President Barack Obama won Virginia and New Jersey last year on his way to capturing the White House. But on Tuesday, November 3, voters in those states put Republicans in their respective governors’ mansions.
The meaning of Election Day 2009 may not be determined for a while. But one thing is clear. Democratic losses in two Obama states increase the “fierce urgency of now” for the party on health care reform.
Certainly health care advocates see overhaul as good policy and even a moral imperative. Remember that there also is a strong political catalyst for the effort. Democrats control the White House and both chambers of Congress by large margins. But their sway will hold in its current form until next November.
When voters go to the polls in 2010, they only have to increase the number of Republicans in the Senate by a couple to completely change the political calculus. Right now the GOP has 40 seats while the Democratic caucus numbers 60, just enough to stop a filibuster.
Democrats enjoy a commanding majority of 256 on the House side. But a loss of 20 or so seats could force House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to slow the breakneck speed at which bills can move through the chamber thanks to rules favoring the party in power. She and her Democratic colleagues have to get health care reform done now.
It’s a melding of the three bills passed over the summer by various House committees and costs either $894 billion or $1.2 trillion over 10 years, depending on which Congressional Budget Office numbers you use.
As the House leaders approached the assembled crowd—composed most of advocacy groups and interns—strains of a U2 song blared over the loud speakers: “You make me feel like I can fly so high,” Bono sang in the refrain.
They have descended closer to earth as they move toward a debate in the full House late this week. The bill text (H.R. 3962) and has been posted on the Web. Good luck wading through that 1,990-page behemoth.
As they build up to floor action, House leaders must deal with recalcitrant Democrats who have concerns about federal funding of abortions in medical plans, coverage of illegal immigrants and a government-run insurance program.
So far, liberals are holding their fire on the so-called public option. They favored the “robust” version that would use Medicare reimbursement rates. Instead, the final bill lets hospitals and doctors negotiate rates with the government.
The revision likely will put many conservative Blue Dog Democrats on board and help ensure approval. “This change now gets us over the top,” said Rep. Earl Pomeroy, D-North Dakota.
Over in the Senate, Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nevada, has melded the two Senate bills and included a public option that allows states to “opt out.” It’s not clear yet whether he has the 60 votes needed to move the bill to the Senate floor and the 60 required to bring it to a final vote.
The Senate is waiting on a CBO cost estimate before proceeding to floor debate, which could drag into next year.
But don’t hold your breath. In the end, Democrats will approve some kind of health care bill. They must for the sake of the Democratic president. It’s debatable whether gubernatorial losses in Virginia and New Jersey reflect poorly on Obama.
If his signature domestic issue—health care reform—fails, it will be tantamount to a vote of no confidence. The administration won’t be brought down, as it would in a parliamentary system, but it could suffer lasting damage.
My beat as the Washington correspondent for Workforce Management is pretty broad. I define it as legislation, regulations and court rulings that affect employers. On most days, there are a couple news events that are part of my portfolio.
Much of the time, I have to do triage, ignoring some potential news while turning my focus to another promising area. One way that I’ve done this at the committee level is by concentrating on the “labor” portion of the House and Senate panels that oversee labor and education policy.
But a recent bill is causing me to rethink my approach. When it comes to workforce preparation, employers increasingly are just as concerned about the K-12 level as they are about college education and incumbent-worker training.
Congress and the Obama administration have emphasized this point in a bill that the House approved September 17, the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act. It would overhaul the college student loan system while instituting other changes, including reform of community colleges and early childhood education programs.
In a news conference urging passage of the bill, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said that education and, in effect, workforce preparation has to be viewed holistically. In his view, it’s a seamless path from Head Start to K-12 to college.
“We have to address these together,” Duncan said.
If a student stumbles at the beginning of his or her educational journey, it’s tough to catch up, according to one House leader.
“Many of them don’t recover in terms of their ability to prosper in our economy, in our democracy,” said Rep. George Miller, D-California and chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee.
Education ties in directly with innovation—the holy grail for business. Companies that come up with killer apps—or products and services—are the ones that will prevail in the global market.
“We know that the nations that out-educate us today will out-compete us tomorrow,” said President Barack Obama in a September 21 speech about innovation. “The ability of new industries to thrive depends on workers with the knowledge and the know-how to contribute in those fields. Unfortunately, today, our primary and secondary schools continue to trail many of our competitors, especially in the key areas of math and science.”
The student aid bill has its detractors. Republicans argue that it is another example of the government takeover of the economy orchestrated by Democrats—this time in the student loan sector. Banks and other financial institutions are resisting the measure because it largely eliminates their role in education lending.
But most members of the business community can get behind other dimensions of the bill, including the community college reforms and the focus on early childhood education.
After a February speech in Washington, Intel president and CEO Paul Otellini told reporters that the U.S. had to become a “high-knowledge industry economy.”
For instance, he sees biotechnology as a big part of America’s future. That sector depends on a steady supply of scientists and engineers.
“The biggest threat is if the educational system erodes the ability to [create] those jobs here,” Otellini said. He advocated a broad, bottom-up approach, starting with K-12.
Immigration advocates celebrated a White House meeting on Thursday, June 25, between President Barack Obama and more than two dozen bipartisan members of Congress.
“My administration is fully behind an effort to achieve comprehensive immigration reform,” Obama said after emerging from the get-together.
It’s difficult to imagine that an issue as complex as immigration can be completed this year, when Congress has its hands full with health care and energy legislation, not to mention routine but big issues like appropriations and a Supreme Court nomination.
More important, the political fissures that caused the ground to crumble under immigration reform in 2007 still exist today, even though Republicans are in a much weaker position on Capitol Hill.
“No immigration system would be worthwhile if it is unable to attract the best and brightest minds of the world to come to the United States and create jobs for Americans—as has been the case for Yahoo, Google, Intel, eBay and countless other companies,” he said.
But he also warned that the U.S. immigration system cannot encourage “underpaid, temporary workers from taking jobs that could and should be filled by qualified American workers.”
Threading the needle will be difficult. Some immigration advocates want to create a commission to do the job by controlling the flow of foreign workers.
Employers that belong to ACIP have at least 500 employees and operations in at least two countries. At the top of ACIP’s immigration reform wish list is what it calls a “trusted employer registration program” that would allow companies that play by immigration rules to have “timely, predictable and efficient access to visas for foreign professionals.”
What ACIP doesn’t want is an immigration commission determining whether international candidates can fill positions at U.S. companies. Such a bureaucracy won’t be able to discern the needs of a particular company or industry, it argues.
“How are they going to do these micro, micro, micro determinations?” asked Austin Fragomen Jr., managing partner at Fragomen, Del Rey, Bernsen & Loewy in New York and chair of the ACIP board, at a recent ACIP conference in Arlington, Virginia.
The organizations that participated in the ACIP meeting—including Oracle and Intel—seek to hire the best possible talent to maintain their competitive edge in the marketplace, regardless of where the talent was born. They argue that the United States should keep foreign national students in the country after they’ve graduated with science and technical degrees from U.S. universities.
More than 75 percent of the postdoctoral degree scientists at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, are foreign nationals, according to Thomas Barnett, director of the organization’s international office.
“We just don’t have enough quality in the math and science areas in this country,” Barnett said.
Democrats and Republicans alike might take umbrage when companies assert that the best talent in a global economy may come from other parts of the globe—and they should be free to make those hires.
Barnett has an answer ready: “Senator or congressman, tell me what you have done lately to improve education in your state.”
For the past couple weeks we’ve been hearing a lot about “empathy.” That’s one of the characteristics President Barack Obama said he wanted in the next Supreme Court justice.
He believes that his nominee, Judge Sonia Sotomayor, possesses such a quality thanks to her hardscrabble upbringing in the South Bronx. In introducing her to the nation May 27, Obama said that she understood daily challenges that face most Americans, especially those who are poor.
“It is experience that can give a person a common touch and a sense of compassion, an understanding of how the world works and how ordinary people live,” Obama said. “Along the way [Sotomayor has] faced down barriers, overcome the odds, lived out the American dream that brought her parents here so long ago.”
During the last two weeks, Sotomayor has been making her rounds on Capitol Hill visiting senators who will vote on her nomination sometime this year. Her hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee will commence July 13.
As she makes her way toward what will likely be Senate confirmation, I’ll be watching to see how this “empathy” theme plays out. For now, it looks as if it’s one of those areas where the business world is a step ahead of some people in the political world, who are criticizing “empathy” as a code word for judicial activism.
I can understand wariness about judges who legislate from the bench. We depend on judges to uphold the law objectively. They ensure that the United States sets the best example in the world of a society that prospers under the rule of law.
But the background a judge brings to his or her role inevitably will influence how he or she rules on a case. It seems that the more backgrounds represented on the Supreme Court the better.
People who promote corporate diversity tend to make the same business case. A group of people with varying backgrounds and perspectives will make a better decision about a product or business strategy than a group of people who are alike.
This is especially true when it comes to finding new markets, according to Carl Brooks, president and CEO of the Executive Leadership Council.
“The new markets are obviously the global markets, but the other increasingly attractive market is the emerging domestic markets, which are populated by African Americans, Hispanics, females, Asian Americans,” Brooks said in an interview earlier this year. “To the extent you can ensure that you understand their needs, their desires, you have a greater opportunity to be able to have products and services which satisfy these groups.”
Tiane Mitchell Gordon, senior vice president for diversity and inclusion at AOL, calls diversity a strategic imperative. Law firms have gotten that message in part because they want to be as diverse as the corporate law departments with whom they work.
These companies and law firms are seeking “empathy” with their consumers and clients. They want to better understand and serve their markets. Everyone is familiar with the social justice arguments for diversity in hiring. But there’s also a strong business—or profit—case to be made.
In the same way, it stands to reason that a more diverse Supreme Court also would strengthen its ability to deliver justice.
But that doesn’t mean I’m comfortable with the following Sotomayor statement, which she has repeated in several speeches: “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.”
Republicans should press Sotomayor on this assertion. Make her explain why her background automatically renders her decisions more valid than those made by someone like Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts Jr.
Both Sotomayor and Roberts have been praised as having brilliant legal minds. A Supreme Court on which they both serve is likely to be stronger than one that didn’t include either of them.
As he was promoting the $787 billion economic stimulus bill, President Barack Obama hailed the behemoth measure for transcending traditional adversarial lines. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers and organized labor all pushed Congress to approve it.
Business and labor agreed on a substantive point as well. They both said Congress should devote as much attention to whether the U.S. labor force is prepared for new jobs as it does to creating them.
Two people on the business-labor continuum made that point at separate events last week as the package was being rushed through Congress.
Harold “Terry” McGraw III, chairman and CEO of publishing firm McGraw-Hill, appeared at a National Press Club news conference February 11 to outline the goals of the Business Roundtable, an association of chief executives from big U.S. companies. McGraw is Business Roundtable chairman.
“Most of the recent discussion has centered on the size and shape of the stimulus projects,” McGraw said. “But even the best package risks failing if America doesn’t have skilled workers to fill the new jobs.”
The stimulus bill provides $3.95 billion for job training. But the total number could be larger than that because training funds are spread out in different areas. For instance, the bill expands help for workers who lost their jobs due to global competition. Under an enhanced Trade Adjustment Assistance Program, states would get $575 million more in training money each fiscal year for two years.
The Business Roundtable backs TAAP expansion. It is calling for “green job” training and a worker-training tax credit for employers. The group also is setting up what it calls the Springboard Project, which will draw together representatives from business, labor, education and government to develop recommendations for workforce preparation.
The next day, February 12, a House subcommittee held the first hearing in the process to revamp the Workforce Investment Act, the law that encompasses the nation’s worker training programs. The measure was due for an update in 2003, but reauthorization has been stalled since then.
Bahr said the key to helping union members—and everyone in the labor market—to move on to better jobs is to change the way education is perceived. Americans have to embrace lifelong learning, not just K-12 or even kindergarten through college.
In an interview after the hearing, Bahr said training helped AT&T operators qualify for new jobs after their positions dwindled following the breakup of the phone monopoly in the mid-1980s. The union helped workers enter programs giving them skills needed to become technicians or move into other work.
AT&T and the CWA created the Alliance for Employee Growth and Development in New Jersey in 1986. The initiative provides training for AT&T workers. It’s revered by management and labor and is protected during bargaining disputes.
“It’s never held hostage,” Bahr said. It’s one example of the joint labor-management educational programs sponsored by 16 unions and 400 employers.
For the moment, labor and management are locked in a death match over a bill that would make it easier for workers to form unions. Wouldn’t it be nice to hear more about how the two sides can work together to advance employee skills—something both sides agree is crucial to economic growth?
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