Justice for some (very special people)

‘Meehan gets emotional over veterans treatment’

“[U.S. Rep. Patrick] Meehan became noticeably emotional when he discussed how veterans are suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and, as a result, sometimes struggle with addictions.”  

         Delaware County Daily Times, Sunday, Feb. 12, 2012

Deserving and undeserving poor meth heads

So here is our own U.S. Rep. (Probably for Life)* Patrick Meehan getting all weepy over veterans with drug problems and introducing federal legislation to create and fund special veterans “treatment” courts where military veterans will receive all of those things conservatives used to ridicule liberals for – love, understanding, drug treatment, mental health services, “diversion, probation or other supervised release” and a free pass on their criminal behavior – by virtue, and only by virtue, of their military service.   

Meanwhile, since we’ve had this whole “war on drugs” going on totally unsuccessfully for 50 years, every other drug addict/user will continue to be carted off to prison for long prison terms to provide fodder for our prison-industrial complex. 

And even though the medical profession has long defined alcoholism and drug addiction as a medical and not a criminal problem, those non-veteran convicts will get no treatment or rehabilitation, will be put back out on the streets with no education or chance to get a job, and will be barred from applying for welfare, food stamps or unemployment because they -- poor stupid sods -- are not veterans.

This is the government squirming out of our uteruses long enough to establish separate classes of criminals based on nothing more than the government’s determination of who is "deserving” (veterans) and who is “undeserving” (all you other welfare cheating, food stamp-abusing, unemployed, homeless, useless slugs crawling on the face of the Earth).  Ronald Reagan lives!

I’m not saying that veterans’ treatment courts are a bad idea.  They’re a great idea, but they should be available for everyone.  Study upon study over decades has shown that making treatment available to addicts immediately is a far better and cheaper means of cutting recidivism than throwing addicts in jail and tossing away the key. 

A veterans’ treatment court in Buffalo, N.Y., seems to be proving the point.  Since it began three years ago, it reportedly has a zero recidivism rate.

But we all know what happens in the real world, don’t we? Drug treatment programs never get funded, never get adequate funding and are the first government service that is cut. 

Addicts who make the big decision to get clean have to wait for months or years to get into a program, but which time they have fallen back off the wagon, or they get thrown in jail for non-violent crimes.

Separate but unequal

No one offers ordinary drug users mental health care, or help with housing or jobs.  Worse, there are bills going through state legislatures all over the country, including Pennsylvania, to force drug testing of welfare applicants and recipients (and I assume that includes unemployment and food stamps). 

So even if drug abusers can get a slight, tenuous grip on the social safety net, there’s a whole lot of Republicans ready to kick them off.  These are the same Republicans who are shedding crocodile tears over and setting up a separate justice system for veterans because, God knows, supporting anything for veterans looks great in an election year.

I’m all for helping veterans, but is there anyone besides me in the whole universe that sees these veterans’ treatment courts as illegal and unconstitutional?  The 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution says:

No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

But that's exactly what separate and unequal veterans' court seem to do: deprive non-veterans of their liberty and property (imprisonment, confiscation of homes and cars) while making veterans a separate class of offenders who will be treated very differently because, after all, they sacrificed for us. That's not due process or equal protection.

Special courts aren’t just for certain people

We have long had specialized courts – juvenile, domestic relations, family, civil, criminal, equity, immigration, small claims, landlord-tenant – for handling specific types of problems, but the difference between these courts and the veterans treatment courts is that these courts are open to all who fall into those categories.

There are not separate juvenile courts for 10 year olds as opposed to 11 year olds.  There are not immigration courts just for Mexican immigrants or just for Canadian immigrants.  Everyone has access and everyone is treated the same.  That is the essence of equal protection under the law.   

But special drug courts just for veterans, where they can get treatment and a helping hand instead of incarceration, is a very different animal.  It is the exact opposite of equal protection of the law.  It is creating a privileged class of criminals.  

By the way, will these veterans’ treatment courts cover Vietnam veterans, hundreds of thousands of whom have been homeless, drug-addled and mentally ill for decades without anyone giving a crap?   If the term “veteran” covers them, I hope they can prove after all these years that they too served their country, even though it is rather late to provide any help for them. 

PTSD is PTSD, no matter how you get it

Yes, soldiers come home with PTSD which may lead them to abuse alcohol and drugs.  But here’s a news flash for you: civilians also suffer from PTSD that may lead them to abuse alcohol and drugs.

If your father sexually abuses you the whole time you are growing up, if Dad beats Mom like a drum every week, if you grow up seeing your single mom doing drugs and engaging in prostitution to survive, if you see your friends shot down in the streets and the only thing you can do is build street corner shrines and plan your own funeral, you too might develop PTSD. 

And if you have no income, no job, no welfare, no unemployment, no prospects, you’ll turn to the only sources of income available to you, which is usually selling drugs or your body.   Or you can, of course, always join the military.

Where is the ACLU now that we need it?

You would think that the American Civil Liberties Union would be concerned about the14th Amendment.  A couple of state chapters have raised objections, but as this reference from the ABA Journal says, the Illinois ACLU is fine with a new Chicago veterans’ court:

In Cook County, vets charged with less serious felonies such as drug offenses are offered the chance to have their cases heard in the special court....  The vets don’t get special treatment under the law, but they get assistance with drug treatment, housing, health care and job training.

Wait, what?! That whole “assistance with drug treatment, housing, health care and job training” thing sounds like “special treatment under the law” to me.  I’m pretty sure that non-vets don’t get that kind of help in our nation’s court systems.  If they did, there would be no need to set up separate courts for veterans, because everyone would already be getting all the help Pat Meehan thinks only veterans deserve. 

*Just reminding readers that the abominable, egregious, outrageous, unconstitutional Republican-engineered redistricting of the Pennsylvania 7th U.S. Congressional District probably guarantees Meehan that seat as long as he wants it.  Good luck finding Woodchoppertown there, Pat.  

Meehan's town halls sap the soul

Abandon hope all ye who enter here.  Having sat through two of U.S. Rep. Pat Meehan’s town meetings yesterday – and all credit to him for even holding them, most congressmen didn't – I can predict right now that there will be no letup in the current gridlock in Congress until after next year’s election, if then.

Government will continue to be dysfunctional to the point that it is not even certain that communities hard-hit by Hurricane Irene will receive significant federal help to rebuild their battered infrastructure or that Congress will pass a routine transportation bill to repair and rebuild highways, airports and railroads nationwide – a bill overwhelmingly approved by every Congress since Republican President Dwight Eisenhower first launched the federal highway system in 1956. 

It is crystal clear to me that Meehan will continue to march lockstep with his Republican House brethren down the path to hell, leading this country into the new Great Depression, firmly believing all the while that his is the true path to salvation.

He traveled around the county yesterday with his slide show of Republican talking points: sense of uncertainty (for business), record debt, complicated, uncompetitive tax code (for business), if the government were a family…, yada, yada, yada.

At each point he mentioned a Gallup Poll that showed that 80 percent of those polled are frustrated with government, but he seems blissfully unaware that it is the relentless Republican/Tea Party assault on President Obama and the Democrats that has caused that frustration.

“I’m frustrated too,” he told about 50 people in Concord and roughly 250 in Springfield, but he never concedes that his lockstep voting with the Republican Party on every major issue contributes to that frustration.

“Where are your jobs bills?” voters asked.  They never got a single straight, specific answer.  Here are Meehan’s solutions instead:

1.      Get our fiscal house in order (cut government spending) and strengthen Social Security and Medicare  He never says how, but he did vote for the Ryan budget that would turn Medicare into “insurance support” payments, a proposal that the Congressional Budget Office says would cost seniors an addition $6,000 or more a year for health insurance. $6,000.  Think about that.

2.      Bring certainty to job creators – reform the tax code and cut corporate taxation (more on this in a minute) and cut bureaucratic red tape (that is, cut environmental and business regulations).

We got lip service, lots and lots of lip service and vague answers and “I don’t know where I stand on that issue, I’ll have to look into it.”  

Tax the wealthy? Never.  Taxing them their fair share would only bring in $75 billion a year, which he fails to note would be $750 billion over 10 years, or roughly the same amount as the taxpayer bailout of the banking industry and their ultra-rich, thieving executives, none of whom have seen a day in jail because, as Meehan observed, what they did was not illegal.

The best question asked at the Concord meeting:  “Given the Republican declaration from Day One to make sure President Obama is a one-term president, would you vote against improving the economy if it hurts Obama or would you vote to improve the economy even though that would make Obama look better?”

Meehan allowed as how that was a “loaded question” (It’s not considering on Day One, U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell declared that the Republicans’ top priority is to ensure that Obama is a one-term president).

Eventually Meehan said he “would like to work with Obama” to improve the economy.  It was as half-hearted, self-serving, vague “what I think you want to hear” response as you can imagine. 

The best question from the Springfield meeting: “How can you lead us out of trouble when you’ve lost the trust of the American public?”

Meehan noted that “That is an observation well-stated.”  He didn’t say anything else.  How could he?  Politicians of every stripe, including Obama, really have lost the trust of the American people.

Here are three words I never heard Meehan say at either meeting: “fairness” “Middle Class.”  Nor did he ever acknowledge that it is consumer demand that stimulates job creation, not tax policy, and you can’t have increased demand for goods and services when people are unemployed or unsure if they soon will be.

He is adamant that our tax code places a “punishing burden” on business, you know, the job creators who haven’t been creating jobs for the past 10 years.

Punishing burden? Read this report put out yesterday by the Institute for Policy Studies that found that in 2009, 25 of the biggest American corporations not only did not pay any federal taxes, many actually received millions in federal subsidies and  paid their CEOs very handsomely, so handsomely that CEO pay now is now 263 times the pay of America’s average worker.

How is a 35 percent corporate tax rate punitive when, as Meehan says, each corporation has an office full of lawyers whose sole jobs are to ensure that the company pays zero?  What is he doing about that?  Oh yeah, he’s going to simplify the tax code and LOWER the corporate tax rate.

I think Pat Meehan is a decent man, what we in other times would have called “a moderate Republican” and I think he wants to do the right thing by his constituents.   He’s a former federal prosecutor who does know something about the corporate thievery that has brought this nation to the brink – perhaps over the brink – of destruction.

But he’s a freshman congressman who feels he  must toe the leadership’s line and he needs those corporate/law firm/insurance/real estate/Republican re-election campaign committee donations to be re-elected.

How glorious it would be if Meehan voted in the interests of the voters each and every time, if we could see him doing that and if, as a result, we would sweep him back into office election after election without his having to constantly shill for contributions and dance for lobbyists.

But that’s not reality.  In reality, the game is fixed, the system is profoundly, perhaps irrevocably, broken, the people lose and Meehan or someone like him will continue to represent the powers that be while the rest of us do whatever we can to survive.

Abandon hope.

Meehan defends his Medicare vote, sort of

It was with the deepest interest that I read U.S. Rep. Pat Meehan’s letter to the Delaware County Daily Times today defending his vote for Paul Ryan’s budget plan, including its proposed changes to Medicare.  I was really hoping I would get some answers from that letter, but alas, no.

The letter points out that various fact-checking websites have found that various Democratic characterizations of Ryan’s Medicare proposal to be lies, false, misrepresentations, distorted and misleading.

He then ends the letter with, “Now you and your readers will have all the facts next time you hear these false charges about a GOP proposal to save Medicare, especially when they come from political partisans with no plan of their own.”

Unfortunately this is not the case.  Spending an entire letter just calling the other side liars does not explain just exactly what the facts are, what your stance is or what the Ryan Medicare plan would do.

Medicare, as we now know it (I qualified for Medicare this year), pays for 80 percent of our medical expenses.  We pay into Medicare through payroll taxes all our working lives, then we continue to pay into it after retirement, and we also either pa yout-of-pocket for the additional 20 percent that Medicare doesn't cover or we  buy Medigap insurance to pay for that 20 percent. 

In my case, that means I pay $115 a month into Medicare and $132 a month into Medigap.  I also pay an addition $32 a month for a prescription plan.

(Editor's note:  I did not put in the hyperlinks here and cannot see how to get them out.  I am NOT shilling for AARP or any other supplemental insurance plan.  My only links are to the CBO and Ezra Klein in case that isn't clear.)
Ryan’s plan would have Medicare, beginning in 2022, pay insurance companies a fixed annual payment of about $8,000 and then those seniors entering the system would shop for supplemental insurance from private companies to make up the difference, much as we do now with Medigap.  I assume we would also continue to buy Medigap and prescription plan insurance too.  No one has said.

Ryan’s plan also provides for higher “insurance support” (let’s not call them vouchers since everyone is sooo sensitive on that characterization) for people with greater healthcare needs, but that’s all kind of vague.

I submit that Ryan and the GOP really are proposing to “change Medicare as we know it” because no matter how you cut it, it will be different and it will cost seniors a heck of a lot more.   

In 2030, the Congressional Budget Office estimates, traditional Medicare insurance would only cost 60 percent as much as the private options Ryan is offering.  But under Ryan’s plan, seniors would pay two-thirds of the cost, while under traditional Medicare, they’d pay only 25 percent.   

So the plan is not so much to cut Medicare spending as to transfer a great deal more of it to seniors, many of whom are currently unemployed and underemployed and therefore not able to pay into Social Security and make the Medicare payroll payments they would otherwise be amassing. 

Read the CBO’s 29-page analysis of the Ryan budget plan here.  Pay particular attention to Pages 4, 5 and 8. The nonpartisan CBO estimates that in 2022 government spending for all people over 65  would be about $15,000 under traditional Medicare, but that Ryan’s proposal would cost the government only about $8,000 per senior. 

Granted that would be a huge savings for the government and a huge windfall for private insurers.

But who’s going to pay the difference?  Our future seniors (otherwise known as our children) will pay, probably both in high insurance premiums and greatly reduced services. 
There are many other ways of reducing Medicare spending without cutting benefits or forcing recipents to pay so much more, and the Democrats do have a plan for at least beginning that process.  They enacted it into law two years ago.  It’s called the Affordable Care Act.

Just a few of those ways include eliminating the estimated $60 billion a year in healthcare fraud that goes both to scam artists and to legitimate healthcare providers, prohibiting Medicare from paying for useless tests and medications, particularly at end of life, and encouraging recipients to adopt a “medical home,” such as Riddle or Crozer-Keystone, where all one’s medical treatment can be coordinated. (I am doing this on my own, gradually transferring to one system.)

Ezra Klein of the Washington Post, who knows more about tax policy than most of us, summarizes the entire Ryan Plan thus:  

“Ryan’s savings all come from cuts, and at least two-thirds of them come from programs serving the poor. The wealthy, meanwhile, would see their taxes lowered, and the Defense Department would escape unscathed.  It is not courageous to attack the weak while supporting your party’s most inane and damaging fiscal orthodoxies.  But the problem isn’t just that Ryan’s budget is morally questionable.  It also wouldn’t work.”

We have already heard Meehan insist that he did NOT vote to “change Medicare as know it,” or to destroy Medicare, that he only voted for the Ryan Plan as a “blueprint” for what the Republicans would like to do to "save" Medicare.  If the Republicans controlled both houses of Congress and the White House right now, that plan would be law, so “blueprint,” “law,” you decide.

I look forward to asking Congressman Meehan just what it is he does support in the way of changes to Medicare (and Medicaid, which pays for 40 percent of the nursing home care for the elderly) at one of his town meetings next Wednesday.  Concord 2 p.m., Springfield 7 p.m.

I trust he can get past the “Democrats are liars” talking point and really tell us where he stands.