Why Romney's Dixie Drought Spells Doom for GOP

By JOE SCARBOROUGH

Many are discounting Rick Santorum's big win in Louisiana last night as too little too late. Perhaps they should take a second look.

The former Pennsylvania senator almost beat the front-runner by a two-to-one margin, reeling in almost 50 percent of the vote in a four-person race. More important to Republicans who want to win the White House this fall is the continued weakness Massachusetts' Mitt Romney is showing in the South.

Romney's performance south of the Mason-Dixon line has been pathetic. Despite having all the money, organization and endorsements that matter, Romney finished third in Alabama, third in Mississippi and a distant second in Louisiana. He was stomped by Newt Gingrich by an average of 20 points in South Carolina and Georgia and had his 13 worst performances in 2008 in the Deep South.

There was a time when the South was solidly Republican but those days are gone. Barack Obama won Virginia and North Carolina four years ago and came close to beating John McCain in Georgia. Bill Clinton beat George Bush in Georgia, Louisiana, Arkansas, Missouri, Tennessee, Kentucky and West Virginia.

Romney's continued weakness in the Heart of Dixie spells trouble for the GOP this fall. The only question is whether it will take a Santorum win in Wisconsin to refocus Republican minds on the unassailable fact that GOP presidential candidates cannot win unless they have the support of rock-ribbed conservatives. Mitt Romney does not, and that is becoming clearer by the day in this painful primary season

Mandate Will Not Affect Most

The fight over the individual mandate has been so loud that people may think it will hit nearly everyone, whether they can afford health insurance or not.

But what’s usually overlooked is that the health reform law has so many exemptions that millions of Americans are likely to be off the hook, including a wide range of middle-class Americans. Most Americans already have coverage that satisfies the mandate. And for the rest, the law would create rich subsidies that would help pay for coverage, even for families earning more than $90,000 a year.

In fact, the mandate would be most likely to hit about 25 million people when it takes effect in 2014 — many of whom are younger, healthier people who were taking the chance of going without health insurance even though they might have been able to afford it — according to MIT economist Jonathan Gruber. That’s out of 272 million nonelderly people.

The mandate has become a powerful political symbol of the Affordable Care Act — Exhibit A of what the law’s critics call government overreach. And the Supreme Court will decide whether Congress overstepped its constitutional powers. But the volume of the debate is out of proportion to the number of people who would actually be affected.

“I think this is a point that the law’s supporters haven’t emphasized enough: The mandate really applies to a select set of people,” said Gruber, who consulted on both the national law and Mitt Romney’s health care overhaul in Massachusetts, which has its own mandate.

Even Joe Antos of the American Enterprise Institute, a critic of the law, plays down the actual impact of the mandate.

“I would say it would affect nobody,” Antos said. He said Republicans’ dislike of the requirement has much more to do with their opposition to “the federal government telling you to do something that is your personal business” than the fear that the mandate will force millions of people to buy something they don’t want.

The poorest Americans are technically exempt from the mandate. But under the law’s Medicaid expansion, which also begins in 2014, they would get essentially free coverage anyway — because the program would cover people with incomes up to 133 percent of the federal poverty level. That would be about $30,000 for a family of four if the law were in effect this year.

Those with incomes between 133 percent and 400 percent of poverty — between around $30,000 and $92,000 for a family of four this year — will have to get insurance, but the law provides substantial subsidies to help make it more affordable.

Families at the bottom of this range would have to pay only 3 percent to 4 percent of their income in premiums, while those at the top would have to pay 9.5 percent. The federal government picks up the rest of the tab.

But the law recognizes that premiums may still be higher than even higher- income people can afford. So anyone who would have to pay more than 8 percent of their income for health insurance would be exempt from the mandate — and this includes some who earn near 400 percent of poverty and qualify for some subsidies.

That means there would be a large income range where people wouldn’t have to comply with the mandate at all. A recent Kaiser Family Foundation simulation found that, starting at about $61,000 a year, a family of four would be exempt from the mandate. And the mandate wouldn’t kick in again until a family brought home more than $150,000 a year.

There are also exemptions for certain religious groups that object to medical insurance, Native American tribes and undocumented immigrants who are also ineligible for premium subsidies.
The mandate was designed to ensure that people didn’t avoid paying into the health insurance system when they were healthy. The Obama administration and insurers fear that if the mandate is taken away but the requirement that insurers cover everyone who asks for it stays in place, premiums will skyrocket because only sicker, more costly people will enroll in coverage.

But the number of people who will actually be affected is likely to be relatively small, at least compared with the rest of the population. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that 80 percent of the 272 million nonelderly people would be insured in 2014 even without the law. (Elderly people get coverage through Medicare.)

And a recent analysis by Gruber found that about half of the remainder will be exempt from the mandate. That leaves the roughly 25 million people he believes will have to comply.

In Massachusetts, where the concept was pioneered under the law enacted by Romney, Gruber said it was mostly intended to ensure that wealthier, younger and healthier people paid into the system instead of hoping they could get by without coverage. It also encouraged people who had turned down their employers’ insurance to sign up.

Just 1 percent of the state’s residents paid the penalty in 2009, and 70 percent of people who were uninsured that year were exempt from the requirement.

Some experts question whether the mandate is actually strong enough to have more than a modest effect on enrollment because the federal penalty won’t be that costly — at least compared with the cost of health coverage. When it’s fully phased in, the penalty will be $2,085 or 2.5 percent of family income, whichever is greater.

In contrast, the Kaiser Family Foundation notes that a “bronze” plan — the cheapest health plan people will be able to buy in 2016 — is expected to cost $12,000 to $12,500 for families.

SCOTUS Considers Obamacare

The Supreme Court on Tuesday considers the main constitutional question in its review of the nation’s health-care overhaul, whether Congress has the power to require almost all Americans to secure health insurance or pay a penalty.

The justices have scheduled two hours of arguments — twice the normal allotment — to consider the issue. The questions of the limits of government power has animated the nation’s debate over the health-care law, which has been lauded by President Obama, passed by a Democratic Congress in 2010, and roundly denounced by Republican officeholders and the candidates who want to take Obama’s place.

The Obama administration has argued that Congress has the authority to impose what it calls the “minimum coverage provision” under its power to regulate interstate commerce and its call to solve national economic problems. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act requires that most Americans have health insurance by 2014 or pay a penalty on 2015 income tax payments.

The measure set off a blitz of legal challenges, and its opponents at the court are 26 states and a private business group, the National Federation of Independent Businesses. They argue that the government has exceeded its authority.

People who do not buy insurance, they say, are by definition, not engaged in economic activity. And they contend that there is no precedent for empowering Congress to essentially force otherwise inactive people to enter one of the markets that Congress can regulate.

The government counters that because virtually everyone will need health care, a person who chooses to forgo insurance is engaged in economic activity: They are effectively making an economic decision about how they will pay for their eventual health care — either by paying for it out of pocket, or by passing the costs on to hospitals, governments and ultimately other patients.

Congress certainly must have the ability to regulate health-care spending, which accounts for nearly 18 percent of the nation’s economy, the government argues.

“As a class, the uninsured shift tens of billions of dollars of costs for the uncompensated care they receive to other market participants annually,” the government’s brief to the court said. “That cost shifting drives up insurance premiums, which, in turn, makes insurance unaffordable to even more people.”

The government also maintains that the mandate is a necessary component of the law’s new regulations on the insurance market — including its prohibition against insurers discriminating against people with pre-existing health conditions.

Unless virtually everyone is required to obtain insurance, healthy people would have an incentive to take advantage of the new insurance rules by waiting until they are sick to buy insurance. This would skew the risk pool, forcing insurers to either pull out of the market or cover the additional cost by raising their rates to unsustainable heights.

The challengers complain that the government’s logic has no limits. If Congress can use such reasoning to justify compelling people to buy a commercial product, what can’t it do?

Mitt Tries to Break Southern Losing Streak

Mitt Romney and his super PAC are pouring energy, money and manpower into next week’s Alabama and Mississippi primaries, attempting to gain a firmer upper hand over his challengers and perhaps finally clock a victory in a competitive Southern contest.

To win either of those deepest of Deep South locales would be to reverse what has become, for Romney supporters, one of the most dismaying and embarrassing trends of the 2012 primaries: that Romney could become the GOP nominee, but only after being roundly and repeatedly rejected in the party’s geographic core.

Even as his campaign argues that Romney has amassed a decisive delegate lead over his GOP opponents, his weakness across the South remains a glaring deficiency. The only Southern state Romney has taken so far is Virginia, where Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum failed to qualify for the ballot. Everywhere else — from South Carolina in January to Tennessee and Georgia this week — Romney has lost by significant margins, getting routed with voters who call themselves “very conservative” and among the white evangelicals who make up much of the GOP base, according to exit polls.

Team Romney could well counter, “So what?” Both Alabama and Mississippi distribute delegates proportionally and it’s unlikely that either Gingrich or Santorum can make a serious dent in Romney’s delegate lead. In these states, as well as the others Romney has already lost, there’s no doubt that he would win them as the nominee.

Even if the delegate math doesn’t add up, a Santorum win in these states — or the Kansas caucuses this weekend — would further underscore Romney’s problems among conservatives and give the former Pennsylvania senator additional energy as the primary drags onward.

There are plenty of signs that Romney strategists are reluctant to accept that their candidate will never be a Southern kind of guy. Advisers have been eyeing areas where his establishment-businessman profile might have appeal as the super PAC Restore Our Future has softened up both states by pummeling Romney’s opponents on the air.

In other words, they’re doing what it would take to win there — if winning is even an option.

“We’re an underdog. But we are an organized underdog who’s got a base that’s excited here in Mississippi, so we have a shot,” said Austin Barbour, the Mississippi Republican strategist supporting Romney.

Though the March 13 states look like more hospitable terrain for Santorum and Gingrich, Barbour suggested that a full airing of Romney’s record — focused on his electability, private-sector background and fiscal management in Massachusetts — could win over voters in urban and suburban areas, along the Gulf Coast and in the fast-growing Memphis suburbs in the northern part of the state.


“The focus really, throughout this race, has been on all these other states. It hasn’t been on the South,” Barbour said. “We win because we do well on the coast, we do well in the city of Jackson, we do well in pockets of the Jackson suburbs and then we do well in DeSoto County.”

Former Mississippi Sen. Trent Lott, a Romney endorser and fundraiser, said that “even in Mississippi” there was a sense that it’s time for Republicans to begin rallying behind an eventual nominee.

“Inevitability is setting in. … People who have been holding out now for a while are ready to get behind him,” Lott said, suggesting that voters “have seen some of the baggage that Newt and Rick have.”

With women voters in particular, Lott said, “Newt certainly has problems in that area.”

As of Thursday, all three major GOP candidates are set to have a paid-media footprint in Alabama and Mississippi. The pro-Gingrich super PAC Winning Our Future reserved nearly $700,000 in airtime for the two weeks before the primaries and Santorum’s campaign invested about $100,000 in cable TV and radio ads starting Thursday, media-buying sources said.

By far the most imposing presence on the airwaves, in the mail and over the telephone lines, has been Romney, whose super PAC boosted him and pounded Santorum with well over $1 million in TV ads and no fewer than four pieces of campaign mail. The pro-Romney group Restore Our Future has also run automated calls attacking Santorum in both March 13 states. Starting Thursday, the Romney campaign is airing six figures’ worth of ads.

Romney has also earned a host of gold-plated endorsements in both states, including from Lott and Mississippi Sen. Thad Cochran, former Alabama Gov. Bob Riley, and most Alabama and Mississippi statewide Republican officials. That may count for something in states that GOP strategist Chris Henick, a Mississippi native, described as having a “sleepily surprised realization that this presidential primary is upon everybody.”

“Mississippi has always been more of a regimental, establishment state when it comes to presidential politics,” he said. “You would think Romney has that built-in advantage — and he does, in terms of endorsements.”

Still, veteran local politicos say it would take a confluence of lucky events for Romney to win a pair of states that are as conservative and evangelical as they come — and entirely alien from Romney’s brand of New England Republicanism.

“I’d guess Newt would probably win, but it’s going to be close between him and Santorum,” said Clarke Reed, the longtime operative known in Mississippi as the father of the state’s Republican Party. “It’s a strong, evangelical element that we’ve got. I’m kind of one of them, but I’m probably going to vote for Romney.”


Bradley Byrne, a former Alabama state senator who ran for governor in 2010, said flatly: “I don’t think Gov. Romney’s going to be in a position to win Alabama.”

“I think he’ll have a reasonably good showing here, I just don’t think he’ll come in first, nor do I think he’ll come in second,” Byrne said. “Partly, it’s just geographic. He’s not from down here. … Whether this perception is accurate or not, they perceive that he’s not as conservative as we are.”

It remains to be seen just how hard Romney will campaign in the Deep South primaries. He’s due to visit Pascagoula and Jackson, Miss., and Birmingham, Ala. on Thursday and Friday but hasn’t announced a full schedule beyond that. Santorum and Gingrich have committed to participating in a Monday night candidates forum hosted by the Alabama Republican Party; Romney has not.

Gingrich and Santorum, meanwhile, have already started on a whirlwind campaign tour of the March 13 battlefields, explicitly pointing to Tuesday’s votes as a chance for Republicans to send a not-Romney message and force another extension of the primary season.

For Romney to win next week, or to come in second in one or both states, he’ll be counting in part on Gingrich and Santorum to keep the conservative vote divided, with Gingrich leveraging his Southern cultural appeal to peel support from the more politically resilient Santorum.

The consolation prize, in any case, would be a handful of the 90 delegates up for grabs. T.J. Maloney, the executive director of the Alabama Republican Party, said “it’s not unrealistic to think all four candidates” might win some delegates in the contests he described as almost a joint primary.

“Alabama and Mississippi, since we’re going on the same day — geographically, demographically, we’re almost the same state,” he said.

That means the pair of states has the potential to send a strong signal in the Republican primary, one way or another, by swinging to the same candidate on the same night.

And regardless of the outcome, Republicans say that for once, they won’t have to worry about general election fallout from an explosive primary fight.

“It’s a strong social issue state, a heavy Bible Belt state,” Reed said. “And I think they’d accept Romney with pretty much open arms. The hard-core South is — we’re hard-core. We’ll be there regardless.”

Constitutional Delimma on Birth Control

Invoking George Washington’s famous letter to the Jews of Newport, R.I., Rabbi Meir Soloveichik of New York’s Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun, one of the foremost Orthodox rabbis of his generation, told a congressional committee on February 16 that requiring health insurance plans to cover contraception threatened “the liberties of conscience” of fellow Americans and “redefined by bureaucratic fiat” the definition of religion itself. He found it appalling that any religious organization — Catholic or not — should be “obligated to provide employees with an insurance policy that facilitates acts violating the organization’s religious tenets.”

In many ways, it is heartwarming to see an Orthodox rabbi standing up for the religious liberties of his Catholic cousins. Many of us felt ashamed when so many rabbis failed to do this in 2010, when the religious liberty of Muslim Americans was challenged during the controversy over building a mosque near Ground Zero. As a minority group that has fought hard for religious equality, and one that rightly takes pride in having received from Washington himself the assurance that religious liberty is an ”inherent natural right“ that cannot be abridged, we should all feel obliged to testify whenever religious liberties are challenged.

Yet for all that one may sympathize with Catholic institutions coerced into promoting contraceptive services that they consider sinful, Soloveichik’s congressional testimony greatly oversimplifies the religious liberty conundrum confronted by those who oversee national health insurance. The guarantee of religious liberty, after all, applies not only to religious organizations, but also to individual citizens. However much Catholic institutions may invoke religious liberty when they deny those they employ access to contraception, it is critical to remember that from the perspective of those employees, the denial reeks of religious coercion.

The analogy to “forcing kosher delis to sell ham,” put forward by Bishop William Lori, exemplifies the way the problem is misunderstood. In America (unlike in Israel), people have the right to choose whether they want to sell ham and whether they want to consume it; neither option is proscribed. We all might agree that kosher delis should not be coerced into selling ham, but hopefully we would also all agree that a deli’s employees and customers should not be penalized for choosing to consume it.

Similarly, a kosher deli routinely gives its employees a day off on Yom Kippur, a fast day. But the deli would not be within its rights if it provided that benefit to only those employees who fast on Yom Kippur; that would be coercive. Denying insurance claims for contraceptive services represents the same kind of coercion. In First Amendment terms, the contraception issue represents a classic tension between the “no establishment”and “free exercise” clauses of the First Amendment. What Soloveichik understandably sees as a limit upon Catholic institutions’ free exercise of their religion, employees of Catholic institutions see, no less understandably, as an attempt to ”establish“ Catholic doctrine coercively. The Supreme Court generally privileges the ”no establishment“ clause over the ”free exercise“ clause in such cases. It certainly does not ignore ”no establishment“ claims, as Soloveichik does.

Soloveichik, in his testimony, takes particular exception to a distinction that the government has drawn between religious employers who hire only members of their own faith and are permitted to conduct their affairs according to church tenets and religious employers who hire members of multiple faiths and are obligated by the government to accommodate them.

“The administration implicitly assumes,” he charges, “that those who employ or help others of a different religion are no longer acting in a religious capacity and as such are not entitled to the protection of the First Amendment.”

In fact, the government makes no such assumption at all. Instead, it reasonably assumes that employers and employees both have First Amendment rights, including the “no establishment” right not to be religiously coerced. Precisely for this reason, chaplains in the military who certainly act in a religious capacity are prohibited from evangelizing those of other faiths, even when their religion otherwise requires them to do so. Where members of different religions dwell together (even when they do so under religious auspices), securing them all the right to the “free exercise” of their faith is much more conducive to social harmony than allowing employers to impose their faith requirements on their employees coercively.

Is there any way of satisfying both the religious strictures of the church and the religious predilections of its employees? If, as in most western countries, the burden of acquiring health care were placed upon individuals rather than employers being required to provide it, then everyone could choose for himself or herself whether to have a plan with contraceptive benefits. Those with other strong beliefs about health care (such as Christian Scientists) could similarly select plans that accord with their faith. Nobody would be coerced, and everybody could purchase the plan that he or she wants.

Meanwhile, one hopes that Congress will ignore the testimony of Soloveichik. To focus on the religious liberties of employers while overlooking those of their employees, and to focus on only the free exercise clause of the First Amendment while ignoring the dangers of coercive religious establishments, is to pervert what Washington meant when he spoke of “liberty of conscience” and to set back the cause of liberty and justice for all.

Jonathan D. Sarna is the Joseph H. & Belle R. Braun professor of American Jewish history at Brandeis University, and chief historian of the National Museum of American Jewish History. His newest book, “When General Grant Expelled the Jews,” will be published this month by Schocken/Nextbook.