This:

A Fox News poll released Wednesday finds that while 26 percent of voters say their health care situation will be better under the new law, twice as many — 53 percent — say it will be worse. Another 13 percent say it won’t make a difference…

That helps explains why a 56-percent majority wants to go back to the health care system that was in place in 2009. Some 34 percent would stick with the new law. 

I’ve watched the congressional hearings on the IRS scandal, and like others, have been appalled at the glib performance of former IRS Commissioner, Douglas Shulman. Shulman isn’t taking an ounce of blame for the mess even though he headed the agency from 2008 to 2012. Dana Milbank reviews his slippery and rather arrogant performance in the Washington Post today.

Unfortunately, we can’t fire the Bush-appointee and Democratic-donor Shulman because he’s already escaped to the private sector. But we can fire other misbehaving IRS workers when we unravel the mystery of who ordered the political targeting.

Politico wrote yesterday that “heads won’t roll at the IRS.” The article is right that it is very difficult to fire federal workers, and I’ve written about the extremely low federal firing rate. The article says that 8,755 people were fired last year. But that was out of 2.1 million civilian federal employees, or just 0.4 percent of the total.

Politico notes that strong civil service protections are a big hurdle to firing. But just as important, I think, has been the unwillingness of federal managers to put the time and effort into removals. It’s much easier for managers to move troublesome employees off to a quiet office to get them out of the way, or to transfer them out of their section.

Also note that it is the firing rate of poor performers that is especially low in the federal government, meaning workers who are lazy or produce poor work. One barrier to their firing is that managers often give these workers good performance reviews because they don’t want to rock the boat.

However, a larger number of federal workers are fired for misconduct—such as willfully ignoring laws and regulations—and that is what we are talking about with the IRS scandal. Recent incidents in the beleaguered Transportation Security Administration (TSA) indicate that federal workers can be fired for misconduct:

• 400 TSA workers have been fired for stealing items from passenger bags.
• 5 TSA employees in Fort Myers were fired for violating screening rules.
• 28 TSA workers in Honolulu were fired for violating screening rules.
• The TSA proposed firing 25 workers in Newark for screening failures, and 4 were eventually removed.
• The TSA proposed firing 12 workers at the Charlotte airport.

Aside from the thefts, the other TSA firings seem to have been for actions no more troublesome than that of IRS employees. IRS employees were apparently not just failing to follow proper protocol, but were proactively inventing new procedures that undermined fundamental rules for nonpartisan, neutral, and fair treatment of taxpayers.

So far President Obama has “fired” acting IRS Commissioner Steven Miller, although Miller had planned to retire in June anyway. But more heads should roll in the IRS scandal, and despite Politco’s cautionary note, I’m guessing that they will roll.

On Thursday, the U.S. House of Representatives is scheduled to take up The Smarter Solutions for Students Act, which would end the practice of Congress designating interest rates for federal student loans, and instead link rates to the 10-year Treasury note. It would be a miniscule improvement. Basically, this change is like banging out a single dent in a car that’s careened off a cliff, rolled over twenty times, and caught fire.

It seems reasonable that if Washington is going to provide student loans, interest rates should be pegged to broader rates. There is disagreement about how much you add to base rates—Rep. George Miller (D‑CA), for instance, is unhappy that the act’s rates could result in profits that would be used for deficit reduction—but letting Congress designate set rates is why we are once again scrambling to keep the subsidized loan rate from suddenly leaping to 6.8 percent from 3.4 percent. 

Of course, the root problem is that Congress furnishes student loans at all, killing the natural discipline that comes from people paying for something with their own money, or money they get from others voluntarily. Getting major dough from taxpayers has enabled massive overconsumption of higher education punctuated by dismal completion rates and huge underemployment for those who manage to finish. And giving people cheap money largely just enables colleges to raise their prices at breakneck speeds, often to provide frills that heavily subsidized students seem to happily demand.

Congress may inject a milliliter of sanity into a swimming pool of irrationality, but what it really needs to do is drain the whole thing.

Cross-posted at seethrue​du​.com

I’m not convinced that any of the recent scandals roiling the Obama administration constitutes an “impeachable moment,” but, as I argue today in the Washington Examiner, there’s something wrong with a (post-?) constitutional culture where opinion leaders treat the very invocation of the “I‑word” as akin to screaming obscenities in a church.

Impeachment talk is “industrial strength insane” says the Daily Beast’s Michael Tomasky; “serial madness,” per Richard Brodsky at the Huffington Post; Rachel Maddow compares it to incontinence; and for the Atlantic’s Philip Bump, it’s like the inevitable idiot in the comments thread invoking Hitler. True, Salon’s recent listicle of 14 “crazy times” right-wingers have called for Obama’s impeachment consists mostly of frivolous, even loopy proposals; but it also includes Bruce Fein’s 2011 call to impeach Obama “over the military intervention in Libya, alleging that it violated the Constitution’s mandate that only Congress can declare war.” Crazy talk!

Also in the Atlantic, “communitarian” godfather Amitai Etzioni moans “I see no way to protect the president and all of us from the second term curse” in a piece titled, “Why It Should Be Harder to Impeach a President.” 

“Harder”? A “reality-based” communitarian Etzioni ain’t. In our 224-year constitutional history, we’ve only managed the feat twice—three times if you count Nixon, who resigned before the full House got to vote. How much harder can it get?

And when did calling for—even musing about—a president’s impeachment become a form of secular blasphemy—the American version of Lèse-majesté? 

Given what the mid-’70s Church Committee hearings revealed about presidential abuses of power, at a minimum, all three presidents of the ’60s deserved to be impeached and removed from office. Of the seven presidents since Nixon, I can make a case for impeaching at least four.

As Ben Franklin put it at the Philadelphia Convention, the impeachment power is “the best way… to provide in the Constitution for the regular punishment of the Executive when his misconduct should deserve it, and for his honorable acquittal when he should be unjustly accused.”

Our problem isn’t too many impeachments, but too few.  

ObamaCare’s Independent Payment Advisory Board is everything its critics say and worse. It is a democracy-skirting, Congress-blocking, powers-unseparating, law-entrenching, tax-hiking, fund-appropriating, price-controlling, health-care-rationing, death-paneling, technocrat-thrilling, authoritarian, anti-constitutional super-legislature. Its very existence is testament to government incompetence. It stands as a milestone on the road to serfdom.

The Congressional Research Service has now confirmed what HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius pretends not to know but what Diane Cohen and I explained here: 

[I]f President Obama fails to appoint any IPAB members, all these powers fall to Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius.

That’s an awful lot of power to give any one person, particularly someone who has shown as much willingness to abuse her power as Sebelius has. 

I would also like the Congressional Research Service to address a feature of IPAB that Cohen and I first exposed. According to the statute, we write: 

Congress may only stop IPAB from issuing self-executing legislative proposals if three-fifths of all sworn members of Congress pass a joint resolution to dissolve IPAB during a short window in 2017. Even then, IPAB’s enabling statute dictates the terms of its own repeal, and it continues to grant IPAB the power to legislate for six months after Congress repeals it. If Congress fails to repeal IPAB through this process, then Congress can never again alter or reject IPAB’s proposals.

You read that right. For more, read our paper, especially Box 3 on page 9.

CRS, I’m interested to know what you think. Take a close look at the law and get back to me.

The Christian Science Monitor suggests this lesson be drawn from the Obama administration’s recent scandalpalooza:

Congress should use this IRS scandal to beef up civics education for federal workers as well as for public school students. Lesson No. 1: Government cannot restrict or discriminate against political causes that it disagrees with.

I think the scandals teach a different lesson: Government will misbehave because it, like Soylent Green, is made from people. Fallible, foible-ridden people. Therefore, government’s unique powers must be strictly limited to avoid miscarriages of justice.

One of these days, someone should build a nation on that lesson.…

I blogged earlier about how HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius is unethically, and possibly illegally, 

shaking down industries she regulates to get them to fund ObamaCare’s implementation.

Sen. Lamar Alexander (R‑TN), the ranking member of the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, says this is “arguably an even bigger issue [than] Iran-Contra,” and ably defends his position against the Washington Post’s Sarah Kliff.

Excerpts from Alexander’s comments:

[I]n Iran-Contra, you had $30 million that was spent by Oliver North through private organizations for a purpose congress refused to authorize, in support of the rebels. Here, you’re wanting to spend millions more in support of private organizations to do something that Congress has refused…

The cause in the first case was the cause of rebels in Nicaragua. And the cause here is to implement Obamacare. Congress has refused to appropriate more for that cause. The administration seems to be making a decision that’s called augmenting an appropriation. Its a constitutional offense that’s the issue…

If you read the report of the Iran-Contra select committee, it said that the executive cannot make an end run around Congress by raising money privately and spending it. That seems to be happening here. That was essentially the problem. There the money came from a different place, but if you look at my statement [the Iran-Contra report said] “a president whose appropriation requests were rejected by Congress could raise money from private sources or third countries for armies, military actions, arms systems, and even domestic programs.” [Emphasis added.] It’s the same kind of offense to the Constitution. It’s the same kind of thumbing your nose at Article 1…

If that’s what they’re saying…that Congress has refused to appropriate the money, then you can’t do it. That’s a curb on the executive.

Alexander has sent a letter to Sebelius requesting information about her extracurricular fundraising activities.