Category Archives: U.S. Congress

Health care and the 10 Commandments: Two monumental stories

Health care, Legislature, Politics, State government, U.S. Congress

By Steve Brawner
© 2017 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

Sometimes news stories are important, and sometimes they are mostly just eye-catching. It’s important for news providers to offer both if they want to stay in business. It’s important for news consumers to understand which is which, and when a story is both, and why.

This week was a good illustration.

On Tuesday, something important but not particularly eye-catching happened. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (see, I’ve bored you already) announced that the Senate health care bill doesn’t have enough support to come to the floor, so he’s delaying action.

Health care is perhaps the country’s most vexing domestic issue. The system has been on an unsustainable path for decades. What Congress decides to do about it is literally a life and death matter.

But Americans know politicians will argue and posture about this issue forever, and it’s been pretty clear for a while Republicans aren’t ready to repeal Obamacare, much less replace it. So I’m doubting McConnell’s decision was the lead topic of conversation at dinner tables and baseball fields across Arkansas.

Wednesday’s top story, on the other hand, was definitely eye-catching. The day after workers installed a controversial 10 Commandments monument at the Capitol, a mentally disturbed individual knocked it over with his Dodge Dart, leaving it broken on the ground.

That’s a heck of a visual, and it followed a long process that involved passing the legislation authorizing the monument, a commission determining its placement, hearings where satanists argued for their own statue of a goat creature named Baphomet, and a pledge by the Arkansas chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union that they would sue to take it down. After all that, it stood for less than a day.

I didn’t monitor every conversation at dinner tables and baseball fields across Arkansas, but I suspect more people were talking about this than were talking about Mitch McConnell.

But was it important?

Not as a statement in the country’s never-ending culture war, on either side. The driver is not an agent of supposed liberal intolerance, nor is this the fault of the monument’s outspoken opponents. On the other hand, he is not a hero for religious liberty or a defender of separating church and state. He instead is a seriously disturbed individual with a history of mental disorders who allegedly committed the same crime against a 10 Commandments monument in Oklahoma. A guy who has heard voices in his head telling him that he will be abducted by a UFO is not on either team.

But this part is important: We are a nation of laws.

Hours after the monument was destroyed, the sponsor of the legislation creating it, Sen. Jason Rapert, R-Conway, told reporters that the private organization that funded it, the American History & Heritage Foundation, had already ordered a replacement, possibly with some protective barriers. Money is being raised, and it’s possible the driver’s insurance will help cover the cost, he said.

That’s good news. Regardless of what you think about the 10 Commandments monument, we should all agree its fate shouldn’t be based on the whims of a disturbed individual. The proper way of deciding its future is through the courts, which will determine if it’s an appropriate historical marker or an unconstitutional government establishment of religion.

There’s also this. We live in a world where mentally ill people have easy access to very dangerous things such as assault weapons and 6,000-pound vehicles. That combination can do a lot of damage before authorities or bystanders can act.

We must prevent these people from doing great harm to themselves and others. Public policies must balance the rights of mentally imbalanced individuals with the need for society to protect itself. Meanwhile, the health care system must be part of the solution. It must provide better mental health services.

However, as we all know, it’s hard to change the health care system. Did you see where Mitch McConnell delayed a vote on the Senate health care bill? That was really important.

How do you make a person or country change? Generally not through nagging

Politics, U.S. Congress

By Steve Brawner
© 2017 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

How do you make a person or a country change?

One option is to use overwhelming force so they have no choice but to bend to your will and eventually maybe even embrace it. It can work but is often unavailable and comes at great cost – for example, when West Germany and Japan became free market democracies after World War II under American occupation. On the other hand, if it fails, it fails big.

A second option is using less than overwhelming force – diplomacy, nagging, the silent treatment. It often results in only partial, pacifying change.

A third option is using influence and persuasion so effectively that the other chooses to change, often while in a state of crisis or transition. It’s the most effective option, but it requires patience, confidence, and the acceptance that others may adopt only some of your suggestions.

Which brings us to Cuba.

There, overwhelming force has never been an option for American policymakers for various reasons, most notably that it could have led to World War III. So instead, for half a century the United States chose option number two – ending diplomatic relations, condemning the Cuban Castro regime, and enforcing a trade embargo.

It didn’t work. Ninety miles from the planet’s wealthiest and most powerful nation, Cuba remained a hardline communist country even as most of the rest of the world rejected Soviet-style communism, including the Soviets.

So near the end of the Obama administration, the United States finally tried the third option, the one based on influence and persuasion, by re-establishing diplomatic relations and easing travel and trade restrictions. The change cracked open the door to American products, visitors and ideas. Meanwhile, it drew enthusiastic support from Arkansas’ agricultural interests, who see Cuba as a nearby and readymade market for Arkansas rice and poultry.

It’s far too early to gauge that policy’s success, but if Cuba is to change, this could be the time. Its longtime leader, Fidel Castro, died last year, while his successor brother, Raul, is 86 years old. Gov. Asa Hutchinson, who traveled to Cuba in 2015, said last year that Castro’s death was “the moment that I believe needs to be seized.”

Last week, President Trump rolled back the Obama policy – though not completely – by announcing new restrictions on travel and by prohibiting commerce with businesses that are owned by the Cuban military. Perhaps more important than the policy changes was the adoption of a much more aggressive, Cold War-era tone.

The move drew criticism from two members of Arkansas’ all-Republican congressional delegation, Rep. Rick Crawford of the 1st District and Sen. John Boozman. Crawford’s district produces half the nation’s rice, a product Cuba currently purchases from Vietnam, a slow boat ride away from the other side of the world. In a statement from his office, Crawford called America’s decades-long policy toward Cuba “failed, outdated, and isolationist” and said returning to it could open the door to increased influence from Iran, Russia, North Korea and China. Boozman released a statement arguing that the Cold War policy didn’t work and that a more open relationship allowed for not only trading goods but also trading ideas. Days earlier, the two had jointly published an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal that called for allowing Cubans to buy American-grown food on credit instead of requiring cash transactions, a policy Crawford has long championed and tried to pass through Congress.

The other members of Arkansas’ congressional delegation didn’t release statements. They’re generally reluctant to criticize Trump, who remains popular in Arkansas, and to varying degrees some agree with him on Cuba. Sen. Tom Cotton strongly condemned Obama’s opening with Cuba when it happened, saying it was wrong to do business with the oppressive Castro regime.

We’ll have to see how serious and long-lasting this latest American policy is, or if it’s just temporary politics that changes nothing, and never would have.

After the shooting, a question

Politics, U.S. Congress

By Steve Brawner
© 2017 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

Many are asking if politics made the shooter crazy. That’s an important question. Another is, what is it doing to the rest of us?

Here’s what we know, as of Thursday morning. A man had lived a relatively normal life, even serving as a foster parent. There had been a few acts of violence and minor run-ins with the law, including one scary episode where he allegedly punched a woman in the face, pointed a gun at a neighbor and then hit him with the stock, but there’s plenty of evidence that he was sane. In recent years he’d become increasingly political and agitated, angrily obsessing over the injustices of a system he could not change. He posted political rants in Facebook’s echo chamber and joined a page pushing to “terminate” the Republican Party. He’d once practiced shooting his rifle outside his home, prompting a neighbor to call the sheriff. He moved to the Washington, D.C., area a few months ago, lived in a van, and frequented a bar where he would sit and drink beer with a creepy smile on his face. Then, on Wednesday, he took his rifle to a congressional baseball practice, calmly asked a congressman which party was practicing, thanked him for his answer, and then started shooting.

I started to write that he “snapped,” until my wife corrected me. No, she said. He made choice after choice after choice to fuel his anger until he’d crossed a line and there was no going back.

Most of us are not going to cross that line, or tiptoe anywhere near it. But we are making many of the same choices the shooter did. We obsess over societal forces we can’t change, that we don’t really understand, and that we’re not objective enough to define. We let our frustrations over these things bleed over into the parts of our lives that we can control, affecting our relationships with the people who matter. We seek shelter in our tribes and then adopt language that dehumanizes the outsiders, turning them first into caricatures and then, naturally, enemies. Political opponents are to be impeached, or locked up, or terminated.

The shooter and many of the rest of us are all marinating in those juices. We differ from him in that almost none of us are going to start shooting other people. But, like him, we can stop seeing them as human.

The American experiment is now almost a quarter of a millennium old. Its founding document, the Declaration of Independence, states that government exists to secure unalienable rights that include life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Unfortunately, American democracy has evolved to the point that it often more deters happiness than defends it. A spirit of anger hangs over the air, unleashing the monster in one man and turning many of the rest of us into angry jerks.

Solutions? I wouldn’t have space to write them even if I knew what they were. But here are two that might help.

The first comes also from my wife, who’s taking somewhat of a news break after spending too much time worrying about the election last year, like many of the rest of us. She’s trying to refocus on real life and on the things she can influence. In a recent conversation, she said Americans should judge President Trump’s individual actions one at a time, rather than declaring him completely right or dismissing him as completely wrong, and that same standard should apply to all other elected officials as well.

That’s true. There are times to judge the totality of an elected official’s performance. They’re called elections, and there will be another one soon enough next May. Until then, let’s try to regain some objectivity – for our own sakes, if nothing else.

The other comes from Proverbs 22:24, which states, “Make no friendship with an angry man; and with a furious man thou shalt not go.”

That verse has two meanings. The obvious one is to avoid angry people.

The second is less obvious but just as important: Don’t be that angry friend. It’s the first bad choice from which a lot of worse ones can follow.

Math beats myth, this time

Debt and deficits, Legislature, Politics, State government, U.S. Congress

By Steve Brawner
© 2017 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

Wednesday saw the triumph of math over myth, in one state.

That would be Kansas, where the Legislature overrode Gov. Sam Brownback’s veto of tax increases made necessary by his previous tax cuts. We’ll see how this applies to Arkansas later in the column.

What happened in Kansas was in 2012, Brownback pushed through the Legislature huge tax cuts that weren’t accompanied by sufficient spending decreases. He said the tax cuts would spur big economic growth. They didn’t.

The state ever since has been a fiscal mess, and a cautionary tale for other governors. This year it faced a $900 million budget deficit along with an order by its state Supreme Court to increase funding for public schools.

Kansas’ previous policies were based on a commonly believed myth – that if you cut taxes, the economy will grow and the tax cuts will pay for themselves. Thus, you don’t really have to cut spending.

The math is quite different, as proven time and again. Tax cuts can spur economic growth, but not enough to make up for the lost revenue. A minus sign doesn’t become a plus sign just because a politician says it’s so. To make the equation work, it’s very simple – just cut spending too. If you don’t have the courage to do that, don’t cut taxes.

The easy decision is to cut taxes without cutting spending. That makes everyone happy until the bills come due, which can take a while. The easy decisions of the Kansas Legislature of 2012 left the Kansas Legislature of 2017 with hard choices – more taxes, less spending, more debt, and/or violating a court order. So after the 2012 Legislature played Santa Claus, today’s legislators had to be Scrooge.

The result was the Legislature passed a $1.2 billion tax increase that Brownback, still determined to be Santa Claus, vetoed. On Wednesday, legislators overrode that veto knowing they’ll have to tell their primary voters that they voted for a tax increase.

It’s ironic this all happened in Kansas, the state that produced President Eisenhower, under whose administration the federal budget was balanced three times in eight years and almost balanced every other year.

If you’re wondering why this is relevant to Arkansas, it’s because your elected officials at the state and national levels will be spending a lot of time talking about taxes and tax cuts.

At the state level, taxes were cut in 2015 and 2017, and now Gov. Asa Hutchinson and other elected officials want to further reduce rates and simplify the tax code to make the state more competitive with its neighbors. A task force is meeting to craft legislation for 2019. For the math to work, the state must eliminate deductions, but each one will have its own constituency that will fight to protect it. On Wednesday, the task force hired a consultant to determine exactly what deductions are littered throughout the code.

Arkansas has a history of being fiscally responsible and has mechanisms in place through the Revenue Stabilization Act to produce a balanced budget. But mechanisms can be overridden or worked around. The Legislature is going to cut taxes. Hopefully, it will offset all of them by closing deductions and with spending cuts, lest Arkansas look like Kansas without the “Ar.”

More concerning is what’s happening at the federal level, where President Trump wants spending increases for the military and the border wall and has proposed spending cuts that largely won’t happen. He wants to leave untouched the government’s biggest programs, Social Security and Medicare.

Meanwhile, he and other Republican leaders have been promising tax cuts that they really, really want. Speaker of the House Paul Ryan was Brownback’s legislative director in the 1990s when Brownback was in Congress.

For a long time, Washington has behaved like Kansas, with much more disastrous results. Taxes have been cut under the theory that they would pay for themselves, spending has been increased, and the national debt has reached $20 trillion, or $62,000 for every American.

Arkansas’ six members of Congress could, as has happened so often, act like the 2012 Kansas Legislature and play Santa Claus, letting a future Congress somewhere down the line be Scrooge.

Let’s hope they instead base their decisions on math, not a myth. Santa Claus isn’t real, but the bills that come due after Christmas are.

Related: $23.33 less debt