcome to The Moose Pond! The Welcomings series provides the moose, new and old, a place to visit and share our words about the weather, life, the world at large and the small parts of Moosylvania that we each inhabit.

From the White House:

Since our earliest days, the American transportation system has comprised our economic backbone — part of what’s made us great as a nation.

But right now, there’s a big problem with our roads and bridges: Over the years, we’ve invested in them less and less. They haven’t kept up with the needs and demands of our growing economy.

That’s why the President has been clear: Investing in our infrastructure is a top priority, and it’s why he’s put out a long-term plan that shows we can invest in our infrastructure and pay for it in part by closing unfair tax loopholes and making commonsense reforms to our tax system.

With funding for surface transportation running out, and hundreds of thousands of jobs at risk, we simply can’t afford to stop investing in our transportation.

65% of America’s roads are already in less than good condition, and a quarter of our bridges require significant repair or can’t handle today’s traffic.

The President has a plan to fix our nation’s infrastructure for the long run — making targeted investments in the short term and laying the groundwork for increased efficiency down the road. But in the meantime, he’s calling on Congress to avoid a lapse in funding of the Highway Trust Fund.

His long-term plan to invest in rebuilding our nation’s infrastructure would (among other things):

   – Invest $302 billion over four years into our highways, railroads, and transit systems

   – Provide certainty that cities, states, and investors need to break ground on major projects

   – Build a world-class freight network that gets our products out to overseas markets

Click to find out more about the roads and bridges in your state — and what will happen if Congress fails to act.

Found on the Internets …

House of Representatives to Sue President Obama

[Speaker John Boehner] plans to secure House approval for a lawsuit alleging that Obama exceeded his constitutional authority by unilaterally delaying the Obamacare employer mandate by one year, to 2015. It’s unclear if the suit has a serious chance of success, legal experts say, but it’s plausible.

The first question is whether Boehner can achieve standing to bring the litigation in the first place. This is uncharted waters for House of Representatives. Never before have the courts granted standing to lawsuit emanating from Congress against a president’s executive actions. There have been previous lawsuits of the sort brought by individual members of Congress, but those have been thrown out for lack of standing.

Some legal experts believe Boehner is destined to lose on the same grounds.

“The House of Representatives as an institution hasn’t suffered the sort of concrete, particularized injury that the courts are constitutionally empowered to review. This is a political dispute, not a judicial dispute, and the courts will properly leave it to the political branches to sort it out,” wrote Nicholas Bagley, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School.

Jonathon Capehart in WaPo: There’s no there there

[Constitutional scholar Laurence] Tribe told me yesterday that he is “now convinced that there’s no ‘THERE there.” And that was BEFORE the speaker released language of a bill seeking authorization to sue the president “over the way President Obama unilaterally changed the employer mandate” in the Affordable Care Act. Boehner’s announced action solidified Tribe’s view.

“The very fact that Boehner is willing to say the House of Representatives is injured by the President’s decision to delay the implementation of the employer mandate is bizarre in itself, given how often the House has voted not just to delay it but to scuttle it,” Tribe told me via e-mail last night. “And it’s hard to imagine what conceivable remedy a federal court could possibly issue: an order directing the President to reverse course and implement the employer mandate sooner? Hardly!”

Well, when the purpose of the lawsuit is to raise funds for the mid-term elections, it does not have to make sense.

More …