Archive for December 12, 2008

Tom Daschle: Secretary of HHS

(No other reason than because it is funny.)

Yesterday, Obama formally announced Tom Daschle as his nominee for Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. Today, I will be on the phone for approximately 45 minutes with my prescription-benefit provider, trying to find out why my co-pay for a monthly prescription has increased 59% in one month.

Daschle was a soft-spoken, big player in the Senate during the Clinton and first W administrations. The New Yorker has a couple of very interesting articles on Daschle’s ability to make stuff happen by keeping the Democratic Caucus united.

Since losing his senate seat in 2004, Daschle has been very active in studying health-care reform policy. He held a position with a D.C. lobbying firm with several medical-industry clients, which might require some maneuvering on the part of the Obama team in light of the camp’s “no lobbyists” promise. He also is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress, where he has written several articles, three on health-care reform in the U.S. where he points out:

[Health care] is increasingly a concern among the educated, middle-income, older, and insured population. It is exacerbated by the chronic disease epidemic that is crippling the nation. And so many people have seen someone they know struggle with the system that everyone fears they are not immune from an underperforming system.

and proposes innovative solutions like

[T]he creation of a federal health board to govern the healthcare system … composed of independent experts. Its main job would be to develop the standards and structure for a health system that ensures accessible, affordable, and high-quality care. It would, for example, develop model benefits, rules for insurers, and best practices for clinicians. These would apply to federal health programs and contractors and serve as a model for private insurers.

The statistics are frightening.

More than 30 percent of adults in the United States report some cost-related barrier to needed care. If the person has a chronic disease, the percentage increases to 42 percent. This is nearly five times higher than in the United Kingdom.

I’ll bet everyone reading this post knows at least one person in each group. I certainly do.

Daschle is a co-chair with Senator Bill Frist of ONE Vote ’08, a non-profit organization aimed at raising public awareness and interest in fighting global poverty and health crises. He also recently published Critical: What We Can Do About the Health-Care Crisis. (Read a review here.)

Is Daschle another Clintonista? I suppose so, but remember it was THE Clintonista who made health-care reform a front-page, kitchen-table issue. (Frankly, I thought Obama would tap Hillary for HHS.) I have little problem with someone who was on the front lines of those ’90s battles in HHS now, especially considering what Bush’s HHS focus has been. I also appreciate the effort Daschle has expended to accrue knowledge and tools to find practical, consensus-building solutions to this problem. Finally, Daschle still holds a lot of sway in Congress. His 2004 defeat was surprising and untimely. (I know Republicans will disagree.) I believe many members of Congress are looking forward to working with Daschle again.

Ex rel. Jon Stewart: the American Left v. Mike Huckabee

Unfortunately, I have to greatly cut back on my writing time over the next week: exams and such. As a result, I can’t spend as much time on this minor conflagration as I’d like. But please, for those of you who don’t watch the Daily Show religiously, make sure you see the below clip. In a consistently respectful manner, Jon Stewart debates Mike Huckabee on the subject of gay marriage:

And I think people on both sides of the aisle will recognize a clear winner.

The crowd-pleasing line of the night (“semantics is cold comfort when it comes to humanity”), the one that bloggers everywhere are agog over, isn’t even Jon Stewart’s best. Jon’s best point of the night is that “traditional marriage,” or, marriage according to Scripture, isn’t what Huckabee thinks it is. The Old Testament, the only part of the Bible that even considers homosexuality, approved of polygamy. Rushing back to “traditional marriage” in defense of “one-man-one-woman-only,” then, is a selective appeal to tradition and Scripture that deals with both history and the document unfaithfully.

Jon’s tactic here is actually fairly clever: I call it the “originalist reversal,” or, “inverting the originalist narrative.” You see, what Huckabee depends upon in his Biblical interpretation is the same thing that conservative judges depend on in their constitutional interpretation: the existence of a single, coherent, conservative “founding tale” that defines both documents, and serves as an objective marker that constrains the interpreter and sets limits upon how the document can be effectuated in the modern day. The appeal of originalism – either Biblical or constitutional – is that it’s putatively objective. As the saying goes, in interpreting a document, can’t disagree with the history that marked its inception.

Oh, but you can. Jon did in this interview exactly what liberal constitutional originalists (like Akhil Amar or Justice Souter) do: point to alternative originalist narratives to draw into question both the conclusion and the legitimacy of originalist arguments. If there are multiple versions of history, they can’t all be right, and the originalist inquiry collapses into a subjective judgment of which historical tale you like best. Fundamentalism starts to look pretty silly even sillier when you point out, as Jon did, that even fundamentalists pick and choose their Biblical “truths.”

The message is this: the next time someone tries to argue with you based on “what [pivotal document] meant when [God/Thomas Jefferson/Paul/etc.] wrote it,” don’t play their game. History never has only one story to tell, and don’t let your opponent’s choice of story bind you. That’s reason #3 of about 20 or so why Jon Stewart won this debate.

For more originalist inversions, see:

• Justice Souter, dissenting in D.C. v. Heller: “My history books are different than the majority’s. Historically, handguns are bad. The fact that I can even colorably make this argument means that, clearly, originalism has failed somewhere.”
• Justice Kennedy, for the Court in Boumediene v. Bush: “Actually, Mr. Scalia, the writ of habeas corpus did have extraterritorial applicability in 1700s England. PWNED.”
• Justice Souter, dissenting in Alden v. Maine: “Sovereign immunity? I don’t think those words mean what you think they mean. Please read your history about the constitutional convention again, and flip through the common law while you’re at it.”
• Justice Kennedy, for the Court in Lawrence v. Texas: “It’s true. Historically, we never liked gay people. But we also never banned their sex acts until 1950 or so.”