Later On

First, this by Ben Armbruster in ThinkProgress:

Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) has tried to portray himself as an upstanding lawmaker dedicated to fiscal restraint. He has frequently criticized “wasteful spending” in the federal government and even called President Obama’s spending plans “reckless.”

Last month, Politico published a chart illustrating the transportation costs from the offices of all 100 U.S. Senators. Topping off the list was Cornyn, who has spent over $150,000 on travel costs during the first half of the 2009 fiscal year.

When a local ABC News affiliate in Dallas (WFAA) asked him about his expensive travel habits, Cornyn called Politico’s report “a cheap shot.” The reporter then asked the obvious follow-up, “In what sense was it a cheap shot? They were using the Secretary of the Senate information?” However, Cornyn wouldn’t budge and instead decided to dig in:

CORNYN: Oh yeah, not every state is the same. When you represent a state as big as Texas and traveling home from Washington D.C. every weekend, it unfortunately costs some money.

The “Texas is a big state” defense seems plausible on its face, but the same records Politico reported show that Texas’s other U.S. Senator, Kay Bailey Hutchison (R), spent nearly 43 percent less on travel than Cornyn during the same period ($87,651).

Moreover, California Sens. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), who represent a state similar to Texas in size and population (and one that’s further away from Washington, DC), spent less than Cornyn on travel combined (Boxer $72,473; Feinstein $29,917; Total $102,390).

But also, WFAA reports that Cornyn and his staff spent more than $55,000 in taxpayer money on a three day retreat to St. Michaels, MD in February and that “a third of the costs, $17,353, was Cornyn’s alone”:

He was reimbursed for $7,750 in incidentals. The senator’s per diem, a daily allowance, was $5,226 for the three-day trip. For a 162-mile, round-trip journey from Washington, D.C., transportation to get the senator to Maryland cost taxpayers $4,377.66.

Referring to Cornyn’s defense, watchdog group Public Citizen’s Tom Smith said, “I agree senator. It is a big state, and most big cities where he’s spending most of his time have real good airline service. He should be flying coach with the rest of us.”

Cornyn said he does fly commercial but admitted that he also takes more expensive charter jets. When asked if he would “change anything” regarding his travel expenses, Cornyn replied, “No, I wouldn’t. I believe the travel I do is essential.”

And then this, by Mike Lillis in the Washington Independent:

The Las Vegas Sun … has conducted an exclusive interview with Doug Hampton, the husband of Sen. John Ensign’s (R-Nev.) former mistress.

Hampton and Ensign were bonded by their conservative evangelical faith. Hampton said he reached out to intermediaries involved in a Christian fellowship home in Washington, D.C., where Ensign and several other powerful Washington figures live.

The group, including [Oklahoma GOP Sen. Tom] Coburn, a well-known conservative, confronted Ensign and suggested that the Hamptons needed to be given financial assistance — in the millions of dollars — to pay off their $1 million-plus mortgage and move them to a new life away from Ensign.

And that’s not all. Hampton also reiterated the claim that Ensign paid his wife $25,000 in severance money when she stopped working for the Nevada Republican’s campaign.

If true, Ensign faces a possible felony violation of campaign finance law if he paid the severance but failed to report it as an in-kind contribution to the campaign committees where she worked, according to ethics complaints filed against him.

Knowingly and willfully failing to report a contribution of more than $25,000 is a criminal violation subject to five years in prison, according to complaints filed last month by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.

Ensign was probably hoping that this thing had gone away following the more recent — and more bizarre — news coming from the governors’ mansions in South Carolina and Alaska. The Doug Hampton interview, a two-part series which airs tonight and tomorrow, ensures that that won’t be the case.

Abraham Lustgarten in ProPublica:

The two key arguments that the oil and gas industry is using to fight federal regulation of the natural gas drilling process called hydraulic fracturing — that the costs would cripple their business and that state regulations are already strong — are challenged by the same data and reports the industry is using to bolster its position.

One widely-referenced study [2] (PDF) estimated that complying with regulations would cost the oil and gas industry more than $100,000 per gas well. But the figures are based on 10-year-old estimates and list expensive procedures that aren’t mentioned in the proposed regulations.

Another report [3] (PDF) concluded that state regulations for drilling, including fracturing, "are adequately designed to directly protect water." But the report reveals that only four states require regulatory approval before hydraulic fracturing begins. It also outlines how requirements for encasing wells in cement — a practice the author has said is critical to containing hydraulic fracturing fluids and protecting water — varies from state to state.

One recommendation in that report flies in face of industry’s assertion that its processes are safe: hydraulic fracturing needs more study and should be banned in certain cases near sensitive water supplies.

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This is quite good. It begins:

As Congress debates health-care reform, the arguments against a "public option" are coming fast and furious. The best I’ve read recently is from Greg Manikow, the distinguished Harvard economist and former Bush advisor who insists that the public option will inevitably crowd out private insurance companies, resulting in less competition and poorer health care. Manikow reminded me of how quickly the efficiencies of private military contractors like Blackwater crushed the socialists in the United States Army, how the option of great public beaches in New York drove all Connecticut elite from their Buffy-and-Muffy-only private beach clubs to the boardwalks of Coney Island, and how the wealthy rushed from their Park Avenue penthouses to take advantage of the great deals in Section 8 housing.

For an alternate point of view, however, I consulted the former governor of Vermont. As a doctor married to a doctor, Howard Dean made health care a priority of his administration, putting strict regulations on health insurance profiteering and figuring out a way to extend insurance to every child in the state. In a new book called Howard Dean’s Prescription for Real Health Care Reform, he makes a persuasive case for reform.

ESQUIRE: Your book really lays everything out in a very simple, clear way. It’s obvious this is something you’ve been thinking about for a long time.

HOWARD DEAN: It was one of the reasons I ran for president.

ESQ: One thing I’ve never seen before is when you say, "Much is made of the 47 million without insurance, but nothing of the 25 million who have insurance but don’t go and see the doctor." I’ve got one of those high-deductible catastrophic plans myself, so I don’t go to the doctor unless I’m bleeding. Why have I never seen this argument before?

HD: Because 99 percent of the discussions among reporters, policy wonks, and politicians focus on the uninsured — which is, frankly, why nothing is passed. They don’t focus on the majority of Americans who have health insurance that doesn’t work.

ESQ: Boil it down, if you would. Why isn’t it working even if you do have insurance?

HD: Because it’s too expensive. The private sector can’t manage costs. Health care is one of the few places — defense is another — that the government works more efficiently and more effectively than the private sector. That’s just a fact.

ESQ: Why is that?

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Mike Lillis in the Washington Independent:

Missed this over the long holiday weekend, but The Washington Post on Friday published a biting op-ed from Robert Kennedy Jr. in which the prominent environmental activist calls mountaintop coal mining “the worst environmental tragedy in American history” and attacks the Obama administration for doing far too little to end the destruction.

His wrap-up of what’s at stake:

Mining syndicates are detonating 2,500 tons of explosives each day — the equivalent of a Hiroshima bomb weekly — to blow up Appalachia’s mountains and extract sub-surface coal seams. They have demolished 500 mountains — encompassing about a million acres — buried hundreds of valley streams under tons of rubble, poisoned and uprooted countless communities, and caused widespread contamination to the region’s air and water.

On this continent, only Appalachia’s rich woodlands survived the Pleistocene ice ages that turned the rest of North America into a treeless tundra. King Coal is now accomplishing what the glaciers could not — obliterating the hemisphere’s oldest, most biologically dense and diverse forests. Highly mechanized processes allow giant machines to flatten in months mountains older than the Himalayas — while employing fewer workers for far less time than other types of mining…

America adores its Adirondacks and reveres the Rockies, while the Appalachian Mountains — with their impoverished and alienated population — are dismantled by coal moguls who dominate state politics and have little to prevent them from blasting the physical landscape to smithereens.

Last month, the Obama administration took steps to rein in mountaintop removal, vowing to examine each new mining application to ensure the projects won’t have lasting effects on neighboring waterways. But the effort got off to a dubious start. Indeed, of the first 48 pending applications reviewed by the Environmental Protection Agency, 42 were approved. Thirty-one of the 42 will bury at least one valley with mining debris, which often contains toxic heavy metals that wash into waterways below. At least one of the 42 will bury six valleys in mining waste.

When asked how burying six Appalachian valleys could have no detrimental impact on water quality, an EPA spokesperson replied that neither the number nor the size of valley fills are, by themselves, enough to determine a mine’s effects on water quality…

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Spencer Ackerman:

So much for the most-transparent-administration-ever stuff.  Remember the Democrats on the House intelligence committee’s effort to open briefings on covert intelligence programs to a broader pool of members of Congress than the so-called “Gang of Eight?” And that they pushed that change because those restricted briefings enabled the Bush administration to keep Congress in the dark about torture and warrantless surveillance? Yeah, President Obama says he’ll veto the fiscal 2010 intelligence bill if the House doesn’t scrap that provision. This is change you can believe in.

Take a look. It begins:

I’m a "gourmet shaver." Who knew?

It is amazing what you can learn while idly surfing the web. Until a week ago I didn’t know there was an entire movement, an independent universe, devoted to the male experience of dragging a razor across the face.

Gourmet shaving, as a movement, apparently has been around for a couple of years but sometimes I’m a little slow picking up on pop culture trends. That’s a trait acquired from having been born in a small town…

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James Fallows writes:

I mentioned yesterday that, while having followed Robert McNamara’s decisions and legacy for many decades, I had never dealt with him personally. Mark Feeney of the Boston Globe, who wrote the paper’s obituary of McNamara two days ago, sent this recollection of his own encounters:

I briefly interviewed him on the phone, twice, the first time in regards to "The Fog of War." The most amusing thing about that conversation was how flabbergasted he was by the price of movie tickets. The fact he wasn’t trying to be funny made it all the more amusing.

My most memorable McNamara experience didn’t involve direct contact. This would have been the summer of 1978 [when Feeney was in college] on Martha’s Vineyard. I was standing on the main street in Edgartown with a couple of friends, and there was a car waiting at a stop sign. I don’t recall if I recognized that the driver was McNamara or only realized that’s who it was after hearing the question I’m about to relate. It came from a middle-aged white guy (clearly not a summer resident) standing by the car. "Hey, are you Secretary McNamara?" he asked through the open passenger-side window. Before there was an answer, the man added, "You’re one of my heroes. Let me shake your hand." He then reached in and shook hands with McNamara.

What made the scene so memorable was McNamara’s response. He visibly flinched; his face just collapsed. It was horrible to see. One could easily imagine numerous similar confrontations–few, if any, ending so cordially. Here was someone who, a decade and a half earlier, had been one of the three or four most powerful men in the world reduced to fleeting agony by an innocuous question. Brief though the moment was, I’ve never forgotten it.

I can’t imagine Donald Rumsfeld either being so publicly available or responding in such a way. Neither fact speaks well of the man.

The last point bears emphasis, and is one I wish I’d made yesterday. If we thought that Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, or for that matter George W. Bush would eventually reflect as deeply on the consequences of their decisions as Robert McNamara clearly did, they would deserve the respect for moral seriousness that the McNamara of "The Fog of War" era had clearly earned. My guess is that, Nixon-like, all of them (and certainly Cheney and Rumsfeld) instead scorn McNamara for giving in to doubts and doubters.

Bruce Schneier:

This is good news:

A federal judge in June threw out seizure of three fake passports from a traveler, saying that TSA screeners violated his Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable search and seizure. Congress authorizes TSA to search travelers for weapons and explosives; beyond that, the agency is overstepping its bounds, U.S. District Court Judge Algenon L. Marbley said.

"The extent of the search went beyond the permissible purpose of detecting weapons and explosives and was instead motivated by a desire to uncover contraband evidencing ordinary criminal wrongdoing," Judge Marbley wrote.

In the second case, Steven Bierfeldt, treasurer for the Campaign for Liberty, a political organization launched from Ron Paul’s presidential run, was detained at the St. Louis airport because he was carrying $4,700 in a lock box from the sale of tickets, T-shirts, bumper stickers and campaign paraphernalia. TSA screeners quizzed him about the cash, his employment and the purpose of his trip to St. Louis, then summoned local police and threatened him with arrest because he responded to their questions with a question of his own: What were his rights and could TSA legally require him to answer?

[...]

Mr. Bierfeldt’s suit, filed in U.S. District Court in the District of Columbia, seeks to bar TSA from "conducting suspicion-less pre-flight searches of passengers or their belongings for items other than weapons or explosives."

I wrote about this a couple of weeks ago:

…Obama should mandate that airport security be solely about terrorism, and not a general-purpose security checkpoint to catch everyone from pot smokers to deadbeat dads.

The Constitution provides us, both Americans and visitors to America, with strong protections against invasive police searches. Two exceptions come into play at airport security checkpoints. The first is "implied consent," which means that you cannot refuse to be searched; your consent is implied when you purchased your ticket. And the second is "plain view," which means that if the TSA officer happens to see something unrelated to airport security while screening you, he is allowed to act on that.

Both of these principles are well established and make sense, but it’s their combination that turns airport security checkpoints into police-state-like checkpoints.

The TSA should limit its searches to bombs and weapons and leave general policing to the police — where we know courts and the Constitution still apply.

S/He writes:

One of the more fascinating sociological phenomenon is the tendency people have, in certain situations, to ignore what their own senses are telling them and instead buy into an elaborate fiction just because other people appear to be doing the same thing. The classic illustration of this phenomenon is Hans Christian Andersen’s story The Emperor’s New Clothes — where a couple of con men convince the Emperor that they’ve made him a new suit out of the finest cloth there is, but that only smart people can see it. Not wanting to look dumb, the Emperor and his ministers rave about how beautiful the suit is and organize a procession through town. The villagers, not wanting to admit they don’t understand what’s going on, also rave about the Emperor’s beautiful new suit as he marches naked through the town. It’s not until a child points out the obvious — that the Emperor has no clothes — that the entire fiction crumbles.

Sarah Palin’s manic, rambling, completely incoherent resignation speech the other day was just the latest of her many naked processions through town. Yet for reasons I can’t begin to fathom, a large number of people, in both Republican circles and the mainstream media, continue to insist that she’s wearing a beautiful new suit. For instance, Mark Halperin of TIME insists– despite all evidence and common sense to the contrary — that by quitting her only significant governmental job before serving out her first term, and doing so in a complete train wreck of a speech, Palin actually strengthened her 2012 prospects. And though many on the right are belatedly acknowledging that the Emperor has no clothes, many others continue to insist that Palin is a viable presidential candidate and that her decision to step down may have been a "shrewd" one.

As Josh Marshall so perfectly put it earlier today: …

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Money must be flowing into the coffers of members of Congress:

Source: Washington Post, July 6, 2009

The healthcare industry is waging a "record-breaking influence campaign," spending "more than $1.4 million a day on lobbying," reports the Washington Post. "The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) doubled its spending to nearly $7 million in the first quarter of 2009, followed by Pfizer, with more than $6 million" spent in just three months. Among the lobbyists are many former Congressional staffers and even former members of Congress, including Dick Armey and Richard Gephardt. The impact is illustrated by a recent meeting in the office of Senate Finance Committee Chair Max Baucus, which "included two former Baucus chiefs of staff: David Castagnetti, whose clients include PhRMA and America’s Health Insurance Plans, and Jeffrey A. Forbes, who represents PhRMA, Amgen, Genentech, Merck and others." The Post "identified more than 350 former government aides, each representing an average of four firms or trade groups." PhRMA leads "the pack in spending and employs 49 former government staff members among its 136 lobbyists." Many of the major lobbyists "remain opposed to the public-insurance option" supported by the Obama administration. PhRMA’s head, former Congressman Billy Tauzin, finds the Congress-drug industry revolving door "pretty normal." He asked, "Is it a distortion of baseball to hire coaches who have played baseball?"

Adm. Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, gave a talk on US Mideast policy at the National Press Club. Spencer Ackerman covers the speech:

Adm. Mullen on U.S. Mideast Policy

Adm. Mullen on U.S. Mideast Policy, Pt. II (featuring Defense Policy)

Worth reading.

I’m really tired of obstructionist Democrats. His constituency should vote him out. Steven Benen:

Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) told his colleagues yesterday, "Don’t let the Republicans filibuster us into failure. We want to succeed, and to succeed, we need to stick together."

It sounds like a pretty simple, common sense concept. The electorate has given Democrats a chance to govern, and expect them to deliver. Members of the caucus "may vote against final passage on a bill," Durbin said, but like-minded colleagues should at least reject the idea of "allowing the filibuster to stop the whole Senate." He concluded, "We ought to control our own agenda."

Some "centrist" Dems don’t see it that way.

Evan Bayh, a moderate from Indiana, said he would not be inclined to vote to cut off a filibuster on a bill if he opposed the substance of the underlying measure, and he predicted his colleagues would feel the same way.

"Most senators aren’t sheep," he said. "They don’t just go blindly along without thinking about things, and I don’t think we want them to do that."

It’s hard to overstate how absurd this is. If legislation Bayh doesn’t like comes to the floor, he can vote against it. Before that, he can offer amendments, give speeches, and encourage others to agree with him. Senators, as he noted, aren’t sheep. Some bills may enjoy the party’s support, but not everyone in the party will see the issue the same way.

But that’s not what Bayh is arguing here. He’s saying he’s inclined to help the failed, discredited minority block the Senate from even giving bills a vote in the first place. It’s not enough for Bayh to vote with Republicans on key issues, he wants to help the GOP ensure there is no vote.

I’m reminded once again of remarks by …

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Wow. Somebody actually said it—and possibly believes it. Kevin Drum:

Glenn Greenwald was on NPR yesterday to talk about their policy of refusing to call torture by its proper name, and while he was waiting to go on he listened to NPR’s ombudsman explaining their policy:

She also said — when the host asked about the recent example I cited of NPR’s calling what was done to a reporter in Gambia "torture" (at the 20:20 mark) — that NPR will use the word "torture" to describe what other governments do because they do it merely to sadistically inflict pain on people while the U.S. did it for a noble reason:  to obtain information about Terrorist attacks.  That’s really what she said:  that when the U.S. did it (as opposed to Evil countries), it was for a good reason.

Jeez, that Glenn.  Always exaggerating.  For the record, here’s what she actually said about NPR’s piece on Gambia:

In that case, these were strictly tactics to torture him, to punish him, versus in the United States, and the way that it’s used, these are tactics used to get information.  The Gambian journalist was in jail for his beliefs.

Wow.  She really did say that, didn’t she?  When other people do it for other reasons, it’s torture.  When we do it for our reasons, it’s not.

You don’t usually find people willing to say this quite so baldly.  Congratulations, Alicia Shepard.

At least any meaningful healthcare reform. I honestly do not know how these Democrats think. Steven Benen at the Political Animal:

It should be a rare opportunity for historic change. A Democratic president with a popular electoral mandate gets to work on health care reform with a Democratic House and a 60-seat Democratic majority in the Senate. Republican efforts to kill reform can and should be blocked, and the policy advance that has escaped Americans for seven decades can finally come together.

But there are still those conservative Democrats who may scuttle the whole thing.

Greg Sargent flags a couple of painful quotes from center-right Senate Democrats who are speaking publicly about possibly siding with Senate Republicans on not letting senators even vote on health care reform. There’s this from Louisiana’s Mary Landrieu…

[Landrieu] flatly refused to rule out filibustering any bill, including health care and climate change legislation. "I’m going to keep an open mind, but I am not committing to any procedural straitjackets one way or another," she said.

…and this from Ben Nelson.

"I’m not a closed mind on cloture, but if it’s an abuse of procedure, if it’s somebody trying to put a poison pill into a bill, or if it’s something that would be pre-emptive of Nebraska law, or something that rises to extraordinary circumstances, then I’ve always reserved the right to vote against cloture," Nelson said.

Now, it’s possible that this is just posturing. When push comes to shove, and this rare opportunity to approve generational change for the nation reaches the floor, it’s possible that Landrieu and Nelson will, at a minimum, let their colleagues vote on the bill. Even in these quotes, neither said they will block an up-or-down vote; they just addressed the possibility…

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As though healthcare was not rationed in the US now. Hilzoy explains very carefully, but I fear that those who should understand are incapable. At any rate, here’s a great post:

There’s one piece of persistent dishonesty in the debate over health care that I would like to see vanish once and for all. It concerns the word ‘rationing’. You can use it in several ways. On the one hand, it can refer to any process that determines who gets some scarce commodity. Here’s an econ textbook quoted by Uwe Reinhardt:

"Prices ration scarce resources. If bread were free, a huge quantity of it would be demanded. Because the resources used to produce bread are scarce, the actual amount of bread has to be rationed among its potential users. Not everyone can have all the bread that they could possibly want. The bread must be rationed somehow; the price system accomplishes this in the following way: Everyone who is willing to pay the equilibrium price gets the good, and everyone who does not, does not. [Italics added.]"

If that’s what rationing means, then health care is already rationed, since it is not free. Moreover, since no one is proposing that it become free, everyone agrees that it should be rationed somehow.

When some people talk about rationing, they mean something scarier: the idea that someone, possibly the government, allocates quantities of something, and forbids anyone to obtain more of it. Thus, if the government rations gasoline in wartime, you get your gas coupons, and you are not allowed to buy any more gasoline, period. (That’s why black markets are illegal.) Likewise, when reselling tickets is illegal, ticket vendors are, in this sense, rationing tickets.

No one — no one — is proposing to ration health care in this way. Not Barack Obama, not Bernie Sanders, no one. Every serious proposal I’m aware of would allow people to purchase whatever health care they want, so long as a doctor is willing to prescribe it. And not only that, they can purchase supplemental insurance, like those add-on plans for Medicare.

What proponents of a public plan are proposing is, well, a public health insurance plan that would compete against private plans. I assume that, just like every private plan I know of, the public plan would not cover literally anything a patient might take it into her head to want. It might not cover unproven therapies, for instance. It might not cover therapies whose benefits did not warrant their costs. If this sounds bad to you, try to imagine a really big cost and a really small benefit: a billion dollar treatment for hangnails that offered only the most minute advantage over band-aids and nail clippers. As long as the fact that this is not covered is disclosed in advance, I don’t see a problem with it.

Some people seem to think  …

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Congress has always had an inordinately high opinion of itself and fights scrutiny fiercely. Mike Lillis in the Washington Independent:

Yesterday, we ran a piece pointing out that there’s really nothing stopping lawmakers, congressional staffers and other government employees from using the non-public information they gather from their daily duties to guide investments and reap enormous profits. Although a House bill — the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act — takes steps to end the practice, support on Capitol Hill has been less than enthusiastic. Indeed, only four of 435 House members have endorsed the proposal, leaving even public-interest advocates to write off its chances of going anywhere.

Today, however, Rep. Dennis Moore (D-Kans.), who heads the House Financial Services Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee, announced that his panel will take a closer look at just how prevalent government insider trading really is. The hearing, entitled “Preventing Unfair Trading by Government Officials,” is scheduled for July 13.

Expect attendance to be spare.

Mike Lillis in the Washington Independent:

Senate Republicans realize that, barring some yet-unrevealed scandal, there’s little standing in the way of Sonia Sotomayor’s eventual placement on the Supreme Court. But that doesn’t mean they’re not going to do everything in their powers to delay the process. Indeed, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), the senior Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said yesterday that even the July 13 target for Sotomayor’s confirmation hearing is “too early.”

From CQ:

Republican senators want more time to prepare their questions for the nominee, especially about a legal advocacy group for Latinos that Sotomayor was affiliated with in the past.

The group, LatinoJustice PRLDEF, turned over hundreds of pages of documents to the committee last week.

Sessions said the committee had received “only about 1,000 pages” out of 300 boxes of material in the group’s archives.

“I just don’t know whether everything’s been produced that’s legitimate to be produced,” he said.

The tactic is clear: The nomination might be inevitable, but each day that Congress is scrutinizing Sotomayor is another day it’s not tackling health care, climate change and the other legislative priorities the Democrats had hoped to take up while President Obama still has the political capital to push through controversial reforms — priorities the Republicans are hoping to kill.

Indeed, the White House has already conceded that there’s likely no time on this year’s legislative calendar for either immigration reform or a transportation bill (they’re opting for an 18-month extension of the current funding instead).

More and more, this is looking like a one-issue year.

From the Center for American Progress:

Some of the unemployed in states that rejected stimulus funding for unemployment insurance are receiving letters declaring them "ineligible for benefits" because their state governments refused to modify rules governing who could receive unemployment insurance. The states, including Mississippi and Alabama, refused despite the fact that the federal government would have fully funded the expansion for several years.

From the Center for American Progress:

For decades, conservatives have used their dominance of the judicial branch to push an agenda that could never pass in the elected branches. In recent years, the Supreme Court granted health insurers and medical device manufactures sweeping immunity from the law. It forbade school boards from racially integrating public schools, audaciously citing Brown v. Board of Education in doing so. And it repeatedly cut back the rights of workers and voters to be free from discrimination. The recently-concluded Supreme Court term was no exception, with workers, voters, and the environment all suffering big loses before the nation’s highest Court. Despite these decisions, however, the Court also left unresolved a number of new and radical claims raised by right-wing advocates. In other words, as bad as the current term’s decisions were, the worst may be waiting on the horizon.

A BANNER YEAR FOR POLLUTERS: No one fared worse before the Court this term than Mother Nature. The justices heard five environmental cases, and they sided against defenders of the environment in every single one. Among these cases, the Court upheld a Bush-era regulation that placed costs to power plants above destruction of aquatic life, it absolved from liability a chemical company that for years, allowed pesticides to spill into the environment, and it erected new obstacles to environmental organizations challenging federal environmental policy. In what may be the most shocking environmental decision this term, Coeur Alaska v. Southeast Alaska Conservation Council, the justices upheld a mining company’s plans to dump millions of tons of mining waste into a pristine lake — a plan that would eventually kill the lake’s fish and nearly all of its other aquatic life, decrease the depth of the lake by 50 feet, and flood the surrounding 40 acres of land with lead and mercury-laden water. As Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg explained in her dissent, the majority’s opinion in Coeur Alaska allows "[w]hole categories of regulated industries" to "gain immunity from a variety of pollution-control standards."

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Read Marion Nestle’s post to get cheered up.