Ginni Thomas' latest move . . .

Politico broke the news last Friday:

Justice Thomas' wife, Virginia, now a lobbyist. 

She started as a congressional aide in the 1980s, became a midlevel Republican operative, then briefly left politics, reemerging in 2009 as founder of a tea party group before stepping down amid continued questions about whether her actions were appropriate for the spouse of a Supreme Court justice. 

Now, Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, wife of Justice Clarence Thomas, has recast herself yet again, this time as the head of a firm, Liberty Consulting, which boasts on its website using her “experience and connections” to help clients “with “governmental affairs efforts” and political donation strategies.

I did have to giggle (with great dignity) at the wording of that phrase, "governmental affairs efforts." But I'm allowed an occasional giggle at wording, don't you think? And I'm allowed to be grateful that the wording wasn't "judicial affairs efforts." But dignified giggling about the wording has nothing to do with the ethics of Ginni Thomas' actions.

The question is, I guess, can wife and husband refrain from influencing each other professionally? And I ask that question as the legality of health care reform barrels toward the Supreme Court.

Clarance and "Ginni" Thomas

Ginni Thomas has mixed it up with the legality of health care reform before in ways she (or her husband or someone) later thought better of. This was posted on the ABC News website on October 21, 2010, when Ms. Thomas was head of the Tea Party group Liberty Central:

More Controversy for Virginia Thomas; First Anita Hill, Now Health Reform Law: Liberty Central Pulls Memo By Wife of Justice Attacking Constitutionality of Health Care Legislation 

Two days after making headlines for reaching out to Anita Hill, Virginia Thomas' non-profit organization has withdrawn her name from a statement that had been posted on its website advocating the repeal of the Obama administration's health care law. 

In a statement, the non-profit group Liberty Central said the organization "assiduously avoids" taking positions on the "constitutionality" of issues. 

The memo posted by Liberty Central came from the Conservative Action Project. Liberty Central said that Virginia Thomas, the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas, was incorrectly listed as the author of the memo. 

On October 27th, NewsOne for Black America joined other news outlets in reporting that Ms. Thomas had stepped down as head of Liberty Central .“She’ll take a back seat so that Liberty Central can continue with its mission without any of the distractions,” the group’s spokeswoman Caitlin Carroll told the Washington Post Monday. “After discussing it with the board, Mrs. Thomas determined that it was best for the organization.”


But now, she's back, with the aim, according to Liberty Consulting's website, of lobbying all those new Tea Party-backed House members.  

With the new ascendancy of constitutional conservatism, Liberty Consulting and Virginia Thomas will continue to serve as a visionary insider who sees political threats, opportunities and can marshal resources to restore our nation's founding principles.

In launching LibertyCentral.org in 2009, Ginni set out to be an "ambassador" between the new citizen activists (tea party movement), the established conservative movement, the entrepreneurial class, the alternative media and principled statesmen and candidates.

Ginni plans to leverage her 30 years of experience as a Washington "insider" to assist non-establishment "outsiders" who share her belief in our core founding principles and values.

 There's a Protect our Elections video posted on YouTube that alleges (with what appears to be strong evidence) that the "office" of  Liberty Consulting is the same P.O. Box used by Liberty Central. Protect our Elections further alleges that:

"both are fake Astroturf organizations putting up a 5 page website and a P.O. box, all to funnel millions of dollars to influence election and legislation, money from donors they don't have to reveal. We call for immediate criminal and ethical investigations to take place surrounding these allegations and we demand that Clarence Thomas get the equal justice under law that everyone else got that came before him seeking justice." 

Conservative firebrand Sean Hannity asks this question on his website: Should Clarence Thomas recuse himself if the Health Care repeal reaches the SCOTUS? And then posts this answer:

All signs point to the Affordable Health Care Act appearing before the Supreme Court sometime next year. This thread really isn't to debate whether or not you personally believe the act is constitutional or effective. My concerns more lie with a potential conflict of interest issue involving Clarence Thomas. 

Mr Thomas's wife, Ginny Thomas, is a well known supporter of the Tea Party. She has spoken at several events and has made her views abundantly clear. That in and of itself is fine with me. We are all entitled to our own opinions and to express said opinions where we wish. 

However, Ginny Thomas recently became a lobbyist for a group known as Liberty Consulting. One of their highest priorities is apparently the repeal of the Affordable Heath Care Act, something that Mrs Thomas would be directly involved in. 

Considering that Mrs Thomas is actively lobbying against the health care law as part of her employment with the lobbying group, would you consider it a conflict of interest for Clarence Thomas to participate in a vote on this subject? If he chose to, it would seem like he has a personal interest in seeing the law overturned.

Seventy-four House Democrats  have sent a letter to Justice Thomas requesting that he recuse himself from any considerations involved with national health care reform because it creates "the appearance of a conflict of interest."


I googled "Ginni Thomas, support" and couldn't find any.


Your opinion?

Uninsured but free?

Today's title is taken from a sign at a Tea Party Patriot rally. Repealing "Obamacare" has been an omnipresent talking point for Tea Party politicians. The latest cacophonous political iteration of this fight ended yesterday.

To review the Congressional opera that has just had its curtain rung down . . .

Tea Party Tax Day in St. Paul, MN. The group protested taxes and called for repeal of the new health care law.

The Tea Party Patriots website asked us to ...

Join your fellow Tea Party Patriots as we begin the next phase in our action plan to fight Government Take over of our Health Care. We are making calls to melt Congress' Phone Lines this week, planning Tea Party Patriots Health Care Freedom Town Halls, and walking our neighborhoods to engage our neighbors in this fight. . . .

. . . We need you to help us prevent politicans (sic) from taking over our health care. It is imperative that you make phone calls and melt the phone lines this week and next week. Time is of the essence and the time to act is now. Let's work together to affect (sic) meaningful change in America and prevent the government from taking over another aspect of our lives. The government take over of our health care is not a done deal yet. Now is the time to act and to a7ct (sic) decisvely (sic). We must weigh in actively, aggressively, and with big numbers.

The Wall Street Journal ran an OpEd  by Douglas Holtz-Eakin, Joseph Antos, and James C. Capretta, stating that the health care repeal will not add to the federal deficit. 


The Congressional Budget Office says that it will.


The stated purpose of Senator Mitch McConnell's unsuccessful effort to undo healthcare reform was "To repeal the job-killing health care law and health care-related provisions in the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010."


FactCheck.org essentially says the Senator's job-killing claim is hooey.


I think the one inarguable truth of the health care reform debate is: Whether it's a good idea for the government to be involved in health care isn't clear to that oft-cited entity, the American people. 

To mark the end of this round of  Congressional debate on repealing health care, I took a look at what the new Tea Party Patriots-backed members of Congress are doing about their own health insurance. FactCheck.org says the U.S. government offers a range of insurance plans to all its employees:

Members of Congress have good health insurance by any standard, but it’s not free and not reserved only for them – and it’s not government insurance. House and Senate members are allowed to purchase private health insurance offered through the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program, which covers more than 8 million other federal employees, retirees and their families.

It’s not a "single-payer" system where the government acts as the one and only health insurance company. As President Bush’s chief of personnel Kay Coles James said in 2003, while lecturing at the conservative Heritage Foundation, "the FEHB program is not centralized, government-run health care." It has drawn praise both from conservatives and liberals, including President Obama, who held it up as a model for his own health care proposals. . . .

Like other large employers, the government pays a large share of the cost of coverage. On average, the government pays 72 percent of the premiums for its workers, up to a maximum of 75 percent depending on the policy chosen. For example, the popular Blue Cross and Blue Shield standard fee-for-service family plan carries a total premium of $1,120.47 per month, of which the beneficiary pays $356.59. Washington, D.C.-based employees who prefer an HMO option might choose the Kaiser standard family plan. It carries a total premium of $629.46 per month, of which the employee pays only $157.36. 

Nice insurance, if you can get it, right?  The kind we'd all like to have.

But still, if you got elected opposing "government-run" health insurance, should you snap up government-offered insurance?

Fourteen of the 85 first-year Republican lawmakers said no and declined federal health insurance. Among them was Richard Nugent of Florida.

"It has to do with just fundamental fairness," Nugent told ABC News. "This is an elected office. I just feel it shouldn't be like a career and I shouldn't be able to able to enrich myself through that, so it was just a personal choice. It had nothing to do with Obamacare."

Seventy-one first-year Republican lawmakers opted to sign up for federal health insurance, among them Missouri Republican Vicky Harzler.

Tea party favorite Congresswoman Vicky Hartzler (R-Harrisonville) will use her government health insurance plan, PoliticMo has learned from a Hartzler spokesman.

All Republicans in the Missouri delegation to Washington have spoken adamantly against the Affordable Care Act passed by congress last year, which includes creation of pool of providers, just like the pool federal employees including members of Congress chose from. The law also includes protections for individuals with pre-existing conditions, something the repeal would do away with for Ameicans not employed by the federal government.

Hartzler spokesman Steve Walsh emails, “The issue was and always has been government-RUN health care … not government providing PRIVATE insurance to its employees.”

So what's a poor American citizen to make of all this? You got any ideas?

Heath care, again . . .

Ezra Klein, 26, writes a very worthwhile blog for washingtonpost.com that he calls Economic and Domestic Policy and Lots of It. As a woman of a certain age, I like reading what a very smart, educated person at the other end of adulthood has to say about how things are going.

Yesterday he posted news of a new poll on the Affordable Healthcare Act (remember that?) which I found quite interesting.

Most everyone's happy (and trending happier) except those Americans on Medicare. And they are worried (and becoming more worried) that they will lose some of what they already have in the interests of improving the heath care of others.

Yesterday, on the WMRA Facebook page, I posted news of a study which shows that, when it comes to health care, Americans spend more . . .

and get less than everyone else.

The Pew Research Center recently released a report on how the press reported the rowdy and contentious health care reform debate. In its introduction, this reports states:

It was a wild political donnybrook and the defining policy initiative of the Obama presidency to date. A Democratic chief executive was staking the crucial first year of his presidency on health care reform—a legislative achievement that had eluded several of his predecessors. And he was facing off against an equally determined opposition spearheaded by a new groundswell of fear about exploding government intervention.

There was a third major player in the health care debate as well. Much of the battle over health care reform, and much of what the public knew or thought about it, played out through a changing media system.

Prior to the legislative battle, curiously, health care had often flown below the news radar screen. Though the system affects virtually every American and represents about one-sixth of the U.S. economy, it accounted for less than 1% of the overall coverage in 2007 and 2008 according to data from the Pew Research Center’s  Project for Excellence in Journalism.

It also amounted to the first long-running policy debate the press would have to cover in what was in some ways a new media era. It was one in which bloggers were being recognized at White House briefings, cable news and talk radio seemed to play an ever larger role in the media landscape and new technologies such as Twitter and social media had become important components of politics.

Add to the challenge, the health care industry itself, a particularly complex and often confusing topic. And the cacophony of charges and countercharges, commentary and criticism from advocates on both sides further complicated efforts to comprehend the issue. Indeed, as the coverage continued, the public seemed more confused. . .

It is interesting in hindsight to think about how both our politicians and our press treated health care reform more as a political issue than a health issue. Wouldn't it have been more sensible and ethical for them to have made the issues under discussion as accessible and understandable as possible?

Robert Banta's idea

This morning's front page Washington Post story on health care reform is  "Obama: 'It's time to vote.'

Maybe so, but as Congress hasn't voted yet, I thought I'd pass along an interesting idea on health care reform from WMRA listener Robert Banta:

Last year President Obama asked Congress to come up with health care reform that pays for itself, encourages competition and is affordable. In the background of the debate on just how to accomplish these goals is the looming issue that, as more and more baby boomers start to retire, Medicare will be the next financial crises if it is not overhauled in this reform.

The old idea of a public option is dead on the floor of Congress. But what if there were a different kind of public option, one that paid for itself, encouraged competition and was affordable? What if every individual or family could choose to pay 8% of their taxable income, capping out at $6,000 dollars, to a government plan for whatever basic health care they needed? The option would exist to choose a private health insurance company for either more or less than 8%, more services or fewer, but the safety net of a public option for all basic health care that cost only 8% of an individual or family’s income would still exist. An 8% plan would replace Medicare, and make the services Medicare provided financially sustainable.

You may have heard the tag line from late night commercials, “but wait, there’s more.” With an 8% plan the tag line would be reversed, “but wait, there’s less.” Take a look at your pay stubs. You are already paying for a public option, whether you are eligible for Medicare or not. Medicare tax is 1.45% of every person and every business’s income. If you chose the 8% plan, you would only be paying 6.55% more than what you are already paying.

To many, 8% must seem so inexpensive as to be too good to be true. A couple months ago the PBS NewsHour did a piece on the Dutch health care reform that by all accounts is doing quite well. The average cost for health care in that country was reported to be 7% of a person’s income. The numbers for the US also seem viable for such a cost. The median household income in the US is 50,000.00 dollars per year. A family choosing the 8% plan would pay $4,000 per year. If only 1/3 of the US population, 100 Million people, used the 8% plan, there would be 400 Billion dollars per year for health care, just for those 100 Million people.

The economic benefits of an 8% plan are many. Besides being affordable, paying for itself and encouraging competition, the 8% plan is not employer based, so it goes with you. Another benefit of this plan is for businesses. In a time when businesses, especially small businesses, need a boost, not having to pay for an employee’s health care would be exactly the stimulus they need. But wait, there’s less. They would not have to pay the 1.45% Medicare tax, either.

Make no mistake; this idea is only part of the greater solution of health care reform. However, an 8% plan is vital to health care reform becoming a true reform.

Health insurance companies will have to become more efficient. They might even have to stop pouring billions of dollars into lobbying Congress to keep things the way they are.

My name is Robert Dean Banta, my idea is 8% health care and I live in Staunton, Virginia.

Any thoughts on Mr. Banta's idea? On health care reform in general? On Congress? On President Obama's handling of the issue?

The first threat to Sunday's Super Bowl's highest-ever TV ratings?

With apologies to Sir Walter Scott: Oh, the tangled web we weave when health care reform we did conceive.

This news yesterday in CNN's politicalticker:

Washington (CNN) - President Obama's bipartisan meeting on health care reform planned for February 25 will be broadcast live, a senior administration official said Monday.

Coverage details were not complete, but the official said the White House expected "the whole thing to be live."

Most of the comments I read that people had posted to this announcement appeared political and vituperative in nature.

Then this was posted today on NPR.org's front page:

Expectations Low For Obama's Health Care Summit  by Liz Halloran

President Obama's plan to hold a televised health overhaul summit with Republicans and Democrats is still more than two weeks away, but reviews of the get-together are already in. And they're not optimistic.

Critics are characterizing the plan as a purely political gambit designed to give the appearance of momentum for the president's health care bill, now stalled on Capitol Hill.

Supporters of the president — and the legislation — say the bipartisan give-and-take will provide Obama the opportunity to publicly portray the opposition as bereft of solutions.

The comments made on the NPR site were pretty close in flavor to those attached to CNN's announcement that the meeting would be televised. Although there was a spate of comments made supporting the idea of the summit.

Then came the news today in the Washington Post's Michael Shear's 44 Politics and Policy blog/column that the House Republicans might not even show up for the conference.

Top House Republicans throw cold water on health-care summit

Leading House Republicans raised the prospect Monday night that they might refuse to participate in President Obama's proposed health care summit if the White House chooses not to scrap the existing reform bills and start over.

In a letter to White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (Ohio) and Minority Whip Eric Cantor (Va.) expressed frustration at reports that Obama intends to put the Democratic bills on the table for discussion at the Feb. 25 summit.
"If the starting point for this meeting is the job-killing bills the American people have already soundly rejected, Republicans would rightly be reluctant to participate," Boehner and Cantor wrote.

I am soooooooo confused. I thought Republicans wanted to sit down with the President and discuss their ideas on healthcare. Is it the fact that the discussion is going to be on television causing them problems? What about all the claims by politicians that "the American people want this" and "the American people want that?" Are they shy about telling us what we want while we're off from work and actually able to watch and listen to them?

I, for one, am delighted by the prospect of having an opportunity to see politicians discussing healthcare with the oft-quoted American people watching. Let's start a WMRA-roots campaign to have more Americans listen to/watch the Health Care Summit on February 25th than watched the Super Bowl.

It's election day for all of us . . .

Republican Scott Brown, Democrat Martha Coakley, and independent Joseph L. Kennedy (Globe file photo)

Today is the day Massachusetts holds its special election to replace Senator Edward M. Kennedy in the U.S. Senate. And the whole country is watching. At stake is the Democrats' 60-vote filibuster-proof majority, which probably means that the late Senator Kennedy's dream of healthcare reform is at stake, as well.

You cannot get much farther from Massachusetts than Los Angeles, yet the Massachusetts election rates a banner link at the top of the front page of the LA Times online. There's also a front page article in the Chicago Tribune, and the race is being closely followed in the Houston Chronicle (through AP reports) which also ran in the Santa Fe New Mexican.

There is massive coverage in both The New York Times and The Washington Post (where it rates lead-article status.) Only the southern newspapers I scanned -- The Miami Herald, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Charleston, S.C.'s Post and Courrier -- decided the Massachusetts special election was not front page news.

We cannot vote, of course. The decision of who should replace Senator Kennedy in the U.S. Senate is Massachusetts citizens' alone. The only out-of-state interference allowed is money -- and millions have poured into both campaigns.

All the rest of us can do is hope that Massachusetts voters cast votes based on informed thinking rather than slogan-driven emotionalism. The future of national healthcare reform is all that's at stake.

Any thoughts?

Thoughts on health care reform fatigue . . .

The picture above was taken this morning after the 1 a.m. strict party-line vote to end debate on the Senate's $871 billion health care reform bill. All signs point to a final vote on the bill, itself, on Christmas Eve.

It has not been a pretty process.

Conservative Democratic Nebraska Senator Ben Nelson had held the vote up until he got what he wanted. Among his wishes, more restrictions on abortion coverage and a provision requiring the federal government to cover Nebraska's costs for expanded Medicaid coverage after 2016. No other state is currently slated to receive such a benefit.

There are quite a few such inglorious provisions in the Senate bill, according to The New York Times.

Truthfully, a large part of me just wants the health care debate to go away. It's the holidays, my daughter arrives this week, we just got a record December snow storm, and, most of all, I'm tired of keeping up with the debate itself. It's ugly, it's undignified, it's been going on forever (in terms of my all-too-American attention span). How much longer do I have to keep plowing through long, complicated, depressing articles--which seem to be mainly accounts of  name-calling, legislative back-biting and skulduggery?

Surely, what's been going on in Congress during the health care reform debate would be more appropriate in third-grade lunchrooms than in the great halls of American government. I mean, do these people even recognize the truth anymore. Where is their dignity?

But then I think about my five-times-a-week, fairly grueling workouts at the gym and my nightly yoga sessions. Charlie calls those sessions "flopping around," which leads me to think I don't appear any more dignified during them than our lawmakers have during the health care debate. Yet I've come to accept those undignified activities as what it takes to keep me keeping on the way I want to keep keeping on as age and old sports injuries work their black magic on my body.

Could it be the same with American governance? Is Ben Nelson et al's  holdup of the Senate bill just the dark underbelly of a process that, in the end, does a pretty good job?

Oh dear, such complicated, gnarly thoughts to be having the week that winter holidays begin. . .

I do know, however, that as things stand now, I cannot afford to get sick--as in  long-term or catastrophically sick.

This means, as a responsible American Citizen, I'm duty-bound to keep up with the unseemly process of legislating health care reform; for, my fellow Americans, as a democracy, our legislative process is only as intelligent and thoughtful, as ethical and responsible, as conscientiously well-informed as we citizens push ourselves to be.

There are some--sigh--good articles today in The New York Times (on last night's Senate vote) and in CNN (comparing the House and Senate bills). And a good comparative interactive graphic in The Washington Post.

Posting my own e-mail

Let me make this clear at the top: I'm on e-mail lists created by those across the political spectrum. I don't advocate for either party; what I do advocate for is informed advocacy.

Timothy Jost is a nationally recognized health care expert who's probably familiar to you from his appearances on NPR and on WMRA's Virginia Insight. He is as informed a person on the subject of health care reform as one is likely to come into contact with.

Professor Jost recently wrote a summary of HR 3962, the Affordable Health Care for Americans Act, on the Health Affairs blog. Earlier, he wrote several posts in the same journal on the Senate Bill. If you wish to be an informed contributor to our current reform discussion and haven't read up on what you're talking about, those links are for you!

All that said, at 7:58 this Saturday morning, I got the following e-mail that had been sent from Jost to Lowell Fulk (Chair, Rockingham County Democratic Committee) to Harvey Yoder (of the Family Life Resource Center, who creates "Centerpiece" for WEMC Public Radio). It seems to indicate that those against the current Congressional bills for health care reform are much more active than those who are for them. For what it's worth, and with Professor Jost's permission, I thought I'd pass his e-mail along.

Hi Lowell,

You know how busy I have been all fall on health care reform.  This battle has proven much harder than I ever could have imagined.  With our health care system in shambles, you would think the public would overwhelmingly favor reform.  The bills we have right now are not as good as they could be. But they would cover over 30 million Americans and, I believe, begin to get a handle on costs.  They are facing overwhelming opposition, however.

Ruth [Mr. Jost's wife, Ruth Stoltzfus Jost] called Senator Warner's office today [note from MW: yesterday, by the time I got this e-mail]. The lines to Washington have been busy all day. She finally called Warner's Roanoke office.  When she told them she was in favor of reform, the woman asked her to repeat herself. She said she has gotten hundreds of calls today and they are overwhelmingly against reform. It was so good to hear someone in favor.

We are not doing our job.  This is the signature Democratic issue this year, and it is important. Senators Webb and Warner need to hear from us.  If they don't this will go down, and the Democratic party with it.

Could you please contact local Dems on your email list and ask them to call Webb and Warner?  They desperately need our support.  Thanks for anything you can do,

Tim

Senator Webb, 202-224-4024, 540-772-4236

Senator Warner, 202-224-2023, 540-857-2676

• Addendum to e-mail from Tim Jost:  You can also contact through Warner.senate.gov or webb.senate.gov.

I thought it was an interesting report from the trenches of the health care reform wars. The WMRA listeners with whom I've discussed the issue have been overwhelmingly in support of some kind of reform. My questions for you are:

1. Have you read a good summary of the bill's in question? 
2. If so, what's your view on them? 
3. And have you called your Senators yet to express your views from either side of the debate?

Finally, anyone gotten something from a well-informed opponent of health care reform they'd like me to pass along?