George Zornick

Climate Change Could Kill 150,000 Americans This Century

George Zornick on May 24, 2012 - 10:54 AM ET

It was an incredibly warm winter in the nation’s capital—March was the warmest on record, capping five straight months of above-average temperatures. And I’m looking at a forecast now calling for a high of ninety-five degrees on Saturday, even before June hits.

Yet policymakers here are reluctant (let’s phrase it generously) to take serious action to combat the underlying problem of climate change. There have been some positive steps—like the EPA’s proposal to limit carbon pollution from new power plants and the delay and possible termination of the Keystone XL pipline—but many frustrating failures as well. It’s been years since any serious effort was made at climate change legislation. I can’t remember the last time Obama spoke about it, and his campaign is not promising much of anything in that regard. In fact, this morning’s New York Times describes in detail how Obama is eager to expand oil drilling off the coast of Alaska.

Perhaps if policymakers were more keenly attuned to the negative externalities of climate change—the bad effects beyond just breaking out your shorts a little earlier than usual—more serious action might be possible. Bill McKibben, in an excellent article for The Nation earlier this year, noted that rising temperatures will have devastating effects on plants, soil and the agricultural industry; dried-out forests mean more massive wildfires; mild winters lead to more disease-spreading ticks.

But there’s a human cost as well: more than many realize, the human body is extremely sensitive to heat, and higher temperatures mean many more deaths across the country. A new report from the National Resources Defense Council estimates that by the end of the century, 150,000 additional Americans will die from excessive heat caused by climate change if the problem isn’t arrested.

Assuming that by the year 2100 carbon pollution doubles, which it’s projected to do absent any policy changes, the report looks at how many Extreme Heat Events there would be in American cities. EHEs are when a location’s temperature, dew point, cloud cover, wind speed and surface atmospheric pressure combine to create unhealthy conditions for human beings, particularly the young, elderly and infirm. The report is based on two peer-reviewed studies in meteorological journals.

Louisville, Kentucky, is projected to be the worst hit, with 19,000 excess deaths projected by the end of the century. Detroit and Cleveland are the next on the list, with 17,900 and 16,600 excess deaths respectively.

The toll in other cities:

Baltimore: 2,900 deaths
Boston: 5,700 deaths
Buffalo: 3,190
Chicago: 6,400 deaths
Columbus: 6,000 deaths
Denver: 3,500 deaths
Los Angeles: 1,200 deaths
Minneapolis: 7,500 deaths
New York: 1,127 deaths
Philadelphia: 700 deaths
Pittsburgh: 1,200 deaths
Providence, RI: 2,000 deaths
St. Louis: 5,600 deaths
Washington, D.C.: 3,000 deaths

A complete list is here. It’s a sobering wake-up call to the suffering that awaits if carbon pollution isn’t slowed down.

Mortgage Fraud Investigation Has a Coordinator, but Does It Have White House Support?

George Zornick on May 23, 2012 - 11:36 AM ET

Without much fanfare, the Residential Mortgage-Backed Securities working group leaked the name of its “lead coordinator” to Politico this week—Matthew Stegman, an assistant US Attorney in California, will serve as essentially an executive director and coordinate the disparate parts of the multi-agency, multi-state investigation.

The coordinator job has been of high concern to many progressive activists; they see it as crucial for keeping a complex investigation focused and smoothing out conflicts between different agencies. There was an early push for Representative Brad Miller to fill that role, and he was interviewed but not selected—because, he believes, the RMBS working group was afraid of industry blowback.

So what to make of Stegman? Some progressive groups were pleased. “Matthew Stegman is a career prosecutor who has put white-collar criminals behind bars,” said Nish Suvarnakar, Campaign Manager for the Campaign for a Fair Settlement. “That’s encouraging, but Americans won't be satisfied until the Wall Street bankers who initiated the foreclosure crisis are convicted for their crimes.”

Indeed, Stegman was already a member of a California-based mortgage fraud task force—though I’m not as certain his accomplishments there are necessarily exciting. I turned up a number of cases put forward by Stegman since being on the task force, but they are for fairly low-level fraud: for example, people who offered homeowners refinance loans that didn’t exist, and then forging the paperwork. There were not any prosecutions of major California financiers or banks, but rather investigations of mostly two-bit hucksters.

Many progressives are concerned that the task force, if it does anything, will only indict low-level financial fraud and fail to get at the root of the stuff that “blew up the economy,” in the words of Schneiderman earlier this year. I’m not sure Stegman’s appointment would assuage those concerns as someone like Miller would. That said, Stegman isn’t doing the actual investigating—that’s left to the task force members and their offices—and will simply guide the process. It’s good that (after almost five months) somebody is serving in that capacity.

But the Politico story had another troubling nugget:

A government source working on housing issues said the unit is struggling in part because of a lack of commitment from the White House since its roll out in the State of the Union, citing a leadership vacuum since DOJ Associate Attorney General Thomas Perrelli left the Obama administration in February.

“It’s not happening at the level that it should be happening,” the source said. “There’s no person with juice at the federal level that is banging heads and making sure things are happening the way they should.”

Task force members pushed back on that notion in the story, but it’s certainly cause for concern. If the RMBS working group is serious about going after major financial institutions—and bringing cases with penalties that would amount to almost the market capitalization for some banks—it’s going to need all the White House support it can get.

Keystone XL Will Increase Gas Prices: Explained

George Zornick on May 22, 2012 - 2:10 PM ET

Proponents of the Keystone XL pipeline have two central arguments: that the project will create jobs and lower gas prices. That would make it a wonderful undertaking—if either claim were true.

On the jobs front, the Cornell Global Labor Institute estimates the project would create only 2,500 to 4,650 short-term construction jobs—not the “hundreds of thousands” of jobs claimed by House Speaker John Boehner.

And as we’ve noted, Keystone XL will ultimately raise gasoline prices in the United States. While Boehner has said, “We want lower gas prices for the American people” by completing the project, that simply isn’t the case.

Here’s a more detailed explanation of why that won’t be, courtesy of a new, in-depth report from the National Resources Defense Council.

If you’ve filled up a car in a foreign country, you probably noticed that it used diesel. The United States is one of the few countries to use primarily gasoline—it provides two-thirds of the fuel for our ground transportation network. Conversely, on the international markets, diesel accounts for about two-thirds of the ground transportation fuel.

For many years, while America was at the top of the consumption pyramid and everyone was driving around in SUVs and minivans, gasoline commanded the highest prices. But in recent years, increasing demand in diesel-using countries areas like Europe, China, India and Latin America—combined with better fuel-efficiency standards in the United States—pushed up the price of diesel fuel. By 2004, average diesel prices exceeded gasoline prices.

This shift impacted domestic oil production facilities greatly. For not much cost, refineries can restructure their operations to increase their diesel yield, which necessarily decreases their gasoline production. Refineries on the Gulf Coast largely moved to do this, since they had access to international markets through ocean shipping routes. But refineries in the land-locked Midwest don’t really have access to those international markets, and so focus more on gasoline production for domestic consumers.

In fact, Midwestern refineries sell 99 percent of their product to US customers. Gulf Coast refineries, meanwhile, produce more than half of the country's gasoline and diesel exports and are shifting rapidly to more diesel production:

Next, it’s important to note two things about the existing pipeline network from Canada: one, it provides crude oil at discounted prices to Midwestern refineries. Two, it’s bigger than Canada needs—in fact, Canadian oil production is only half of what the pipelines are able to carry.

This is ultimately why prices will go up if Keystone XL is built—the pipeline goes directly from Canada to the Gulf Coast, bypassing the Midwest, which will no longer get the discounted crude. And since Canada already doesn’t have more oil than it can transport, this means a trade-off to the amount of crude headed to the Midwest.

The NRDC report indicates that if Keystone is built, Midwestern refineries will produce 80,000 fewer barrels per day—which means reducing the gasoline available to US consumers by 1.2 billion barrels per year. There is no way that doesn’t lead to higher gas prices.

In fact, that’s part of the TransCanada business plan. The increased supplies to the Midwest have lead TransCanada to sell its crude at a $3 discount—which Keystone would then eliminate. Based on the company’s own analysis, this would increase the cost of crude by up to $27 billion per year.

This is an energy product almost uniquely designed not to lower prices, though that wasn’t really the intent. They simply want to ship the oil to more expensive international markets—which are so big that the additional Canadian crude won’t lower prices, and even if it did, OPEC would likely act to counter that. Meanwhile, US refineries get less crude and thus prices go up.

And this doesn't even take into account the environmental consequences of harvesting more dirty tar sands oil. From any angle, this seems like a terrible deal.

Ad Policy

Industry Forces Out Nuclear Safety Chief

George Zornick on May 21, 2012 - 4:56 PM ET

On several key votes over the past few years, Nuclear Regulatory Commission chair Gregory Jaczko was the lone voice for tougher industry standards—and now he has resigned, following an intense character assassination campaign.

Jaczko put out a generous and neutral statement this morning: “After an incredibly productive three years as Chairman, I have decided this is the appropriate time to continue my efforts to ensure public safety in a different forum,” he said. “This is the right time to pass along the public safety torch to a new chairman who will keep a strong focus on carrying out the vital mission of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.”

But that belies a much uglier history. You may recall that late last year, Republicans hauled Jaczko before Congress to answer questions about his supposed brutish behavior as chairman: intimidating and bullying staff, particularly female members, and keeping the other commissioners out of the loop.

But Representative Ed Markey, for whom Jaczko used to work, put together a report on the turmoil that painted a different picture. Instead of uncovering abusive behavior—which still hasn’t been documented—Markey’s staff detailed how in the wake of the Fukushima disaster in Japan, the four other NRC commissioners teamed up to slow down safety responses being designed by Jaczko. It also found “high levels of suspicion and hostility directed at the chairman” from the other four commissioners.

The charge was led by commissioner William Magwood, who spent many years in the nuclear industry—including for the same company that ran the Fukushima Daiichi plant in Japan, as Huffington Post’s Ryan Grim reported at the time. Magwood’s point person, Grim notes, was a then-GOP Senate staffer who is now the top nuclear industry lobbyist.

The supposed turmoil made public by Magwood and the other commissioners was eagerly taken up by Congressional Republicans during those December hearings. “I think you should resign,” Representative Jason Chaffetz, a Tea Party favorite from Utah, told Jaczko after a rapid-fire series of questions during which he repeatedly cut off Jaczko mid-reply. “If you’re going to do the right thing for this country and this commission, you should step down.”

Now, he has. And Republicans eagerly danced on his grave today. “Dr. Jaczko’s troubling behavior as chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission had clearly resulted in a hostile work environment for women that ran counter to acceptable norms of workplace equality and that threatened to undermine the mission of the NRC itself,” said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell in a statement.

“The resignation of Chairman Jaczko will close an ugly chapter and allow the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to focus on its mission—ensuring the safe operations of the nation’s nuclear plants,” said Representative Darrell Issa.

But not everybody was pleased. Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders called out the smear campaign in a statement: “For his efforts to hold the nuclear industry accountable, Chairman Jaczko was subjected to repeated personal attacks made by some of his colleagues and pro-industry advocates in Congress,” Sanders said. “I am extremely disappointed he is leaving the Commission.”

Public interest groups were outraged as well. “News today of Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chair Gregory Jaczko’s pending resignation is a terrifying example of industries trying to wreak havoc on those who regulate them—and winning,” said Tyson Slocum of Public Citizen. “Jaczko sought to create tougher rules for the nuclear industry in the wake of Japan’s Fukushima disaster last year. But the nuclear industry wanted Jaczko gone from Day One. Jaczko stood alone.”

The War in Afghanistan Is No Longer Tenable in Congress

George Zornick on May 18, 2012 - 11:52 AM ET

Count this as the most under-covered story of the week: late Thursday, Republicans in the House of Representatives forbade a vote on a resolution that would end the war in Afghanistan next year—because they knew it would pass. This means that, though we don’t have the roll call vote to prove it, Obama’s current strategy for Afghanistan is no longer sustainable in Congress.

You might recall that last year, Representative Jim McGovern offered an amendment to the defense authorization bill that called for President Obama to offer an “accelerated” withdrawal plan to Congress—which lost by only eleven votes, 215-204. All but eight Democrats supported it, along with twenty-six Republicans, including key members of the House Armed Services Committee.

Yesterday, McGovern was back with another amendment that would require the end of combat operations by the end of 2013—a year ahead of the president’s schedule—and redeployment by the end of 2014. It would require Congressional authorization for any deployment of troops to Afghanistan after 2014. McGovern’s bill was bipartisan and co-sponsored by Representatives Ron Paul, Walter Jones and Adam Smith, and had the full support of the Democratic leadership in the House.

But Republicans on the Rules Committee didn’t allow it to come for a vote—and two GOP sources told CNN the reason was that “Republicans were concerned the amendment could pass.” They expected a significant bloc of Republicans to support it, and that “they couldn't rely on the White House to lobby Democrats against it.”

Instead, Republicans only allowed debate on a resolution by Representative Barbara Lee, which would have effectively ended the war immediately by only authorizing further money for withdrawal efforts. That has no real chance of passing the House.

McGovern, speaking on the House floor, was incensed. “What is the Republican leadership afraid of? Are they afraid a bipartisan majority of this House will vote to follow the will of the American people and change our Afghanistan policy?” he asked.

The vote would have been a massive embarrassment for the White House, coming as NATO leaders are gathering in Chicago this weekend to discuss the war strategy. Republicans rarely miss a chance to embarrass the president, but party leaders—including Mitt Romney—have long supported the war and have at times criticized Obama for drawing down even on his longer timetable.

But this should still be a huge story, particularly for reporters covering the summit in Chicago this weekend. Backed by constituents that are sour on the decade-long war in Afghanistan, Congress no longer has the votes to support the president’s plan.

The Tea Party Boxes Boehner In, Again

George Zornick on May 17, 2012 - 5:38 PM ET

House Speaker John Boehner set the conservative blogosphere afire yesterday, when Politico’s Jake Sherman reported that the House GOP leadership would seek to reimplement popular parts of healthcare reform should the Supreme Court strike the entire law down next month. The pushback—and immediate retraction from Boehner—illustrates once again that the far right has the GOP leadership on a very short leash.

According to the story, Boehner briefed his colleagues on a contingency plan to reinstate both the requirement that keeps young Americans on their health insurance plans until age 26, and the laws that forbid insurers from discriminating based on pre-existing conditions. He believes that it’s “too politically risky” to rip those provisions from the law.

Boehner is quite right, but this sounds like fingernails on sheet metal to the Tea Party, which has spent the last two years fulminating about the socialistic, dictatorial, no-good, very-bad Obamacare. And the reaction from the hard right was swift.

“If this is true I have had it. I’m calling out John Boehner right now,” said powerful radio talker Mark Levin last night. “Look how fast they fold like a cheap tent.”

Daniel Horowitz at the popular blog RedState groused: “I’ve long struggled with the question of whether Republicans lack a full understanding of the free market or whether they simply lack the communication skills and fortitude to articulate free market positions to the public.”

“GOP thinking about keeping parts of ObamaCare, if you can believe it. No, no, a thousand times no,” tweeted Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association.

Within hours, GOP aides were e-mailing conservative pundits, assuring them that “Jake Sherman & Politico are liars.” And today, Boehner’s office sent out an e-mail blast titled “Anything Short of Full ObamaCare Repeal is Unacceptable.” Boehner was quoted as saying that “the president’s healthcare law is making things worse” and that “the only way to change this is by repealing ObamaCare in its entirety.… Anything short of that is unacceptable.”

But if that repeal were to happen, does Boehner still favor legislation to protect people with pre-existing conditions? He doesn’t say. Notably, even conservative stalwarts like Senator Jim DeMint and Representative Tom Price favor that. (DeMint would like to see state pools for those with pre-existing conditions, while Price has said he wants stop-gap legislation protecting those provisions should Obamacare disappear).

If Boehner does indeed want to create such legislation, does the far right object to that on principle, now that Obama has created such laws? Because Boehner is absolutely right, it’s politically dangerous to gut that, along with provisions for Americans under 26. (What if the law is repealed, does everyone age 22 to 26 suddenly lose coverage?) The GOP leadership gets that, but the opinion-makers and Tea Party firebrands don’t—and it’s clear who holds more power.

Obama Faces Political Risks by Staying Soft on Wall Street

George Zornick on May 17, 2012 - 11:54 AM ET

New polling out this week shows that beyond the moral and economic imperatives to holding Wall Street accountable, there are significant political imperatives for President Obama as well.

In five critical states—Nevada, Arizona, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Florida—a majority of independent voters say the administration is not doing enough to police Wall Street banks in the housing market. Strong majorities of independent voters in each state agree that the economic crisis was caused in part by criminal actions on Wall Street. It’s important to reiterate these are independent voters in purple states.

Here are some highlights from the polling, which was released by the Campaign for a Fair Settlement and conducted by Public Policy Polling:

In the five states polled on the statement “President Obama has not done enough to hold the banks accountable for their role in the housing collapse,” a stunning 69 percent of independent voters in Nevada agree. Obama gets agreement from at or above 60 percent of independents in each state except Florida, where 59 percent agree.
Only 25 percent of Nevada independents disagree with that statement, and the highest number that disagrees is 33 percent, in Florida.
In each state, over 70 percent of voters agree that “the economic crisis we’re in is at least partially the result of criminal actions by Wall Street executives,” with the exception of Florida, where 69 percent agree. In Nevada, 77 percent of independents agree with that statement.
Obama never gets higher than 41 percent approval for his handling of the housing and mortgage crisis (North Carolina). It’s as low as 30 percent in Arizona.
54 percent of independents in both Nevada and Arizona disapprove of Obama’s handling of the crisis, and he’s at 50 percent in Florida.

The poll does not ask specifically about the Residential Mortgage-Backed Securities working group, the investigation into Wall Street criminality leading up to the housing crash. So it’s impossible to know if voters haven’t heard of it or are unsatisfied with the progress—though really, there’s not much of a difference. If the working group doesn’t do anything, which so far it hasn’t, people aren’t likely to know about it.

Ari Berman argued persuasively this week that Obama should follow Elizabeth Warren’s example and make Wall Street accountability a centerpiece of his campaign. It’s a political winner, and I strongly suspect the Obama team knows this but is more concerned with losing financial industry donations. Berman argues this could be replaced with money from small donors energized over the get-tough approach, which may be true.

But the administration’s reluctance may go deeper than simply counting dollars and votes. A hard truth is that there may be many people inside the White House who are just philosophically opposed to going after the financial industry, and who, if they didn’t work in it themselves, have many friends and political allies there.

If that’s not the case, it’s clear that broad swaths of voters would, and do, believe it—and the onus is on the White House to convince them otherwise.

Will John McCain Save Campaign Finance Reform?

George Zornick on May 16, 2012 - 4:11 PM ET

The Hill published an intriguing scoop this morning—one that suggests campaign finance reform, all but left for dead in the 112th Congress, may suddenly have new life.

Senator John McCain is reportedly huddling with Democrats on the DISCLOSE Act, a major piece of campaign finance legislation that would require outside groups that spend more than $10,000 on electioneering to file a disclosure report with the Federal Elections Commission within twenty-four hours. The reports would have to detail the expenditures and also disclose any donors over $10,000.

The legislation, sponsored by Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, has forty-three Democratic co-sponsors in the Senate—but no Republicans have yet said they would support the bill, which would make it impossible to clear a GOP filibuster. McCain’s support would be monumental, since it could provide cover for several Republican moderates to support the legislation. “That would change everything,” one Democratic aide told The Hill. “That would breathe new life into it.”

There are several caveats here, however. It’s legitimate to wonder how serious McCain actually is. When the DISCLOSE Act passed the House in 2010 and arrived in the Senate, it failed to clear a filibuster by one vote—and McCain was among the Senators voting against ending debate. He publically attacked it as a “bailout to unions,” and his vociferous opposition was significant, since he co-sponsored the last serious Congressional attempt to improve campaign finance, the McCain-Feingold bill of 2003.

Sarah Dufendach, vice president for legislative affairs at Common Cause, sounded skeptical in an interview with The Hill, saying McCain “hasn’t shown any indication that he wants to be involved in this stuff anymore.”

McCain still believes the bill is too friendly to labor unions and signaled that his support is conditional on the bill's being “balanced and address[ing] the issue of union contributions as well as other outside contributions.”

Campaign finance reformers say that’s already the case. “The major argument made in the last Congress, and now being made again by the Chamber of Commerce and its allies, is that this bill is unfairly tilted to labor and against business,” Fred Wertheimer of Democracy 21 told me. “We strongly disagree with that.” (Democracy 21 joined thirty-seven other organizations this week, calling on the Senate to pass the DISCLOSE Act).

A cynic’s view is that McCain is either trying to water down legislation he feels is inevitable anyhow or is not actually serious about getting the bill passed and is simply interested in floating the story, thus burnishing his maverick credentials with the media and redeeming some lost credibility on campaign finance issues.

But his now-public support is still very notable, and if he does actually want to make campaign finance more transparent—and if his office actually does start negotiating language of the bill with Democrats—we might see serious campaign finance legislation much earlier than anyone expected.

New Mexico Congressional Candidate: Jail the Bankers

George Zornick on May 15, 2012 - 7:53 AM ET

A candidate for Congress in New Mexico has an interesting new television ad out—one that, for the first time this cycle (as far as I’m aware) explicitly calls for criminal charges for Wall Street executives.

Eric Griego, currently a state senator, is competing in the Democratic primary for the 1st Congressional district in New Mexico against former Albuquerque Mayor Marty Chavez and Michelle Lujan Grisham, a county commissioner. His ad, released today, features an angry Albuquerque couple who lost money in the financial collapse—and then Griego appears. “Wall Street has gotten away scot-free, and Congress has done nothing to hold them accountable,” he says. “I won’t stop until Wall Street bankers who broke the law go to jail.” Watch it:

Griego was the first candidate endorsed by the Progressive Change Campaign Committee this year, and Democracy for America has named him one of its top ten progressive House candidates. Griego is also part of a push to have fellow Democratic state legislators across the country drop any affiliation with ALEC.

Realistically, there’s little that a first-term Congressman could do to force criminal accountability for Wall Street bankers that helped cause the crash. Many of the members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus already want to see jail sentences, as displayed during its meeting with New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman last month.

But of course there’s strength in numbers, and the more candidates that come to Congress with a demand for Wall Street accountability, the stronger the prospects ultimately get. In Massachusetts, Elizabeth Warren is making that key to her campaign pitch, and it will be interesting to see if other progressive candidates take up this mantle as well.

The Chamber’s Dishonest Ad Campaign Is Underway

George Zornick on May 14, 2012 - 5:04 PM ET

The US Chamber of Commerce has promised to mount “the most significant political effort in its 100-year history” to influence this fall’s Congressional races—and, not surprisingly, it’s looking to be a daring exercise in dishonesty as well.

The Chamber rolled out a national television ad last week hitting Democrats who voted for healthcare reform, and now Senator Bill Nelson, who is facing a tough re-election campaign in Florida, is marshaling his lawyers to have the ad pulled from the air waves because of dishonest claims.

The spot contains a particularly explosive charge, particularly in Florida—and one that Republicans have often repeated: “Seniors will see $500 billion in Medicare cuts to fund Obamacare.” See the ad here, as tailored for Nelson:

Nelson’s legal team is warning Florida television stations not to run the ad because the claim about Medicare cuts is literally untrue—the program is still going to get bigger every year; the $500 billion is just a reduction in expected growth. But it’s fundamentally even more dishonest than confusing cuts and reductions in growth.

The clear implication of the ad is that “Obamacare” will reduce Medicare services for seniors. The truth is that spending on Medicare is actually increased under the bill in several key areas: it will, for example, increase spending on preventive services and close the so-called “donut hole” of Medicare Part D prescription drug coverage.

The bill aims to slow the growth of Medicare by increasing premiums to wealthy seniors, reducing payments to the semi-privatized Medicare Advantage program, establishing a review panel to oversee reimbursement rates and slowly decreasing payment rates to healthcare providers.

One might make the case that these measures harm seniors to a greater degree than increasing preventive care and prescription payments—I’m not sure that’s convincing, but it would at least be honest, so long as the growth reductions weren’t presented as cuts. But the Chamber ad does neither, and Nelson’s team is begging local television stations to be the arbiter of these claims—something it claims is all the more important in the post–Citizens United era. From the campaign’s news release:

In the wake of the recent Citizens United case, in which the Supreme Court allowed unlimited and undisclosed corporate money to be spent on such ads, TV stations have a greater responsibility to protect the public from the spread of false and deceptive information, Kendall Coffey, a lawyer for Nelson wrote in a letter to the stations today.

“On behalf of our client, we respectfully insist that you take this inaccurate ad off the air immediately,” Coffey wrote. “As a media outlet, this station has a duty to protect the public from the spread of false information and deliberate deception.”

The ad—which will inevitably be reproduced by journalists covering this dispute (ahem)—may end up bamboozling some Florida seniors, but it also telegraphs the defensive and ultimately weak position of Republicans.

It’s the GOP, of course, which twice passed Paul Ryan’s budget out of the House of Representatives, which ends Medicare as we have always known it. At least two of Nelson’s potential opponents voted for or support that budget. The Chamber might get by for a bit by muddying the waters, but if the heart of the current attack campaign is to essentially criticize the Republican philosophy on Medicare but pretend it’s one held by Democrats, that's not strong political ground to stand on.