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Here is the key portion of Jonathan Gruber’s mea culpa:

I did not draft Governor Romney’s health care plan, and I was not the “architect” of President Obama’s health care plan. I ran microsimulation models to help those in the state and federal executive and legislative branches better assess the likely outcomes of various possible policy choices.

After the passage of the ACA, I made a series of speeches around the nation endeavoring to explain the law’s implications for the U.S. health care system from the perspective of a trained economist. Many of these speeches were to technical audiences at economic and academic conferences.

Over the past weeks a number of videos have emerged from these appearances. In excerpts of these videos I am shown making a series of glib, thoughtless, and sometimes downright insulting comments. I apologized for the first of these videos earlier. But the ongoing attention paid to these videos has made me realize that a fuller accounting is necessary.

I would like to begin by apologizing sincerely for the offending comments that I made. In some cases I made uninformed and glib comments about the political process behind health care reform. I am not an expert on politics and my tone implied that I was, which is wrong. In other cases I simply made insulting and mean comments that are totally uncalled for in any situation. I sincerely apologize both for conjecturing with a tone of expertise and for doing so in such a disparaging fashion. It is never appropriate to try to make oneself seem more important or smarter by demeaning others. I know better. I knew better. I am embarrassed, and I am sorry.

In addition to apologizing for my unacceptable remarks, I would like to clarify some misconceptions about the content and context of my comments. Let me be very clear: I do not think that the Affordable Care Act was passed in a non-transparent fashion. The issues I raised in my comments, such as redistribution of risk through insurance market reform and the structure of the Cadillac tax, were roundly debated throughout 2009 and early 2010 before the law was passed. Reasonable people can disagree about the merits of these policies, but it is completely clear that these issues were debated thoroughly during the drafting and passage of the ACA.

I had a feeling this would happen:

President Barack Obama spent several hours on Monday in a closed-door Oval Office meeting seeking advice on how to establish a monarchy, Fox News reports.

According to Fox, the President peppered his Oval Office guest with detailed questions about the mechanics of setting up a monarchy and was curious about the perks and powers that go along with it.

Obama’s guest advised him that establishing a monarchy would probably require rewriting or even replacing the Constitution, an option that Obama reportedly said would be “difficult, but doable.”

Introducing a note of caution, the guest urged the President to alter the Constitution so that it vested the monarch with genuine power, adding, “You don’t want to wind up being a figurehead who just goes around visiting foreign dignitaries and so forth.”

According to the Fox report, the President came away “intrigued” by the meeting and said he would explore the idea further next week when Congress is on vacation.

BTW, I hope you catch the reference to the title of the post. It’s quite apt.

During oral argument today in Department of Transportation v. Association of American Railroads (transcript here), Justice Breyer does what he does best–raise the specter of Lochner. He did it in Active Liberty and Sorrell v. IMS Health most recently. Today, he worried that a ruling agains the government would “work havoc” on the regulatory state.

JUSTICE BREYER: Going back to Carter v. Carter Coal.

MR. GANNON: Yes.

JUSTICE BREYER: We could go back to Lochner.

Jonathan Keim reports that Breyer made the comments looking right at Nino:

And then it happened: Justice Breyer looked right at Justice Scalia and asked whether deciding the case for the plaintiffs would take us all back to Lochner v. New York (1905),

Justice Breyer returned to Joseph Lochner’s bakery while questioning counsel for the railroads.

JUSTICE BREYER: My reaction was the way you deal with that normally is the statute would be interpreted not to give them the authority to write anticompetitive regulations and you’d attack it under the antitrust laws. There may be other ways to do it.  I’ve never heard of an example where the due process problem really was a constitutional problem under due process. Now ­­ now, maybe there’s some cases I’ve overlooked. The only one coming close, it seemed to me,  is Carter v. Carter Coal, which I always put in the same box as Lochner. Now ­­ now, are we supposed to resurrect that? Is there other authority for that proposition? What is it?

Thomas Dupree answers that Carter Coal remains vital today, and is not a “remnant of the Lochner era.”

I second Jonathan’s comment that Lochner has become a Godwin’s law for the Supreme Court:

Lochner has long been invoked in legal discussions as a reductio ad absurdum: What you’re proposing would take us back to the Lochner era, so you must be wrong. (If you are familiar with Godwin’s Law for Internet discussions, substitute “Lochner” for “Nazis” and you’ve basically got the idea.)

Last month the Associated Press reported that Al Qaeda and ISIS made peace. This led me to conclude (tongue in cheek) that the President’s authority under the 2001 AUMF to target ISIS got a lot stronger.

But now, another fracture between the groups has become clear. The Times reports that Al Qaeda has condemned ISIS for beheadings.

On Monday, Al Qaeda came out publicly against the practice of beheading in a strongly worded interview with one of its field commanders, making clear that the organization founded by Osama bin Laden was more pragmatic and as a result less extreme than its jihadist rival in Syria — which has turned the act of decapitation into a signature of its brutality.

In a 43-minute video, Nasr bin Ali al-Ansi, a military strategist and official of Al Qaeda’s branch in Yemen, is asked whether he condones recent beheadings. He says that although some Qaeda members may have carried out such acts, the organization does not sanction the practice.

“No doubt, some of our brothers were affected by seeing scenes of beheadings that were spread recently. We do not accept — and we strongly reject them,” Mr. al-Ansi says, according to a transcript provided by SITE Intelligence, an organization that tracks jihadist propaganda. “Recording such acts and spreading them among the people in the name of religion and jihad, we see as a big mistake. It is not acceptable, no matter the justification.”

“Big mistake.” Al Qaeda and ISIS do not agree here. Al Qaeda is the more “pragmatic” of the groups, and “less extreme.”

And we aren’t only talking about Al Qaeda Yemen. We are talking about the whole network.

He makes clear that the position he is articulating is not just his own, or even that of Al Qaeda’s branch in Yemen known as Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, but rather is the guidance of the group’s most senior current leaders — and reflected the wishes of Osama bin Laden himself. “Therefore, I assert that whoever does such actions,” he says, “he has violated the command of Sheikh Osama.”

 

Can it still be said that ISIS is the true inheritor of Usama Bin Laden’s legacy, as the President reminded us? After all, they have differed over beheadings since at least 2005–well before UBL’s death.

Nearly a decade ago, Ayman al-Zawahiri — the man who would go on to become the head of Al Qaeda — wrote a letter to his deputy in Iraq, scolding him for beheading hostages and posting videos of their execution online. He explained that although he was in favor of killing the enemy and agreed with the principle of sowing terror, the scenes of slaughter risked turning public opinion against their organization.

His advice was to be more discreet: “Kill the captives by bullet.”

The letter — written in 2005 and recovered by American forces in Iraq — was addressed to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the founder of the group that would become the Islamic State, which split off from the Qaeda network earlier this year.

And Bin Laden himself opposed this tactic!

A veteran of Al Qaeda, Mr. al-Ansi moved to Afghanistan in the 1990s to train in the group’s elite camps. He was dispatched by bin Laden to the Philippines in 2001 to help guide jihadists there, including by teaching them the principles of Shariah law, as well as military tactics.

He says in Monday’s video that bin Laden specifically asked him to stress to the cell in the Philippines that recording scenes of brutality was forbidden.

In case you couldn’t tell, this post is mostly facetious–as is the President’s argument that the 2001 AUMF covers ISIS in Iraq and Syria.

In an article titled “G.O.P. Extracts Price for Averting Shutdown,” the Times explains how Republicans are attempting to throw in favorable pieces into the budget bill, as a reward for averting a shutdown. Buried towards the bottom is this sentence, without any further explanation:

Cultural conservatives in the House and Senate were also pressing to include a “conscience clause” for employers who say funding contraception violates their religious beliefs.

If I understand this correctly, this amendment would modify the Affordable Care Act, and exempt from the contraception mandate (which isn’t actually in the statute) employers (presumably for-profit as well as non-profit). But, without any more details, who knows?

Update: Politico adds more:

A tussle over contraceptives has ended with Democrats keeping an attachment pushed by House conservatives out of a trillion dollar government funding bill.

Conservatives had asked their party leaders to attach a policy rider to the funding bill that would have allowed corporations potentially to duck contraceptive coverage rules under Obamacare.

Story Continued Below

But House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi was opposed, a senior Democratic source said. Republicans will likely depend on Democratic votes to pass the spending bill, so both parties have been negotiating over the language of the legislation.

Pelosi tapped Democratic negotiators to draw “a firm line” against any changes that focused on the so-called ‘conscience clause’, a senior Democratic source said. There were no direct conversations about contraceptives between Pelosi and Speaker John Boehner or House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy.

And Democrats were broadly opposed to any additions to the government spending bill that would change the 2010 health care law.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2014/12/spending-bill-contraceptives-113426.html#ixzz3LQDe4X7x