Several State Prosecutors Probing Nelson Health Care Deal
The top Prosecutors in seven states are probing the constitutionality of a political deal that cut a funding break for Nebraska in order to pass a federal health care reform bill, South Carolina's Attorney General said Tuesday.
Attorney General Henry McMaster said he and his counterparts in Alabama, Colorado, Michigan, North Dakota, Texas and Washington state — all Republicans — are jointly taking a look at the deal they've dubbed the "Nebraska compromise."
"The Nebraska Compromise", which permanently exempts Nebraska from paying Medicaid costs that Texas and all other 49 states must pay, may violate the United States Constitution — as well as other provisions of Federal law," Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott said.
McMaster's move comes at the request of Republican U.S. Sens. Lindsey Graham and Jim DeMint of South Carolina.
We have serious concerns
In a letter to McMaster, Graham singled out the deal to win Nebraska Sen. Ben Nelson's vote on the massive health care bill the Senate is expected to adopt Thursday. Nelson held out as fellow Democrats worked to get 60 votes to foreclose a GOP filibuster and the bill was amended to shield Nebraska from the expected $45 million annual cost tied to expanding Medicaid programs.
"We have serious concerns about the constitutionality of this Nebraska compromise as it results in special treatment for only one state in the nation at the expense of the other 49," Graham and DeMint wrote.
Nebraska wasn't alone in getting Medicaid breaks. Vermont, Louisiana and Massachusetts also got help with their programs.
Along with Texas, officials in Washington, Alabama, Colorado and Michigan confirmed they were working with McMaster.
North Dakota Attorney General Wayne Stenehjem said he wasn't sure what could be done while the federal legislation remained under debate. Officials in the other states did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Meanwhile on Tuesday, Tennessee's Republican Senate Speaker Ron Ramsey called for his state's attorney general to investigate the deal.
Ramsey, McMaster and Michigan's Mike Cox are running for governor in their states.
"Whether in the court of law or in the court of public opinion, we must bring an end to this culture of Corruption," McMaster said. The negotiations "on their face appear to be a form of vote buying paid for by taxpayers," he said.
We'll assist anyone
McMaster is encouraging a South Carolina citizen to step forward to sue to challenge the measure if it is signed into law. "We'll assist anyone to the extent that we're able," McMaster said.
Also Tuesday, U.S. House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn, D-S.C., said Republicans need to stop complaining about deals their colleagues made.
"Rather than sitting here and carping about what Nelson got for Nebraska, I would say to my friends on the other side of the aisle: Let's get together and see what we can get for South Carolina," Clyburn said.
For instance, Clyburn expects states will get more help covering Medicaid expansion costs. Critics say the federal government's coverage of 91 percent of those future costs will disappear, leaving states with huge holes in their budgets. Clyburn says the legislation the federal share should be 95 percent, with states picking up no more than 5 percent.
South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford said the federal legislation is "well intended," but called it "fundamentally flawed in the same way the stimulus efforts were in that the states and the taxpayers are left footing the bill."
Sanford this spring was the nation's only governor to take a state legislature to Federal and State court to block federal stimulus money.
Schumer Goes Hunting, Bags Nelson
The perils of "Political hunting" trips range from mockery — as with Sen. John Kerry’s (D-Mass.) expensive gear — to mortal danger — as in ending up on the wrong end of Dick Cheney’s 28-gauge.
But Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) had another story in mind when he traveled recently to Nebraska, a cautionary tale told to him early in his career by an older, urban-oriented New Jersey congressman who had made the mistake of accepting a hunting invitation from a Midwestern colleague.
“He shot the dog,” Schumer recalled, referring to the outcome of the Jersey pol’s inept marksmanship.
Schumer did not shoot the dog. He bagged three pheasants. And six weeks later, he bagged Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.), serving as key negotiator as Nelson held the fate of landmark health care legislation in the balance.
While the two Senate Democrats didn’t spend their morning in a field outside Omaha talking business, the hunting trip will go down as a key, if unconventional, detour on the road to the Democrats’ most important modern legislative accomplishment.
The senator from Brooklyn woke up early the morning of Nov. 8, a day after he’d watched Nebraska thump Oklahoma on the gridiron. He put on a blaze orange hunting vest and hat, refusing only the boots (“too big”). He received a crash course on shotgun safety and marveled at the dogs.
“They were just amazing,” he said of the pointers and retrievers. “I always thought hunting dogs were just for companionship.”
Then the senator from New York saw a pheasant, took aim and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened.
“He didn’t get the safety off, so he couldn't shoot,” his host, Nelson, recalled with a chuckle Tuesday morning. “You have to push the safety off to shoot. He figured that out.”
The next pheasant wasn’t so lucky.
“He thought I shot it,” said Nelson. “I said, ‘No, I know I didn’t shoot ‘cause I didn’t shoot.’ And I said, ‘So you either scared it to death or you hit it.’ He was ready to jump up and down.”
Schumer bagged, his companions told him, three pheasants that early November day in Nebraska, though he was “never 100 percent sure they weren’t helping me.”
Schumer and Nelson's friendship began in 2005, when Schumer was named chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. Nelson was considering retiring instead of seeking reelection in a conservative-oriented state in 2006, and Schumer told POLITICO that when he assumed the DSCC chairmanship, Nelson was his first call.
The logic was clear, Schumer said: “He runs, we win; if he doesn’t run, we lose.” So he gave in, he says, to extensive demands from the Nebraskan, and Nelson cruised to what turned out to be an easy reelection.
Schumer’s bond with the Senate moderates he helped elect and reelect in 2006 and 2008 has powered his remarkable ascent within the chamber. Two years ago, Schumer seemed in danger of being overshadowed by his state’s junior senator, Hillary Clinton, or elbowed aside in the Senate leadership by Obama mentor Dick Durbin.
Beyond Majority Leader Harry Reid, the architect of the Democrats' successful health care strategy, Schumer has emerged as the dominant political force and go-to negotiator on Reid's leadership team. And the Senate is on the verge of passing landmark legislation that's deeply controversial in states such as Nelson's, a lesson Schumer said was drummed into him by the people he met that weekend in Omaha.
The apparent political victory has further enhanced Schumer’s stature. The jokes about the most dangerous place in Washington being between him and a camera have gone stale, replaced by a widespread recognition that he has evolved into one of the essential players on the American political landscape and, quite likely, a future majority leader.
The hunting story became legend in the Senate last month after Nelson passed photographs of the orange-clad, gun-toting Harvard grad, dead bird in hand, around an amused caucus lunch. But it also belongs in the broader legend of Schumer, the political animal par excellence.
“Chuck always wants to know where the other guy is coming from,” said Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.), a former Schumer staffer, who added that he wasn’t surprised that Schumer acquitted himself well.
“He has handled more guns at crime bill press conferences than most hunters,” he said.
Indeed, word of Schumer’s hunting exploits was greeted with astonishment on both sides of the simmering gun control wars, in which Schumer came of age as a central player. His work on the Brady Bill’s handgun restriction turned him into, literally, a National Rifle Association poster child. The NRA’s favorite image pictures Schumer grinning under bright blue earmuffs as he demonstrates the deadliness of a stubby assault weapon.
“He just must have needed Nelson's vote very badly to do that,” said Tom King, the president of the New York State Rifle and Pistol Association, who called Schumer “patently anti-gun.”
Schumer says, however, that he favors only common sense and regionally varied restrictions on guns, and he has long bragged of winning, at summer camp, an NRA sharpshooting prize with a .22 rifle.
“It surprised me he went out with Ben Nelson shooting, but it doesn’t surprise me that he shot a couple of birds,” said Jim Kessler, a former Schumer aide who later founded Americans for Gun Safety, a gun control group that was later folded into the group Third Way. “In 1994, if Chuck thought the way to win the assault weapons ban vote was to go out and hunt with [former Democratic Rep.] Bill Brewster of Oklahoma and shoot three birds, he would have done it.”
Schumer and Nelson differ slightly about the origins of the hunting trip. Schumer recalls Nelson telling him, in the spring, “You have to come out.”
“I’ve always wanted to go hunting,” he said.
“I thought he was kidding at first; I said 'sure,’” Nelson said. “And I finally said, 'If you are serious, I can arrange this.' And he was, and so I did.”
Schumer and Nelson also shot skeet. They also tooled around on ATVs, with Schumer’s wife, former New York City Transportation Commissioner Iris Weinshall, hanging onto the back of Nelson’s vehicle. (Her city job hadn’t involved much off-roading.) Schumer posed with his dead quarry, though he left it for Nelson to dress, before they retired to the lodge for a lunch of pheasant.
(“He would definitely want to eat it,” Kessler said of his former boss. “He’s got to eat it. He’d eat anything.”)
They did not, both senators said, talk health care.
“There wasn’t any lobbying effort, just two guys having fun and going hunting and watching football,” said Nelson.
But the Nebraska senator’s warm regard for the New Yorker, and their relationship of trust, would prove central to getting the final health care deal done. Last Wednesday night, Nelson gave a list of must-haves to Schumer and Reid. At times on Thursday, Schumer was calling Nelson every 15 minutes, as part of what the Nebraskan called “pre-negotiations.” By nightfall, with progress being made, Reid asked Nelson to join a round of intensive talks Friday morning. Nelson was set up in one wing of Reid's suite of offices. Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), one of the Senate’s most liberal members, was in another part. For 12 hours, Schumer and Reid shuttled between them.
Schumer “was extremely important,” Nelson told POLITICO just after the deal was done. “The thing about Chuck Schumer is he is very innovative, he doesn’t get ideological about something. …We may be an odd couple in a lot of respects, but we share some of the same qualities in trying to solve things.”
Schumer said the negotiations left him with deep respect for Nelson and that the hunting trip also taught a lesson.
“You can see where going hunting is a real bonding experience, kind of like golf,” he mused. “I’d like to do it again.”
“I’ve got a lot of invitations,” Schumer said.
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Sources: MSNBC, Politico, Youtube, Google Maps
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