U.S. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell made the following remarks on the Senate floor Tuesday regarding free speech in the health care debate:

“I rise to call my colleagues’ attention to a disturbing development in the health care debate.

“A colleague of ours has called for an investigation into a major health care company because this company informed its customers of its concerns about health care legislation that this colleague of ours introduced.

“As a result, the federal government has now told all companies that provide Medicare Advantage to seniors to stop communicating with their clients about the effects of that legislation — even telling them what they can and cannot post on their websites. This gag order, enforced through an agency of the federal government at the request of a Senator, is wrong.

“It started when a company based in my hometown of Louisville — Humana — had the temerity, in the eyes of some of our colleagues, to explain to its customers that if Medicare Advantage is cut, as the chairman’s mark requires, it may have to reduce benefits, which, of course, is a common sense conclusion.

“Mr. President, this is America: Citizens, either as individuals or grouped together in companies, have a fundamental right to talk about legislation they favor or oppose. That is the core of the First Amendment’s protections on speech. Unfortunately, this is part of a troubling trend of efforts to dismiss the concerns raised by the American people over the past few months.

“Over the summer, we saw American citizens who raised concerns about the health care proposals before Congress dismissed as ‘un-American’ by leaders in Congress. That’s bad enough, but using the full weight of the federal government’s enforcement powers to stifle free speech should trouble all Americans — and all of us — even more.

“We cannot allow government officials to target individuals or companies because they do not like what they have to say.

“This latest effort to squelch free speech raises several serious questions:

“Is this what we have come to as a country — that an individual or company can no longer factually advocate their position on an incredibly important public policy issue?

“Shouldn’t customers have a right to know the potential impact of a Congressional action?

“Is this what we believe as a Senate — that this body should debate a trillion-dollar health care bill that affects every American while using the powerful arm of government to shut down speech?

“Is this how citizens and companies can expect to be treated if health reform passes? That any health provider that disagrees with a powerful Senator will be subject to an investigation and a gag order?

“How is this any different than what the Washington Post and New York Times have done in lobbying for a reporter shield law? Would we stand by if the Judiciary Committee asked the FBI to investigate the media for taking positions on pending legislation we don’t agree with? Of course not.

“Humana is headquartered in my hometown of Louisville, and yes, I care deeply about its 8,000 employees in Kentucky. But this gag order now applies to all Medicare Advantage providers.

“I would remind my colleagues that I have spent my career defending the First Amendment rights of people to criticize their elected officials, including me. I would make the same argument if this were a company based in San Francisco or Helena or Chicago.

“The right to free speech is at the core of our democracy. Free citizens have a First Amendment right to petition their government for a redress of grievances. This gag order on companies like Humana and those in all our states, in my view, is a clear violation of that right. It’s wrong.

“Employers that warn their customers about the effects of legislation aren’t the ones who should be getting warnings here. Senators who threaten Americans’ First Amendment rights are.”

Memo to the Democratic leadership threatening to censure Rep. Joe Wilson if he doesn’t publicly apologize on the House floor for calling President Barack Obama a liar on that floor: You don’t have the moral authority to be demanding apologies.

Not only has their own decorum in that very chamber been abysmal at times, such as when they booed President George W. Bush during his 2005 State of the Union address; they do much worse damage every week to this nation and its institutions than Joe Wilson conceivably could have done with his temporary breach of decorum.

While Democratic leaders are wagging their fingers at the Republican Party’s alleged descent into incivility over Joe Wilson’s unplanned, indignant outburst, they have a very short memory about their own partywide monopoly on incivility, as they savaged President Bush throughout his presidency. I researched and wrote a 400-plus-page book documenting the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of these hypocritical scolds in 2006, in case you need a refresher course.

Unlike Rep. Wilson, these offending Democrats have never apologized for their outrages. Did Rep. John Murtha apologize for prejudging and slandering our battlefield Marines who were later vindicated? Did Sen. Harry Reid ever apologize for calling President Bush a liar? Al Gore? John Kerry? Has suspected tax evader Rep. Charles Rangel apologized for his conduct while devising new ways to confiscate even higher taxes from honest, hardworking Americans who actually pay their taxes?

Did Sen. Dick Durbin retract the substance of his remarks in comparing Gitmo to the gulag? Did House leader Nancy Pelosi repent for defaming the CIA?

While we’re at it, is anyone calling Obama and his colleagues on their opportunistic attacks on the Bush administration for not capturing Osama bin Laden, just as bin Laden has reportedly issued another taped lecture against the United States from some undisclosed cave somewhere?

On a related matter, Democrats, in order to bolster their credibility to attack President Bush on Iraq, pretended for years to be war hawks on Afghanistan. Iraq, they said, was an ill-conceived Bush-Cheney diversion from the war on terror. The real war, they said, was Afghanistan, where al-Qaida trained for its 9/11 attacks. But I could have sworn I just read this past week that Nancy Pelosi said, “I don’t think there’s a great deal of support for sending more troops to Afghanistan, in the country or in the Congress.” I guess Dems were just kidding, then, when they bludgeoned President Bush for soft-pedaling “the good war,” huh?

Then there’s the little matter of Social Security, the subject that gave rise to Democrats’ unceremoniously booing President Bush on the House floor. Though Democrats were so concerned about a looming Social Security crisis in 2000 that Bill Clinton and Al Gore demanded Social Security funds be placed in a “lockbox,” they caught partisan amnesia when President Bush tried to reform it five years later.

The Chicago Tribune reported Feb. 3, 2005, that Democrats “plan to stand in the cold and excoriate the president, accusing him of dismantling a 70-year-old promise to senior citizens.” The beloved Sen. Harry Reid went so far as to say: “Social Security is not in crisis. It’s a crisis the president’s created, period.” Do you suppose an apology will be forthcoming from Reid, though, now that government-revised estimates project the insolvency of Social Security to occur even sooner than expected?

How about the Democratic leaders who urged President Bush in January 2007 to reverse his “reckless” fiscal policies, a move that would include “difficult choices and shared sacrifices”? Where are these latter-day fiscal hawks now that President Obama is deliberately bleeding the national treasury and mortgaging our future earnings in pursuit of a fiscal recklessness so egregious that it represents a difference in kind, rather than degree, from President Bush’s budgetary infractions?

In the meantime, could we please not lose sight of the fact that Wilson’s claim was substantively true? President Obama has dissembled on many of his health care claims. Adding insult to injury, in that very speech before Congress, Obama was falsely accusing Republicans of lying — an accusatory art Democrats perfected during the Bush years.

Indeed, if Democrats were to issue public apologies every time accepted moral standards demanded it, they wouldn’t have time for governance, which would be a wonderful development. This latest witch hunt — against Rep. Wilson, who has already apologized to the White House — is strategically designed, along with their infernal playing of the race card against Obama’s critics, to divert attention from and marginalize the spontaneous grass-roots tidal wave of opposition to Obama’s socialist agenda.

So please, Democratic high officials, spare us the phony sanctimony in your transparent attempt to mask your own policy outrages, about which the public has been awakened and duly mobilized.

In 1950, Lionel Trilling could write, “In the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition.” In 1980, as the Reagan revolution was starting, Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan concluded, “Of a sudden, the GOP has become the party of ideas.”

Where now is the intellectual center of gravity — the thrill of innovation, the ideological momentum — in American politics? Not in the party of Obama.

This failure of imagination was on full display during Barack Obama’s address to Congress. In a moment that demanded new policy to cut an ideological knot, or at least new arguments to restart the public debate, Obama saw fit to provide neither. His health speech turned out to be an environmental speech, devoted mainly to recycling. On every important element of his health proposal, he chose to double down and attack the motives of opponents. (Obama was the other public official who talked of a “lie” that evening.) Concerns about controlling health costs, the indirect promotion of abortion and the effect of a new entitlement on future deficits were dismissed but not answered. On health care, Obama takes his progressivism pure and simplistic.

The emotional core of the speech was a closing request to win one for Ted Kennedy — an appeal that seemed designed to rally Democrats rather than unite Americans. And that clearly is now the goal. Eke out 60 Senate votes for passage, or perhaps 50 using the riding crop of “reconciliation.” Victory without concession (except, maybe, on the already doomed public option). Victory without consensus.

This is the most consistent disappointment of Obama’s young term. Given a historic opportunity to occupy the political center, to blur ideological lines, to reset the partisan debate through unexpected innovation, Obama has taken the most tired, most predictable agenda in American politics — the agenda of congressional liberalism — and made it his own. Elected on the promise to transcend old arguments of left and right, Obama has systematically reinforced them on domestic issues. A pork-laden stimulus. A highly centralized health reform. Eight months into Obama’s term, American politics is covered in the cobwebs of past controversies. Obama has supporters, but he has ceased trying for converts.

This should surprise no one. Obama did not rise on Bill Clinton’s political path — the path of a New Democrat, forced to win and govern in a red state. Obama was a conventional, congressional liberal in every way — except in his extraordinary abilities. His great talent was talent itself, not ideological innovation. And given the general Republican collapse of 2006 to 2008 — rooted in the initial unraveling of Iraq, the corruption of the Republican congressional majority and the financial meltdown — Obama did not need innovation to win. Only ability and the proper tone.

But Obama’s decisive political victory did not involve a decisive ideological shift in the country. Even near the height of Obama’s popularity, in April, 55 percent of Americans in a Gallup poll said that big government was the biggest threat to the economy vs. 32 percent who said big business. A center-right nation elected a conventionally liberal president. The current health debate is the result. Obama, once again, relies on his political virtuosity to prevail. But he lacks the ideological tools to win unexpected allies and poach support in the middle. His main argument remains: “I won.” That may be enough to muscle through a comprehensive health reform bill (though I doubt Obama has changed the challenging political dynamic in Congress). It is not enough to realign American politics or change its tone.

Some Republicans are likely to draw the wrong lesson from the past few months — that somehow their shrillness, incivility and conspiracy theories have been responsible for Obama’s fall to Earth, rather than Obama’s overreach. This is a political miscalculation equal to Obama’s own. With some exceptions among governors, the modern GOP can hardly be called intellectually ascendant. Some Republican forms of populism — pitting the heartland against the coasts and the “real” America against the elites — involve hostility to the very idea of ideas. But it will be wonks, not firebrands, who can exploit Obama’s main weakness — his lack of policy creativity.

Obama now leads the party of liberalism. The GOP bids to become the party of anger. America needs at least one of them to be the party of ideas.

by Lisa Benson

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Tough economic times are usually no problem for trial lawyers. Pain, suffering and liability abound even in a bad economy. Vioxx, defective products, bad hip replacement joints, video games that “cause” violence, perhaps even foods that “make” people fat — you name it.

Even so, the trial lawyer lobby is looking for a bailout of sorts. In exchange for the billion dollars that the legal profession has contributed to lawmakers since 1990 — the vast majority of it to Democrats — trial lawyers are gunning for a tax break that applies only to them, worth some $1.6 billion.

Their top lobbyist, Linda Lipsen of the American Association for Justice, remarked at a recent conference in San Francisco that the provision would have to be attached to another bill.

“You cannot have a stand-alone bill to help lawyers,” she explained, “so we have to tuck it into something.”

The bill is already in Congress, waiting to be “tucked into” something else. Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, the recipient of $309,000 from lawyers this year, introduced it in February before becoming a Democrat.

Specter’s bill, S 437, would allow trial lawyers to deduct immediately on their taxes the up-front expenses they incur when investing in contingency lawsuits — the kind of suits where they collect a fee only if they win a judgment or a settlement. Currently, the IRS treats the expenses as a loan to the client.
Specter’s bill has appeared in Congress before. But only now, with complete Democratic control of the federal government and a few friendly Republicans in the Senate, does it have a serious chance of passage.

This single provision would more than repay the legal industry for its roughly $762 million in political contributions to Democrats over the last two decades. That would, in turn, mean more money could be recycled through plaintiffs’ law firms and funneled back to Democrats.

An Examiner analysis of National Law Journal’s “2008 Plaintiff’s Hot List ” shows that in the first six months of 2009, employees of the top 15 trial firms contributed $636,305 to federal politicians and political action committees.

Only $4,875 of that went to Republicans, meaning that trial lawyers at the nation’s top firms are giving more than 99 percent Democratic this year. Similarly, AAJ’s PAC gave Democrats 96 percent of its $627,000 in contributions in the first half of this year.

Trial lawyers are concentrating on the Senate, with the top 15 firms giving $236,000 to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and $54,000 to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., a former trial lawyer who faces a potentially difficult re-election. Reid collected $978,000 from the legal industry as a whole between January and June.

Trial lawyers have suffered an image problem lately — worse than the usual one that prompts all the lawyer jokes. Their political standard-bearer, former Sen. John Edwards, admitted to cheating on his cancer-stricken wife, and is being investigated for his presidential campaign’s $100,000 payment to his mistress.

Last spring, four senior partners of Milberg Weiss, formerly New York’s pre-eminent class action securities firm, were fined and imprisoned for bribing plaintiffs in cases that had netted them $250 million in fees. (The firm since reorganized, and its remaining partners and employees have made $36,537 in political contributions this year, all to Democrats.)

And Dickie Scruggs of Mississippi, a master trial lawyer and architect of the billion-dollar tobacco settlement in 1998, received a seven-year prison sentence earlier this year for bribing a judge.

Trial lawyers make their living as populists, inciting public anger in juries against faceless, greedy corporations. But what happens to their populist image when they become yet another outstretched hand, begging Uncle Sam for yet another bailout?

by Nate Beeler

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