Disaster and some health care hijinks on nation’s birthday
Half the country is under water and out of power, and the other half is ablaze. Smoke from wildfires in Colorado, Montana and most of the West can surely be seen from outer space. Aliens probably won’t be landing here anytime soon.
Fireworks to celebrate our nation’s birthday in many places are rightly verboten.
Last Saturday, temperatures cooled, firefighters caught their collective breaths and in some places gained ground. Of the 30,000-plus residents evacuated in Colorado, some were able to return to their homes but others had nothing left to go back to. Malibu remembers what it’s like to lose more than 300 homes in one night.
These are real-life challenges often lost in an election year full of silliness and rancor.
Just when we thought the whole country had lost its sense of humor, the Supremes woke us up with a ruling that President Obama’s health care law was indeed constitutional. The humor came not from the court but from some media’s inaccurate reporting.
In a case of self-inflicted embarrassment, CNN and Fox News forgot that it’s better to be right than to be first when they originally announced that the law had been struck down. Fox blamed “conflicting reports” from the court. But it didn’t take a legal scholar to see whose error drove the conflict. To its credit, CNN gave a prompt and complete mea culpa. Fox apparently absolved its speed-driven reporters and, I believe, has yet to say, “Oops, our bad.”
Meanwhile, PBS legal correspondent Jan Crawford read quickly through page four before announcing, correctly, that the “individual mandate” had been upheld. Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts prefaced the actual opinion with “Congress did not have authority under the commerce clause to impose the mandate,” the line that eager beaver reporters seized upon. A few pages later, however, he explained that Congress did have the constitutional authority “to lay and impose taxes,” and that the penalty for not purchasing health insurance would be collected as a tax by the IRS. Note: Roberts didn’t exactly label the penalty a tax.
The pundits had a heyday parsing that one. When is a tax not a tax? If Congress can make a citizen buy insurance, could it force one to buy broccoli? Good grief! It’s illegal to drive a car without liability insurance and we seem to have no problem with that. The Constitution makes no mention of this because, of course, when it was written individual transportation was by horses and buggies, hence no auto insurance.
Waiting for the Sunday talk shows to see if anyone cared about CNN and Fox jumping the gun, so to speak, I found little said except on CNN where the media analysis program “Reliable Sources” devoted an entire segment to it with pundits Mark Feldstein, Michael Medved and Margaret Carlson.
On “Reliable Sources” Feldstein called the blunder a supreme miscalculation. “There’s no way to spin it,” he said. “If they had waited just two minutes for reporters to read further,” they would have gotten it right.
Medved said it wasn’t just a rush to report the court decision, but that “there wasn’t enough prep. There were Congress members responding immediately without waiting for the truth.”
Carlson disagreed: “I think there was some overpreparation; the Commerce Clause [in the Constitution] was the big kahuna. If you had ever made that mistake and had egg on your face you would wait.” She also cited the myriad predictions from every corner: “Opinions were rampant and that’s a risky business.”
As to the court’s actual decision, Medved noted the court was closely divided. “This is a huge change in all of our lives and it came down to one person’s opinion. That’s awesome power.”
NBC’s “Meet the Press” led with a taped David Gregory interview with House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. After the break, the panel discussed the decision and its likely ramifications more than the rush to judgment. And yet, NBC veteran legal correspondent Pete Williams had taken the time to read the document and reported the decision accurately with ten minutes of its release at 10 am.
In coming weeks, legal scholars will debate Roberts’ siding with more liberal justices; Republicans will vow to repeal the law (a huge waste of time); pollsters will note a virtual standoff in public opinion while ignoring that already implemented parts of the law are wildly popular.
An April report by the non-partisan U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) stated that if the law was invalidated, health care costs and the national debt would skyrocket.
That’s enough for me; a bit of encouraging news amid natural disasters. Happy Birthday, America.