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30 1 Hope Change Fall 2023
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hello and welcome to Our Hope and change
lecture on the Obama presidency we're
almost done with the class so today
we're looking at reapportionment
redistricting and gerrymandering we'll
be looking at the major components of
the ACA which stands for the Affordable
Care Act also known as Obamacare and
we'll be looking at what political Norms
were violated by the Republican
opposition during the Obama
presidency first
up Obama nominated two Republicans for
his cabinet and offered a position to a
third one and no president had appointed
two members of the opposition party to
their cabinet since FDR did it in his
Unity government at the start of World
War II Obama's policy proposals
continued this effort at bipartisanship
working with the GOP that is the
Republican Party one-third of his
stimulus package to counter the Great
Recession was made up of tax cuts that
the GOP had previously supported and his
Healthcare law was modeled on Republican
Governor Mitt Romney's plan in
Massachusetts which was based on the GOP
counter to Clinton's far more liberal
plan back in the90s on foreign policy he
kept W Bush's Secretary of Defense in
place and he honored Bush's status of
forces agreement and the timetable it
set for when to pull American troops out
of Iraq he basically offered a more
liberal version of Clinton's Third Way
or middle path but despite these
attempts at bipartisanship the GOP tried
to block Obama's program Republican
leadership forbade its members in
Congress from even negotiating with
Obama and tried to create the image that
he was the most partisan president ever
GOP Senator vavic concluded if he was
for it we had to be against it the GOP
used unprecedented delays holds and
filibusters to block legislation
filibuster can refer to both taking up a
lot of time and preventing something
from coming to a vote during a session
of Congress or it can mean demanding a
60 uh plus vote in the Senate instead of
the normal 50 plus
one now the Tea Party emerged as a
far-right fiercely conservative wing of
the Republican party but it got its
start back in the 1980s with a group
called citizens for a sound economy the
CSC worked with tobacco companies
against laws regulating secondhand smoke
exposure they argued that an
individual's right to smoke F outweighed
other people's right to not have to
breathe that in in public the csse made
the first tea party website in September
2002 long before Obama's presidency in
2010 in part in response to Obama's
election T party activists won primary
elections and steered the Republican
Party further to the
right now the fight over smoking and
pollution both came back to a basic
Civics disagreement about where one
person's rights end and another begins
and we see on the slide here the
definition of civics a social science
dealing with the rights and duties of
citizens and if we were in an elementary
school classroom the teacher might kind
of Swing her arm and say you know you
have a right to swing your arm but where
does that right end and you might get
close to a student and say it ends when
it butts up against that student's right
to not be hit right so all of our rights
have limits typically when they begin to
harm others now this was also about
where a business say rights ended when
weighed against public health the same
arguments against anti-smoking laws are
used in the climate change debate too
the first is an effort to present the
science as unsettled or controversial
when it isn't and the second is the
Civics argument over where individual or
corporate rights end and where
regulation should begin to protect
others and their rights how much Freedom
should an individual or business have if
the exercise of that freedom harms
others scientists linked smoking with
lung cancer in the early 1950s but
cigarette makers began a media campaign
denying that smoking was harmful or that
nicotine was addictive their 1963
internal memos later showed they knew
quote nicotine is addictive we are then
in the business of selling nicotine an
addictive drug end quote in 1976 major
tobacco companies started operation
Berkshire to protect the industry from
regulation arguing that the science was
unsettled smoking was still legal and
socially acceptable in libraries
classrooms restaurants bars and even on
airplanes in 1994 seven tobacco
Executives testified before Congress
that quote nicotine is not addictive but
a tobacco company lawyer leaked secret
internal memos to the New York Times
proving they knew
otherwise and proving the companies had
known the truth for decades in 1996
Clinton announced that the FDA would
regulate nicotine as a drug and the
industry sued and operation Burkshire
was made public during that lawsuit now
in 2000 then Governor Mike Pence who
would of course go on to be vice
president under President Trump wrote an
oped arguing that smoking doesn't cause
enough harm to Warrant the government
regulation it had received and you see
an excert here on the slide of that
Pence wrote quote despite the hysteria
from the political class and the media
smoking doesn't kill in fact two out of
every three smokers does not die from a
smoking related illness and nine out of
10 smokers do not contract lung cancer
that is not to say that smoking is good
for you new Splash smoking is not good
for you the relevant question is what is
more harmful to the nation secondhand
smoke or backhanded big government
disguised and do good or Health Care
rhetoric so he's arguing there's more
harm in the regulations and how they
expand the power of government than
there is in smoking itself so he uses
statistics to downplay the real harm
caused by smoking both to smokers and
those exposed to secondhand
smoke oil companies used the same
strategy to defend their contributions
to climate change in the 1970s and 80s
experts substantiated anthropogenic or
human caused global warming this was the
scientific consensus former vice
president Al Gore's book and documentary
and Inconvenient Truth helped publicize
this conclusion but conservatives and
energy companies sewed questions in
doubt much like operation Burkshire
years later once climate change became
apparent they argued that the only
measures that should be taken had to be
economically advantageous meaning they
couldn't cost any company's profits or
conversely they argued that there was
nothing that could be done about climate
change and so we just have to live with
it now 2010 was a census year which
happens every 10 years in the United
States and back in 1911 Congress passed
a law capping the size of the US House
of Representatives in 19 19 29 they set
that cap at 435 members so the US House
is capped at 435 members but as it is
based on population and can't get any
bigger than 435 people every year after
a census so the census 2020 we did this
in 2021 and so on Congress goes through
reapportionment they use the new census
numbers to determine how many
representatives each state will get in
the house for the next 10 years so in
April of 2021 based on that 2020 census
Texas North Carolina Florida Oregon
Montana and Colorado each gained one
additional representative in Congress
which also gave them an extra rep in the
Electoral College now if you're going to
add a seat for those States but you
can't change that 435 number you have to
take it away from other
states New York Illinois Ohio
Pennsylvania California Michigan and
West Virginia all lost one seat in
Congress and one one Electoral College
vote in this
reapportionment now once a state knows
how many seats it will get it redraws
the district Maps or re districts the
districts are the areas each
representative in Congress will serve
and Republican victories in the 2010
primaries and state elections when they
had a lot of say in redrawing these
election Maps uh during redistricting so
they drew election Maps favorable to
Republicans so this is called Jerry
mandering now if we look at the
depiction here and I wish it wasn't in
blue and red so just ignore that we've
got team blue with 60% and team red with
40% of popular support so in a fair map
team blue should have about 60% of the
seats in that house and team red should
have about 40% now if team blue wanted
to gerrymander this District or these
districts it could draw these five
districts this way making sure that they
held 60% in each district and they
therefore they would win 100% of the
seats in that house so five blue seats
and no red which is not very fair to
team red who deserves 40% of those seats
now if you were team red even though
you're the minority at 40% you could
still draw a map that would give you the
majority in your house if you draw these
kind of weird districts you can break it
up so that team red will have three safe
seats each election and team blue
despite being the majority will only
have two and that is called Jerry
mandering we can see how Jerry mandering
worked in North Carolina in 2010 in 2010
in North Carolina each party wins
roughly 50% of the vote 50% for
Republicans 48% for Democrats and yet
Republicans win nine of the 13 seats
that they send to the US House in
Pennsylvania Republicans won 54% of the
vote to the Democrats
46% but that gave them
72% of the seats in the US House 13 out
of 18 House
Seats now we can also see this in Texas
where in 2011 Republicans Drew maps to
dilute Black and Hispanic voting power
fearing that those groups would support
Democrats and that's how we get weird
Maps districts like this that stretch
all the way from San Antonio all of this
rural area up into this little sliver of
Austin all right to make sure that that
is a safe Republican District but Black
and Hispanic texts ensued arguing the
maps unfairly boosted voting power and
when the courts ruled that the original
Maps were drawn with discriminatory
intent Texas Republicans argued that the
maps with only minor changes to fix the
most egregious parts of it should be
used instead and that is what happened
now this map is an idea of what Texas
might look like if it was not
gerrymander the 2010 gerrymander ensured
that Republicans gained four new house
seats from Texas in 2016 that they
likely would have lost under Fair Maps
the AP statistical analysis of us house
races in November 2016 found that the
Republicans won 22 seats more than
expected and in the US House that's huge
computer generated maps are one way to
prevent partisan or racial
gerrymandering in gerrymander districts
candidates run further and further from
the center because you don't have to
worry about the other party winning you
only have to compete within your party
and so people tend to get more and more
extreme so Jerry mandering is one factor
among many for the excessive
partisanship we see from the Obama era
forward Additionally the Supreme Court
has been hostile to voting rights since
the 1980s in Shelby County volder 2013
they gutted the Voting Rights Act of
1965 ruling that pre-clearance was
unconstitutional pre-clearance meant
that states with the history of voter
discrimination had to get permission
from the federal government to change
their voter laws and they had to show
that it would not harm minority voters
in in response to Shelby County volder
States especially in the South cut early
voting times and locations and attempted
to pass voter ID laws that further
restricted access to the
ballot in rucho V common cause 2019 the
Supreme Court ruled that courts were
largely powerless to stop partisan Jerry
Manders in 2015 the Supreme Court called
Jerry mandering quote inconsistent with
Democratic principle but they had never
struck down an extreme Jerry Mander
leaving it to State Court to do that but
surprisingly in June of 2023 the Supreme
Court struck down an Alabama gerrymander
and Allan V Michigan ruling the map
violated the Voting Rights Act by
unfairly diluting black voting power so
this is an ongoing fight there's cases
in front of the Supreme Court as I am
recording this in November of
2023 now Obama's biggest achievement was
a national healthc care law the patient
protection and Affordable Care Act the
ACA also known as Obamacare
now Obama's plan moved the Democrats to
the right on Healthcare he abandoned
models of a National Health Care system
like clintons and like many other
nations have and instead he picked up
what had been the conservative model of
regulating and subsidizing private
insurance instead of providing
government insurance similar plans had
been supported by Republicans Richard
Nixon n Gingrich and Mitt Romney but by
2008 the Republicans had also grown more
more conservative on Healthcare they had
moved fur to the right and they no
longer supported their own former plans
which Obama picked up in 2012 the GOP
argued that Healthcare was not a right
and shouldn't be guaranteed by
government that that was a personal
responsibility Obama's healthc care law
involved three different categories for
Americans who already had health
insurance typically through their jobs
it abolished pre-existing conditions as
a cause for denying care so before
Obamacare if you had an injury that
dated back from before you were with
this current insurance company they
could use that as an excuse to deny you
care today so for example when I was 8
years old I broke my right arm I got a
big scar on it right if you've seen me
in person you've probably noticed that
and let's say I develop arthritis in
that arm from when I broke it when I was
eight years old if Obamacare wasn't in
place the insurance company that I have
today could say we don't have to cover
any of the scans or any of the treatment
to do with that arm because you broke it
when you were eight and therefore it's a
pre-existing condition the other thing
Obamacare did for insured people was it
scrapped junk Plans by setting minimum
requirements for health insurance plans
and this addressed the problem of maybe
young people who thought they had decent
health insurance they just didn't use it
a whole lot and then they get a
catastrophic illness or they're in a
terrible car wack and they expect that
insurance plan to cover their health
care only to find out it doesn't cover
just about anything so those plans go
away because we now have a minimum
standard for what healthc care plans
have to require in the United States now
the second group is for people on
Medicaid which you will remember as
lbj's Great Society program that
provides government health insurance for
the very poor now the Affordable Care
Act provides States money funds to
expand the number of people that they
cover in Medicaid so for people in the
third group that still can't afford
their own health insurance but weren't
poor enough for the expanded medicaid
offerings the ACA provided for statun
Health Care exchanges this is kind of
like buying Health Care via Sam's Club
or Costco instead of going as an
individual to a health care company and
saying or an insurance company and
saying I need to buy insurance how much
would it be for me you get all these
uninsured people together and we say
okay we've got 200,000 people who need
this level of coverage what price are
you going going to give us now because
having so many people is going to pull
our buying power it's going to lower
that cost and then the ACA provided
subsidies that is money to make up the
difference between what these people
could pay based on their salary for
insurance and what insurance actually
cost so let's say based on your income
you can reasonbly pay reasonably pay
about $500 for insurance a month but
insurance cost $1,200 a month then the
government would step in and pay the
other 700 to the insurance company to
make sure you are covered under the
state run health
exchanges now finally the Affordable
Care Act required all Americans to have
proof of health insurance or they could
pay a tax penalty and this tax penalty
or the requirement that you have
insurance was called the individual
mandate so we're going to watch a clip
of a news program from the Obama era
roughly 2014 explaining the idual
mandate and how they understood it at
the time so consider this a primary
source from the
era go take a look at what the
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