GOP Senators: We’ll Hold Up Treasury Nominee Unless Obama Makes Medicare Cuts That He’s Already Made

In a letter sent to the White House on Tuesday, 22 Republican senators are demanding that President Obama propose Medicare cuts before the chamber considers Treasury Secretary nominee Jack Lew.

The letter is part of an ongoing GOP smear campaign against Lew alleging that, during his tenure as director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), Lew and the Obama Administration failed to comply with a law requiring the White House to submit Medicare cost-cutting proposals “whenever the program’s trustees express concerns about its solvency in their annual report.” The senators suggest that Lew should have known about that legal requirement and spurred the Administration to take action by formally proposing Medicare cuts:

“We find it stunning and noteworthy that so far Mr. Lew has not provided adequate responses to congressional inquiries on the matter,” the senators wrote to Obama Tuesday.

“Congress needs a clearer understanding about his role in the violation of this law, including exactly when Mr. Lew first became aware of this legal requirement and what counsel, if any, he provided the administration on whether it should comply with this law.”

But there are some glaring falsehoods in the senators’ claims and their subsequent demand for an Administration plan to curb Medicare cost growth.

First, calling for Medicare cuts to ensure the program’s long-term solvency is based on the assumption that inflation in medical services — and, consequently, spending on health care entitlements like Medicare — will continue to balloon at staggering rates indefinitely. But the key to reducing national health expenditures is to reduce the actual price of consuming care — so if forces in the health care market facilitate cost reductions in medical technology and services, then entitlement spending will drop accordingly. Recent evidence shows that that is exactly what is happening, as the recent slowdown in health care cost growth has reduced Medicare’s future projected spending by over half a trillion dollars, all without a single policy change. Furthermore, a just-released GAO report found that if Obamacare and its cost-containment mechanisms are fully implemented, then future spending on Medicare would decrease “from 6.2 percent of GDP in 2035 in the simulations run before [Obamacare] was enacted to 4.7 percent in the simulations run immediately after enactment.”

President Obama also directly cut Medicare spending to the tune of $716 billion over the next decade by signing Obamacare, which reduces overpayments to providers servicing private Medicare Advantage plans. In fact, the GOP — led by their presidential nominee, Mitt Romney — hammered the president mercilessly over these cuts during the 2012 election cycle, claiming that the provider payment reductions amounted to “robbing Medicare.” And the president has proposed further cuts to entitlement programs — including Medicare — on multiple occasions, including his proposed budget and this month’s State of the Union address.

The only way that the senators’ claims bear credence is if they are hewing to an absurdly narrow, literal interpretation of the law in question, and want the Administration to submit a single specific bill addressing Medicare cuts. But the more likely explanation is that the senators are engaging in a bit of political grandstanding that affords them an opportunity to attack both the president’s entitlement policies as well as one of his highest-profile cabinet nominees.

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Georgia Will Execute An Intellectually Disabled Man Next Week Unless The Supreme Court Intervenes

Warren Lee Hill.

While a series of procedural rulings have delayed execution for Warren Lee Hill, he faces imminent capital punishment by the state of Georgia a week from tomorrow, in spite of a U.S. Supreme Court decision that says executing the severely mentally disabled is unconstitutional. Hill, who was deemed “mentally retarded” at trial (an unfortunate legal term), has exhausted his appeals, and only U.S. Supreme Court action can stop his execution this time.

Among those who have advocated for Hill’s clemency are several jurors from Hill’s trial, disability groups, and President Jimmy Carter. Even the victim’s family has submitted an affidavit stating that they prefer clemency.

In its ruling in Atkins v. Virginia, the high court held that executing individuals deemed “mentally retarded” violated the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment because their disability “places them at special risk of wrongful execution.” Wrongful convictions are already rampant in the U.S. criminal justice system, and the unique irreversibility of capital punishment is one of the reasons why the remedy is becoming increasingly unpopular and uncommon.

In spite of the Supreme Court’s holding, a harsh procedural technicality has allowed the state to skirt existing Supreme Court precedent. While all other states require a finding that the defendant is meets the mental disability criteria by a “preponderance of the evidence”or some other moderate standard of evidence, Georgia imposes the “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard — the equivalent of legal certainty. Psychologists have attested that this is a standard that is almost impossible to attain when it comes to mental disability.

Unfortunately, the statute that permits this standard survived legal challenge in a narrow 4-3 ruling. In her dissent in that case, Georgia Supreme Court Justice Leah Sears articulates the clear inconsistency of this statute with the prohibition on executing the severely mentally disabled:

Despite the federal ban on executing the mentally retarded, Georgia’s statute, and the majority decision upholding it, do not prohibit the state from executing mentally retarded people. To the contrary, the State may still execute people who are in all probability mentally retarded. The State may execute people who are more than likely mentally retarded. The State may even execute people who are almost certainly mentally retarded.

In its decision in Atkins, the U.S. Supreme Court said, “we leave to the State[s] the task of developing appropriate ways to enforce the constitutional restriction upon [their] execution of sentences.” It is now up to the justices to make clear that, by imposing an unattainable standard for proving “mental retardation,” Georgia is not enforcing this “constitutional restriction” at all.

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IMF Chief: ‘Unless We Take Action On Climate Change, Future Generations Will Be Roasted, Toasted, Fried And Grilled’

Another day, another icon of the global financial system becomes a climate hawk.

You may recall World Bank President Jim Yong Kim said of the climate crisis: “If there is no action soon, the future will become bleak.”

Turns out IMF managing director Christine Lagarde is also a climate hawk — and she’s the former conservative finance minister of France.

At the World Economic Forum in Davos, she said, “the real wild card in the pack” of economic pivot points is “Increasing vulnerability from resource scarcity and climate change, with the potential for major social and economic disruption.” She called climate change “the greatest economic challenge of the 21st century.”

Ms. Lagarde concluded with a call for a new kind of economic growth. “So we need growth, but we also need green growth that respects environmental sustainability. Good ecology is good economics. This is one reason why getting carbon pricing right and removing fossil fuel subsidies are so important.”

In response to a question from the audience, she said: “Unless we take action on climate change, future generations will be roasted, toasted, fried and grilled.”

Perhaps the IMF can release an analysis as blunt as the stunning World Bank Climate Report from November that concluded: “A 4°C [7°F] world can, and must, be avoided” to avert “devastating” impacts. Its 2012 release, “Fiscal Policy to Mitigate Climate Change: A Guide for Policymakers,” was kind of a yawner.

Then we need to see the IMF actually focus on environmentally sustainable growth, as opposed to say, our currently unsustainable trajectory, which will roast, toast, fry and grill countless future generations.

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Lindsay Graham: I Will Destroy America’s Solvency Unless The Social Security Retirement Age Is Raised

Although official Washington is currently fixated on the so-called “Fiscal Cliff,” the biggest threat to American prosperity is the debt ceiling, which must be raised in February to prevent economic catastrophe. If Republicans refuse to reach a deal on the so-called cliff, the Congressional Budget Office predicts that they will spark a new recession in 2013. But if Republicans block action on the debt ceiling, they will make that potential recession look quaint. Without raising the debt ceiling, the United States will be forced to embrace austerity so severe it will lead to “a bigger GDP drop than that experienced during the Great Recession of 2008.”

But in an interview on Fox News Sunday this morning, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) threatened to oppose this must-pass bill unless Social Security benefits are taken away from millions of future retirees:

I’m not going to raise the debt ceiling unless we get serious about keeping the country from becoming Greece, saving Social Security and Medicare [sic]. So here’s what i would like: meaningful entitlement reform — not to turn Social Security into private accounts, not to take a voucher approach to Medicare — but, adjust the age for Social Security, CPI changes and means testing and look beyond the ten-year window. I cannot in good conscience raise the debt ceiling without addressing the long term debt problems of this country and I will not.

Watch it:

This is extortion, plain and simple. It is the budgetary equivalent of threatening to break America’s legs unless Congress agrees to break the backs of millions poised on the edge of retirement. Graham’s position is that seniors should have to wait longer for their retirement benefits — even if they work in physically demanding jobs that literally tear the body apart by the time a worker reaches age 65 — and that those benefits should be reduced in the future.

And if Congress won’t agree to this deal, then Graham is prepared to thrust the nation into an economic calamity unheard of since the Great Depression.

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