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The revolving door in Washington keeps spinning. The irony of this revolution is particularly delicious. Recently, Karen Ignani, longtime Chief of America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP) stepped down. You may recall that Ignani was instrumental in rounding up support for Obamacare, and perhaps most significantly, persuaded then-candidate Obama to reverse his position and support an individual mandate. Why wouldn’t health insurance companies want a federal mandate to buy their products!  So who will replace her?

None other than Marilyn B. Tavenner. Remember her? She was the top official involved in the rollout of HealthCare.gov. Yes, the person who is largely responsible for the biggest colossal flop in the ACA’s history was hired as the top lobbyist for the health insurance industry! Unbelievable.

NYT reports, charitably:

Ms. Tavenner led federal efforts to carry out the Affordable Care Act, and she was stunned in October 2013 when HealthCare.gov crashed during its initial introduction, frustrating millions of consumers who were trying to buy insurance online.

In the ensuing months, she helped fix the website, after the White House deployed a management expert to supervise the operation, with the assistance of technology experts recruited from Silicon Valley.

“The rollout was far from ideal,” Ms. Tavenner said on Wednesday. “But I spent a month pulling a team together and creating a turnaround. The management challenges seemed insurmountable, but I am proud of what we accomplished.” Millions of people eventually gained insurance, she said.

 

Perhaps the most delicious irony, is that she was hired to lobby Congress.

She said that, because of federal conflict-of-interest rules, she would not lobby the agency or other parts of the Department of Health and Human Services in the remaining months of the Obama administration. But she said she was free to lobby Congress.

 

I can’t how many hearings before Congress where Tavenner looked like an absolute fool, totally unable to answer any questions about why HealthCare.gov was such a abysmal failure.

Glenn Reynold’s revolving door tax sounds like a great idea now.

In the WSJ, Roger Pilon offers a libertarian take on businesses that decline to provide services for same-sex weddings.

With nationwide same-sex marriage now in its pocket, the gay-rights movement is turning quickly to the next item on its agenda: outlawing discrimination based on sexual orientation. That is where many libertarians who strongly supported same-sex marriage step back for a more measured approach. It is one thing to prevent government officials from discriminating against same-sex couples—that is what equal protection is all about—quite another to force private individuals and organizations into associations they find offensive.

…

The public-accommodation cases are closer calls. Because they represent their businesses as open to the public, the Kleins and Giffords shouldn’t be able to deny entrance and normal service to gay customers—and neither has done so. If a same-sex couple had walked into that bakery hand-in-hand and ordered bagels, they would have been served without objection. But it is a step further—and an important one—to force religious business owners to participate in a same-sex wedding, to force them to engage in the creative act of planning the event, baking a special-order cake for it, photographing it, and so on.

No one enjoys the sting of discrimination or rejection. But neither does anyone like to be forced into uncomfortable situations, especially those that offend deeply held religious beliefs. In the end, who here is forcing whom? A society that cannot tolerate differing views—and respect the live-and-let-live principle—will not long be free.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, by now you should know that Harper Lee’s prior-in-time sequel to “To Kill A Mockingbird” was published today. Perhaps the greatest surprise in “Go Set a Watchman” is that Atticus Finch, the icon, is now portrayed as a bigot.

In one of the more fascinating and surreal scenes, Atticus and Scout (here known as Jean Louise) have an extended conversation about the Supreme Court, Brown v. Board of Education, and the Tenth Amendment.

Her father leaned back in his chair. He said, “Jean Louise, you’ve been reading nothing but New York papers. I’ve no doubt all you see is wild threats and bombings and such. The Maycomb council’s not like the North Alabama and Tennessee kinds. Our council’s composed of and led by our own people. I bet you saw nearly every man in the county yesterday, and you knew nearly every man there.”

“Yes sir, I did. Every man from that snake Willoughby on down.”

“Each man there was probably there for a different reason,” said her father.

No war was ever fought for so many different reasons. Who said that? “Yeah, but they all met for one reason.”

“I can tell you the two reasons I was there. The Federal Government and the NAACP. Jean Louise, what was your first reaction to the Supreme Court decision?”

That was a safe question. She would answer him.

“I was furious,” she said.

She was. She had known it was coming, knew what it would be, had thought she was prepared for it, but when she bought a newspaper on the street corner and read it, she stopped at the first bar she came to and drank down a straight bourbon.

“Why?”

“Well sir, there they were, tellin’ us what to do again—”

Her father grinned. “You were merely reacting according to your kind,” he said. “When you started using your head, what did you think?”

“Nothing much, but it scared me. It seemed all backward— they were putting the cart way out in front of the horse.”

“How so?”

He was prodding her. Let him. They were on safe ground. “Well, in trying to satisfy one amendment, it looks like they rubbed out another one. The Tenth. It’s only a small amendment, only one sentence long, but it seemed to be the one that meant the most, somehow.”

“Did you think this out for yourself?”

“Why, yes sir. Atticus, I don’t know anything about the Constitution. . . .”

“You seem to be constitutionally sound so far. Proceed.”

Proceed with what? Tell him she couldn’t look him in the eye? He wanted her views on the Constitution, then he’d have ’em: “Well, it seemed that to meet the real needs of a small portion of the population, the Court set up something horrible that could— that could affect the vast majority of folks. Adversely, that is. Atticus, I don’t know anything about it— all we have is the Constitution between us and anything some smart fellow wants to start, and there went the Court just breezily canceling one whole amendment, it seemed to me. We have a system of checks and balances and things, but when it comes down to it we don’t have much check on the Court, so who’ll bell the cat? Oh dear, I’m soundin’ like the Actors Studio.”

“What?”

“Nothing. I’m— I’m just trying to say that in trying to do right we’ve left ourselves open for something that could be truly dangerous to our set-up.” She ran her fingers through her hair. She looked at the rows of brown-and-black bound books, law reports, on the wall opposite. She looked at a faded picture of the Nine Old Men on the wall to the left of her. Is [JB: Owen?] Roberts dead? she wondered. She could not remember.

Her father’s voice was patient: “You were saying—?” “Yes sir. I was saying that I— I don’t know much about government and economics and all that, and I don’t want to know much, but I do know that the Federal Government to me, to one small citizen, is mostly dreary hallways and waiting around. The more we have, the longer we wait and the tireder we get. Those old mossbacks on the wall up there knew it— but now, instead of going about it through Congress and the state legislatures like we should, when we tried to do right we just made it easier for them to set up more hallways and more waiting—”

Her father sat up and laughed.

“I told you I didn’t know anything about it.”

“Sweet, you’re such a states’ rightist you make me a Roosevelt Liberal by comparison.”

“States’ rightist?”

Atticus said, “Now that I’ve adjusted my ear to feminine reasoning, I think we find ourselves believing the very same things.”

She had been half willing to sponge out what she had seen and heard, creep back to New York, and make him a memory. A memory of the three of them, Atticus, Jem, and her, when things were uncomplicated and people did not lie. But she would not have him compound the felony.

She could not let him add hypocrisy to it: “Atticus, if you believe all that, then why don’t you do right? I mean this, that no matter how hateful the Court was, there had to be a beginning—”

“You mean because the Court said it we must take it? No ma’am. I don’t see it that way. If you think I for one citizen am going to take it lying down, you’re quite wrong. As you say, Jean Louise, there’s only one thing higher than the Court in this country, and that’s the Constitution—”

…

“You are inconsistent,” said her father mildly.

“Why so?”

“You slang the Supreme Court within an inch of its life, then you turn around and talk like the NAACP.”

“Good Lord, I didn’t get mad with the Court because of the Negroes. Negroes slapped the brief on the bench, all right, but that wasn’t what made me furious. I was ravin’ at what they were doing to the Tenth Amendment and all the fuzzy thinking. The Negroes were—”

Earlier in the book, Atticus refers to Brown this way:

“I mean about the Supreme Court’s bid for immortality.”

Wow! I need to digest Atticus talking about the 10th Amendment and federalism.

Also, this scene offers a flashback to a distorted version of the trial of Tom Robinson where he is (gasp!) acquitted because he proved the sex was consensual, and the defendant (who is not even named) had lost his arm in a sawmill accident:

Against Mr. O’Hanlon’s humming harangue, a memory was rising to dispute him: the courtroom shifted imperceptibly, in it she looked down on the same heads. When she looked across the room a jury sat in the box, Judge Taylor was on the bench, his pilot fish sat below in front of him writing steadily; her father was on his feet: he had risen from a table at which she could see the back of a kinky woolly head. . . . Atticus Finch rarely took a criminal case; he had no taste for criminal law. The only reason he took this one was because he knew his client to be innocent of the charge, and he could not for the life of him let the black boy go to prison because of a half-hearted, court-appointed defense. The boy had come to him by way of Calpurnia, told him his story, and had told him the truth. The truth was ugly. Atticus took his career in his hands, made good use of a careless indictment, took his stand before a jury, and accomplished what was never before or afterwards done in Maycomb County: he won an acquittal for a colored boy on a rape charge. The chief witness for the prosecution was a white girl. Atticus had two weighty advantages: although the white girl was fourteen years of age the defendant was not indicted for statutory rape, therefore Atticus could and did prove consent. Consent was easier to prove than under normal conditions— the defendant had only one arm. The other was chopped off in a sawmill accident. Atticus pursued the case to its conclusion with every spark of his ability and with an instinctive distaste so bitter only his knowledge that he could live peacefully with himself was able to wash it away. After the verdict, he walked out of the courtroom in the middle of the day, walked home, and took a steaming bath. He never counted what it cost him; he never looked back. He never knew two pairs of eyes like his own were watching him from the balcony.

 

Shortly after King v. Burwell was decided, I noted that now that the Chief Justice has effectively put on ice any future challenges to Obamacare, the law will, at last, have to stand on its own two feet–and it would be quite wobbly. Obamacare’s biggest challenge is Obamacare. Two stories from the past week shine a light on these fissuring cracks.

First Slate (of all places) writes of Obamacare’s skyrocketing premiums. It begins:

Now that the Supreme Court has once again saved Obamacare, can we have an honest talk about it?

Yes. While the challenges to the law were pending, supporters dare not say anything negative, lest it get in the way of the Chief’s Justice’s resurrection of the bill no one read. But now, we can have that “honest talk.”

The bill for the health care expansion is coming due, just as the recipients will be heading to the ballot box to vote in the first primaries for the 2016 election. More than a few are likely to be annoyed.

Last week Oregon’s insurance commissioner, Laura Cali, announced that the state had approved a 25 percent premium increase for the largest health insurer on the state’s exchanges. The second largest insurer did even better: It received permission to boost its monthly charge to consumers by 33 percent.

Oregon might be the first health insurance exchange equivalent of a penguin getting shoved off an ice floe, but it won’t be alone in the freezing-cold waters for long. For example, BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee requested an average 36 percent price increase for the plans it offers—after receiving a 19 percent bump last year. And that sounds like a relative bargain compared with Minnesota and New Mexico, where the BlueCross BlueShield family is looking for increases of more than 50 percent. Even if the final numbers are lower than the asks, it seems quite likely these states will approve substantive premium increases.

The problem is simple. As Trudy Lieberman reported this month in Harper’s, the ACA made a decent stab at solving the problem of Americans lacking insurance. Unfortunately, the bargain struck to get the bill to a point where lobbyists for the hospital, insurance, and pharmaceutical industries to sign on, or at least not fight it, did not adequately address the issue of overall medical costs.

I think this sentiment describes so much of what has happened since 2009. The benefits can only be judged in the long-term. The President has prematurely taken a victory lap and spiked the football. The real challenges begin as his term winds down.

What is the Times referring to here: (a) Iran; (b) Obamacare; (c) Executive Power; (d) all of the above.

Answer.