How I turned a traffic ticket into the constitutional trial of the century →

Some towns and cities are using a new combination of legal definitions in a way that makes contesting robo-issued speeding tickets nearly impossible to contend in court, which pretty clearly appears to be un-Constitutional:

Traffic camera laws are popular in part because they appeal to a law-and-order impulse. If we are going to stop those nefarious evildoers who jeopardize the health of the republic by sliding through yellow lights when no one else is around and driving through empty streets at thirty miles per hour in twenty-five zones, then we need a way around such pesky impediments as a lack of eyewitnesses.
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In short, municipal officials and their private contractors have at their disposal the powers of both criminal and civil law and are excused from the due process duties of both criminal and civil law. It’s a neat trick that would have made King George III blush.

Trump’s Team Is Shaping Up to Be Dangerously Incoherent →

Trump is on opposite sides of so many issues, changing his stance and tone with little (usually no) public reason, that his own advisers are regularly contradicting his stances, seemingly with no care for what the president has previously said. This is bad for efficient policymaking domestically, and it is dangerous for foreign policy. Other countries are less able to understand what's going on below the surface in Washington, and more likely to misinterpret the administration's intentions, increasing the chances of war around the world.

Another possibility, especially on the international stage, is that mixed signals could stir confusion and even strife. Trump has taken a belligerent stance with China, calling on it to do more to curb North Korea’s nuclear program, saying that the longstanding One China policy is negotiable, threatening a trade war, and warning about its building islands on the South China Sea—all of which has caused Chinese state media to raise the specter of war. Tillerson has echoed some of Trump’s hawkishness on China, but in modulated ways, and on the issue of North Korea he takes a very different line: that the United States has to be “clear-eyed” in what can realistically be expected from the Chinese government. If relations between China and the U.S. deteriorate, as seems likely, there will be the added problem of who the Chinese government tries to engage with in their negotiations. Will they think the relatively conciliatory Tillerson is setting policy, in which case changing policy on North Korea can be regarded as secondary? Or will they believe Trump is driving policy, in which case they will go into negotiations with greater pessimism about finding common ground?
If the Chinese government listens to Tillerson, it’ll be clear that the word of the American president carries little weight. If they listen to Trump, they’ll conclude that their relationship with the U.S. can’t be fixed. Both outcomes are troubling.
U.S. policy toward Russia has the greatest potential for disaster. Given the growing anti-Russia sentiment on Capitol Hill and the Pentagon, strengthened by reports of Russian interference in the election, Mattis might feel more beholden to hawks in Congress than the president he’ll serve under. In fact, Mattis might feel the need to take a firmer line against Russia to compensate for Trump’s gestures of friendship to Vladimir Putin.
The danger is that Putin will see Trump’s victory as an irresistible window of opportunity to test the fragility of NATO, only to encounter Mattis-led resistance. If so, conflict with Russia becomes more likely, not less.
Back in 1950, the U.S. sent mixed messages about its relationship with South Korea. Formally, the Truman administration was committed to a policy of containment of communism, but in speech that year, Secretary of State Dean Acheson failed to mention the country in describing the U.S.’s “defensive perimeter” in Asia. Dispatches between the U.S. and its embassy in Moscow, which were intercepted by the Soviets, also suggested that South Korea was a low priority. As a result, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin made the made miscalculation that he could greenlight a North Korean invasion of South Korea, with little risk of American resistance. So began the Korean War.

That Vow To Defund Planned Parenthood: Easy To Say, Hard To Do →

According to the organization, about 75 percent of that government support comes from the Medicaid program to pay for direct medical services provided to low-income patients, including contraception, cancer screenings and sexually transmitted disease testing and treatment. The remaining quarter comes from other sources, primarily the Title X federal family planning program. The Congressional Budget Office estimated last year that the group gets approximately $390 million annually from Medicaid and $60 million from Title X.
None of the funds from either program may be used for abortion, under longstanding federal prohibitions. Only half of the Planned Parenthood affiliates even offer abortion services, the group says. But it is still the largest single provider of the procedure in the nation, and that has made it a target for anti-abortion lawmakers since the 1980s.
...taking away Planned Parenthood's access to Medicaid funding would require a change in the federal law that guarantees most Medicaid patients with a choice to use any qualified provider. The Department of Health and Human Services has repeatedly warned states that have tried to evict Planned Parenthood from their Medicaid programs that they cannot legally do that because such a move would violate that law. And federal courts have consistently blocked states that have tried to end Planned Parenthood's Medicaid funding...
 

Donald Trump And His Cabinet Of Criminals →

We must watch Trump's administration like hawks, and take every opportunity to remind them of the law and hold them accountable to it (and we must demand that our press and justice system do their part).

Not surprisingly, the lack of concern for ethics in his own dealings has spilled over into his picks for top administration positions. While his cabinet is filled with the incredibly rich who, thanks to Trump’s proposed tax breaks, will be newly incentivized to steal, there are two individuals who stand out: Steven Mnuchin, Trump’s pick for Treasury Secretary, and Andrew Puzder, Trump’s choice for Labor secretary.
These two nominees sat at the top of major corporations that had large scale violations of the law. They may not have known of the illegalities, but as CEOs, they have the responsibility to ensure that their companies are following the law. Furthermore, if both are approved, they will be in a position where they are responsible for enforcing the laws that their own companies violated.

Letter: This is why Republicans can't find a replacement for Obamacare →

A key reason the Republican Party is having such a hard time with the replacement part of “repeal and replace” is that Obamacare is virtually the same privatized mandate plan it pushed for since President Richard Nixon first proposed the National Health Strategy in 1971 then again in 1974. Then the GOP revived its privatized mandate plan again in 1993 with then-Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole helping to propose the Health Equity and Access Reform Today act or HEART as the alternative to the proposed single-payer plan Health Security Act of 1993 — commonly known as “Hillarycare“ — and then again when then-Gov. Mitt Romney proposed — and succeeded in implementing — the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2006 in Massachusetts.
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As a result, the GOP’s repeal and replace position backs it into a challenging corner. It has no real replacement plan because the ACA is essentially the privatized mandate it has pursued for so many years. The only possible alternative to a 40-year-old GOP plan would be reverting to the old system, leaving millions of people without full coverage or proper health care. Even those with coverage — perhaps through their employers — could then once again have a cap on lifesaving treatments, such as those for cancer, and thereby reinstating the privatized insurance “panels” deciding the profitability of patient treatment versus patient outcomes.
Or, the GOP could go with the Democratic option — a single-payer system — the same plan that virtually every major western democracy has successfully implemented with significantly lower cost and higher life expectancy than America has, according to a recent Commonwealth Fund study, and with much better patient-centric results. (America ranks 37th in the world in patient health outcomes as reported by the World Health Organization.)

Donald Trump and the Future of Intelligence →

The relationship between the Trump administration and the intelligence agencies will be worth keeping an eye on. The loss of trust will lead to otherwise-avoidable intelligence failures.

But while there is a long history of intelligence-policy friction, the hostility between the incoming administration and the intelligence community is unprecedented. This is not just due to Trump’s tweets, though they have certainly played a role. Gen. Flynn’s statements about the CIA must sound ominous to insiders, given his checkered past. As director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, he reportedly alienated subordinates by telling them “that the first thing everyone needed to know was that he was always right. His staff would know they were right, he said, when their views melded to his.” Because the White House is the CIA’s most important consumer, rejection by the president’s national security advisor would be particularly troubling.
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The intelligence community faces two looming dangers in the next four years. The first is neglect. If the president elect means what he says, he is likely to downplay intelligence or ignore it completely. Trump has already announced that he won’t receive the President’s Daily Brief on a daily basis. Instead, he’ll get intelligence briefings three times a week and rely on his advisors to alert him when international events require his attention. The issue of neglect, however, goes beyond the number of formal interactions between the president elect and his intelligence officials. The real question is whether such actions will have any value to the policy process, or whether they will descend into brief pro forma exercises. Policymakers can easily ignore intelligence while going through the motions.
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Whatever the cause, neglect has serious consequences for the conduct of foreign policy. Intelligence agencies have access to unique sources of information, along with personnel who are specially trained to make sense of it. As a result, ignoring intelligence removes a potentially important source of information from policy deliberations. It also removes an important check on policymakers’ assumptions. Like anyone else, leaders are susceptible to cognitive biases that reinforce prior expectations. Healthy intelligence-policy relations are a natural barrier to this kind of tunnel vision. Ignoring intelligence, on the other hand, opens a pathway to policy myopia.  

The second problem is politicization, or the manipulation of intelligence to reflect policy preferences. Politicization comes in many flavors. Direct politicization refers to crude arm-twisting, as leaders try to coerce intelligence officials to deliver politically convenient estimates. Indirect politicization is more subtle: rather than threatening or cajoling intelligence officials, policymakers send repeated tacit signals about what they expect to hear. And like the problem of neglect, intelligence agencies can also be responsible for politicization if they let their own policy preferences affect their estimates.

Ethics Rules Are National Security Rules →

...Ethical transparency is critical to national security because it ensures that personal financial interests are not placed before the interests of the country.
Identifying conflicts is the first step in preventing harms. Once a conflict is disclosed and identified, it might be eliminated by either ending the financial relationship or requiring individual recusals. Where that doesn’t occur, the disclosure process allows for the public and other stakeholders to assess a government official’s judgment for indications of bias. The White House and the cabinet are charged with immensely consequential decisions; not infrequently, they determine matters of life and death. The legitimacy of the office of the presidency rests on public faith that the government is placing the interests of the country first.
The demand for adequate ethics disclosure and vetting reflects the national security strategy of—as Reagan put it—“Trust, but verify.” We ask for verification that our government officials are free from undue influence because it goes to the core of basic democratic legitimacy. There should be no questions regarding the purity of the motives of individuals we authorize to place our soldiers, foreign service officers, or intelligence agents in harm’s way. Because of the necessary secrecy that surrounds a great many of these decisions, full vetting and transparency at the outset are critical to ensuring the Executive branch is, in fact, placing country first and also to maintaining basic integrity and legitimacy in the eyes of the people.
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Recently, the Director of the Office of Government Ethics (OGE) has sent a letter to Congress warning that not all of Trump’s nominees have submitted the paperwork required for the legally-mandated ethics review. A large number of consequential—and controversial—confirmation hearings have been scheduled for Wednesday. OGE cautions this schedule does not allow sufficient time to complete reviews, especially considering the complex financial backgrounds of Trump’s “Billionaire cabinet” and the necessity for highly-detailed reviews of individuals like Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson. Confirmation hearings are traditionally not scheduled before ethics review is complete, not only because Senators must be fully informed in their votes, but also because the confirmation process serves as important leverage in ensuring full compliance. Once a nominee is Senate-confirmed, there is little incentive for the individual to fully and timely comply with ethics disclosure, especially of potentially controversial matters.
The relationship between ethics and national security is perhaps most important when it comes to the President himself. President-elect Trump’s refusal to divest himself of his business interests invites conflicts, though Trump asserts that the President cannot have legally cognizable conflicts. That is a controversial legal argument, at best, but it also fails to recognize the distinction between a legal conflict and a conflict in fact. Because of his multinational business interests, President Trump will eventually face a decision where the interests of the nation run contrary to his personal financial interests, whatever his interpretation of legislation on conflicts might be. And a Politico poll this morning found that 65% of those polled believed Trump’s business interests will “affect his decision making.”

This old bill could be the secret to affordable universal health care →

You can think of the AmeriCare approach as a public option on steroids. It would create a new single-payer program called AmeriCare that would take on everyone ensured by Medicaid and SCHIP, and would automatically enroll all children at birth. It would pay the same rates to providers as Medicare, meaning it'd be considerably less generous to doctors and hospitals than private insurers.
Unlike Sanders's plan, AmeriCare involves cost sharing very similar to what you'd find in a private plan. There are deductibles ($350 for individuals, $500 for families), co-insurance (20 percent of spending above the deductible), an out-of-pocket spending cap ($2,500 for individuals, $4,000 for families), and premiums.
However, cost sharing would be sharply limited for low-income families. Individuals and families living on less than twice the poverty line ($48,500 for a family of four in 2015) wouldn't have to pay premiums, deductibles, or co-insurance, and there would be premium subsidies and lower deductibles for people between two and three times the poverty line.
Here's the kicker: Employers could buy into the plan. They'd have to pay 80 percent of the premium, leaving 20 percent to employees, but it'd be an alternative every company got to their existing private plan.