Bankruptcy bill passes House, 302-126
"Tunesmith" of politology links to the roll call vote: voting Republicans were unanimous, 229-0; Democrats opposed it 125-73; seven representatives abstained. My representative, Chris Van Hollen, voted Nay; good for him.

Somewhat to the credit of 72 of those 73 Democrats, they (and 3 other representatives) voted for a failed amendment to recommit the bill for improvements. But prominent Democrats like Senate minority leader Harry Reid (D-NV), Rep. Ellen Tauscher (D-CA-10) and Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-MD-5) supported this bill, and deserve to be held to account for it. MSNBC's Tom Curry got this Harry Reid statement:

We’ve done a good job this year. In spite of the so-called partisanship, we’ve moved two pieces of legislation that have been around for 15 years, class action (reform) and bankruptcy. ... We’re moving along well.

Former Senator and vice-presidential candidate John Edwards, on the other hand, expressed his opposition to the bill in a special TPM/Bankruptcy post:

Like a lot of Democrats, I voted for a bankruptcy reform bill before. I can't say it more simply than this: I was wrong.

The bill is supposed to crack down on irresponsible borrowers. That's the right thing to do. The problem is that this bill imposes big burdens on families who did everything right but went broke just because they lost a job or lost their health insurance. And, even more than the legislation I supported, this bill doesn't crack down on the real abusers.

There's more, it's a very good statement. Edwards is maintaining a web site, One America For All of Us, which shows that Edwards is making a point of supporting labor interests around the country.

Department of faint hopes -- In a comment to a second politology post, Thomas Blumer ("bizzyblog") suggests that the measure may be unconstitutional, since it raises revenues (I didn't know that), but originated in the Senate. So there's that, or Bush chokes on a pretzel.

Labor sleeping with the enemy? -- On his blog, Blumer also makes an interesting point about two late-to-nevercomers to the anti-bankruptcy fight, the AFL-CIO and AARP: they both earn significant income -- in the tens of millions of dollars annually -- from co-branded credit cards, and thus may have faced internal or external pressure not to fight this bill. Unfortunately, the AFL-CIO seems to have picked a particularly notorious credit card partner, Household (recently renamed HSBC). While Blumer makes this into too much of a blanket denunciation of the AFL-CIO -- the organization did finally join in the debtslavery.org coalition -- this is a real Achilles heel, I think.


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UPDATE, 4/16: There's an excellent interactive sortable database of the House vote at techpolitics.org, which is chock-a-block with similar stuff -- maps, votes, census data. "Blue Dog" Democrats -- even Black Caucus ones -- loved them some bankruptcy "reform", "New Democrats" mostly did too. posted by Thomas Nephew at 6:30:00 AM -- |    

 
30 minutes
Jason Spitalnick of Talking Points Memo: Bankruptcy Edition relays the news:

We're hearing from sources on the Hill that tomorrow's House debate on S.256 will be 30 minutes long. Apparently that's how long it takes for the House to pass on the fates of hundreds of thousands of hard-working, underserved American families.

This reflects "closed rule"-no amendment debate protocol which anti-bankruptcy bill advocates (like me) were trying to head off last week with a last-minute round of phone calls. No luck: "tunesmith" notes this evening that the House Rules Committee voted for closed rules on a party line 7-4 vote. Spitalnick adds:

The truth is that the bill is so bad that the House leadership wants to shove it down Americans' throats as rapidly and with as little debate as possible. It's fundamentally anti-democratic.

Par for the course in DeLay World. Expect little change once Ronnie Earle gets DeLay, though. Much of the rest of the Republican Party leadership is also a corrupt bunch of hacks, who'll probably be just as glad to squelch any semblance of debate in our House of Representatives. posted by Thomas Nephew at 11:57:00 PM -- |    

 
Fair Share idea spreads to New Jersey... and beyond?
Newsday's Angela Delli Santi reports ("Newsday.com: Lawmaker wants better health care for Wal-Mart workers"):

Major employers such as Wal-Mart would have to spend more money on health care for their New Jersey workers under legislation being crafted by a state lawmaker.

Assemblyman Louis Greenwald, who contends that Wal-Mart profits are fattened by the company's skimpy health care plans, is preparing a bill that would require large employers to spend at least 8 percent of their payroll on employee health insurance.

Meanwhile, Tennessee superblogger Southknoxbubba linked to one of my Maryland Fair Share posts, giving me the chance to point out to that this plan might bring some needed revenues to Tennessee's beleaguered "Tenncare" system as well. As the AFL-CIO pointed out early this year:

One out of four Wal-Mart workers in Tennessee have to go to the state's social authorities to get their health care costs paid. A survey by TennCare and the state Department of Labor, quoted at the AFL-CIO website, found 9,617 of the retailer’s 37,000 workers were enrolled in TennCare, designed to provide health care for low-income workers.*

Now I've been out of the Volunteer State for a while, but my impression was that Tennesseans are like anyone else and don't like freeloaders one bit. Here's a big one, and it's helping sink a decent health care program right out from under them.

I think the Fair Share Health Care idea has real legs. I'd much rather they supported it, but something like this also has the potential to leave a lot of Tennessee Republicans (and sadly, perhaps Democratic governor Bredesen as well) caught flat-footed when the whirlwind passes over. The more so if that god-awful bankruptcy bill puts more Tennesseans at the poor house door in the years to come -- or, worse for status quo politicians, in front of TV cameras.

Will Fair Share "make my red state blue"? Probably not any time very soon. But meanwhile, it's satisfying to latch on to a strategy of my own and giddyup that little pony down the road. Feel free to come along.


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* Via a second SouthKnoxBubba post, here's an AP story discussing this study -- commissioned by the Chattanooga Times and published in January 2005. Wal-Mart is the tip of an iceberg in Tennessee, with temp agencies and Krystal coming in close behind in the numbers of employees forced to use Tenncare for their health needs. SKB feels this argues for simply decoupling health care and employment. Maybe so, in the long run. In the meantime, I think Fair Share plans help avoid penalizing businesses that aren't short-shrifiting their employees. posted by Thomas Nephew at 6:20:00 AM -- |    

 
Let's build a truly national party

Dear Thomas,

Every four years, a few months before the presidential election, the Democratic Party puts staff and resources on the ground in a few battleground states ... and then they're gone. After November the whole operation disappears.

Then, four years later, we do the same thing all over again.

That hasn't worked. And I ran for chairman on a promise to do it another way.

So a few days ago I met with the state party chairs, and we made a decision together. For the first time ever we're going to build for the future by putting staff and resources on the ground early -- starting in 2005, not 2008. The first four states: North Dakota, Missouri, North Carolina and West Virginia. [...]

Thank you.

Governor Howard Dean, M.D.
Chairman, Democratic National Committee

P.S. -- Please tell every Democrat you know -- no matter where they live -- that together we're building a truly national Democratic Party. Ask them to join us now: www.democrats.org/join.

Concede nothing. I gave today. I hope you will, too. posted by Thomas Nephew at 9:31:00 PM -- |    

 
A republic, if you can keep it
The New York Times' Doug Jehl reports, in "White House Has Tightly Restricted Oversight of C.I.A. Detentions":

The White House is maintaining extraordinary restrictions on information about the detention of high-level terror suspects, permitting only a small number of members of Congress to be briefed on how and where the prisoners are being held and interrogated, senior government officials say. [...]

By law, the White House is required to notify the House and Senate Intelligence Committees of all intelligence-gathering activities. But the White House has taken the stance that the secret detention program is too sensitive to be described to any members other than the top Republican and Democrat on each panel. [...]

At a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing last month, Mr. Goss turned aside questions about the detention program on grounds that the C.I.A. had already answered them, through the briefings provided to the leaders of the intelligence panel.

"As far as I know, there has been no question that has been asked that has not been answered to the committee," Mr. Goss said, adding that he knew that the chairman, ranking member and some staff members from each panel "have been briefed in on the aspects of the transfer, the detention, the interrogation and the techniques." [...]

In the Senate, Mr. Roberts and his Republican majority have blocked an effort by Mr. Rockefeller to open a formal inquiry into the C.I.A. detention and interrogation practices. That has angered Democrats, who have said that such an inquiry would allow all 15 members of the committee access to information that has been restricted to the limited briefings.

Even if you don't give a hoot about extraordinary rendition or torture and abuse (even though you should), this should worry you. All the intelligence reform in the world won't matter if Congress doesn't have and won't even insist on carrying out real oversight. That's not what's described above.

What we have instead is a political system edging ever further from a true republic. posted by Thomas Nephew at 9:31:00 PM -- |    

 
Washington Post opposes Fair Share Health Care
Last week, Maryland legislators passed the Fair Share Health Care Act, requiring companies with more than 10,000 employees which didn't spend 8% of their payroll on health care expenses to make up the difference in payments to a state Medicaid fund. Quite by design, this legislation affects Wal-Mart, a company notorious for freeloading health care in state after state around the country.

Today, the Washington Post editorialized against the legislation ("Right Problem.Wrong Solution"), concluding

The larger problem is 40-odd million uninsured Americans, and the soaring cost of health care, which has made it increasingly difficult for employers to continue providing benefits. The legislation in Maryland is a symptom of that problem, but surely not the solution.

But why the act must be "the" solution rather than part of it? The Post warns darkly of "populist stunts" and of its suspicions that some legislators are "piling on" Wal-Mart. Interesting notions. Maybe this editorial is a "capitalist stunt" by editors congenitally predisposed to preferring a rapacious company like Wal-Mart to the people's representatives trying to pry it away from the public trough.

In its single halfway substantive argument, the editorial finds fault with legislation that basically singles out Wal-Mart by targeting companies with over 10,000 employees who spend less than 8% of their payroll on health care expenses:

Hundreds or maybe thousands of smaller firms in Maryland would also fail to meet the 8 percent threshold, and collectively their workforce may far exceed Wal-Mart's. They are untouched by the legislation.

So is this legislation a kind of economic bill of attainder -- or legitimate regulation of the marketplace? I say the latter. Both this Wal-Mart and its future emulators are served notice of the public's intent that it is not legitimate to grow to 10,000+ employees by essentially freeloading their health care expenses on to the rest of the Maryland economy. The injured party here is not Wal-Mart, it is Giant Foods and other large Maryland companies who pay their employees decent wages and benefits, and then see their decent business practices undermined by Wal-Mart's piratical ones.

Wal-Mart is not singled out by its name, it's singled out by its practices -- and, yes, by its aggregate impact on Maryland. The state's legislators would be foolish not to target the single largest unnecessary drain on their state supported health care expenses. A given small business not meeting the 8% threshold remains just that -- a small business. A global behemoth doing the same is much more than that. It's a mortal threat to any other way of doing business -- and preventing that is very much in the public interest.

The Maryland legislature has done the right thing. And the Washington Post should be ashamed to oppose this bill. posted by Thomas Nephew at 10:14:00 PM -- |