How The Media Invented The Latest Obamacare Controversy

By Igor Volsky and Sy Mukherjee/Think Progress

After a Politico article on Wednesday evening suggested that Congress is plotting to “exempt” itself from enrolling in the Affordable Care Act’s health care exchanges, other media outlets quickly began using the piece to accuse Democrats of trying to avoid complying with the law. But a close reading of the original Republican amendment behind the uproar reveals that the controversy has more to do with politics than the merits of the health legislation.

The provision, initially authored by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), requires Congressional employees, including lawmakers and some of their aides, to drop their existing health care coverage in the Federal Health Benefits Program (FEHB) and enroll in the insurance exchanges at the core of the health law by 2014.

“My interest in having Members of Congress participate in the exchange is consistent with my long-held view that Congress should live under the same laws it passes for the rest of the country,” Grassley said in a press release at the time, hoping to force Democrats to take a vote of “no confidence” in their own law. But that’s not what happened. Democrats, led by Sen. Chuck Schumer (NY), called Grassley’s bluff and included his amendment in the final Senate bill that eventually passed.

The measure ended up on page 157 of the final law, but did not specifically mention the role of the employer contribution, leading regulators to raise concerns that the language could prohibit the federal government from contributing to the insurance costs of Congressional employees and leave poorly-paid aides responsible for the full cost of coverage. The Office of Personnel Management is currently deciding the matter, though Republican staffers told Politico that lawmakers are in negotiations to change the amendment and alter Grassley’s requirement.

But Politico’s implication that Democrats are trying to exempt themselves from the Affordable Care Act, while mandating millions of Americans to enroll in expensive coverage through the exchanges, falls apart upon examination of the original Grassley amendment, available on the Senate Finance Committee website. The measure may have been a political ploy to embarrass Democrats, but it does not seek to treat Congressional aides as unemployed and uninsured individuals who would have to (comparatively) pay more for insurance than they currently do. Rather, the measure clearly stipulates that Congressional employees “use their employer contribution” to buy insurance through the exchange:

The author of the provision and all of the lawmakers who ultimately voted for it always intended for the federal government to continue subsidizing coverage for their staff (Grassley introduced another amendment to cover more staffers in 2011, which also included the “employer contribution” portion) and Democrats fully expect OPM to issue regulations consistant with the intent of the law. “Senator Reid is committed to ensuring that all members of Congress and Congressional staff experience the benefits of the Affordable Care Act inexactly the same way as every other American,” spokesman Adam Jentelson said in a statement. “He believes that this is the effect of the legislation as written, and that therefore no legislative fix is necessary.”

Unfortunately, conservative critics and some in the press are so eager to report on the alleged failure of the Affordable Care Act, they’d exploit a fairly mundane and technical question into sensationalistic story about Congressional hypocrisy.

Did A Top GOP Staffer For Sen. Grassley Cover Up Evidence Of News Corp Hacking In The U.S.?

By Lee Fang/Think Progress

A News Corp. whistleblower allegedly gave sensitive documents to Grassley's Senate Finance investigator Nick Podsiadly in 2006. Above, Podisadly addresses a conference.

A top investigator for the Senate Finance Committee, working under Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), may have had smoking gun evidence of News Corp’s hacking activity. While News Corp’s British subsidiaries have received the most media attention for systematically hacking the cell phone and personal records of private citizens, the public still has heard little of allegations relating to similar conduct perpetrated by News Corp against its American competitors. ThinkProgress has learned that not only did a sensitive tip come to Grassley’s office about News Corp’s cyber attacks against other American companies, but authorities may have failed to look into the matter partially because a staffer named Nick Podsiadly allegedly never followed through on his promise to the whistleblower.

In December 2006, Robert Emmel, an account executive in News Corp’s profitable marketing division called News America Marketing, mailed Grassley’s office a 58-page document detailing News Corp’s unfair business practices. News America Marketing had won incredibly lucrative contracts away from a New Jersey-based firm called Floorgraphics not too long after Floorgraphics caught someone with a News Corp I.P. address illegally accessing password-protected information on the company’s computer system. As critics have pointed out, the alleged hacking attempts by News America Marketing seem to mirror information-stealing tactics used by News Corp’s British newspapers, including the now-defunct News of the World tabloid.

In 2006, Grassley was chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, and Emmel had gone to the committee looking for help. According to court filings, Grassley investigative staffer Nick Podsiadly had spoken with Emmel and told him that the committee would consider its own inquiry into the matter or he would refer the documents to the Justice Department. Podsiadly was Emmel’s best hope. After he submitted the sensitive information about his employer to the Senate Finance Committee, Emmel signed a non-disclosure agreement with News Corp, and was dismissed from the company the following month. News Corp unleashed a slew oflawyers against Emmel, which eventually forced the man into bankruptcy. As the New York Times has reported, News Corp more or less extinguished allegations of corporate espionage with $655 million in various settlements and buy-outs to competitors. (In-store marketing companies Valassis and Insignia claimed that News Corp had used similar tactics against them.)

Podsiadly, as it turned out, may have never opened an inquiry or passed along Emmel’s tip to the Department of Justice. A spokeswoman for Grassley explained to the Guardian that ongoing litigation prevented the committee from action:

A spokeswoman for the finance committee said nothing would be done with any documents sent by Emmel until the litigation over them had ended. Emmel today remains under a court-imposed injunction that forbids him from disclosing anything from these documents. “I cannot comment,” he said.

Phil Hilder, Emmel’s attorney, is not buying the committee’s excuse for not investigating the matter. “What litigation? I’m not sure at the time there was any litigation that they were referring to.” Hilder explained that to his knowledge the tip was never referred to the Department of Justice either. “I have no idea what if anything Mr. Podsiadly did with the information,” said Hilder, a former federal prosecutor.

Perhaps Grassley’s spokeswoman was hoping that the Guardian, a London-based paper, would be unaware of standard congressional procedures. Ongoing litigation, or even the threat of litigation, never prohibits a congressional committee from opening an investigation.

Mort Rosenberg, the author of Investigative Oversight and a number of manuals for conducting congressional inquiries, dismissed the Grassley excuse in an interview with ThinkProgress. “Congress has huge powers over what it decides to investigate,” Rosenberg explained. In some cases, when the Department of Justice is already looking into a criminal matter, Congress will avoid engaging in an investigation. But overall, Rosenberg said outside litigation never prevents a committee from opening an inquiry.

ThinkProgress spoke to Beth Levine, a spokeswoman for Grassley, who said the documents are not currently under Grassley’s purview because he is no longer the chairman or ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee. Asked if Podsiadly ever referred the whistleblower documents to the Justice Department or began a congressional inquiry into the matter when he received them in 2006, Levine responded, “I don’t know the answer to that question.” Further requests to Podsiadly and Grassley staff for more information have gone unanswered.

In the United Kingdom, News Corp ducked prosecution for its systematic hacking for years byexploiting the company’s connections to prominent politicians and police authorities. In the United States, FBI agents, after reviewing the “excellent paper trail” left by News Corp while allegedly breaking into the computers of competitor Floorgraphics, contacted the the U.S. Attorney’s Office in New Jersey to consider a criminal investigation. At the time, the U.S. attorney was a Bush appointee named Chris Christie — a confidant of News Corporation executive and Fox News chief Roger Ailes and now the Republican governor of New Jersey. As reporter David Carr noted, the FBI case “died a slow death” in Christie’s office.

News Corp has quieted the alleged American victims of its corporate espionage by buying their silence with over half a billion worth of settlements. The public, however, deserves a fair hearing about the alleged criminal conduct. News Corp is no ordinary company; its vast newspaper and cable news holdings have a responsibility to serve the public interest, so a pattern of corrupt conduct across the company has wide implications. The question remains though why Grassley’s staffer, Podsiadly, may have dropped the ball and thrown News Corp’s whistleblower under the bus.

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• Chuck Grassley
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Grassley’s Debt Ceiling Flip-Flop: In 2006, He Blasted Efforts To Use Debt Vote To Control Spending

By Travis Waldron

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), in keeping with other GOP lawmakers, recently stated that the GOP should not vote to increase the debt limit unless Democrats and President Obama make major concessions on federal spending cuts. That position, however, is exactly opposite the one he took in 2006, when he urged his Senate colleagues to unanimously vote to increase the debt limit, saying it should not be used “to control government debt and deficits.”

In a recent interview with Newsmax TV, Grassley said the GOP should use the vote as leverage to “get a lot of things done” on spending and budgetary changes:

GRASSLEY: My take is that we should have thought about not increasing the debt limit before we spent the money. […]
But the point is, we’ve got tremendous leverage by not increasing the debt to get a lot of things done that we want done – tackling entitlements and tackling a constitutional amendment requiring a balance budget. I support moving in both of those areas.

Watch it:

But in March 2006, Grassley took the polar opposite position to the one he is taking now. Before the Senate ultimately voted to increase the debt limit to $8.965 trillion, then-Senate Finance Chairman Grassley told his colleagues that the debt limit was not an accurate predictor of future fiscal problems, and that they should not use it to make assumptions about those problems. The Senate should “not have an extended debate” about the issue, Grassley said, because not increasing the debt limit is “a choice that we shouldn’t make and we wouldn’t want to make”:

GRASSLEY: Given these facts, it should be obvious to everyone that the federal debt limit provides a misleading and inaccurate picture of the government’s future liabilities. Efforts to use the statutory debt limit to control government debt and deficits cannot succeed because it ignores the long-term budget problems. […]
And so I would hope we would not have an extended debate and a lot of breast-beating about the issue of increasing the national debt. … Now there will be a lot of debate about it, a lot of political points trying to be made, but the point is, we’ve got to keep the business of government going. […]
This ought to pass unanimously. It won’t. But it ought to.

Watch it:

During the presidency of George W. Bush, Grassley viewed the debt limit increase as such a non-issue that he admonished his Senate colleagues for not voting for it unanimously. Now, however, he’s willing to play politics on the issue just like the rest of his party.

Video reveals GOP Senator brushed off Obama assassination threat

By Stephen C. Webster A little-noticed YouTube video of a recent town hall meeting with Iowa Republican Chuck Grassley reveals the Senator gave a strikingly anemic reply to a man who compared Barack Obama to genocidal Nazi leader Adolf Hitler and made an implied threat against the president.

“The President of the United States,” said Tom Eisenhower, who claimed to be a World War II veteran. “That’s who you should be concerned about today … Because he’s acting like a little Hitler.”

He added that he would “take a gun to Washington if enough of you would go with me,” according to a report in the Pocahontas, Iowa newspaper The Messenger.

By his words, he seemed to be advocating something much stronger than a protest. Some in the audience applauded. One man booed.

The video below distorts the audio in portions of the man’s statement, but he apparently made reference to the “death panel” myth, suggesting he would be told to die after he “hit 80.”

Sen. Grassley, a member of the Senate Finance Committee and one of the most important Republicans in the health insurance reform debate — who recently told AIG executives to “resign, or go commit suicide” — did not call out the man’s brazenly false analogy or object to his threat.

Instead, his response trailed and lacked any specificity. Although Grassley noted that former President George W. Bush initiated the massive bailouts and “started us on down that road,” he overtly sympathized with the elderly man’s angry sentiments toward President Obama.

“Well, you didn’t ask for a comment, but I think I want to make it clear that President Obama, I agree with him on a lot of things,” Grassley said. “I think he’s doing what he thinks he was elected to do and I did disagree with a good part of it … Uh, but I don’t, uh … Ascribe any ulterior motives to him in the process.”

He continued: “But I do think that you’re right from the standpoint that there is a lot of holes that he has put in place, like General Motors, the nationalization of banks — although, I gotta be … Bush, uh, Bush started us on down that road in October before he left office. And, uh, also, uh, this deficit spending that we have. It’s … It’s, uh, something we’ve got to worry about. And we want a country like we inherited for our grandchildren.

“And, I think most of you came to talk about health care, but I think health care is a, in other words, why people are coming to town meetings … But I think health care is the straw that broke the camel’s back, in the sense that they were looking at General Motors, looking at the stimulus package not working, looking at the Federal Reserve shoveling money out of an airplane, looking at [inaudible] percent increases in the budget and a $4 trillion budget that was about to, uh, adopted in March, and they don’t see anything good comin’ from it and they’re fearful of the government taking everything over.”

The Senator has in the past endorsed the “death panel” myth and told his constituents, “you have every right to fear” it.

However, when pressed by Bob Schieffer on a recent episode of Face the Nation, Grassley recanted his implication that such a thing exists in the health insurance reform legislation.

“I think most of us believe we have the best health care system in the world, but I think we all know there’s some things we need to change,” Grassley said at the town hall meeting, according to The Messenger. “We need to fix what’s broken and leave alone what’s working well.”

This video is from YouTube, uploaded Aug. 24, 2009.

Grassley Voted For So-Called "Death Panel" In 2003

The Huffington Post | Rachel Weiner

Time Magazine's Amy Sullivan pointed out last night that, for all of his ardent demagoguery on the so-called "death panels," Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) voted for just such a provision in 2003.

Remember the 2003 Medicare prescription drug bill, the one that passed with the votes of 204 GOP House members and 42 GOP Senators? Anyone want to guess what it provided funding for? Did you say counseling for end-of-life issues and care? Ding ding ding!!

So either Republicans were for death panels in 2003 before turning against them now--or they're lying about end-of-life counseling in order to frighten the bejeezus out of their fellow citizens and defeat health reform by any means necessary. Which is it, Mr. Grassley ("Yea," 2003)?

Reps. John Boehner (R-Ohio) and Thaddeus McCotter (R-Mich.), who both claimed end-of-life consultations could result in "government encouraged euthanasia," also voted for similar policy in 2003.

Sen. Arlen Specter (D-Pa.) tried to call Grassley on Friday and tell him he was wrong about health care reform. He got the senator's voicemail.

Grassley Endorses "Death Panel" Rumor: "You Have Every Right To Fear"

BySam Stein

One of the three Republican senators working on a bipartisan health care bill perpetuated a particularly outrageous untruth about the legislation on Wednesday.

Appearing at a town hall in his home state of Iowa, Sen. Chuck Grassley told a crowd of more than 300 that they were correct to fear that the government would "pull the plug on grandma."

"There is some fear because in the House bill, there is counseling for end-of-life," Grassley said. "And from that standpoint, you have every right to fear. You shouldn't have counseling at the end of life. You ought to have counseling 20 years before you're going to die. You ought to plan these things out. And I don't have any problem with things like living wills. But they ought to be done within the family. We should not have a government program that determines if you're going to pull the plug on grandma."

Watch:

In making his remarks, Grassley becomes the latest in a string of GOP lawmakers to jump on a myth about the health care legislation produced by the House of Representatives. The most infamous statement was made last week by former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, who declared that the President's health care plan would set up a "death panel" to determine whether or not to euthanize her son with Down Syndrome.

The Iowa Independent was the first to report Grassley's remarks. The Huffington Post was able to obtain audio from an attendee at the event.

On Wednesday, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs hit back at Palin for her death panel remark, saying that the former governor had given out "information that I think many of you all pointed out was wrong." The House bill would require Medicare to cover voluntary consultations between individuals and their doctors about end of life care, including whether or not to write a living will. Several Republican lawmakers have endorsed the idea in past legislation.