A Mandate Is Essential for Health Reform
Rajkumar & Pollack, LA Times
The individual mandate provision of the 2010 healthcare reform law is winding its way through the courts, and will probably be decided by the Supreme Court. It's the place of judges to decide the constitutional issues. However, as a physician and a public health researcher, respectively, we believe that striking down the mandate would threaten the future of private health insurance coverage.
Bill Daley, Health Care and the Left
Michael Tomasky, The Guardian
The conventional wisdom on Obama's hiring of Bill Daley as chief of staff seems quite positive, as summed up in this Politico piece, which is replete with slavering quotes like this one:”The heads of the Fortune 50 and the Fortune 10 will be able to call Bill with a great deal of comfort, but similarly [Russian Prime Minister Vladimir] Putin will be able to call Bill with a great deal of comfort,” said Chicago lawyer and Democratic operative Wayne Whalen, a longtime Daley friend.
Daley a Good Choice for Obama
The Benjamin Button Congress
Ronald Brownstein, National Journal
President Obama's greatest political failure during his first two years was his inability to convince most Americans, especially most white Americans, that an activist federal government could provide them greater opportunity and security. Paradoxically, because of that failure, he will now get a second chance to make his case.The Republican House majority that took power this week will bring to Washington what could be called the “Benjamin Button” Congress.
GOP’s Fetishizing of the Constitution Is Unsettling
Alex Altman, Time
After much hullabaloo, the 112th Congress kicked off its second day as promised: by reading the Constitution aloud on the House floor for the first time ever, per a chamber historian. Except not all of it. The bipartisan recitation omitted several critical passages, including the three-fifths compromise.Both the ceremonial reading and the whitewashing it involved were fitting. There is a long record of politicians of all stripes devoting time to publicly venerating the Constitution, but in the 2010 election cycle the cult of the Constitution seemed to balloon. Candidates brandished their…
