21 April 2010
University of Maryland Newsdesk
A new study out today from the International Center for Media & the Public Agenda (ICMPA) at the University of Maryland, concludes that most college students are not just unwilling, but functionally unable to be without their media links to the world. "I clearly am addicted and the dependency is sickening," said one person in the study. "I feel like most people these days are in a similar situation, for between having a Blackberry, a laptop, a television, and an iPod, people have become unable to shed their media skin."
The new ICMPA study, "24 Hours: Unplugged," asked 200 students at the College Park campus to give up all media for 24 hours. After their 24 hours of abstinence, the students were then asked to blog on private class websites about their experiences: to report their successes and admit to any failures. The 200 students wrote more than 110,000 words: in aggregate, about the same number of words as a 400-page novel.
WITHOUT DIGITAL TIES, STUDENTS FEEL UNCONNECTED EVEN TO THOSE WHO ARE CLOSE BY
"We were surprised by how many students admitted that they were 'incredibly addicted' to media," noted the project director Susan D. Moeller, a journalism professor at the University of Maryland and the director of the International Center for Media and the Public Agenda which conducted the study. "But we noticed that what they wrote at length about was how they hated losing their personal connections. Going without media meant, in their world, going without their friends and family."
"The students did complain about how boring it was go anywhere and do anything without being plugged into music on their MP3 players," said Moeller. "And many commented that it was almost impossible to avoid the TVs on in the background at all times in their friends' rooms. But what they spoke about in the strongest terms was how their lack of access to text messaging, phone calling, instant messaging, email and Facebook, meant that they couldn't connect with friends who lived close by, much less those far away."
"Texting and IM-ing my friends gives me a constant feeling of comfort," wrote one student. "When I did not have those two luxuries, I felt quite alone and secluded from my life. Although I go to a school with thousands of students, the fact that I was not able to communicate with anyone via technology was almost unbearable."
The student responses to the assignment showed not just that 18-21 year old college students are constantly texting and on Facebook -- with calling and email distant seconds as ways of staying in touch, especially with friends -- but that students' lives are wired together in such ways that opting out of that communication pattern would be tantamount to renouncing a social life.
NEWS: ACCESSED VIA CONNECTIONS WITH FRIENDS & FAMILY
Very few students in the study reported that they regularly watched news on television or read a local or national newspaper (although a few said they regularly read The Diamondback, the University of Maryland student newspaper). They also didn't mention checking mainstream media news sites or listening to radio news while commuting in their cars. Yet student after student demonstrated knowledge of specific news stories. How did they get the information? In a disaggregated way, and not typically from the news outlet that broke or committed resources to a story. "To be entirely honest I am glad I failed the assignment," wrote one student, "because if I hadn't opened my computer when I did I would not have known about the violent earthquake in Chile from an informal blog post on Tumblr."
"Students expressed tremendous anxiety about being cut-off from information," observed Ph.D. student Raymond McCaffrey, a former writer and editor at The Washington Post, and a current researcher on the study. "One student said he realized that he suddenly 'had less information than everyone else, whether it be news, class information, scores, or what happened on Family Guy."
"They care about what is going on among their friends and families and even in the world at large," said McCaffrey. " But most of all they care about being cut off from that instantaneous flow of information that comes from all sides and does not seemed tied to any single device or application or news outlet."
That's the real takeaway of this study for journalists: students showed no significant loyalty to a news program, news personality or even news platform. Students have only a casual relationship to the originators of news, and in fact rarely distinguished between news and more general information.
While many in the journalism profession are committing significant resources to deliver content across media platforms --print, broadcast, online, mobile -- the young adults in this study appeared to be generally oblivious to branded news and information. For most of the students reporting in the study, information of all kinds comes in an undifferentiated wave to them via social media. If a bit of information rises to a level of interest, the student will pursue it -- but often by following the story via "unconventional" outlets, such as through text messages, their email accounts, Facebook and Twitter.
Students said that only the most specific or significant news events -- for example, a medal event at the Olympics -- merited their tuning into to a mainstream outlet. Even news events that students cared about were often accessed via their personal interactions. To learn about the Maryland vs. Virginia Tech basketball game, for example, one student told of "listening to someone narrate the game from a conversation they were having on their own phone" (although he would have preferred watching it on TV) and another student told of calling her father to learn more about the earthquake in Chile.
STUDY BACKGROUND:
The University of Maryland is a large state university campus, and the class, JOUR 175: Media Literacy, that undertook this 24-hour media-free assignment, is a "core course" for the entire student body -- which means it enrolls undergraduate students across majors. It is, in short, a class of 200 students, characterized by a diversity of age, race, ethnicity, religion and nationality. According to the assignment, students had to go media-free for a full day (or had to try to go media-free), but they were allowed to pick which 24 hours in a nine-day period, from February 24-March 4. By coincidence that period saw several major news events, including the earthquake in Chile on February 27, and the close of the Vancouver Olympics on February 28.
According to separately obtained demographic data on the student class, 75.6 percent of the students in JOUR 175 self-identify as Caucasian/White, 9.4 percent as Black, 6.3 percent as Asian, 1.6 percent as Latino, 3.1 percent as Mixed Race and 3.9 percent as Other. Students who self-reported themselves as non-American, said they were from China, South Korea, Sri Lanka and Ethiopia. Women outnumbered men, 55.9 percent to 44.1 percent.
44.1 percent of the class reported that their parents or guardians earned over $100,000 or more; 28.3 percent reported that their parents or guardians earned between $75-$100,000; 22 percent reported coming from a household with an income between $50-75,000; and 5.5 percent reported that their families' income was between $25-50,000.
40.9 percent of the students who responded to the demographic survey reported that they were first-year students, 40.9 percent reported that they were sophomores, 11 percent reported that they were juniors, and 7.1 reported that they were seniors or beyond. Most students reported their ages as between 18-21; the average class age was 19.5.
When asked about what types of media devices they own, 43.3 percent of the students reported that they had a "smart phone" (i.e. a Blackberry or an iPhone), and 56.7 percent said they did not.
Prof. Susan Moeller led the study research team, and the six teaching assistants for the course acted as researchers/authors, conducting a qualitative content analysis of the student responses. Those six TAs, all PhD students in the Philip Merrill College of Journalism, were: Ms. EunRyung Chong, Mr. Sergei Golitsinski, Ms. Jing Guo, Mr. Raymond McCaffrey, Mr. Andrew Nynka and Ms. Jessica Roberts.
Friday, April 23, 2010
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
About Twain
There is a famous picture of Mark Twain on the deck of a ship, looking at the water, contemplating, looking dapper in his cap. I wish I had been on that ship with him as he returned from Bermuda shortly before he died on April 21, 1910. I would have been privileged to hear his final remarks on life. Twain’s increasingly dark view of humanity would have reached the tipping point with the Guns of August. The butchery of World War I would have destroyed what little faith he had left in humanity. He lived to the return of Haley’s Comet and no more. Perhaps he hit it just right.
Monday, April 19, 2010
The Real Tea Party
The Populism of the Privileged
Tea Partiers don't represent "Real America" after all.
E.J. Dionne Jr.
WASHINGTON -- The tea party is nothing new, it represents a relatively small minority of Americans on the right end of politics, and it will not determine the outcome of the 2010 elections.
In fact, both parties stand to lose if they accept the laughable notion that this media-created protest movement is the voice of true populism. Democrats will spend their time chasing votes they will never win. Republicans will turn their party into an angry and narrow redoubt with no hope of building a durable majority.
The news media's incessant focus on the tea party is creating a badly distorted picture of what most Americans think and warping our policy debates. The New York Times and CBS News thus performed a public service last week by conducting a careful study of just who is in the tea party movement.
Their findings suggest that the tea party is essentially the reappearance of an old anti-government far right that has always been with us and accounts for about one-fifth of the country. The Times reported that tea party supporters "tend to be Republican, white, male, married and older than 45." This is the populism of the privileged.
Tea party backers are far more likely than others to describe their views as "very conservative," and are decidedly more inclined than the rest of us to believe that too much is made of the problems facing black people.
This last finding points to a disconcerting fact that white Americans are reluctant to discuss: Part of the anger at President Obama is driven by the color of his skin.
Saying this invites immediate denunciations from defenders of those who bring guns to rallies, threaten violence to "take our country back" and mouth old slogans about states' rights and the Confederacy. So let's be clear: Opposition to the president is driven by many factors that have nothing to do with race. But race is definitely part of what's going on.
Here is the poll question in its entirety: "In recent years, do you think too much has been made of the problems facing black people, too little has been made, or is it about right?"
Twenty-eight percent of all Americans -- and just 19 percent of those who are not tea party loyalists -- answered "too much." But among tea party supporters, the figure is 52 percent. Tea partiers are almost three times as likely as the rest of us to say that too much attention is being paid to the problems of blacks.
Among all Americans, 11 percent say that the Obama administration's policies favor blacks over whites; 25 percent of tea party sympathizers say this. Again, more is going on here than race, but race is in the picture.
Tea party enthusiasts also consistently side with the better-off against the poor, putting them at odds with most Americans. The poll found that while only 38 percent of all Americans said that "providing government benefits to poor people encourages them to remain poor," 73 percent of tea party partisans believed this. Among all Americans, 50 percent agreed that "the federal government should spend money to create jobs, even if it means increasing the budget deficit." Only 17 percent of tea party supporters took this view.
As for raising taxes on households making more than $250,000 a year to provide health care for the uninsured, 54 percent of Americans favored doing so, as against only 17 percent of tea party backers.
And this must be the first "populist" movement ever driven by a television network: 63 percent of the tea party folks say they most watch Fox News "for information about politics and current events," compared with 23 percent of the country as a whole.
The right-wing fifth of the American population deserves news coverage like everyone else, and Fox is perfectly free to pander to its own viewers. What makes no sense is allowing a sliver of opinion out of touch with, yes, the "real" America to dominate the media and distort our political discourse.
Democrats face problems not from right-wingers who have never voted for them, but from a lack of energy among their own supporters and from dispirited independents and moderates who look to government for competence in solving problems and have little confidence in its ability to deliver.
A just-released Pew Research Center study found widespread mistrust of government, but also of banks, financial institutions and large corporations. Yes, there is authentic populist anger out there. But you won't find much of it at the tea parties.
Tea Partiers don't represent "Real America" after all.
E.J. Dionne Jr.
WASHINGTON -- The tea party is nothing new, it represents a relatively small minority of Americans on the right end of politics, and it will not determine the outcome of the 2010 elections.
In fact, both parties stand to lose if they accept the laughable notion that this media-created protest movement is the voice of true populism. Democrats will spend their time chasing votes they will never win. Republicans will turn their party into an angry and narrow redoubt with no hope of building a durable majority.
The news media's incessant focus on the tea party is creating a badly distorted picture of what most Americans think and warping our policy debates. The New York Times and CBS News thus performed a public service last week by conducting a careful study of just who is in the tea party movement.
Their findings suggest that the tea party is essentially the reappearance of an old anti-government far right that has always been with us and accounts for about one-fifth of the country. The Times reported that tea party supporters "tend to be Republican, white, male, married and older than 45." This is the populism of the privileged.
Tea party backers are far more likely than others to describe their views as "very conservative," and are decidedly more inclined than the rest of us to believe that too much is made of the problems facing black people.
This last finding points to a disconcerting fact that white Americans are reluctant to discuss: Part of the anger at President Obama is driven by the color of his skin.
Saying this invites immediate denunciations from defenders of those who bring guns to rallies, threaten violence to "take our country back" and mouth old slogans about states' rights and the Confederacy. So let's be clear: Opposition to the president is driven by many factors that have nothing to do with race. But race is definitely part of what's going on.
Here is the poll question in its entirety: "In recent years, do you think too much has been made of the problems facing black people, too little has been made, or is it about right?"
Twenty-eight percent of all Americans -- and just 19 percent of those who are not tea party loyalists -- answered "too much." But among tea party supporters, the figure is 52 percent. Tea partiers are almost three times as likely as the rest of us to say that too much attention is being paid to the problems of blacks.
Among all Americans, 11 percent say that the Obama administration's policies favor blacks over whites; 25 percent of tea party sympathizers say this. Again, more is going on here than race, but race is in the picture.
Tea party enthusiasts also consistently side with the better-off against the poor, putting them at odds with most Americans. The poll found that while only 38 percent of all Americans said that "providing government benefits to poor people encourages them to remain poor," 73 percent of tea party partisans believed this. Among all Americans, 50 percent agreed that "the federal government should spend money to create jobs, even if it means increasing the budget deficit." Only 17 percent of tea party supporters took this view.
As for raising taxes on households making more than $250,000 a year to provide health care for the uninsured, 54 percent of Americans favored doing so, as against only 17 percent of tea party backers.
And this must be the first "populist" movement ever driven by a television network: 63 percent of the tea party folks say they most watch Fox News "for information about politics and current events," compared with 23 percent of the country as a whole.
The right-wing fifth of the American population deserves news coverage like everyone else, and Fox is perfectly free to pander to its own viewers. What makes no sense is allowing a sliver of opinion out of touch with, yes, the "real" America to dominate the media and distort our political discourse.
Democrats face problems not from right-wingers who have never voted for them, but from a lack of energy among their own supporters and from dispirited independents and moderates who look to government for competence in solving problems and have little confidence in its ability to deliver.
A just-released Pew Research Center study found widespread mistrust of government, but also of banks, financial institutions and large corporations. Yes, there is authentic populist anger out there. But you won't find much of it at the tea parties.
Wednesday, April 14, 2010
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The prose is as lyrical and beautiful as any I have read. No other writer's words dance and chime as sweetly as those of Marquez.
The novel traces seven generations of the Buendia family in the town of Macondo. It is about how time is circuitous and repetitious and is as destructive as it is sublime. It is about how progress is deleterious and how it reshapes the past as much as it fosters nostalgia.
What impresses is that with as many characters as there are and with so much happening - over an entire century - Marquez weaves it all together with such fluidity. We often segment time; here, time is singular and free-flowing.
The novel is funny. For instance, at the end, Macondo is so dilapidated and forsaken by almost everyone that when someone leaves town on a train, he must signal the conductor to stop to pick him up. Or, as an example of magical realism (which I like), when some folks are staying at the Buendia house towards the end, they are unable to sleep because of the traffic of ghosts traipsing about.
The novel traces seven generations of the Buendia family in the town of Macondo. It is about how time is circuitous and repetitious and is as destructive as it is sublime. It is about how progress is deleterious and how it reshapes the past as much as it fosters nostalgia.
What impresses is that with as many characters as there are and with so much happening - over an entire century - Marquez weaves it all together with such fluidity. We often segment time; here, time is singular and free-flowing.
The novel is funny. For instance, at the end, Macondo is so dilapidated and forsaken by almost everyone that when someone leaves town on a train, he must signal the conductor to stop to pick him up. Or, as an example of magical realism (which I like), when some folks are staying at the Buendia house towards the end, they are unable to sleep because of the traffic of ghosts traipsing about.
Sunday, April 11, 2010
The Civil War Never Ends for the NeoConfederate South
By JON MEACHAM
Published: April 10, 2010
IN 1956, nearly a century after Fort Sumter, Robert Penn Warren went on assignment for Life magazine, traveling throughout the South after the Supreme Court’s school desegregation decisions. Racism was thick, hope thin. Progress, Warren reported, was going to take a while — a long while. “History, like nature, knows no jumps,” he wrote.
Last week, Virginia’s governor, Robert McDonnell, jumped backward when he issued a proclamation recognizing April as Confederate History Month. In it he celebrated those “who fought for their homes and communities and Commonwealth” and wrote of the importance of understanding “the sacrifices of the Confederate leaders, soldiers and citizens during the period of the Civil War.”
The governor originally chose not to mention slavery in the proclamation, saying he “focused on the ones I thought were most significant for Virginia.” It seems to follow that, at least for Mr. McDonnell, the plight of Virginia’s slaves does not rank among the most significant aspects of the war.
Advertently or not, Mr. McDonnell is working in a long and dispiriting tradition. Efforts to rehabilitate the Southern rebellion frequently come at moments of racial and social stress, and it is revealing that Virginia’s neo-Confederates are refighting the Civil War in 2010. Whitewashing the war is one way for the right — alienated, anxious and angry about the president, health care reform and all manner of threats, mostly imaginary — to express its unease with the Age of Obama, disguising hate as heritage.
If neo-Confederates are interested in history, let’s talk history. Since Lee surrendered at Appomattox, Confederate symbols have tended to be more about white resistance to black advances than about commemoration. In the 1880s and 1890s, after fighting Reconstruction with terrorism and after the Supreme Court struck down the 1875 Civil Rights Act, states began to legalize segregation. For white supremacists, iconography of the “Lost Cause” was central to their fight; Mississippi even grafted the Confederate battle emblem onto its state flag.
But after the Supreme Court allowed segregation in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, Jim Crow was basically secure. There was less need to rally the troops, and Confederate imagery became associated with the most extreme of the extreme: the Ku Klux Klan.
In the aftermath of World War II, however, the rebel flag and other Confederate symbolism resurfaced as the civil rights movement spread. In 1948, supporters of Strom Thurmond’s pro-segregation Dixiecrat ticket waved the battle flag at campaign stops.
Then came the school-integration rulings of the 1950s. Georgia changed its flag to include the battle emblem in 1956, and South Carolina hoisted the colors over its Capitol in 1962 as part of its centennial celebrations of the war.
As the sesquicentennial of Fort Sumter approaches in 2011, the enduring problem for neo-Confederates endures: anyone who seeks an Edenic Southern past in which the war was principally about states’ rights and not slavery is searching in vain, for the Confederacy and slavery are inextricably and forever linked.
That has not, however, stopped Lost Causers who supported Mr. McDonnell’s proclamation from trying to recast the war in more respectable terms. They would like what Lincoln called our “fiery trial” to be seen in a political, not a moral, light. If the slaves are erased from the picture, then what took place between Sumter and Appomattox is not about the fate of human chattel, or a battle between good and evil. It is, instead, more of an ancestral skirmish in the Reagan revolution, a contest between big and small government.
We cannot allow the story of the emancipation of a people and the expiation of America’s original sin to become fodder for conservative politicians playing to their right-wing base. That, to say the very least, is a jump backward we do not need.
Published: April 10, 2010
IN 1956, nearly a century after Fort Sumter, Robert Penn Warren went on assignment for Life magazine, traveling throughout the South after the Supreme Court’s school desegregation decisions. Racism was thick, hope thin. Progress, Warren reported, was going to take a while — a long while. “History, like nature, knows no jumps,” he wrote.
Last week, Virginia’s governor, Robert McDonnell, jumped backward when he issued a proclamation recognizing April as Confederate History Month. In it he celebrated those “who fought for their homes and communities and Commonwealth” and wrote of the importance of understanding “the sacrifices of the Confederate leaders, soldiers and citizens during the period of the Civil War.”
The governor originally chose not to mention slavery in the proclamation, saying he “focused on the ones I thought were most significant for Virginia.” It seems to follow that, at least for Mr. McDonnell, the plight of Virginia’s slaves does not rank among the most significant aspects of the war.
Advertently or not, Mr. McDonnell is working in a long and dispiriting tradition. Efforts to rehabilitate the Southern rebellion frequently come at moments of racial and social stress, and it is revealing that Virginia’s neo-Confederates are refighting the Civil War in 2010. Whitewashing the war is one way for the right — alienated, anxious and angry about the president, health care reform and all manner of threats, mostly imaginary — to express its unease with the Age of Obama, disguising hate as heritage.
If neo-Confederates are interested in history, let’s talk history. Since Lee surrendered at Appomattox, Confederate symbols have tended to be more about white resistance to black advances than about commemoration. In the 1880s and 1890s, after fighting Reconstruction with terrorism and after the Supreme Court struck down the 1875 Civil Rights Act, states began to legalize segregation. For white supremacists, iconography of the “Lost Cause” was central to their fight; Mississippi even grafted the Confederate battle emblem onto its state flag.
But after the Supreme Court allowed segregation in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, Jim Crow was basically secure. There was less need to rally the troops, and Confederate imagery became associated with the most extreme of the extreme: the Ku Klux Klan.
In the aftermath of World War II, however, the rebel flag and other Confederate symbolism resurfaced as the civil rights movement spread. In 1948, supporters of Strom Thurmond’s pro-segregation Dixiecrat ticket waved the battle flag at campaign stops.
Then came the school-integration rulings of the 1950s. Georgia changed its flag to include the battle emblem in 1956, and South Carolina hoisted the colors over its Capitol in 1962 as part of its centennial celebrations of the war.
As the sesquicentennial of Fort Sumter approaches in 2011, the enduring problem for neo-Confederates endures: anyone who seeks an Edenic Southern past in which the war was principally about states’ rights and not slavery is searching in vain, for the Confederacy and slavery are inextricably and forever linked.
That has not, however, stopped Lost Causers who supported Mr. McDonnell’s proclamation from trying to recast the war in more respectable terms. They would like what Lincoln called our “fiery trial” to be seen in a political, not a moral, light. If the slaves are erased from the picture, then what took place between Sumter and Appomattox is not about the fate of human chattel, or a battle between good and evil. It is, instead, more of an ancestral skirmish in the Reagan revolution, a contest between big and small government.
We cannot allow the story of the emancipation of a people and the expiation of America’s original sin to become fodder for conservative politicians playing to their right-wing base. That, to say the very least, is a jump backward we do not need.
Wednesday, April 7, 2010
Historian Garry Wills on President Obama
Obama’s strategy everywhere before entering the White House was one of omnidirectional placation. It had always worked. Why should he abandon, at this point, a method of such proved effectiveness? Yet success at winning acceptance may not be what is called for in a leader moving through a time of peril. To disarm fears of change (the first African-American presidency is, in itself, a big jolt of change), Obama has stressed continuity. Though he first became known as a critic of the war in Iraq, he has kept aspects or offshoots of Bush’s war on terror — possible future “renditions” (kidnappings on foreign soil), trials of suspected terrorists in military tribunals, no investigations of torture, an expanded Afghan commitment, though he promised to avoid “a dumb war.” He appointed as his vice president and secretary of state people who voted for the Iraq war, and as secretary of defense and presiding generals people who conducted or defended that war.
To cope with the financial crisis, he turned to Messrs. Geithner, Summers and Bernanke, who were involved in fomenting the crisis. To launch reform of medical care, he huddled with the American Medical Association, big pharmaceutical companies and insurance firms, and announced that his effort had their backing (the best position to be in for stabbing purposes, which they did month after month). All these things speak to Obama’s concern with continuity and placation. But continuity easily turns into inertia, as we found when Obama wasted the first year of his term, the optimum time for getting things done. He may have drunk his own Kool-Aid — believing that his election could of itself usher in a post-racial, post-partisan, post-red-state and blue-state era. That is a change no one should ever have believed in. The price of winningness can be losing; and that, in this scary time, is enough to break the heart of hope.
To cope with the financial crisis, he turned to Messrs. Geithner, Summers and Bernanke, who were involved in fomenting the crisis. To launch reform of medical care, he huddled with the American Medical Association, big pharmaceutical companies and insurance firms, and announced that his effort had their backing (the best position to be in for stabbing purposes, which they did month after month). All these things speak to Obama’s concern with continuity and placation. But continuity easily turns into inertia, as we found when Obama wasted the first year of his term, the optimum time for getting things done. He may have drunk his own Kool-Aid — believing that his election could of itself usher in a post-racial, post-partisan, post-red-state and blue-state era. That is a change no one should ever have believed in. The price of winningness can be losing; and that, in this scary time, is enough to break the heart of hope.
Saturday, April 3, 2010
Why States Rights Will Lose Again
This from 2 state Attorney Generals (of Ohio & Iowa)
Why we won't file states' rights suits By RICHARD CORDRAY & TOM MILLER
Richard Cordray and Tom Miller say they have no legal reason to challenge the new health reform law.
The new health care reform law has already become the target of multiple lawsuits, including many filed by public parties.
Some are arguing that the new law is unconstitutional because Congress lacks authority to address the health care issue by mandating coverage and that people have a right to refuse to buy health insurance. Others see it as an affront to their basic freedoms.
As attorneys general for our respective heartland states, we take issue with the constitutional arguments being made against this new legislation. Under long-settled Supreme Court precedents, Congress has ample power under the commerce clause of the Constitution to legislate on health care.
Congress has the authority to regulate anything that affects interstate commerce “among the several States.” This is bolstered by the supremacy clause, which explicitly makes the Constitution and the laws of the United States “the supreme Law of the Land” for all Americans.
For Congress to have the power to pass this legislation, therefore, the health care problem need only affect interstate commerce. It clearly does.
Health care now accounts for one-sixth of our gross domestic product. The costs of health insurance pose fundamental economic challenges to the competitiveness of our American common market.
We need only look at the existing Medicaid and Medicare programs to see that this issue is national in scope. If the commerce clause authorizes Congress to prohibit the cultivation of marijuana for personal medical use because it has economic effects, as the Supreme Court ruled in Gonzales v. Raich, then surely it authorizes Congress to regulate health care.
But critics contend that the federal government lacks the power to address this problem.
Why?
Are they telling us that only state governments can address it? Or that nobody can? If the argument is that nobody can, experience shows this is wrong.
The “individual mandate” now drawing so much attention mimics a law already on the books in Massachusetts — a law broadly accepted and never invalidated by the courts.
And there is a good reason for that requirement. When an uninsured person ends up in an emergency room needing urgent and expensive treatment, someone has to pay for it — through either higher premiums or higher taxes — and “we” are that someone.
By RICHARD CORDRAY & TOM MILLER | 4/2/10 3:00 PM EDT Text Size- + reset
Richard Cordray and Tom Miller say they have no legal reason to challenge the new health reform law.
AP photo composite by POLITICO
That is also why state laws require many millions of Americans to have car insurance — a few irresponsible citizens should not be allowed to heap the costs of their behavior on the rest of us.
For those who contend that the states alone can address these kinds of insurance problems, their logic condemns us, forever, to an unsatisfactory “patchwork quilt” of conflicting provisions and mixed results.
Yet this is why our Founding Fathers rejected the anemic Articles of Confederation as inadequate and authorized Congress to legislate on matters of interstate commerce — and then made the laws supreme, despite any state laws to the contrary.
Nobody can seriously argue that the health care industry operates only in “intrastate” commerce and that the mandate provisions in this bill cannot be effectively disentangled from the comprehensive economic approach that Congress adopted to fix the deep flaws in our current health insurance system.
We live under mandates every day. Without them, society as we know it would disintegrate. Every criminal law tells us what we cannot do.
And sometimes the law tells us what we must do. Congress can require young Americans to register for the draft to serve in the military, for example, or can require us all to pay taxes for programs like Social Security and Medicare.
We can — and do — argue about what shape these laws should take, without claiming that our leaders are constitutionally barred from dealing with our most pressing problems.
Instead of pursuing lawsuits, we should work to find ways to improve the lives of the American people and protect our four most fundamental freedoms: of speech, of religion, from want and from fear.
As President Franklin D. Roosevelt told us in articulating these freedoms, this is “no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation.”
We are still striving to shape that new world.
Richard Cordray is the attorney general of Ohio, and Tom Miller is the attorney general of Iowa.
Why we won't file states' rights suits By RICHARD CORDRAY & TOM MILLER
Richard Cordray and Tom Miller say they have no legal reason to challenge the new health reform law.
The new health care reform law has already become the target of multiple lawsuits, including many filed by public parties.
Some are arguing that the new law is unconstitutional because Congress lacks authority to address the health care issue by mandating coverage and that people have a right to refuse to buy health insurance. Others see it as an affront to their basic freedoms.
As attorneys general for our respective heartland states, we take issue with the constitutional arguments being made against this new legislation. Under long-settled Supreme Court precedents, Congress has ample power under the commerce clause of the Constitution to legislate on health care.
Congress has the authority to regulate anything that affects interstate commerce “among the several States.” This is bolstered by the supremacy clause, which explicitly makes the Constitution and the laws of the United States “the supreme Law of the Land” for all Americans.
For Congress to have the power to pass this legislation, therefore, the health care problem need only affect interstate commerce. It clearly does.
Health care now accounts for one-sixth of our gross domestic product. The costs of health insurance pose fundamental economic challenges to the competitiveness of our American common market.
We need only look at the existing Medicaid and Medicare programs to see that this issue is national in scope. If the commerce clause authorizes Congress to prohibit the cultivation of marijuana for personal medical use because it has economic effects, as the Supreme Court ruled in Gonzales v. Raich, then surely it authorizes Congress to regulate health care.
But critics contend that the federal government lacks the power to address this problem.
Why?
Are they telling us that only state governments can address it? Or that nobody can? If the argument is that nobody can, experience shows this is wrong.
The “individual mandate” now drawing so much attention mimics a law already on the books in Massachusetts — a law broadly accepted and never invalidated by the courts.
And there is a good reason for that requirement. When an uninsured person ends up in an emergency room needing urgent and expensive treatment, someone has to pay for it — through either higher premiums or higher taxes — and “we” are that someone.
By RICHARD CORDRAY & TOM MILLER | 4/2/10 3:00 PM EDT Text Size- + reset
Richard Cordray and Tom Miller say they have no legal reason to challenge the new health reform law.
AP photo composite by POLITICO
That is also why state laws require many millions of Americans to have car insurance — a few irresponsible citizens should not be allowed to heap the costs of their behavior on the rest of us.
For those who contend that the states alone can address these kinds of insurance problems, their logic condemns us, forever, to an unsatisfactory “patchwork quilt” of conflicting provisions and mixed results.
Yet this is why our Founding Fathers rejected the anemic Articles of Confederation as inadequate and authorized Congress to legislate on matters of interstate commerce — and then made the laws supreme, despite any state laws to the contrary.
Nobody can seriously argue that the health care industry operates only in “intrastate” commerce and that the mandate provisions in this bill cannot be effectively disentangled from the comprehensive economic approach that Congress adopted to fix the deep flaws in our current health insurance system.
We live under mandates every day. Without them, society as we know it would disintegrate. Every criminal law tells us what we cannot do.
And sometimes the law tells us what we must do. Congress can require young Americans to register for the draft to serve in the military, for example, or can require us all to pay taxes for programs like Social Security and Medicare.
We can — and do — argue about what shape these laws should take, without claiming that our leaders are constitutionally barred from dealing with our most pressing problems.
Instead of pursuing lawsuits, we should work to find ways to improve the lives of the American people and protect our four most fundamental freedoms: of speech, of religion, from want and from fear.
As President Franklin D. Roosevelt told us in articulating these freedoms, this is “no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation.”
We are still striving to shape that new world.
Richard Cordray is the attorney general of Ohio, and Tom Miller is the attorney general of Iowa.
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