...and the reporters who enable him. Both BTD and David Dayen catch Jim Cooper in gross duplicity yesterday.
In an interview with Ezra Klein, Cooper talked about "one of the best votes I ever cast" and the overreach of theStupak Coathanger amendment, without ever mentioning that he himself voted for Stupak, and without his interviewer bringing it up.
[Klein]: The argument over Stupak’s amendment was striking for how effectively it evaded questions of choice and focused on the Hyde amendment. They narrowed that debate very sharply.
[Cooper]: They won the argument that their amendment was the continuation of current law. It shows how popular the status quo is. That’s the major problem health-care reform has always had. People prefer the devil they know. The default position is usually to do nothing.
But the debate is a continuing education process. Before the Stupak amendment, many of my friends had not realized that the government gives a $250 billion annual subsidy to employer-sponsored health care. If you understand today’s system, the Hyde amendment bans direct subsidies of abortion. It does not ban indirect subsidies of abortion, in particular the $250 billion that goes to employer-based health care. The bishops never noticed that. But this is the way education works in a democracy. It’s not easy or simple. But when people begin making decisions, they learn about lots of things they never noticed before.
It's the same with procedural things. In the Rules Committee’s explanation of the Stupak amendment, they said flat out that the Stupak amendment codifies the Hyde amendment. Most people didn’t realize that that’s the description from the Stupak amendment’s advocates, not necessarily the judgment of the Rules Committee’s staff. Like many things in Congress, lots of folks did not pay attention to the details. It looked like it just continued current law. But this turned out to be very important.
Ahem, shouldn't that be we and our, Mr. Cooper, since you voted for the thing? Maybe he has complete amnesia from Saturday, because he did the exact same thing again on Hardball.
COOPER: Well, first of all, Chris, as you know, it was a very historic night. The most important issue is to get health care to all Americans, men, women, children, everybody. This was a surprise, sort of last-minute amendment. [Oh, really? It wasn't the primary point of contention for a week leading up to the floor debate? It wasn't introduce back in June?] A lot of folks were confused about the best way to preserve the status quo, the so-called Hyde amendment that has prevented direct taxpayer subsidy of abortion.
This is a new health reform plan, and a lot of folks don’t quite understand it yet. And the Stupak amendment was really aimed at the exchange, and the exchange would really only affect 10 percent of the American people, about 30 million people, and that’s a lot. And these would tend to be your lower-income folks, vulnerable, but not the poorest of the poor, who are already on Medicaid.
So the question is, how would the restriction on direct taxpayer subsidies affect the folks in that exchange? And this is something that we’re still working out. The bottom line is this. The House bill will be substantially changed in the Senate. In fact, it may bear little or no resemblance to the House bill. That will be good news for a lot of choice folks on this issue. It will all determined by the senators, though. And as you point out, it could make the House passage of the bill look easy to try to get something through the Senate with 60 votes....
COOPER: Well, the Speaker was very artful getting the bill through Congress. It was a tough thing to get 220 votes. We nearly didn’t get to 218.
MATTHEWS: Right.
COOPER: They had to pull out all of the stops, and this was one of them. I think, as members calm down, as members look at this carefully-one of the problems was the Rules Committee itself reported out language that said that the Stupak amendment codified the Hyde amendment. That was not accurate and it went beyond the Hyde amendment....
MATTHEWS: Explain how.
COOPER: Well, by affecting not only direct but indirect taxpayer subsidies. The Hyde amendment has never affected indirect taxpayer subsidies. For example, the second largest health program in America is a tax break for folks with employer-sponsored coverage. Anybody works for a private company gets some help from his fellow taxpayers to afford that coverage from the private employer. It’s not obvious. It doesn’t look like a government program, but it is and it’s $250 billion a year. The Hyde amendment has never applied to that...
If Jim Cooper had a problem with this legislation going beyond the Hyde Amendment, which is implying here as the primary problem with the legislation, why in the hell did he vote for it. And why is he not owning up to that vote in these interviews? Jim Cooper gets play professor with the national media, talking about this amendment, but he doesn't provide full disclosure--he voted for the damned thing. And he should get called on that in these interviews.