I get many requests for donations in my email daily. Some come from the Committee to protect Medicare.
This was written by Dr. Rob Davidson, executive director of the Committee:
For the past three days, I’ve watched Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation hearings in the Senate. As a doctor, it’s beyond bizarre to see a potential Supreme Court Justice say she’ll make decisions about health care based on Originalism — what she thinks people in the 1700s would have intended.
How different was medicine back then?
The first vaccine wasn’t developed until 1799 (smallpox). Does Judge Barrett support Medicaid covering the routine immunization of kids against deadly diseases? Would she oppose Donald Trump providing a coronavirus vaccine to us, even though the founders would be confused?
1846 saw the first demonstration of anesthesia in the world. Should Medicare pay for anesthesia for hip replacements or heart bypasses, even though the constitution doesn’t mention anesthesia?
To Judge Barrett, would my evaluations of Medicare patients with chest pain be unconstitutional since EKG’s and X-rays weren’t used until 1895?
This list goes on and on. Nearly every aspect of modern medicine was non-existent in the late 18th century. An “originalist” approach to the government funding of any type of health care today might deem all of them unconstitutional.
This is personal for me. Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation is all but certain to doom the Affordable Care Act and rip health care from over 20 million Americans, including over 8,000 people in my poor, red, rural Michigan county of 48,000. Is the ACA just the first step? Is Medicare next on the chopping block?
If Amy Coney Barrett is confirmed, we need to be able to push twice as hard to reach voters in these final weeks to convey just how high the stakes are for health care. Can you chip in $5, $10, or more today to help us reach voters in swing states and save Medicare in these final 19 days? Click here to chip in now.If you’ve saved your payment information with ActBlue Express, your donation will process automatically:
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Thank you so much for your support,
Dr. Rob Davidson
Executive Director of Committee to Protect Medicare
Of course the originalists and strict constructionists (libertarian hacks) think that Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and the FDIC are unconstitutional.
Will We Choose the Right Side of History?
In Amy Coney Barrett, Republicans are once again backing a Supreme Court nominee who could take us backward.
By Nicholas Kristof
Opinion Columnist
…It is true, as some conservatives argue, that this path toward social progress would ideally have been blazed by legislators, not judges. But it is difficult for people who are denied voting rights to protect their voting rights, and judicial passivism in these cases would have buttressed discrimination, racism, sexism and bigotry.
That brings us to another historical area where conservatives, Barrett included, have also been on the wrong side of history — access to health care.
Over the last hundred years, advanced countries have, one by one, adopted universal health care systems, with one notable exception: the United States. That’s one reason next month’s election is such a milestone, for one political party in America is trying to join the rest of the civilized world and provide universal health care, and the other is doing its best to take away what we have.
The G.O.P. is succeeding. Census data show that even before the Covid-19 pandemic the number of uninsured Americans had risen by 2.3 million under Trump — and another 2.9 million have lost insurance since the pandemic hit. Most troubling of all, about one million children have lost insurance under Trump over all, according to a new Georgetown study…
If Trump wins, we probably won’t even have a chance at universal health care or Medicare for all for the next 50 years! It’s an ugly abject obscenity that we do not have universal health care in 2020. We should have had it at least 40 or 50 years ago. The GOP is hell bent on killing off the ACA which was not universal health care but better than what we had. But wait, there’s more..the GOP is also looking to weaken, gut, destroy and eliminate Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.
Viruses for Trump
The viruses are waiting
In wings, with baited breath
If Trump should win
They’ll all come in
And love us all to death
If conservatives move to eliminate all these programs through the courts, and those who support these programs can’t figure out how to write and pass court proof legislative solutions, then expanding the court may be essential. The Republicans have been packing the courts for the last few decades. Trump falsely claims that Obama left 170+(?) judge seats unfilled when the truth is the Republicans refused to vote on his choices. I am beginning to think that we would be restoring the balance if courts are expanded.
I have a better idea. Build a one-way time machine and send all of the originalists back to 1775, so they also get a chance to fight in the American Revolutionary War, too, with muskets to prove how patriotic they are. Send Trump back, too.
Surgeons also did not sanitize their surgical tools between operations. Death after surgeries was usually due to infections.
“During the American Revolution (1775–1783), the Continental Congress authorized one surgeon to serve in each regiment. Few of the regimental surgeons, mostly trained through the apprenticeship system as there were only two medical schools in the United States (King’s College [now Columbia University] in New York, NY, and the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, PA), had any experience treating trauma. The organization was minimal, and regimental surgeons tended to work for their unit instead of seeing themselves as part of the Hospital Department, which was rendered ineffective by bureaucratic infighting [116].” …
During the American Revolutionary War, surgeons from the British and American sides emphasized conservative care. John Hunter (1728–1793), surgeon general of the British army, directed physicians to resist aggressive débridement in smaller wounds. Wine was applied topically to minor burns, and hog lard to full-thickness burns [96]. John Jones (1729–1791), a veteran of the French and Indian Wars (1754–1763) and Professor of Surgery in King’s College, New York, advised surgeons to delay primary wound closure and apply: …
Bullets were removed only if within easy reach of the surgeon. If a wound had to be closed, a piece of onion was placed in the cavity before closure, and the wound reopened in 1 to 2 days. As in the past, Colonial physicians saw the development of pus a few days after injury as a sign of proper wound digestion [96]. …
In the 18th century, infection control was not considered an issue, because physicians assumed disease was caused by an imbalance of humors rather than microbes. However, surgeon Charles Gillman, after accidentally spilling rum on the badly infected hand of a soldier wounded in the Battle of Harlem (1776), noted the infection resolved rapidly, an observation consistent with Hippocrates’ recommendation to use wine to irrigate a wound [116]. Yet, the practice was never adopted by the Continental surgeons.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2706344/
Good point, Lloyd. Originalist medicine needs to be a thing. Humor me a bit here.
Justice Barrett would surely approve leeches and bleeding the patient to expel bad humours.
Originalist Medicine
In balance of the humors
The bile will always win
If we should get a tumor
It means that we have sinned
On the other hand, keep them here, and force gun owners to come in and exchange their AK47s for muskets
lmao yes!
Medical procedures and practices weren’t much better during the Civil War, which was a major contributing factor to the huge death and casualty toll.
Origionalism offers no insights into modern medical care. At the time the Constitution was written medical care included the application of leeches and bleeding “to let the fever out.” Origionalism is legal regression.
Origionalism implies inflexibility. Coney Barrett is centuries behind the times in applying law to current issues, and we’re behind the eight ball.
retired teacher; My grandfather, when I was 7 or 8 years old, wanted me to drink some whiskey to get rid of a cold.
He had a pair of wooden teeth which apparently didn’t fit very well. He ate with his gums.
I heard my parents say that if he had tooth problems, he would pull out the affected tooth with a pair of pliers. All of his teeth were gone.
Times were very rough in the past.
Wonder how whiskey would work on covid
With folks like Barrett, Originalism goes much further back than the Constitution: to the Old Testament.
“Wonder how whiskey would work on covid”
I think it might depend on how it was applied, intraveneously or by ingestion. I think ingestion might have a more salubrious effect.
cx: intravenously
I only take my whiskey intravenously, which makes it hard to have it on the rocks.
Though not impossible. I have found a blender helpful in that regard.
When I salad in college, I knew some people who actually “snorted” Jack Daniels.
Probably would kill the coronavirus — along with a lot of brain cells.
But I think they were already brain dead. So it probably didn’t matter.
Yeah, it sounds like they were already brain dead. Ah! Those were the days…
In what way was Citizens United an originalist decision? The interpretation of a corporation as falling under the first amendment is clearly as activist as any suggesting of the 14th amendment suggesting a right to privacy. The claim of originalism is a farce. It is a farce that has produced a PR coup d’etat which seems accepted. I say nonsense.
Barrett says that legislation should guide the law, and I agree. Legislators are spinelessly allowing the exploitation of powerless Americans by not enshrining a right of medical privacy in an amendment. They are shameless in their promulgation of a educational system that runs on reverse Robin Hood funding. But will Barrett uphold laws that are passed to right the wrongs that exist? If Citizens United is any indication, she will twist herself up into a pretzel (religious reference here) in order to declare anything she does not like to be unconstitutional. As the increasingly right wng judges have continued to do.
Education is important, guitar is importanter.
What did the founders think of giving women political rights? Does she not see the irony? Amy Covid Barrett will take America backwards.
In the Constitution slaves were counted as 3/5 of a person, and women had no right to vote. Original ideas are not always good. They have to be viewed within the context of the era.
Originalists have no problem with issues that are changed by amendment. Unfortunately, the founders made the process exceedingly difficult. Of course, it makes us much less likely to make stupid decisions, but it also delays real progress.
Amen to this. “Originalism,” its bastard spawn “constitutionalism,” and libertarianism are truly the most immature political ideologies. Grounded in idealistic fantasies that are as far from real life and experience as possible.
I have long noticed that Adam Smith, the father of economics, sounds just as utopian in his writing as does Fourier or any of the other political/economic authors of that day. Even the so-called utilitarian philosophers like Bentham and Mill sound like dreamers.
Sometimes I think philosophers who live by the generalization die by it as well.
Isaiah Berlin made similar comments in many of his essays. I think that’s why he was so taken with Vico, whose ideas were grounded in human experience and was arguably the originator of the idea of culture. If only those who live by ideology would also die by it as well!
And Alexander Herzen, whose ideas inspired one of my favorite Isaiah Berlin quotes:
“Why does a singer sing? Merely in order that, when he has stopped singing, his song might be remembered, so that the pleasure that his song has given may awaken a longing for that which cannot be recovered? No. This is a false and purblind and shallow view of life. The purpose of the singer is to sing. And the purpose of life is to live it.”
Originalism is ridiculous. If living in 2020, where would Enlightenment philosophers be on the issues? They willfully ignore the preamble to the Constitution which describes exactly the reasons for creating it in the first place. Does “promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of ….” mean they were socialists or that act together as a community is part of the Constitution. This includes the Constitution as malleable.
>
The originalists/texturalists have always been hypocrites. They use the Constitution to repeal democratically-approved laws they don’t like, citing something from the text. And then they use the Constitution to approve repressive state laws they do like, citing something from the text. And then when the text they cite would do things like allow states to do reprehensible things that they don’t want to admit because they know how racist and fascist their answers would make them look to the public, they evade with unresponsive comments like: “since there are no challenges to that and very unlikely to be, it’s not a problem”. Knowing that their right wing legal network – as Sheldon Whitehouse explained, can bring a challenge to any law they don’t like.
I also thought that Judge Barrett’s use of precedent was arbitrary and capricious, which is typical. The originalists’ argument seems to be that precedent should only be cited as a super precedent if it aligns with their desires, or if not citing it as a super precedent would reveal their true desires to make the Constitution into a document that requires that America become the Christian right nation they want.
Some use the terms “textualist” and “originalist.” I prefer a more general term that encompasses both: fundamentalist fanaticism.
News flash to the Scalia disciples: we figured out that “people” doesn’t refer solely to straight, white, propertied men.
This should be a clue that the Constitution must be a living, organic document.
Woodrow Wilson summed up the differences between the parties when he headed Princeton. Democrats represent people, Republicans represent property.
And one question I wish someone would have posed to Coney Dog: You claim to be an originalist. Do you think the framers of the Constitution were originalists?
And still, Wilson was a willing accomplice to the rising white supremacy in the nation at the time. It was not until FDR (or was it Elanor?) that the democratic party became the party of growing equality.
Oh, Greg, what a beautiful, beautiful question!!!!!!!! My hat is off to you!
I read A. Scott Berg’s magnificent biography of Wilson this summer (HIGHLY recommended!). It seems to me that many of the criticisms of him on the question of equality are grounded “in the false assurance of perfect hindsight.” (A phrase I read today.) He was by no means perfect, but he was a man of his times. Berg does not shy away, however, from the issues at all. It’s complicated. Too complicated to call him “a willing accomplice.”
I would say Democrats represent people. Republican represent money/greed.
Gina Raimondo would be an exception to that generalization. There are others.
The Judge has seven children. It is relevant to know if her originalism means that she has not authorized any new fangled medical care for any of her children or if her husband has had such care.
Did she deliver the children as was typical during the time the Constitution was written?
Has she ever had dental work in a new fangled modern office? Is she a closet Christian Scientist who rejects medical care?
You can bet that she will strike down any federal funding for birth control.
Original intent
Original intent
Of Constitution birth
The men were Heaven sent
And black was simply serf
I’m not very familiar with this case, but from the summaries I’ve read, the main arguments seem really terrible. But I suppose one never knows. I’m going to take an optimistic view and hope SCOTUS upholds the ACA.
Justice K could be a key vote.
The Iowa, Republican Secretary of State recently gave awards to 18 high schools in the state for their efforts to register the schools’ 18- year- olds to vote. Seven of the 18 are as follows, Notre Dame, Newman and St. Mary’s Catholic schools. Pella and Isaac Newton Christian Schools, Valley Lutheran and, a former Catholic school, now private, Rivermont Collegiate.
In an interview about the award, posted at the site of one of the top most-read Iowa newspapers, two white, male students from Notre Dame High School forecasted a win for Trump.
As much as I think that is great for high schools to register their students to vote, those high schools must red shirt a whole lot of kids — or flunk a whole lot of kids — if there are many students who have already turned 18 by November 3 of their senior year. In NYC public schools, only students who have transferred after kindergarten or had to repeat a year would already be 18. I know other places have earlier cut offs, and apparently red-shirting is popular in private schools, so maybe those schools’ seniors are well over the age that most high school seniors are.
Future Republican voters.
CON-ey Barrett said in the third day of hearing that she didn’t have “firm views about climate change.”
Greta Thunberg pointed out in a tweet that this is not the sort of thing that one has a “view” on (e.g., an opinion), that it doesn’t make sense to say that one has a “view” on gravity or other scientific facts.
CON-ey is being touted for her intelligence. Hmmmmm.
CONY-ey is being touted for her Christian faith. Isn’t lying a sin?
Bob Shepherd: Having thoughts on climate change would make Barrett go against the work that her father did. I’m sure that the family made a lot of money from its connection to fossil fuels. Would she have the ethics to recuse herself on corporate pollutions put out by fossil fuels once she hits the highest court in the land? I believe that if she was moral, she would have declined the nomination until after the election. She seeks fame.
“She has not recused herself from matters involving the A.P.I.” Not good.
NYT:
Judge Barrett’s family has strong ties to the fossil fuel industry.
Her father, Michael E. Coney, worked as a prominent attorney at Shell Oil in New Orleans and Houston for 29 years, from 1978 to 2007, focusing on deep sea exploration and drilling in the Outer Continental Shelf. As part of his work, he represented the oil and gas giant before the federal government, frequently dealing with the Department of Interior on royalties, regulations and compliance issues.
Mr. Coney was also an active member of the powerful oil and gas trade organization, the American Petroleum Institute, twice serving as chairman of its Subcommittee on Exploration and Production Law. On top of being the industry’s main lobby group, A.P.I. has played a critical role in casting doubt on climate science and opposing policies to address climate change.
Judge Barrett has previously recused herself from cases involving four Shell entities related to her father’s work. She has not recused herself from matters involving the A.P.I.
Religion- the substitute and replacement for conscience.
Jefferson warned the nation.
Yes, and she claims she does not have any firm views on climate change.
Just as I am sure her father doesn’t have any law firm views on it.
Ha ha ha ha.
You say Con-ey, I say Crony
Con-ey, Crony
Tomato, tomahto
Let’s call the whole thing off
Oh, SomeDAM!!!! You’ve outdone yourself!!!! This is PERFECT!!!
Here are a few quotes from the Bible about ignorance. If she has no opinion about climate change then it is out of ignorance. Having and opinion and not sharing it is different than not having an opinion.
https://www.openbible.info/topics/ignorance