Fair Share Health Care becomes Maryland law
The Washington Post's headline tonight is still off by one -- it's not just the "Md. Senate Overrides Veto on 'Wal-Mart Bill', but the House as well. By 30-17 and 88-50 votes, respectively, Governor Bob Ehrlich's veto of the Fair Share Health Care bill was overridden by the Maryland legislature.

The law calls for Maryland companies with over 10,000 employees to either pay 8% of payroll to health benefits, or make up the difference with payments to a state Medicaid fund. This partly recompenses the state for the costs all too often shunted to state health care systems by low-wage, low health benefits companies like Wal-Mart.

The Post's John Wagner captured the moment:

The bill prompted frantic lobbying in recent weeks, with unions and health care advocates airing radio and television ads and Wal-Mart running full-page ads in major newspapers. The company also bulked up its lobbying corps in Annapolis, hiring at least 12 lobbyists, whom [Senator] Pinsky derisively called the Dirty Dozen during yesterday's debate.

The Annapolis press corps was swollen with members of the national media, and immediately after the House vote, [House speaker Michael] Busch was whisked outside the State House for a national television interview.

The whoops and cheers of advocates echoed in the vast hallway outside the House chamber. Union members and their lobbyists hugged lawmakers and posed for photos, giving a thumbs-up, some with tears in their eyes. "We prevailed. Yes!" said an exuberant Del. Veronica L. Turner (D-Prince George's).

The party's in full swing over at Wal-Mart Watch, Wake-Up Wal-Mart, Americans for Health Care, and elsewhere. And the victory in Maryland may be just the first of many. The New York Times' Michael Barbaro wrote last week:

In a national campaign aimed squarely at Wal-Mart Stores, lawmakers in 30 states are preparing to introduce legislation that would require large corporations to increase spending on employee health insurance, according to the A.F.L.-C.I.O., which planned to announce the initiative this morning. [...]

Seizing on momentum from the Maryland bill, lawmakers plan to introduce similar legislation in Connecticut, Kansas, Florida, Colorado and Tennessee, among other states, according to A.F.L.-C.I.O. leaders.

"We know that Congress is not going to take action any time soon," said Naomi Walker, director of state legislative programs at the A.F.L.-C.I.O. "So states are finding their own way to get at this problem."

(AFL-CIO link added). The bills elsewhere will propose broadly similar provisions to the legislation passed in Maryland.

Meanwhile, a big "Well done!" to the Maryland Democratic Party for seeing this fight through and winning it. They had a lot of support, but it was Maryland's Democratic senators and delegates who had to go ahead and vote for this. Let them know you appreciate it.


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EDIT, 1/13: Americans for Health Care and legislative history links added (click MD flag for MD Senate leg. history and link to MD House). posted by Thomas Nephew at 12:30:00 AM -- |    

 
Waah -- they made Alito's wife cry
So I hear Ms. Alito departed the (hopefully non)confirmation hearings of her husband in tears, sniffling after some Democrats had the unmitigated nerve to remind Mr. Alito of what the Concerned Alumni of Princeton (CAP) he bragged about belonging to was actually all about -- i.e., keeping women and blacks out, experiments on gays, what have you.

Digby suspects this was likely orchestrated by Graham, who seems to be taking the position that questioning Alito about anything more controversial than his favorite pie and baseball team is beyond the pale of "civility." The suspicion is all the more reasonable when you realize it was actually during Graham's questioning -- of the man he's shepherding around Capitol Hill -- that it all became too much to bear. The Washington Post's Dana Milbank reported:

"If you don't mind the suspicious nature that I have, it's that you may be saying that because you want to get on the Supreme Court, that you're disavowing this now because it doesn't look too good," said Graham, trying to help Alito. "I'm going to be very honest with you," Graham continued. "Are you really a closet bigot?"

Alito's ears turned scarlet. "I'm not any kind of bigot," he said, emotionally. "I'm not." Behind him, Martha Alito had had enough. She stood up, tissue in hand, and rushed to the back of the room, where Capitol Police whisked away the tearful woman. She didn't return for an hour.

Alito will make a terrible Supreme Court justice, if his lickspittle past is any guide. Especially now, when Bush et al are claiming they can ignore laws specifically constraining their actions, and specifically not giving them an "executive waiver" to do so, the last guy we need is "Stripsearch Sammy," someone with the kind of obsequious deference to and expansion of executive and police power Alito has made a career of. As Robert Gordon puts it on the Balkinization blog,

But wherever there is running room - opened up by gaps in application, conflicts in precedents, ambiguities in statutes - Alito is an activist who works steadily to push the law well beyond conventional boundaries of precedent. [...]

Almost every time law enforcement clashed with individual rights to due process, Alito supported law enforcement.

Gordon outlines case after case, drawing in part on Nathan Newman's analysis of labor cases Alito has ruled on, and writes:

These cases illustrate a more general pattern in Alito's thinking - which is that people in authority usually have good reasons for what they do, and that the legal system should cut them a lot of slack and give them a lot of discretion. Employers, prison authorities, immigration judges, the police, don't have to give specific reasons or put forward evidence justifying what they do. Anyone who challenges such authorities, however, has to follow strict procedural requirements and satisfy high burdens of proof. - even if he is a pro se litigant or defendant facing the death penalty who has been saddled with incompetent counsel.

Thus, as Mark Kleiman points out, the CAP business is far from a sideshow, it's a direct look at the values of a petty little man. While I concede for the sake of argument that he may not have actually shared every revolting opinion to be found in CAP, it's revealing that he would hope his association with them would help him get a job with the Reagan administration. These were the hard core types he needed above all to appear to be one of. Kleiman:

The social content of conservatism is partiality toward those of higher status and greater social centrality and hostility to those lower down the social scale and further toward the margins: rich over poor, white over black, Anglo over Latino, Christian over Jew, Muslim, Hindu, pagan, or atheist, straight over gay, male over female. [...]

Paleoconservatives tend to be more explicit about those preferences, while neoconservatives and libertarians are generally more shamefaced about them. The neos and libertarians loudly argue that they merely support neutrality and a limited state, and ignore the fact that "neutrality" as between the more powerful and the less powerful is neutrality with a bias.

I hold out little hope the Democrats in the Senate will suddenly all develop spines and filibuster this little man's hopes to become a Supreme Court justice. (Lieberman's little hints about that are, if anything, the death knell for hopes along those lines; I doubt he'd go out on a limb unless he were perfectly certain it wouldn't get sawed off behind him.) But I welcomed that Kennedy and yes, even Joe Biden at least imposed a bit of tough questioning on Alito's coronation.

And I also welcome that at least there's a new image of the right: a bunch of crybabies who clutch their hankies the first time they are called on anything -- and/or script a scene where the poor dear wife will do so.

And who, of course, routinely wet their beds anytime the terror threat is elevated to dark yellow or stool-brown or whatever it is these days. They know we can all count on Alito to keep us safe from habeas corpus and privacy, too, and to make the President super strong to keep his babies super safe. The Restoration of the Non-60s, Non-Watergate era continues apace. posted by Thomas Nephew at 10:30:00 PM -- |    

 
Waah -- big government made us do it
Two of the very deepest thinkers of the Party of Responsibility ponder the Abramoff scandal, and come up with the same answer they always do:

Peggy Noonan (via Balloon Juice):

The problem with government is that it is run by people, and people are flawed. They are not virtue machines. We are all of us, even the best of us, vulnerable to the call of the low: to greed, conceit, insensitivity, ruthlessness, the desire to show you’re in control, in charge, in command.

If the problem with government is that it is run by people and not, as James Madison put it, angels, the problem with big government is that it is run by a lot of people who are not angels. They can, together and in the aggregate, do much mischief. They can and inevitably will produce a great deal of injustice, corruption and heartlessness. [...]

This is essentially why conservatives of my generation and earlier generations don’t like big government.

George Will:

The national pastime is no longer baseball, it is rent-seeking -- bending public power for private advantage. There are two reasons why rent-seeking has become so lurid, but those reasons for today's dystopian politics are reasons why most suggested cures seem utopian.

The first reason is big government -- the regulatory state. This year Washington will disperse $2.6 trillion, which is a small portion of Washington's economic consequences, considering the costs and benefits distributed by incessant fiddling with the tax code, and by government's regulatory fidgets.

You look at it this way and you realize the poor lambs never had a chance. It makes me so mad! Dammit, big gummint is why Abramoff hired a DeLay staffer's wife with a spare $25,000 he squeezed out of one of his clients, why Ralph Reed cackled to Abramoff about his state chair campaign fund being The Reed Family Retirement and Educational Foundation, why Representative Ney apparently had no choice but to sell his legislative access for a golf trip and a sky box, and why Abramoff just couldn't keep himself from bilking Indian tribes of millions, calling them 'monkeys,' 'troglodytes,' and 'morons' all the while.

Yep, looks to me like the only way to fix this mess in Washington is to lower taxes and drown New Orleans excuse me, the federal government in a bathtub.

"We are all of us, even the best of us..." Dang, that just about brought a tear to my eye. Ole Peggy sure whipped up some good stuff out of a steaming pile of manure. posted by Thomas Nephew at 11:55:00 PM -- |    

 
Fair Share Health Care veto override vote soon
Maryland's Fair Share Health Care Act, passed last year, promised to require companies with over 10,000 employees in the state to pay at least 8% of payroll for health insurance, or pay the shortfall into the state's Medicaid fund. The only company in the state that's likely to be affected is Wal-Mart; while other large employers like Northrop Grumman and Johns Hopkins University pay decent health benefits, Wal-Mart -- by its own admission -- does not. From an internal memo leaked in December:

Wal-Mart's critics can easily exploit some aspects of our benefits offering to make their case; in other words, our critics are correct in some of their observations. Specifically, our coverage is expensive for low-income families, and Wal-Mart has a significant percentage of associates and their children on public assistance. [...]

In total, 46 percent of Associates’ children are either on Medicaid or are uninsured.

Republican Governor Ehrlich vetoed the bill in May -- in a notably disquieting scene in the Eastern Shore town of Princess Anne, with high ranking Wal-Mart executive Eduardo Castro-Wright delightedly looking on as protesters were literally silenced and forbidden to display signs by the local sheriff.

Now the long-awaited attempt by the Maryland legislature to override that veto is finally at hand. In December, the Washington Times' S.A. Miller reported:

"The House leadership is considering the bill one of the top priorities, if not the top priority," said [House Majority Whip Anthony] Brown, a Prince George's Democrat who is also the running mate of gubernatorial candidate Baltimore Mayor Martin O'Malley. [...]

Mr. Brown said he was "pretty confident" the General Assembly leadership will secure the requisite 85 House votes to override the Wal-Mart veto when the session convenes Jan. 12.

Sen. Andrew P. Harris, a Baltimore County Republican and the minority whip, expects the veto also to be overridden in the Senate, despite "having every Republican supporting the governor."

The latest volley in the debate has come from the Maryland Chamber of Commerce, which released a legal opinion last Wednesday that the bill conflicts with the federal Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA). Maryland Gazette.Net's David Tallman explains:

Under ERISA, the federal government prevents states from requiring employers to provide a certain level of benefits.

"It has a fairly sweeping pre-emption to any state legislation covering employee benefit plans," said Ronald W. Wineholt, the chamber’s vice president for government affairs.

Not everyone agrees:

Phyllis C. Borzi, who teaches law at the George Washington University Medical Center, said Smith’s analysis would have been valid 10 years ago, but since a 1995 decision, the Supreme Court has given states more control in regulating employee benefits.

Unless state laws specifically prescribe the kinds of benefits, they will not be pre-empted by ERISA, Borzi said.

So suddenly we're for national employee benefit standards, are we? Let's check back with the Maryland Chamber of Commerce when a national health care debate gets back in the headlines. The same warning can be given to Governor Ehrlich, who's criticizing the Act as a new business tax. Yet it's one that will be a drop in the bucket (politically, if not financially) compared to a national health care system -- the chief alternative for providing decent, paid-up health care for those 46% of Wal-Mart "associate" kids. Assuming, for the sake of argument, that Ehrlich and his pals give a damn about them in the first place.

Don't get me wrong -- like Mark Schmitt, I'd prefer a national health care system to a patchwork, Rube Goldberg scheme stitching together Medicaid, employer based benefits, and the rest of it. But I don't support making the perfect the enemy of the good. And as Schmitt observes, "You only get political consensus for public benefits when there's pressure for employer-based benefits."

So in the meantime, I want the Fair Share Health Care bill. The Chamber of Commerce may hate it, but not all businesses do; one of the major reasons the bill passed was that Giant Foods CEO Dick Baird supported it -- it levels the playing field between his company, paying decent wages and benefits, and the Medicaid-freeloaders at Wal-Mart. Public subsidies for working Americans should not be allowed to result in competition-altering wage and benefit pressures on unionized companies.

You can support the Fair Share Health Care bill by sending an e-mail to Maryland delegates and state senators via Maryland for Health Care.


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UPDATE, 1/9: Wake-Up Wal-Mart provides links to Maryland legislators:

You can contact your legislators by email via this page, find out who your legislators are via this page, or you can talk to them directly by calling the Maryland General Assembly switchboard and asking for them. The phone number is 410-841-3000.

UPDATE, 1/12: Washington Post: Md. Senate Overrides Veto on 'Wal-Mart Bill'. YAY! posted by Thomas Nephew at 9:44:00 PM -- |