Category Archives: Politics

End Military Aid to Israel Now

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From The Guardian:

Thousands of Gazans fled their homes … on Sunday after Israel warned that it would “strike with might” against what it says are rocket-launching sites.

The exodus … came after Israel dropped leaflets and sent text messages warning civilians to evacuate northern Gaza by midday on Sunday in advance of a large-scale bombing campaign. The area is home to at least 100,000 people….

The warning was issued hours after Israeli naval commandos launched an early morning raid on a beach … in the north of Gaza City, targeting another rocket-launching site. On Saturday the coastal enclave suffered the bloodiest day of the six-day Israeli assault, with 54 Palestinians reported killed.

There has been speculation that Israel may launch a ground offensive into Gaza, a move likely to sharply increase the number of civilian casualties. So far 166 people have been killed, including 30 children, according to Gaza’s health ministry. There have been several Israeli injuries but no fatalities….

In the worst single incident of the conflict so far, at least 17 people were killed and 45 injured when two large Israeli bombs hit a house in the Tuffah neighbourhood of Gaza City where the city’s chief of police … was sheltering. Five other people were missing, presumed dead.

Most of the injured were returning home from a mosque when they were caught by shrapnel from the blast.

Israel has been massing tanks and soldiers at Gaza’s borders, which some fear could signal a wider ground offensive that would cause heavy casualties. “We don’t know when the operation will end,” the Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, told a cabinet meeting on Sunday. “It might take a long time.”

The United States gives more military aid to Israel than to any country except Afghanistan. This year we’re giving the Israelis more than 3 billion dollars to spend on their military. 

That’s between 15% and 20% of Israel’s military budget, even though Israel is a relatively wealthy country. According to the International Monetary Fund, Israel has a higher gross domestic product per capita than South Korea, New Zealand, Italy or Spain.

We should immediately cancel all military aid to Israel. They would still survive and prosper with a smaller military budget; we could create some jobs in America with $3 billion; our standing with the rest of the world would improve; and the right-wing Israelis might finally understand that they need to reach a reasonable accommodation with the Palestinians instead of treating them as if they’re less than human.

Some Progress, But We Could Be Doing Much More

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Jonathan Chait of New York Magazine sums up the continuing success of the Affordable Care Act here :

The Commonwealth Fund has a new survey showing that the proportion of adults lacking health insurance has fallen by a quarter, from 20 percent of the population to 15 percent. (Most respondents, including 74 percent of newly-insured Republicans, report liking their plan.) Also, this week, the Congressional Budget Office again revised down its cost estimates for Medicare, which now spends $50 billion a year less than it was projected to before Obamacare passed. Also, the New England Journal of Medicine recently estimated that 20 million Americans gained insurance under the new law.

Just think what we’d be able to do in this country if the Republicans were reasonable or if there were fewer of them in office. We could have boosted the economy, for example, by investing in our infrastructure during this terrible recession instead of going crazy about the deficit. Below is a chart from Paul Krugman’s blog showing the “Great Disinvestment”, how public spending on construction has dropped in the past four years when it should have increased:

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A Federal Judge Tells the Supreme Court to Shut the F*** Up

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Judge Richard G. Kopf, presumably a Republican since he was appointed to the Federal bench by George H. W. Bush (the first one), reacts to the Hobby Lobby ruling:

In the Hobby Lobby cases, five male Justices of the Supreme Court, who are all members of the Catholic faith and who each were appointed by a President who hailed from the Republican party, decided that a huge corporation, with thousands of employees and gargantuan revenues, was a “person” entitled to assert a religious objection to the Affordable Care Act’s contraception mandate because that corporation was “closely held” by family members. To the average person, the result looks stupid and smells worse.

To most people, the decision looks stupid ’cause corporations are not persons, all the legal mumbo jumbo notwithstanding. The decision looks misogynist because the majority were all men. It looks partisan because all were appointed by a Republican. The decision looks religiously motivated because each member of the majority belongs to the Catholic church, and that religious organization is opposed to contraception. While “looks” don’t matter to the logic of the law (and I am not saying the Justices are actually motivated by such things), all of us know from experience that appearances matter to the public’s acceptance of the law….

Next term is the time for the Supreme Court to go quiescent – this term and several past terms has proven that the Court is now causing more harm (division) to our democracy than good by deciding hot button cases that the Court has the power to avoid. As the kids says, it is time for the Court to STFU. 

Being one of the “most people”, there is no doubt in my mind that the Hobby Lobby decision was stupid, partisan, misogynist and religiously-motivated, but it’s understandable that Judge Kopf expresses himself more judiciously.

There is a little more on the subject from the judge here:

Remembering Alexander Bickel’s passive virtues and the Hobby Lobby cases.

The Burdensome and Anti-Christian “EBSA Form 700”

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As noted in the previous post, a majority of justices on the Supreme Court granted Wheaton College a temporary reprieve from having to fill out and distribute EBSA Form 700. That’s the form that’s supposed to be used by non-profit religious organizations to say they don’t want their employees’ health insurance to cover some or any forms of contraception.

Wheaton told the Supreme Court that Form 700 constituted a significant burden on their religious beliefs. They preferred writing their own letter to the government instead. Understandably, the three women on the Supreme Court thought that was crazy (I’m guessing that the other Democrat on the Court, Justice Breyer, agreed with Justices Sotomayor, Ginsburg and Kagan, but this isn’t the kind of issue that requires the whole Court to express an opinion. Maybe he was out of town or so fed up with some of his colleagues that he’s thinking of giving up the law.)

As government forms go, Form 700 is simplicity itself. Here are its key features:

This form is to be used to certify that the health coverage established or maintained or arranged by the organization listed below qualifies for an accommodation with respect to the federal requirement to cover certain contraceptive services without cost sharing…

[Enter name of objecting organization, individual authorized to make this certification, name and address, etc.]

I certify that, on account of religious objections, the organization opposes providing coverage for some or all of any contraceptive services that would otherwise be required to be covered; the organization is organized and operates as a nonprofit entity; and the organization holds itself out as a religious organization.

[Signature and date.]

The organization or its plan must provide a copy of this certification to the plan’s health insurance issuer (for insured health plans) or a third party administrator (for self-insured health plans) in order for the plan to be accommodated with respect to the contraceptive coverage requirement.

That’s basically it. The form doesn’t even ask for the name and address of the health insurance issuer/administrator, something I certainly would have included if I were the senior bureaucrat responsible for EBSA Form 700.

I think Wheaton objected to this form because they didn’t want to send a copy to their health insurance issuer or third party administrator. Apparently, they thought that doing so would amount to being too cooperative with the government in its anti-Christian effort to make sure health insurance covers contraception. Justice Sotomayor argued in her dissent that forcing the government to identify the issuer/administrator and then send them a copy would be wasting the government’s time, especially if such religious exemptions become common.

Her main point, however, was that it’s the Court’s job to determine whether a law is too burdensome on somebody, not simply take their word for it, as the majority on the Court did here. But the activist Republican judges on the Supreme Court are clearly making this stuff up as they go along.

The burdensome (?) and anti-Christian (?) EBSA Form 700 is available here.

The Court’s brief ruling and Justice Sotomayor’s lengthy dissent is here.

Five Bad Men Screw Us Again, Part 2

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(1) As further evidence that the all-male, all-Roman Catholic, all-Republican majority on the Supreme Court is willing to sacrifice legal principles to ideology, consider this statement from Justice Alito’s opinion: “A corporation is simply a form of organization used by human beings to achieve desired ends”.

Among those ends, however, is limiting the liability of the corporation’s owners, as discussed in this article from Mother Jones. The author explains how ascribing the owners’ religious beliefs to a corporation undermines the idea of a corporation:

[Quoting from an earlier Supreme Court decision:] “Linguistically speaking, the employee and the corporation are different ‘persons’, even where the employee is the corporation’s sole owner. After all, incorporation’s basic purpose is to create a distinct legal entity, with legal rights, obligations, powers, and privileges different from those of the natural individuals who created it, who own it, or whom it employs.” 

That separation is what legal and business scholars call the “corporate veil,” and it’s fundamental to the entire operation. Now, thanks to the Hobby Lobby case, it’s in question. By letting Hobby Lobby’s owners assert their personal religious rights over an entire corporation, the Supreme Court has poked a major hole in the veil. In other words, if a company is not truly separate from its owners, the owners could be made responsible for its debts and other burdens.

(2) The Hobby Lobby ruling was supposedly a limited one. But anytime the Supreme Court rules, lower courts invariably extend the Supreme Court’s “logic” to other cases. Believe it or not, the Supreme Court itself has already ordered lower courts to do just that, as Mother Jones reports:

Less than a day after the United States Supreme Court issued its divisive ruling on Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, it has already begun to toss aside the supposedly narrow interpretation of the decision. On Tuesday, the [Court] ordered lower courts to rehear any cases where companies had sought to deny coverage for any type of contraception, not just the specific types Hobby Lobby was opposed to.

In related news, religious leaders have written to the White House asking that proposed regulations regarding the hiring of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people by federal contractors include a religious exemption.When this issue comes to the Supreme Court, we can expect the Republican majority to agree that discriminating against people based on their sexual orientation and even their gender is one more religious belief the government should not burden.

(3) In maybe he most bizarre development of all, the Court yesterday granted a request from Wheaton College to be temporarily exempted from filling out and distributing copies of a particular government form. The form in question allows a non-profit religious organization to declare its opposition to insurance coverage for contraceptives. From the Supreme Court’s ruling:

The applicant need not use the form prescribed by the Government, EBSA Form 700, and need not send copies to health insurance issuers or third-party administrators.

Instead, the Court said it would be sufficient to send a letter to the Department of Health and Human Services stating the organization’s opposition to contraception without identifying its health insurance issuer or third-party administrator. Apparently, the majority agreed that the prescribed use of Form 700 would constitute a serious burden on Wheaton College’s religious beliefs, while sending a letter to the government wouldn’t or didn’t.

The three women on the Supreme Court pointed out the absurdity of this latest ruling in a dissent called “unusually fierce” by the New York Times. Justice Sotomayor stated that this latest ruling “undermines confidence” in the Court. She also pointed out what should be obvious to everybody:

Thinking one’s religious beliefs are substantially burdened — no matter how sincere or genuine that belief may be — does not make it so.

(5) Remember to vote, even in mid-term elections like the one four months from now, and, most importantly, never vote for a Republican.