Having skillfully and successfully created and deployed an initial ruling on mandated contraceptive coverage solely to inflame a “war on women” narrative crucial to winning the presidential election for its champion, the ACA/Obamacare is now triangulating back toward the political center in an effort to dissipate the criticism it no longer needs and which now can only prove harmful to it. Keep in mind that everything that is true now was true then, every reason and every action being advanced now would have been just as intelligent, rational and compelling had they been the choice instead last year. The only difference is the political utility gained last year by that now-disposable passive-aggressive Alinskian political ploy:
Responding to complaints from religiously-affiliated groups, the Obama administration today proposed new health insurance rules for covering the cost of birth control, laying out a plan to ensure coverage without compelling faith-based organizations to pay for it.
White House spokesman Jay Carney said the administration sought to balance two principles in its rule-making: “We had to ensure that women have access to preventive services like contraception and that the policy respects religious beliefs,” he said.
The Affordable Care Act requires employers to provide full health care coverage for contraception, though the rule exempts houses of worship like churches or synagogues. However, other nonprofits with religious affiliations — such as, for instance, a Catholic university — were expected to comply. The Obama administration faces several lawsuits over the issue.
Under the new proposed rules, such non-profit religious organizations would have to ensure that enrollees of their health care plans get full contraception coverage, but they would not have to pay for it — a health insurer would pay for it.
“Today, the administration is taking the next step in providing women across the nation with coverage of recommended preventive care at no cost, while respecting religious concerns,” Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said in a statement. “We will continue to work with faith-based organizations, women’s organizations, insurers and others to achieve these goals.”
While the value of the ACA/Obamacare as health care law (its putative raison d’être) is yet to be determined, there is no question it has already proved a campaign tool critically useful in manipulating electoral politics. With such a sturdy proof of concept, we can expect more of the same: law as law except insofar as it needs be pragmatically mutable to higher, transient political ends, by whomever is in the driver’s seat at the time.
Update: What is the product when the law comes to serve the transient expediencies of politics instead of politics serving the rule of law? One ends up with, in concept if not in effect, idiosyncratic warlordism: a political campaign armed with the legal (and, implicitly, martial) force of the state.
H. M. Stuart
Alexandria
Ah, the ingenious and devious “Alinskian political ploy”: and yet Obamacare did not prove much of “a campaign tool useful in manipulating electoral politics” back in 2010; it was widely considered a primary reason for Republican victories. As for the contraceptive mandate: if the Obama administration gives not an inch, they’re accused of conducting a “war on religion”; if they seek compromises (this isn’t the first ruling they’ve issued to try to accommodate critics), they’re accused of manipulating the law for political ends. Given that you don’t even seem to accept the law’s “putative” purpose–I guess you assume it’s actually some Machiavellian (oops: I mean, “Alinskian”)attempt to control people’s lives or simply to kill off (death panels!)elderly whites who tend to vote Republican–what exactly would you have the administration do? They could, of course, completely surrender on the issue and eliminate the contraception mandate, but then you’d insist they only put it in there in the first place to gin up a “war on women” narrative. (By the way, you omitted any reference to Bill Ayres or Frank Marshall–surely they must figure into this narrative somehow?)
My good Jack,
As I made unmistakeably clear by my sentence structure, the Alinskian ploy I am referring to is not the ACA in general in 2010 but rather specifically the details of the HHS mandate as it was crafted and deployed in 2012, specifics which even Democrats found bizarre and perplexing at the time, given the negative reactions they predictably provoked; provocations we see now, post election, were never actually really necessary to the implementation of the ACA as health reform law at all – because the current, far less-provocative compromise could just as thoughtfully have been proposed back then had such compromise actually been the primary Executive Branch goal.
Contrary to your poor understanding of them, Saul Alinsky’s techniques are not some vague, rhetorical bogeyman but rather are timeless, very simple, and very effective passive-aggressive means of forcing an opponent to over-react to a provocation to his downfall or to react in a manner for which one has already pre-prepared a narrative slide which will ultimately lead him to similarly negative ends. The Obama administration, disdainful of negotiation politics of the sort previous Democratic and other presidents either relished or at least pursued out of a sense of duty and thus not very competent at them, is nevertheless without question highly skilled at this sort of passive-aggressive manipulation, even more effectively so given the latitude it has concomitantly awarded itself in executive privilege with respect to the law, and in pursuit of them it has found in contemporary Republicans a willing partner repeatedly eager to take its frequently obvious bait. The sudden current Obama preoccupations with gun control and immigration in lieu of far more pressing jobs and economic issues is simply more of the same, from the same playbook, ultimately to the same cynical, nihilistic ends.
Again, simply put: either the compromise acceptable to the Obama administration now would have been just as acceptable to the Obama administration as a matter of principled law way back in 2012, or, equally, the impossibility of the currently offered compromise being tendered back in 2012 as a matter of principled law must make any such compromise equally impossible currently. The discrepancy cannot be explained by reference to either principled implementation of the law or even to purely political negotiation in good faith; therefore, something else must needs explain them, and they fit the specific Alinskian profile of calculated agitation in which President Obama is historically skilled vocationally more closely than they do even mere random, incompetent Executive Branch flailing.
I leave the remainder of your guesses and assumptions to you, where they originated.
H. M. Stuart
Alexandria
H.M.: In other words, what you said the first time, repeated at length and with a gratuitous insult tossed in regarding my “poor understanding” of Saul Alinsky’s jujitsu techniques. While your impeccable sentence structure did initially refer specifically to the HHS mandate, it quickly embraced the ACA/Obamacare as a whole, saying that “[it] is now triangulating back toward the political center.” Your penultimate paragraph refers, again, to the ACA/Obamacare rather than merely to the HHS mandate, saying that it “has already proved a campaign tool critically useful in manipulating electoral politics”–thus my observation that the ACA/Obamacare had not done such a good job manipulating the 2010 elections. In any case, I’m glad you find the administration’s latest offer to be a “far-less provocative compromise,” which suggests, among other things, that Obama’s intention was never to trample on people’s religious freedom but just to win the White House by pretending to trample on people’s religious freedom. So that’s good news, right?
My good Jack,
Given your wild references in your initial response to Machiavelli, Bill Ayres, Frank Marshall, and what you found necessary to assume about me to complete your internal narrative about what I said, whether or not I insulted you with respect to your demonstrated grasp of Alinsky in that same comment does not concern me, although your approach to commentary would suggest you understand Alinky’s techniques quite well and relish using them yourself when you imagine someone might respond to them.
that Obama’s intention was never to trample on people’s religious freedom but just to win the White House by pretending to trample on people’s religious freedom.
Yes, precisely.
There is little or nothing the Obama administration has championed to date that has proved more substantially successful in its own right than it has proved formally useful in politically manipulating either the administration’s Republican opposition or, indeed, its own Democratic supporters; the end of Obama politics appears to be no larger than the perpetuation of the Obama administration itself, a perception which has chagrined both sides almost equally.
The ACA/Obamacare may be the largest case in point: there is little to actually point to in it in the present or in any foreseeable future which actually has or will improve health care and its delivery. The insurance industry’s self-interested compliance in providing free contraception in lieu of paying for more expensive alternate pre-natal and natal care may actually be the highest point. Everything else is already well along in the process of collapsing either judicially, politically, economically, or logistically like a house of cards, leaving the ACA/Obamacare as probably the largest single purely formalistic political campaign totem to date to masquerade as virtuous, substantive law of the land. But that was precisely the manner in which it was designed, constructed and enacted: as purely and nothing more than a hollow campaign promise, to initially draw votes from those who believed in its promises while leaving its ultimate fate to unravel well after those supported by such votes no longer needed them.
H. M. Stuart
Alexandria
H.M.: so you admit that I do understand Saul Alinsky!
“Mandated contraceptive coverage”? Eric Blair, thou shouldst be living at this hour. Or maybe Aldous Huxley. You make it sound as if every female in America is forced to go through Malthusian Drill every morning.
The hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church believes that contraception is immoral. Most of their employees, even the Catholic ones, do not share this opinion. Catholic organizations are complaining about having to provide their employees with the OPPORTUNITY to get contraceptive care without out-of-pocket expense. And the church, in turn, wishes to MANDATE that their employees, if they insist on limiting the size of their families and minimizing the ill effects of non-marital sex, pay for it out-of-pocket. Whose freedom is being limited here?
And why, while we’re on the subject, is everybody being so inconsistent? Whether or not the Catholic church pays directly for their employees’ health insurance, they are paying indirectly for anything those employees choose to buy with their paychecks, including contraception. How long before they require those employees to sign a contract pledging not to use contraception on pain of losing their jobs? Or at least to pay for it from some private financial resource other than their consecrated paycheck? Surely the Catholic hierarchy should be “free” to do that, shouldn’t they?
And, OTOH, if we buy the proposition that the Catholic Church should be free to refuse to pay for their employees’ immoral behavior, why aren’t the Quakers free to refuse to pay for the Department of “Defense”? Is this just a matter of the number of votes a particular religious body can mobilize? Whatever happened to “no establishment of religion”?
Well said, WiredSisters, well said. I’ve honestly not understood this whole HHS controversy at all, and it seems to me that the Obama administration has bent over backwards to avoid ruffling Catholic feathers. I continue to wonder if the Catholic Church will forbid (or has forbidden) its members from working for pharmaceutical companies that manufacture contraceptives, or for insurance companies that offer policies with contraceptive coverage; as you say, there seems to be some inconsistency here.