23 March 2019 — 0747 mdt

There are doomsday devices in HB-658

Saturday roundup and follow-up

Note to readers: I’m back in limited action following a week dealing with health issues. For the indefinite future, my posts, especially on events at the MT Legislature, will be more sporadic and possibly less detailed than usual.

Today, observations on legislation to extend expanded Medicaid in Montana, legislation to protect Northwestern Energy from bad investments, and elevator blowback and Boeing’s reversal of fortune.

Extending expanded Medicaid

The 16-page fiscal note for Rep. Ed Buttrey’s bill, HB-658, posted on 21 March, confirms that Buttrey’s scheme would eventually kick every other person off expanded Medicaid, which currently serves 96,182 Montanans:

Buttrey’s bill contains two doomsday devices, nonseverability and contingent voidness. Here, from Page 76 of the MT Legislature’s 2018 Bill Drafting Manual, are the official definitions:

In the 2007 legislative session, Republicans in the MT House employed the coordination section contingent voidness variant to hold bills hostage in an attempt to gain leverage in negotiations with the Democratic majority MT Senate. In the 2017 legislative session, Sen. Llew Jones and Rep. Rob Cook also used a coordination contingent voidness clause to try strong-arming Gov. Steve Bullock to extend the state’s contract with the private hoosegow in Shelby. Buttrey, however, is conditioning the fate of his bill on the behavior of federal bureaucrats and persons not necessarily members of a governing body in Montana.

In HB-658, the nonseverability and contingent voidness clauses are doomsday devices because they’re intended to blow up the act, and take away everyone’s expanded Medicaid, if there are (a) lawsuits that successfully challenge the bill, and/or (b) federal disapprovals of Montana’s request for waivers from the Affordable Care Act.

The nonseverability section is essentially boilerplate language:

This use of a nonseverability clause is an attempt to shift blame for the law’s failure, if parts of it fail, from the bill’s author to the bill’s challengers. It’s an admission that Buttrey knows he’s proposing something so dodgy that he can get away with it only by holding hostage the recipients of expanded Medicaid, and ensuring they’ll be harmed if anyone tries to rescue them from HB-658’s cruelties.

Section 1 is “Community engagement requirements — countable activities — exemptions — self-attestation.” Section 2, “Community engagement — self-reporting of compliance — disenrollment.” Section 5, “Disenrollment for failure to report change in circumstances.”

The contingent voidness section is specific to the bill’s schemes to (a) force virtually all expanded Medicaid recipient to prove they are working, looking for work, or performing volunteer civic service, as a condition of receiving Medicaid, and (b) levy up to a five percent tax (called “premiums”) on the income of Medicaid recipients. If the work scheme waivers are not granted, the entire law explodes and expanded Medicaid disappears. If the “premium” waiver is not granted, that section of the bill is voided.

None of these sections is necessary for extending expanded Medicaid.

The goal of Medicaid is providing health insurance to low income people, not forcing them to work for their insurance. Indeed, HB-658’s forced labor provisions are gratuitous, as approximately 70 percent of the program’s current recipients have jobs, and 80 percent live in households in which someone is working.

The work provisions are there only because Republicans think everyone on Medicaid is a work shirking freeloader who must be forced to perform labor in exchange for the privilege of receiving tax dollars stolen from responsible Americans with jobs. In the words of Sen. Scott Sales (R-Bozeman, SD-35), president of the MT Senate:

Sales has his mythology down pat, but his facts wrong. A generation ago, low income families worked but could not afford health insurance. That’s why we have the Affordable Care Act. Although far from perfect, the ACA, by expanding Medicaid, significantly reduced the number of households without health insurance. The direct benefit to the economy and our fellow citizens? Healthy workers work harder and are more productive.

Although a bastardized version of Medicaid that condemns those who qualify to private health insurance (the root of much health care evil), expanded Medicaid insures one of ten Montanans, brings hundreds of millions of federal dollars into Montana each year, helps keep rural hospitals open, and for all its deficiencies, is a successful government program.

And for Sales, Buttrey, et al, that’s the real problem. For conservatives, only one thing is worse than a government program that fails: a government program that succeeds. The former wastes money, but the latter validates the premises that government can make a positive difference, and that it can do some things better than private enterprise. For conservatives, expanded Medicaid’s success in Montana profanes the gospel of personal responsibility, and mocks their faith in social Darwinism and Adam Smith’s invisible hand.

Republicans who support HB-658 are not making a serious effort to help low income people who need health insurance. Instead, they’re making a serious effort to punish their impoverished brothers and sisters for the assumed but unproven offenses of sloth and fecklessness, and they’re willing to employ blackmail and doomsday devices to get their way. This is neither political hardball nor political beanball. It’s stomp on the less fortunate class warfare waged by selfish and sanctimonious higher income ideologues.

Ill-advised sweetheart legislation for Northwestern Energy

Former legislator and budget director Dave Lewis is not a green gloating, carbon loathing, wind worshipping, enemy of private enterprise, or hater of Colstrip. Neither is erstwhile Montana Power Authority member Gary Buchanan or former Public Service Commission member Travis Kavulla. Each man is a diehard capitalist, a defender of big business, a believer in fossil fuels. Ergo, when they warn that a bill before the legislature is a gift to an electric utility that could result in that utility’s ratepayers being ripped off for hundreds of dollars for electricity they might never receive, and could shield that utility from effective by the Public Service Commission, legislators should heed their arguments. (Oped by Lewis and Buchanan; below, oped by Kavulla.)

That utility, of course, is Northwestern Energy, which is trying to recreate the empire that Montana Power lost through ill-advised deregulation back in Lewis’ legislative days — and trying to protect its stockholders from the economic consequences of shutting down the dirty old coal-fired power plants at Colstrip. Working in cahoots with Sen. Tom Richmond (R-Billings, SD-28), Northwestern has cooked up legislation, SB-331, that’s being touted as rescuing Colstrip from old age and contemporary economics but is actually, Kavulla argues, a bill to rescue Northwestern’s owners from an investment that’s going sour:

On Thursday, the MT Senate’s energy and telecommunications committee approved SB-331 on a 9–4 vote, with all eight Republicans and Anaconda Democrat Gene Vuckovich (SD-39) voting aye.

Richmond, incidentally, may be trying to settle old scores in addition to rescuing Colstrip and hauling Northwestern’s water. During the committee’s hearing, in his closing and his responses to questions by Sen. Richard Barrett and Sen. Mary McNally, he complained that:

Part of the bill’s purpose, he said, is to

He expressed fear that intervention could end up in a federal court somewhere, perhaps not even in Montana. “Part of the bill’s purpose,” he told McNally, responding to her asking whether SB-331 was to make sure the “wrong people” didn’t intervene in the process, “is to make sure the process isn’t hijacked.”

In his closing, Richmond took a final shot at SB-331’s critics:

For Richmond, “reliable power” means fossil fuel fired generation such as Colstrip.

Sen. Duane Ankney (R-Colstrip, SD-20), who supports SB-331, told the Montana Free Press “I’ve never passed a bill to screw people.” Perhaps not everyone believes him, but although I disagree with much of what he supports, I accept his statement at face value. He’s been a stalwart advocate for his community. I wish I could believe that Richmond’s motivations are as pure, but given his testimony at the hearing on SB-331, it’s next to impossible not to believe that screwing people is one of the prime reasons he’s promoting this bill.

SB-331 also appears to be a partisan attempt by Republicans to lay a foundation for blaming Democrats for the inevitable early shutdown of Colstrip. Some Montanans, delirious with coal derangement fever, genuinely believe that with a bit of luck, some regulatory relief, and a denial to environmentalists of recourse to the courts, Colstrip can keep converting coal to electricity, carbon dioxide, and various noxious substances, forever. Serious students of energy economics — and there are Republicans among them — know better. Coal is in decline, especially in the Powder River Basin according to a new report by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, and Colstrip’s future is short and bleak.

Although SB-331 is backed by organized labor, an important Democratic constituency, and probably will be whooped through the legislature by Republicans on almost perfect partyline votes, there is, I believe, a fairly high probability that Gov. Steve Bullock will veto it because of the damage it would do to Montana’s ability to protect consumers through the regulation of natural monopolies. Although Republicans would welcome SB-331’s being signed into law, they also would welcome the bill’s being vetoed, for in the 2020 campaign they could cite the veto as proof that Democrats killed Colstrip to appease urban greenies who don’t give a tiddlywink for rural Montanans.

Incidentally, Leia Larsen at the Montana Free Press, and Tom Lutey at the Billings Gazette, are providing excellent coverage of SB-331 and other legislative mischief related to Colstrip.

Elevator blowback, and Boeing’s reversal of fortune

Fixing the 737 Max’s flight control software is the least of the challenges facing Boeing. It’s pretty much a straightforward engineering task — not necessarily easy, but a task Boeing has the expertise to complete. The Max will fly again, safely.

Whether after two deadly crashes of the Max Boeing can convince the flying public that its jetliner is safe is by far the greater challenge. Its judgment impaired by competitive pressures, and not kept on the straight and narrow road to safety by the Federal Aviation Administration, Boeing made mistakes. Now it must correct those mistakes, and convince the public, the airlines, and the FAA, that it’s learned its lesson and reformed itself.

It’s a fascinating situation, and it’s being covered well by the Seattle Times, the AV Herald, James Fallows at The Atlantic, major newspapers including the New York Times and the Washington Post, and of course the trade press.

One aviation centric website worth reading regularly is the Leeham News, whose Bjorn Fehrm, an aeronautical engineer and former Swedish fighter pilot, reported Thursday that the pilots of the 737 Max-8s that crashed in Indonesia and Ethopia were unable to pull out of their fatal dives because of elevator blowback:

It’s a fascinating analysis that’s well worth studying.

In the meantime, if you’re someone who travels by air, consider asking Sen. Tester, Sen. Daines, and Rep. Gianforte, to use their offices to muscle Boeing, the FAA, and the airlines, into subordinating greed to safety.