Tag Archives: LBJ

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Hubris will bring down Donald Trump

“Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.”

 King James Version of the Bible. Book of Proverbs, 16:18

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President Trump was ecstatic. Standing before a crowd of in the East Room of the White House, he held aloft a copy of the Washington Post. “Trump acquitted” the headline declared in bold letters. For about an hour, Trump celebrated and embraced the applauding crowd of administration officials and supporters.

“Now we have that gorgeous word,” said a triumphant Trump. “I never thought a word would sound so good. It’s called: total acquittal.”

What’s next?

Probably overreach and misfortune.

If history is any guide, the president and his sycophantic hangers-on will want to run a victory lap.

The first sign of that has already emerged, dismissal of some of those Trump believes have undermined him and his cause.

These moves were presaged by Eric Ueland, the White House’s legislative affairs director, who said to a group of Capitol Hill reporters, “I can’t wait for the revenge.”

The first targets were Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, who testified in the House impeachment hearings, and his brother, Lt. Col. Yevgeny Vindman, Both were bounced from the National Security Council and Trump appeared to suggest that the Army should discipline Alexander. Then Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, was fired after refusing to resign.

Trump also rescinded his nomination of Jessie Liu, former U.S. Attorney for D.C., who presided over the case against former Trump campaign adviser Roger Stone, and criticized D.C. District Judge Amy Berman, whom Liu worked with. Stone was convicted in November 2018 on seven counts of obstructing and lying to Congress and witness tampering.

Another likely Trump move will be taking new and excessive risks, with Trump and his most devoted followers sucked into delusions that they are on a roll and are now invincible.

As the writer P. G. Wodehouse put it. “I’m not absolutely certain of the facts, but I rather fancy it’s Shakespeare who says that it’s always just when a fellow is feeling particularly braced with things in general that Fate sneaks up behind him with the bit of lead piping.”

The behavior of previous presidents is instructive.

For Lyndon B. Johnson, the lead piping that confronted his hubris was the Vietnam war.

After President John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, Johnson used his political cunning to push a historic civil-rights bill and a massive Great Society program through Congress. Then he trounced Republican Barry Goldwater in the 1964 election, carrying 44 of the 50 states and the District of Columbia.

He was on a roll, confident of public support as he simultaneously poured money into the Great Society and ramped up the America’s military commitment in Vietnam. Then the anti-war protests began, small at first, mostly on college campuses, then massive, furious and country-wide.

Eventually worn down and dispirited, the once ebullient Johnson announced soberly on March 31,1968 that he would not seek a second full term.

For Ted Kennedy, it was hubris that led to Chappaquiddick.

On July 17, 1969, he saw himself as a rising star, primed to carry forward the legacy of his brothers, Robert Kennedy, gunned down a year earlier, and President John F. Kennedy, assassinated in 1963.

Then everything changed. On the night of July 18, 1969, Ted Kennedy left a party and recklessly drove an Oldsmobile Delmont 88 off Dike Bridge on Chappaquiddick Island, killing his passenger, 28-year-old Mary Jo Kopechne.

Ten hours later, and only after consulting with his advisors, Kennedy reported the accident to police, To the disgust of many who thought him guilty of much more, he managed to escape with only a two-month suspended sentence for leaving the scene of an accident.

But the fatal accident left a stain that couldn’t be erased.

“(The) accident that killed Mary Jo was the end of the Kennedy moment, when the dreams of Camelot and the deferred hopes of martyrdom went skidding off the road and disappeared into the abyss,” wrote Peter Canellos, editor-at-large of Politico.

Richard Nixon experienced a fall from grace after reaching the mountaintop, too.

After narrowly losing the presidential race to John F. Kennedy in 1960, Nixon waged a successful campaign against Vice President Hubert Humphrey and Alabama Governor George Wallace in 1968 in a close election.

On November 7, 1972, Nixon reached the peak of his success when he ran against Sen. George McGovern and won in an electoral landslide. McGovern carried only Massachusetts and Washington, D.C.

Just 21 months later, on August 8, 1974, Nixon went from the heights to the depths, becoming the first U.S. president to resign his office.

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Nixon departing from the White House after his resignation.

Behind his downfall was a paranoid White House more than willing to bend the rules. At one point that included burglarizing the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist in an effort to uncover evidence to discredit Ellsberg, who had leaked the Pentagon Papers.

Then there was Watergate. In a 1973 Fortune analysis, Associate Managing Editor Max Ways described the Watergate affair as a failure of management.

“These footless ventures would remain forever incomprehensible unless we turned to the beliefs and emotional patterns of the participants.,” Ways wrote. “Their attitudes were shaped in part by the general ambience that enveloped the White House and the Committee to Re-elect the President, and that ambience included a lot of fear, suspicion, and hostility. Although the word “paranoia,” used by many people, is too strong, it is correct to say that a high level of self-pity influenced the style of the Nixon White House.

The seeds of this attitude were sown long before Watergate. Self-pity was evident, though excusable, in many of Nixon’s periods of adversity, and it had not melted away in the warm sun of ambition fulfilled.”

George W. Bush and his close advisors were also overly confident that the country was behind them and would hang tough after Bush responded to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks with aggressive military action in Afghanistan and Iraq.

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U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan.                                                                                                                       “After 18 years of war, thousands of lives lost, and hundreds of billions of dollars squandered, the United States accomplished precisely nothing.”                                                      ForeignPolicy.com

“In considering war on Iraq,” Newsweek said, “the sibling of danger was opportunity…The thinking went that if the United States could change the regime in Baghdad, it might create a new model of democracy in the Middle East. After all, democracy was on the rise globally …”

In concert with that thinking, Newsweek cited a belief in the prowess of the high-tech United States military and its ability to ensure that wars in Afghanistan and Iraq would be “decisive, quick, easy, and low-cost.”

They weren’t.

Why will Trump fall from grace after his impeachment victory? History and his character foretell it.

In his book “Truman,” David McCullough said it was Truman’s character that defined the man.

“He stood for common sense, common decency,” McCullough wrote. “He spoke the common tongue. As much as any president since Lincoln, he brought to the highest office the language and values of the common American people. He held to the old guidelines: work hard, do your best, speak the truth, assume no airs, trust in God, have no fear.”

This is about as far as you can get from a description of President Donald Trump.

 

 

 

 

 

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Medicaid: the beast that’s devouring Oregon’s budget

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An increasing number of Oregonians and their elected representatives appear to believe that affordable medical care is a right.

But fewer Oregonians seem to worry about paying for it.

Take Medicaid.

Like “The Eggplant That Ate Chicago,” Medicaid is gnawing away at Oregon’s budget.

Medicaid was created as a Federal-State funded program by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965 as part of his “Great Society” initiative. It was originally intended to be a fairly limited government program to subsidize health care for the poor.

But like so many initially modest government programs, Medicaid has metastasized into what one commentator has called “a budget-gobbling fiscal disaster.” Medicaid is now the third largest domestic program in the federal budget after Medicare and Social Security and, as Pew Charitable Trusts noted in a recent report, Medicaid is now most states’ biggest expense after K-12 education.

Spiraling enrollment is the major reason for the cost jumps.

In the beginning, federal and state Medicaid money allowed states to provide medical care only for single parents and children on welfare. Over time the universe of people eligible for benefits grew to include two-parent families, children with speech and development impediments, people who could be cared for at home rather than in an institution, children up to age 5, 8 and then 18, individuals with mental retardation, pregnant women and so on.

Just since 2000, the number of enrollees nationally has more than doubled, going from 34.5 million to 73.5 million. And because Medicaid is an entitlement program, states have to provide required benefits to eligible enrollees, with the state paying part of the cost. In other words, as more people join the program, it costs more.

Medicaid went into effect on July 1, 1966. Just a few million people enrolled the first year and about $850 million of public money was spent on the program, partly because only 28 states implemented it immediately.

Oregon introduced Medicaid in July 1967. By the end of that year, 37 other states had also implemented their Medicaid programs. In 1982, Arizona became the last state in the nation to implement a Medicaid program.

That same year, the first hints of federal cost concerns surfaced when Congress passed legislation limiting Medicaid eligibility to the “medically needy” whose income was at most 133 1/3 percent of the AFDC income eligibility level in a state. But the program’s explosive growth continued.

By 1973, national enrollment had reached 17 million and total Medicaid spending $9.4 billion. By 2013, Medicaid enrollment was 52.3 million and spending totaled $460 billion. In 2016, Medicaid enrollment reached 72.2 million and Medicaid spending totaled $553.5 billion.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ Office of the Actuary projects national enrollment will reach 77.5 million in 2024.

According to the National Association of State Budget Officers, the run-up in Medicaid costs meant that Medicaid spending accounted for 28.2 percent of total state spending in fiscal 2015, the single largest component of total state expenditures, and 19.7 percent of general fund expenditures. The Association projected that in fiscal 2016, Medicaid spending will come out at 29 percent of total state spending and 20.3 percent of general fund expenditures.

Oregon’s Medicaid spending has also seen explosive budget-busting growth, posing fiscal challenges for the entire government.

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) called for states to expand Medicaid to low income adults and provides federal funds to cover 100 percent of the costs of the newly eligible people from 2014 through 2016. The federal matching rate was then set to decrease over the next four years to 90 percent in 2020.

When Oregon made the well-intended but ill-conceived commitment to expanding Medicaid under Obamacare, a report commissioned by the state estimated that the Medicaid expansion would cost the state $217 million in the 2017-2019 biennium, the first full two-year budget cycle in which the state would begin shouldering some of the costs. The Oregon Health Authority later revised that to $369 million, about 70 percent more.

In June of this year, the Legislature sent to Gov. Kate Brown a plan to raise $550 million in health care taxes to fund Oregon’s Medicaid program in the 2017-2019 biennium.

The Legislature even went so far as to extend Medicaid to children brought to the United States illegally. Coverage will begin in January 2018, with total enrollment of about 15,000 anticipated.

The Oregon Health Authority has calculated that the fiscal impact of this expansion will be about $36 million during the 2017-19 biennium. Under federal law, illegal immigrants can only receive Medicaid for emergency conditions, including pregnancy-related costs. To get around that, Oregon will pay 100 percent of Medicaid costs for illegal immigrants.

Some people breathed a sigh of relief at the enactment of the Medicaid package, but the solution is temporary and elected officials know it. Escalating costs are only going to get worse, partly because of the scheduled decrease in the percentage of the bill to be covered by the federal government.

Newly eligible Medicaid beneficiaries were fully financed by the federal government for 2014 through 2016, but the federal share will decline until the federal government funds just 90 percent of the costs and the states pick up 10 percent starting in 2020.

That’s going to have a bad enough impact on the state budget, but what happens after that could be even worse. Oregon’s expansion of Medicaid eligibility was considered a no-brainer by supporters because of the 90 percent commitment, but government can be fickle. From a fiscal perspective, it is unrealistic to expect the federal government to continue to pay 90 percent.

Congress could change the state/federal shares at its discretion, a possibility John Kasich, Ohio’s Republican governor, raised on July 19. “…states cannot expect the federal government to continue paying 90 percent of Medicaid expansion costs given our nation’s historic debt; they must accept a gradual return to traditional cost-sharing levels,” Kasich wrote in a New York Times opinion piece.

The federal government has historically provided states with Medicaid funding on a sliding scale based on their per capita income, with more affluent states getting a 50 percent match and poorer states getting up to 83 percent.

If efforts to constrain burdensome Medicaid costs are made again, you can be sure they will be met with overwrought cries of despair. There will also be new accusations like the claim by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) that the House GOP’s plan to repeal and replace parts of the Affordable Care Act “…will devastate Americans’ healthcare. Families will go bankrupt. People will die.”

But not tackling the escalating costs of Medicaid will be medical malpractice.

So hold on to your hats, folks. This isn’t over.

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Obama’s executive orders on immigration: A feast for special interests

“A government above the law is a menace to be defeated.”
Lord Scarman

“This is a nation of laws,” President Obama proclaimed on Tuesday during his plea for calm in Ferguson, MO.

Yes it is. And the President of the United States, who appears to be unable or unwilling to work with Congress on immigration, shouldn’t be focusing his energies on how to go around it.

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“America is a nation of laws, which means I, as the president, am obligated to enforce the law. I don’t have a choice about that. That’s part of my job,” Obama said in March 2011, at an event hosted by the Spanish-language television network Univision.

“There are enough laws on the books by Congress that are very clear in terms of how we have to enforce our immigration system that for me to simply through executive order ignore those congressional mandates would not conform with my appropriate role as president,” Obama added.

So there’s something very dispiriting about his administration’s current maneuvering, in collusion with an array of special interests, to bypass Congress and circumvent immigration law through executive orders.

It reminds me of my time as staff on a committee of the House of Representatives when an impatient constituent complained about House inaction on a piece of legislation. Rep. Edwin Forsythe (R-NJ), the ranking minority member of the committee, replied that the Founders intended Congress to be deliberate. “It keeps a lot of bad bills from passing,” he said.

Instead of letting that legislative process play out, there’s something odious about all the special interests sidling up to Obama and his advisors behind closed doors to plead their case. They haven’t succeeded in pushing Congress to pass an immigration bill to their liking, so they’re happy to win by going in the back door.

This is where special deals for special interests, many of which have likely contributed generously to Obama and Democrats, can get their rewards without public exposure.

In an interesting juxtaposition of stories in today’s New York Times, one story highlighted Obama’s disengagement with Congress. “…nearly six years into his term, with his popularity at the lowest of his presidency, Mr. Obama appears remarkably distant from his own party on Capitol Hill, with his long neglect of would-be allies catching up to him,” the story said.

Meanwhile,another story outlined Obama’s plans to use executive orders to make “potentially sweeping changes to the nation’s immigration system without Congress.”

”America cannot wait forever for them to act,” Obama said of Congressional Republicans.

But the unwillingness of Congress to act on a president’s priorities shouldn’t mean defaulting to unbridled executive action. Rather, it should lead to more aggressive effort to secure Congressional votes.

When faced with Congressional resistance to his civil rights proposals, President Johnson didn’t retreat to the oval office to invent spurious ways to bypass Congress. As Robert Caro has so ably documented, Johnson worked every angle, twisted every arm, and glad-handed every critic to secure passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

According to Caro, when Johnson embarked on his campaign for a civil rights bill, his allies cautioned him about using up his political capitol on a important but doomed effort so soon after ascending to the presidency following Kennedy’s assassination.

Johnson’s reply? “Well, what the hell’s the presidency for?”