Thursday punditry.
Peter Schrag:
For voters in California, with its 12.4 unemployment rate, the main concern is almost certainly jobs, as it is in much of the country, rising university tuition, sharp cuts in school spending and the gridlocked Legislature’s chronic inability to pass a budget, with is now nearly three months overdue.
These issues aren't a particularly fitting arena for Tea Party action. But there are a couple of other things that make California an even less inviting Tea Party target. One is the fact that unlike Delaware, California is a huge state where political campaigns are enormously expensive.
If Sal Russo can spend a few hundred thousand dollars to get the needed 30,000 votes to nominate a U.S. senator in Delaware, why spend the $90 million that Meg Whitman spent to win the gubernatorial nomination or the $6 million that Carly Fiorina spent in her Senate primary?
EJ Dionne:
Is the Tea Party one of the most successful scams in American political history?
You betcha. Also.
Steven Stark:
In their attempts to understand the Tea Party movement, analysts have looked to the Populists of the 1890s, the followers of Father Coughlin and Huey Long in the 1930s, and, of course, the original Boston tea partiers themselves. But in a nation whose pop culture is its politics and vice versa, the real antecedent for this political happening is a relatively recent phenomenon — reality television.
NY Times on health reform:
On Thursday, the six-month anniversary of the signing of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, a number of its most central consumer protections take effect, just in time for the midterm elections.
Starting now, insurance companies will no longer be permitted to exclude children because of pre-existing health conditions, which the White House said could enable 72,000 uninsured to gain coverage. Insurers also will be prohibited from imposing lifetime limits on benefits.
The law will now forbid insurers to drop sick and costly customers after discovering technical mistakes on applications. It requires that they offer coverage to children under 26 on their parents’ policies.
It establishes a menu of preventive procedures, like colonoscopies, mammograms and immunizations, that must be covered without co-payments. And it allows consumers who join a new plan to keep their own doctors and to appeal insurance company reimbursement decisions to a third party.
Jacob Hacker:
Added: Georges Benjamin:
Wednesday, if you had a pre-existing health condition, you could be flatly denied insurance coverage. If you were a young person recently graduated from college — but without a job — your parents could no longer carry you on their insurance until you got on your feet. And if you had an expensive medical condition, your insurance benefits could be cut off at a certain lifetime limit, possibly forcing you into poverty to pay your medical bills.
Starting Thursday, those things are no longer true — thanks to the much-maligned health reform bill passed earlier this year.
Gail Collins:
The legislative process is almost never uplifting. But if you watch the United States Senate in action these days, you come away convinced that the nation has jumped the shark.
On Tuesday, the Senate failed to override a Republican filibuster of a defense authorization bill. This is a new record for dysfunction. Until now, even when politics was at its worst, Congress did manage to vote to pay the Army.
Ezra Klein:
The GOP's bad idea
"America is more than a country," begins the GOP's 'Pledge to America.' America, it turns out, is an "idea," an "inspiration," and a "belief." And the GOP wants to govern it.
Their policy agenda is detailed and specific -- a decision they will almost certainly come to regret. Because when you get past the adjectives and soaring language, the talk of inalienable rights and constitutional guarantees, you're left with a set of hard promises that will increase the deficit by trillions of dollars, take health-care insurance away from tens of millions of people, create a level of policy uncertainty businesses have never previously known, and suck demand out of an economy that's already got too little of it.
That's just collateral damage. The question is will it help get them elected?