Surprising elections make voters great again -- Dec. 13, 2017 column

By MARSHA MERCER

The dramatic election of Democrat Doug Jones as a senator from Alabama was at once stunning and reassuring.

Stunning because it had been nearly 25 years since Alabama sent a Democrat to the Senate, and just last year Alabama embraced Donald Trump by nearly 30 points over Hillary Clinton.

Reassuring because it, along with last month’s Virginia election, showed our political system -- messy and rowdy as it is -- still works.

Trump’s winning the White House despite losing the popular vote last year led to lasting frustration and a sense of powerlessness among some Democrats. But in state and congressional races no Electoral College stands in the way of the popular will.

The message from voters in Alabama, Virginia and New Jersey this year was a resounding no to the benighted politics of the past.  

“Decency wins,” Sen. Jeff Flake, Republican of Arizona, tweeted Tuesday night, one several Republicans who praised Alabama voters. Flake, who is retiring, had tweeted a picture of his $100 contribution to the Jones campaign.

Jones had been the lead federal prosecutor in cases against two Ku Klux Klansmen in the 1963 bombing of the 16^th Baptist Church in Birmingham, which took the lives of four black girls. Jones won convictions in both cases in 2001 and 2002.

For Democrats who hope to turn back the Trump tide in congressional elections next fall, the Alabama contest was consequential. It shaves the Republican majority in the Senate to 51 to 49.  

“This is a political earthquake,” said Sen. Chris Van Hollen, Democrat of Maryland, who heads Democrats’ 2018 Senate campaign effort. He cited as part of the earthquake the elections in Virginia and other states and localities.

Alabama answered the question whether black voters in the Deep South will turn out for a Democrat who is not Barack Obama. Yes, they can.

About 30 percent of Alabama voters Tuesday were black, and 96 percent of them voted for Jones, exit polls reported. That’s about the same share of the black vote President Obama received in 2012.

Solid-red Alabama suggests Democrats may be able to persuade more Southern whites to vote blue. Obama received just 15 percent of Alabama white vote in 2012; Jones got 30 percent.

And, perhaps more significant going forward, younger voters and suburbanites in Alabama decisively went for Jones.

 Trump remains personally popular in some quarters -- Alabama voters approved and disapproved of him equally -- but he exhibited no coattails. His tweet and robocall endorsements were words in the storm of words.

After his gubernatorial candidate lost in Virginia, Trump lost twice in Alabama. He’d backed Moore’s competitor in the GOP primary, then fully endorsed Moore near the end of the campaign and attacked Jones.

When Moore lost, Trump dodged blame, tweeting he’d been right all along that Moore couldn’t win a general election. The “deck was stacked against him,” Trump tweeted.

More accurately, Moore had stacked the deck against himself.

Long before The Washington Post’s reports of allegations of sexual misconduct against Moore roiled the campaign last month, Moore had a history of judicial defiance and racist and homophobic comments.

He denied all the sexual misconduct allegations, and fewer than one in 10 voters said they were the most important factor in their vote, according to exit polls.

The splintering of the GOP also played a role in Jones’s victory, but it’s doubtful another candidate anywhere could engender as much bipartisan animosity as Moore.

The last Democrat who successfully ran for the Senate in Alabama was Richard Shelby in 1986, who was reelected in 1992. Two years later, he switched parties and still represents Alabama. But Republican Shelby couldn’t stomach his party’s candidate and announced he’d written in someone else.

It’s too soon to declare Trump irrelevant or Trumpism dead, but neither has the ruddy glow of health at the moment.

Trump tweeted his congratulations to Jones election night and called him the day after. Hoping to find an ally, he invited Jones to the White House.

Jones has promised civility and to work with Republicans when possible.

“The people of Alabama expect me to do the right thing and vote for the people of Alabama,” said Jones in a news conference. He faces the voters again in 2020.

 ©2017 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

On taking Christmas off the school calendar -- Nov. 13, 2014 column

By MARSHA MERCER

A Maryland school board could hardly have angered residents more had it abolished Christmas.

The Montgomery County Board of Education outside Washington didn’t scrap Christmas but it did vote Tuesday to eliminate any mention of Christmas and other religious holidays from next year’s official school calendar. 

Schools in Maryland’s largest county will still be closed as usual around Christmas, Easter and the Jewish holidays of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, but students will be on Winter Break, Spring Break or the awkward “no school for students and teachers.”

The reaction on social media was swift and intense. Infuriating almost everybody was the board’s insistence that it was not closing the schools to observe religious holidays, which it said would be illegal, but as a practical, operational matter because of the high absenteeism that would result if school were held on those days.

The illegality argument is debatable. The state requires schools to be closed at Christmas and Easter, and the county has been closing school on Jewish holidays since the 1970s. It’s disingenuous and ridiculous to pretend schools are not closed so families can observe religious holidays. But which families and which holidays?

For years, local Muslim leaders have asked Montgomery schools to close for at least one Muslim holiday. To bolster their case, they’ve urged Muslim parents to keep their students home on Eid al-Adha, also called the Feast of Sacrifice.

Montgomery says absenteeism runs about 5 percent that day, a little higher than usual, but not high enough to justify closing the schools. Absences are excused, but Muslim families say fairness demands that Muslim holidays be recognized.

Asked again to add a Muslim holiday, the school board opted out, deciding instead to scrub all mention of religious holidays from the calendar.

“It makes no sense,” Saqib Ali, a former Maryland state legislator and co-chair of the Eid Coalition wrote on Facebook.  

“By stripping the names Christmas, Easter, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, they have alienated other communities now, and we are no closer to equality,” he told The Washington Post.  

Board members said they meant no disrespect to any religion.

“No matter how well-intentioned we are, it comes off as insensitive” to Muslim families, said Michael A. Durso, the lone vote against the calendar change, the Post reported.

“Political correctness reaches a new level of absurdity,” one parent of former county students commented on Facebook. “Next thing you know they’ll change the name of Church Street in Rockville.”

This hullabaloo didn’t have to happen. Many school districts have already quit mentioning Christmas, Easter and the Jewish holidays on their official calendars – and it hasn’t caused a fuss. Baltimore city schools have Winter Holiday and Spring Break.

Montgomery County board members cited the example of Winter Break instead of Christmas Vacation in Fairfax County, Virginia’s largest school district. Fairfax’s Spring Break is March 30 through April 3 next year, and April 6 is a Student Holiday, a.k.a. elsewhere as Easter Monday.

The diverse Fairfax district also has an online combined calendar of religious events that teachers can consult in planning lessons. For example, Sikh Martyrdom Day is Nov. 24; Bodhi Day, a Buddhist celebration, and the Feast of the Immaculate Conception in the Roman Catholic Church are Dec. 8.

A check of websites finds other Virginia districts that call their time off Winter and Spring Breaks include Richmond, Alexandria and Lynchburg. The school calendar in Bristol, Va., highlights Christmas programs, Christmas Eve and Christmas Day but doesn’t formally name the December vacation; Easter is mentioned as part of Spring Break. 

In Atlanta, the December holidays are called Semester Break.

Most people understand that schools cannot and should not favor one religion over another, and calling holidays Winter Break and Spring Break may make religious minorities feel more accepted, a worthy goal. It’s not as if anyone needs a school calendar to remind that it’s Christmas.

At the same time, not all districts are silent about Christmas. Dothan City Schools in Alabama have Christmas Break and schools are closed for Good Friday. And some districts are putting Christmas back into December.  

In 2006, Falcon School District northeast of Colorado Springs, Colo., returned to Christmas Break after receiving a letter from a religious rights group. In Woodbury, Tenn., the Cannon County Board of Education agreed in October 2013 to again call the December days off Christmas Break. 

When the school committee in Marshfield, Mass., a coastal town near Boston, changed the December calendar to Holiday Break, residents started a petition drive, demanding that Christmas Vacation be restored. More than 2,000 names have been collected.

Conservatives often rage against a War on Christmas. That’s silly, given the country’s obsession with the holiday. But we live in an age of silly political fights. A War on Winter Break could be next.

©2014 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

30

RX for states: Expand Medicaid -- June 13, 2013 column

By MARSHA MERCER 

“Americans can always be counted on to do the right thing – after they have exhausted all other possibilities,” Winston Churchill supposedly said.

Whether the remark reflected Churchill’s or someone else’s wit, we again are seeing Americans struggle over the right thing. This time the right thing is for every state to expand Medicaid, the joint federal-state health insurance program for the poor.  

Medicaid currently provides health care to about 59 million low-income people – mostly young children and their parents and pregnant women. It pays for long-term care for seniors in nursing homes and people with disabilities. Some states, like Massachusetts, expanded Medicaid coverage on their own.

In March 2010, President Barack Obama signed the Affordable Care Act – a.k.a. Obamacare – which aims to bring affordable health care to most Americans no matter where they live.

The law is making significant changes. Next year, insurance companies can no longer discriminate against people with pre-existing health conditions, and almost every American will have to have health insurance or pay a tax penalty. The law also required every state to expand Medicaid to cover people with incomes up to 133 percent of the federal poverty level, about $26,000 for a family of three in 2013. The Congressional Budget Office said the Medicaid expansion would provide 16 million Americans with reliable health care.   

Republican state officials challenged the law in the courts. Last June, the Supreme Court upheld the law but said expanding Medicaid was a state option. Today 22 states and the District of Columbia are moving forward with the Medicaid expansion, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. These include California, Minnesota, New Jersey and New York.

About 20 states have rejected the expansion – at least for now. Among them are Alabama, Florida, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Texas and Virginia. Eight other states around the country are still fighting it out.

In five Deep South states that have opted out – Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, Louisiana and South Carolina – 62 percent of residents support the Medicaid expansion, a poll in March and April by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies found. The center is a public policy research group that focuses on African Americans.

Virginians were almost evenly split in March with 45 percent favoring expansion and 43 percent opposed, a Quinnipiac University poll reported.    

States that have rejected the expansion have some of the nation’s worst health records. America’s Health Rankings, an annual report by United Health Foundation, ranked Mississippi and Louisiana 49^{th,  --} the least healthy states. Alabama is 45^th and Virginia 21^st.

The states are forgoing “free” money. The federal government will foot 100 percent of Medicaid expansion costs from 2014 to 2016. Repayment will drop  to 90 percent in 2020 and level off after that. That’s a much better match than states currently have for Medicaid. The federal share ranges from 50 percent to 83 percent, with poorer states getting higher amounts per capita.   

Critics of expansion say they worry about unspecified costs down the road, and yet people without health insurance get health care every day in more costly hospital emergency rooms.    

A new Rand study of the first 14 states whose governors declared they would not expand Medicaid, including Alabama, found those states together would spend $1 billion more on uncompensated health care in 2016 than if they expanded Medicaid. The 14 states would give up $8.4 billion annually in federal payments, Rand said.

An analysis of state health data by the Los Angeles Times indicates that the states could use the help. Colon cancer deaths in states that oppose the Medicaid expansion are, on average, 16 percent higher than in states that support expansion, and deaths from breast cancer are 8 percent higher on average in states that oppose the expansion.

“Medicaid by itself may not close those gaps, which also reflect income and education disparities,” the paper reported, noting that conservatives argue that poor people would be helped more by alternative strategies that encourage people to take responsibility for their own health care.

States that don’t expand Medicaid still face other higher costs. Nationwide, only about two-thirds of people eligible have signed up for Medicaid, and the new health law includes a major outreach effort.

The fight over Medicaid is far from over. There’s no deadline for expansion, and supporters say they’ll be back in statehouses for the next legislative session. As they say in baseball, there’s always next year.

For now, though, it appears many states are determined to ignore the proverb and be “penny wise and pound foolish.”   

©2013 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.