While the Obama administration has been fanning the flames of a burning world in the Near East and the Ukraine, the Supreme Court has been fiddling with what perhaps has been its major domestic achievement, the Affordable Care Act. And doing it in sinister ways.
There is nothing particularly new in this. The time tested way to undermine and eventually defeat national legislation has been to systematically underfund such legislation, leave key aspects of its enforcement and pass parts of its funding onto state governments, creating policy crazy quilts.
There are many examples of how this works. The passage of the original National Labor Relations Act(1935) was a great victory for the U.S. working class , which then created the context for mass organizing drives that increased the number of unionized workers by five times in the next twelve years.
But employers used the developing cold war and the Republican victory in the 1946 congressional elected to force through the Taft-Hartley Act(1947) which ,among its other anti-labor provisions, gave states the “right” to pass anti-union shop “right to work” laws, which negated the major gains of the original legislation in those states(now nearly half the states of the United States) First them this served and still serves as the major roadblock to union organization in the states where such laws were passed, Also, from the 1950s on, these “right to work for less ” laws. as the labor movement called them and still calls them , stimulated to the shift of industry to those states, over time depressing both wage rates and levels of union organization.
Also, state minimum wage and unemployment insurance differentials mean that the national standards, becomes a bare minimum instead of a standard that lifts wages in the “right to work states” where labor cheaper.
At the beginning of the 20th century even moderate progressives understood that national problems required national solutions, although the judiciary resisted that approach until the 1930s. Today, at the beginning of the 21st century, the judiciary is seeking to uphold the 19th, against a fragmented opposition
Where there is no national legislation, on the question of gun control for example, we see the crazy quilt most dramatically, as some states have strict laws and harsh penalties for improperly attained and registered fire arms while the same weapons can be quickly and easily attained in other states and brought anywhere in the country by individuals.
When there was no national civil rights legislation, pro segregation politicians argued that the issue was a “state matter” and should be dealt with at the state level.
Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater in opposing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 Ronald Reagan,his supporter and successor as leader of the far right in U.S. polical life took that position in opposing the Civil Rights law of 1964. Reagan later defended that position and applied it to his successful opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment , constitutional amendment proposed by women’s rights activists to place equal rights for all people , regardless of race, religion, gender, ethnicity a part of the constitution. From the
If Mississippi for example ,had the same “right” to pass state “separate but equal” acts to defeat national civil rights legislation as it has to pass under Taft-Hartley “right to work” legislation(which it did more than sixty years ago) segregation, disenfranchisement, and lynch law would still be the rule.
Now a federal appeals court by a two to one vote has sided with those states, in the hands mostly of Republican governors and legislatures, which have refused to establish federally funded health care exchanges, putting millions of people at risk in regard to their health care.
Never mind for a moment that the Affordable Health Care act itself is something of a crazy quilt involving regulated insurance companies, complicated choices for individuals and families, as against a simple national program with comprehensive benefits and limitations that everyone can understand.
This decision threatens to cripple its most significant parts, providing coverage for the tens of millions without coverage, stopping the policy of denying coverage to individuals with pre-existing conditions like cancer(which has meant in the past a death sentence for some people) and creating with the various new choices the possibility of both improved and less expensive coverage for the people who really need it the most, under covered moderate and low income people and families.
The Obama administration is appealing the decision as overly narrow, given previous court decisions on federal state matters, and is expected to win in the Federal Appeals Court in the District of Columbia. But then there is the Supreme Court , which has already shown its willingness to strike at the ACA in the Hobby Case, invoking the even more specious doctrines of “religious freedom” and “corporate personhood” to support employers who refuse to give employees coverage concerning contraception and abortion.
What does all of this mean, beyond the suface. Even sections of the capitalist class are saying that the political system isn’t working—that we live in an age of “gridlock” and “broken government.” Of course, their aim is to make matters for the people much worse, to institute “austerity policies that will sharply reduce existing social security benefits, force de facto wage and salary reductions on the overwhelming majority of workers, and in all llikelihood turn more and more of government over to “financial juntas” of the kind which first appeared in New York City and other cities in the “fiscal crisis” of the 1970s—corporate dominated commissions at all levels which will fire large numbers of public employees and “restructure” the salaries and benefits of those employees Given the U.S general debt crisis, its relative economic decline vis-à-vis its EU NAT0 bloc “allies,” not to mention Japan and the Peoples Republic of China, these are essentially the blowback policies that the U.S. created agencies of “globalization” aka imperialism have been advocating for the U.S since the second Bush administration.
We can’t break with the Democratic Party in 2014 or even 2016. We meaning the CPUSA and the broad left, can’t seriously agitate within the labor movement for the establishment of a mass labor party in 2014 or 2016. But we can and we should begin to search for serious alternatives, to Elizabeth Warren, a 21st century version of Robert La Follette, that is a serious anti-monopoly progressive whom finance capital fears in a way that they don’t fear Hilary Clinton and they have not feared Barack Obama.
We can begin to take serious political chances, rejecting those Democratic candidates whose de facto opportunism has made them buffers between the Republican right and their own constituents, a lot like the AFL business unionists a century ago and for that matter in the segregationist South, the ministers whom African-American freedom fighters derisively called “pork chop preachers.” We can begin to create the conditions for the Harry Bridges’ and John L. Lewis’, the Thurgood Marshalls’ and Martin Luther King’s, to end of the right-center hegemony over our political economy and our lives.
The battle over the judiciary is not only to break the domination of Federalist Society reactionary jurists by appointing more and more progressives who will outvote them(and this is really a long and difficult process) but to challenge the ideological influence that they have developed over the last four decades. This means once more centering judicial policy around both the general welfare clause of the constitution and the bill of rights, restoring the 14th amendment to establish federal supremacy over the states and ending the shell game of permitting states to opt out of major federal policy and also from the federal side to devolve the funding of all kinds of policies unto the states.
Given where U.S. finance capital aka state monopoly capitalism is today at home and abroad, we should begin to raise these issues in all mass organizations that we are involved in.
