So as previously noted, Rep. Joe Wilson, R-S.C., last night got himself into trouble for calling the President a liar. Now, there’s nothing wrong with calling the President a liar; indeed, that’s a time-honored American tradition. But you’re not supposed to do so by shouting at him while he’s speaking to a joint session of Congress, especially if you’re a member of the House of Representatives. That will get you in enormous trouble.
That said, Right Blogistan is defending Wilson today, saying that was totally right to heckle Barack Obama, because the bill does totally take the money of honest white Americans and give it to dastardly illegal immigrants from Mexico. So who’s right? Well, as everyone knows, the media doesn’t deal in “right” or “wrong,” just “he-said-she-said.” So let’s take a look at the arguments side-by-side:
| Democrats | Republicans | |
| Does the health care plan benefit undocumented aliens? | No | Yes |
| How can you be sure? | Because it’s right there in the bill. H.R. 3200, Sec. 246, “No Federal Payment for Undocumented Aliens.” The relevant text: “Nothing in this subtitle shall allow Federal payments for affordability credits on behalf of individuals who are not lawfully present in the United States.”
So, you know, the bill bans payments for undocumented aliens. |
Okay, maybe the bill “bans federal payments to undocumented aliens.” But that doesn’t mean it bans payments for illegal immigrants. Because, you know, the bill doesn’t require people to show their long-form birth certificates when they show up at the doctor, and how can anyone know that Jose Gonzales isreally an American citizen? Hmmmm?
Also, there’s no new government agency created to monitor immigration, because none exists right now. Oh, and what if someone pretended to be a U.S. Citizen and got around the law and got funding, even though they weren’t supposed to? That would pretty much mean that instead of breaking the law, the…uh…law would give them candy! Yeah. I mean, everyone knows that if you can break a law, it’s really the fault of the government for passing that law in the first place. Finally, there’s nothing in the law that specifically prohibits non-citizens from buying coverage without any support whatsoever from the government, and that’s outrageous, because what Americans are most concerned about is that undocumented aliens aren’t allowed to spend any money on anything while in this country. |
| And your response to your opposition’s point? | They’re either lying, or stupid, or possibly both. | Barack Obama is a socialist. |
So that’s your summary! Were I a journalist, I’d be forced to point out that reasonable minds disagree, and some say that the Obama plan would force you to kill your grandma so that an undocumented alien can get Viagra. Being a dirty liberal blogger, though, I’ll simply say that the right’s argument is painfully specious, even by the right’s recent standards.
wilson’s probably right. the ban on illegal immigrants is a ruse. there’s no verification mechanism and dems have rejected amendments to require one and i doubt many repubs even care since letting govt supply your cheap labor with health insurance isn’t exactly bad for big biz, especially big-agro, which last i checked, still gets subsidies. there’s long been a stealth pro-illegal bipartisan consensus in congress along with business and the Mexican oligarchy hellbent on avoiding free-market reforms that empower those down the social ladder.
thats probably why they’re making joe wilson apologize. the public, including huge chunks of the immigrant community, is opposed to illegal immigration commonsensical grounds (hey, its illegal!) so congress has to pretend be against it while they casually look the other way.
anyway, this joe wilson guys been kinda unhinged ever since Cheney outed his wife.
well, we do know that illegal immigrants routinely use the social security numbers of citizens/legal aliens, at least in the work context.
Generally speaking, the cost of such deception may not be so high: although they are using those fake SS #s to get jobs to which they are not entitled, they are also, sometimes, paying taxes which they don’t have to pay. And of course there’s the economic effect of their work, whatever that is.
If the practice continues w/r/t health care, the cost could be considerably higher. Health care is relatively expensive. [Shrug] [this P edited] I haven’t the foggiest idea how difficult or easy it would be to get covered under the program, using a false (or purchased, or stolen) SS #. Nor do I know what the costs would be, if so. Nor do I know how it might incetivize illegal immigration. But without knowing, how can I know whether or not to be concerned?
And BTW, when you say
you are making the wrong point. A better summary of the republican stance would be this: If a law is routinely broken, it makes no sense to base predictions for a new program on a presumed adherence to that law.
If you want to claim that simply stating “no illegal aliens shall receive services” will solve the problem, you have to explain why that would work in this case. Because we know that stating “no illegal aliens will enter the country illegally” or stating “no illegal aliens shall work without a permit” don’t really seem to have any effect at all.
Frankly, if you (global, not personal) claim that the language is sufficient, and you’re fine with it, then as a result of your claim you are functionally agreeing that none of those services should be available to illegal immigrants. In that case, why not simply agree to better intake mechanisms, or more punitive terms, or different language? After all, if you don’t want illegal immigrants covered, you don’t have much of a case for complaining about harsher or more punitive language.
People who actually believe that the language will work and who want it to work shouldn’t have any real problem with changing it to make it work “better.” People who claim that it will work just fine and that they want it to work, but who don’t want to make it any different, seem to be less truthful.
well, we do know that illegal immigrants routinely use the social security numbers of citizens/legal aliens, at least in the work context.
Generally speaking, the cost of such deception may not be so high: although they are using those fake SS #s to get jobs to which they are not entitled, they are also, sometimes, paying taxes which they don’t have to pay. And of course there’s the economic effect of their work, whatever that is.
If the practice continues w/r/t health care, the cost could be considerably higher. Health care is relatively expensive. [Shrug] I haven’t the foggiest idea how difficult or easy it would be to get covered under the program, using a false (or purchased, or stolen) SS #. but it’s certainly a reasonable concern.
So why don’t we have millions of illegal immigrants collecting Social Security and Medicare?
Why shouldn’t illegal immigrants be covered? If everyone is entitled to health care, if it’s a “right”, then how monstrous is it to predicate that right on someone’s legal status?
Why does Barack Obama hate immigrants so much that he makes denying their care a fundamental part of his argument on national TV?
Robert,
There’s a right to vote, yet it’s constrained to citizens (over 18 and, in some states, who don’t have a felony record). Does that mean it’s not really a right, because it’s only for citizens?
Manju, when you say:
are you making a joke or do you really not know that Joseph C Wilson, former U.S. Ambassador and wife of “outed” CIA agent Valerie Plame, is not the same person as U.S. Congressman Addison Graves “Joe” Wilson, perpetrator of this recent outburst?
It was brilliant. At the very moment Obama was unequivocally saying undocumented aliens would not be covered (and how often does a
Chicagopol say anything unequivocally?) Wilson set the ball rolling on giving the public the impression that there’s some question on this point.I don’t know. I suspect it is because those are programs in which a delay is expected between application and payment. That delay gives ample time and opportunity for the government to verify your various data and eligibility for the program. there is certainly fraud in both those programs of course, but AFAIK the participation of illegal immigrants is very small to almost nonexistent.
Like I said, this may be possible for health care. Or it may not. We COULD surely set up a system which would preclude illegal immigrants from getting benefits; it wouldn’t be impossible to do. And obviously we could also (intentionally or not) set up a system which was comparatively easy to defraud.
Consciously or unconsciously, I simply wouldn’t trust anyone to really be careful about a system unless they had a vested interest in avoiding system errors. It makes perfect sense. It’s the same reason that you wouldn’t put the Republicans in charge of making sure that everyone who was eligible for free health insurance was signed up for insurance: Given that the Republicans don’t want insurance at all, they aren’t going to break their back to expand the system.
The Democratic party is comparatively pro-illegal-immigrant, so I don’t trust them much when it comes to enforcing immigrant issues. I don’t trust the republicans to be fair either, but the dems seem to be claiming credibility that they don’t deserve. Neither party is especially trustworthy.
Given the choice, I’d rather have the republicans write more of the language (making it more difficult for illegal immigrants to get access) and the democrats do the enforcement (making it more difficult for LEGAL immigrants, POC, and poor people to get mysteriously denied services as they do in, say, voting.)
Hmm, PG, it’s almost as though many people were throwing the word “right” around without any coherent understanding of the concept… :)
In a simplified nutshell it’s because the IRS is happy to get multiple tax payments from a single SSN (even if those multiple payments are impossible to have come from a single person) but they are not happy to send out multiple checks to multiple addresses for a single SSN. Applying for SS benefits with your stolen SSN is the surest way to get busted.
I suspect it is because those are programs in which a delay is expected between application and payment. That delay gives ample time and opportunity for the government to verify your various data and eligibility for the program.
How do you think this will be different from eligibility for affordability credits? In fact, Medicare allows you to obtain benefits without looking into your income, whereas these credits require verification of your income, which probably will be through that document oh-so-popularly filed by illegal immigrants, the federal income tax form.
Robert,
Your claim ‘it’s almost as though many people were throwing the word “right” around without any coherent understanding of the concept’ implies that you know what the concept of a right entails, yet you still haven’t explained whether there actually is a right to vote even though it’s held only by citizens.
Perhaps the reason you think others lack coherent understanding is that you seem to believe there is only a single concept that could be called a “right,” when in fact political theory has a dozen different kinds of rights: natural rights, human rights, constitutional rights, statutory rights, etc.
PG,
Are you confusing me with Robert? He seems to be saying that he thinks we will give benefits to IIs.
That is not my position. I don’t trust the promises of most politicians, on either side. It seems to me that “draft the program in such a way as to functionally allow II participation” is certainly within the realm of possibility.
I don’t think it is the most likely possibility. But I don’t think it should be discounted as implausible, given the existing problems we have with immigration enforcement across a wide variety of areas. And since it is something that I would strongly oppose, I discuss it in the hopes that the opposition will prevent it from happening.
So why don’t we have millions of illegal immigrants collecting Social Security and Medicare?
How do you know they aren’t?
If everyone is entitled to health care, if it’s a “right”, then how monstrous is it to predicate that right on someone’s legal status?
Health care is already a right in the U.S. Just like printing presses, guns and church buildings, you can buy as much of it as you like and no one has a legal facility to stop you because you are white/black/gay/straight/female/male/Martian.
Having a right to health care and being entitled to health care are two different things.
Jeff, your summary of the opposition position to the wording of HR3200 in this instance is quite slanted and absurd.
First, I say “opposition” rather than “conservative” because I happen to know people who self-describe as “liberal” who nonetheless do not favor providing any such services to illegal aliens. Opposing provision of publicly-funded services to illegal aliens does not automatically define someone as “conservative”.
Second; the opposition position can be summarized quite neatly and simply as “it’s meaningless to forbid anything in the law if there is no mechanism for enforcing it.” The history of the last major revision of immigration law in 1986 has been that the provisions favoring amnesty for illegal aliens in the country at that time were followed, but the provisions tightening up enforcement to deal with further illegal border crossing and presence in this country were de-emphasized. In fact, it wasn’t until the aftermath of 9/11/01 that people started taking it seriously. Given the history of Democratic party positions and actions at the national level and the actual actions of Democratic administrations at the state and local levels (e.g., declaring various municipalities as “sanctuary cities”, refusing to cooperate with the ICE and it’s predecessors, forbidding local social service agencies from asking people seeking services about their immigration or citizenship status, etc.) it’s quite reasonable to require a bill being pushed by a Democratic administration to include language stating how the ICE and other agencies will help ensure that the provision banning provision of this service to illegal aliens will actually have teeth.
Those who apply for Medicaid/Medicare Social Security have to provide proof of their citizenship. Why do the Republicans assume those who are under any for of state-supported plan will not have to in the future?
Let’s believe them for a minute. Would they rather have illegal immigrants get free treatment on the taxpayers’ dime at the Emergency Room? What solution do they propose?
Joe Wilson is a shill of the healthcare lobby.
http://rawstory.com/08/news/2009/09/10/obama-speech-disrupter-a-health-industry-darling/
Moreover, Congresscritters got a copy of the President’s speech before it was actually delivered. This was ot a spontaneous outburst. It was another instance of astroturfing, as they have done at the townhalls.
Sailorman,
I don’t think I’m confusing you with Robert. Robert is advancing the argument that if there is a right to health care, it must be a right held by everyone, because any right must be a universal right and there’s no such thing as a right specific to citizens.
It seems to me that “draft the program in such a way as to functionally allow II participation” is certainly within the realm of possibility.
The realm of possibility also includes the Large Hadron Collider’s creating a black hole that will suck up the Earth. “Realm of possibility” is not a very good way to decide what to worry about.
RonF,
How do you know they aren’t?
I find it unlikely that Republicans would not be talking about illegal immigrants’ collecting Medicare and SS benefits if it were actually occurring. It would be a brilliant way to motivate the reliably-voting elderly population to get really upset about illegal immigration and push for more raids, penalties, punitive border enforcement, etc.
Health care is already a right in the U.S. Just like printing presses, guns and church buildings, you can buy as much of it as you like and no one has a legal facility to stop you because you are white/black/gay/straight/female/male/Martian.
RonF, I don’t think it makes sense when speaking of political theory/philosophy to claim that one has a right to anything in particular simply because one won’t be obstructed on the basis of an unchangeable status from obtaining it. In political philosophy, a right to purchase X =/= a right to X. When New York State is said to provide a constitutional right to a basic education, it is not a right to buy such education, but a right to obtain it through the state.
“it’s meaningless to forbid anything in the law if there is no mechanism for enforcing it.”
The bill allows for the Secretary of HHS to determine eligibility. The Secretary will come up with the mechanism she considers best suited to accomplish the task without creating an excessively onerous burden on applicants. It’s the same balancing act that’s left to the states when it comes to voting in state and federal elections. I realize Republicans are convinced that scary hordes of illegal immigrants are voting in every presidential election and skewing the results (I mean, Obama couldn’t *really* have been elected by a majority of U.S. citizens), but there isn’t evidence for that. So why do you persist in claiming that if the legislation itself doesn’t provide an enforcement mechanism, therefore none will ever exist at all?
Incidentally, it’s pretty standard for Congressional legislation to leave the procedure up to the regulatory state, usually the agency with primary responsibility for the subject matter of the law. In this case, it’s the Secretary of Health and Human Services because it’s a health care bill. For something like, say, the PATRIOT Act, a great deal of procedure was left to the Attorney General, e.g. “The Attorney General shall establish procedures for the disclosure of information pursuant to section 2517(6) and Rule 6(e)(3)(C)(i)(V) of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure that identifies a United States person, as defined in section 101 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (50 U.S.C. 1801)).”
One could on the one hand scream OH NOES! about the very fact of the AG’s being left to figure out precisely how something ought to be accomplished, or one could wait and see how the AG does it before commencing the howling. As I recall, Democrats mostly went for the latter.
So lots of countries with national healthcare (which isn’t even what’s on the table here) have undocumented immigrants. Are those immigrants getting lots of free care? If they are, what is the impact on those countries’ healthcare infrastructure?
Anyone would think that this crazy healthcare provision thing was something that no one in the world ever had tried so we had no idea how it could possibly work, when it’s actually something that’s been tested over and over and over again in various permutations around the world.
In any case, don’t a lot of undocumented folks use the ER for expensive emergency care now? It might even be cheaper to provide basic treatment to undocumented immigrants–unless what the right is proposing is that someone who has no papers who gets sick in this country should just be left to die.
Further to 18: If that is what the right is proposing, then let them say it directly, instead of pretending that somehow denying care to undocumented immigrants will make a bunch of economically desperate people pack up and go home. We may as well have all cards on the table.
Notwithstanding the rest of your comment, they should.
RonF, I don’t think it makes sense when speaking of political theory/philosophy to claim that one has a right to anything in particular simply because one won’t be obstructed on the basis of an unchangeable status from obtaining it.
I think it makes perfect sense in this context. We are talking about American law, which is based on the Constitution. Read the Bill of Rights (the body of the original part of the Constitution deals mostly with governmental roles, not individual rights). Things that are explictly described using the word “right” s in the Constitution are described in one of two ways: either something that the government cannot do to you (such as quarter troops in your home) or something that the government cannot stop you from doing (buy a gun, speak freely, publish, practice religion). The Constitution does not describe any good or service or anything else that the government must provide for you if you cannot do so for yourself, never mind describe it as a “right”.
In political philosophy, a right to purchase X =/= a right to X.
In your political philosophy, perhaps. But what’s important here is the political philosophy of the Founders and how they wrote it into the Constitution.
We are talking about creating a law. Under the law, healthcare is already a right. According to it’s sponsors (although held in great doubt by many of it’s opponents) this law will not change that – you will still be able to exercise that right unchanged and buy as much healthcare as you can afford. What it will do is make it an entitlement, where the government must take money from other people and use it to buy you what you cannot afford. The distinction is clear, useful and accurate.
For a group of American legislators to say that the law they desire to pass will make healthcare a “right” is either ignorant or deliberately deceptive.
So why do you persist in claiming that if the legislation itself doesn’t provide an enforcement mechanism, therefore none will ever exist at all?
I don’t. Please quote where I said that.
RonF,
Things that are explictly described using the word “right” s in the Constitution are described in one of two ways: either something that the government cannot do to you (such as quarter troops in your home) or something that the government cannot stop you from doing (buy a gun, speak freely, publish, practice religion).
Ever read the 6th Amendment?
The right to Assistance of Counsel for one’s criminal defense is a right to have the government provide that counsel if one cannot afford to pay a lawyer oneself. It actually operates much as I’ve been trying to explain to Robert: a right to something need not include getting the best of it, but rather a bare minimum.
I don’t. Please quote where I said that.
@14: “it’s meaningless to forbid anything in the law if there is no mechanism for enforcing it.”
That was you, right?
None of the things in the Sixth Amendment (with one exception) are things that you would ordinarily buy for yourself and that you would not be able to get if you didn’t have enough money. People who have money cannot get the government to prepare and present a case faster than people who don’t, People with money cannot buy subpoenas, etc.
The one exception that you cite, the right to assistance to counsel, was intended by the Founders to ensure that the Federal Government could never block a defendant from hiring counsel and using it during legal proceedings. In English law at the time defendants did NOT have the right to have the advice of counsel during a criminal trial, giving the State a huge advantage. In fact, Wiki gives a citation of an apparently prominent lawyer who argued against such a right.
The migration of that from right to entitlement was not in any country or state’s legal system at that time, was never intended by the Founders and was invented by the Supreme Court through a process that started about 150 years after the amendment was adopted. I won’t argue against the wisdom or morality of doing so, mind you. I think it’s a good thing and endorse it’s continuation. But finding it in the Constitution was a novelty and a usurpation of the legislative process and depends on the “what good is a right if you can’t afford to exercise it?” argument. By that argument the Federal government should be buying homeless people shotguns, but somehow the Supreme Court sees no need for consistency there.
To say that it is meaningless to forbid something in law if there is no mechanism to enforce it is not equivalent to saying that there will never be an enforcement mechanism.
RonF,
@24: “The migration of that from right to entitlement was not in any country or state’s legal system at that time, was never intended by the Founders and was invented by the Supreme Court through a process that started about 150 years after the amendment was adopted. … But finding it in the Constitution was a novelty and a usurpation of the legislative process and depends on the “what good is a right if you can’t afford to exercise it?” argument.”
I think you may be confusing the 6th Amendment right to counsel in federal criminal prosecutions (like the rest of the Bill of Rights, prior to the adoption of the 14th Amendment, the 6th Amendment did not apply to the states) with a general right to counsel in criminal prosecutions.
Your history is wrong. In fact, England already provided for what you would call an entitlement to counsel in treason cases, and seven months prior to the 6th Amendment’s ratification and enactment, Congress passed a statute requiring the federal government to provide counsel in any capital case (and “felonies” at the time under English and U.S. law were synonymous with “crime punishable by capital punishment”).
@25, but there can’t be an enforcement mechanism created by the administrative state unless the law provides for something be prohibited in the first place. The Secretary of HHS couldn’t decide on how precisely to bar improper persons from medical school (for example) unless the statute said “improper persons shall be barred from medical schools.” So the law DOES provide the authority for creating the enforcement mechanism, which is why I object to your claim that the law is meaningless simply because it does not in itself contain the mechanism but rather leaves it to the discretion of an administrator.