SCOTUS rules on ACA

Supreme Court – Who’da thunk? Well, I, for one.
On June 28, I was en route to Washington for the NEA Representative Assembly with a busload of northeastern Ohio delegates when my lovely wife Lynn texted the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold Obamacare (I guess it’s all right to call it that now) to me.
When I passed the word along, the bus erupted in cheers, and people flogged their smartphones with demands for information from MSNBC, CNN, The Plain Dealer, and the oddly-silent Fox News.

It was a long and uneventful ride, so I decided to check out the opinion itself. I recommend reading the opinion itself; it’s surprisingly readable.

I didn’t see the TV news coverage myself, but I understand that analysts were initially confused because SCOTUS ruled against the government on one issue and for the government on another. Evidently there was some skirmishing about whether the Court should rule it completely constitutional (since that would be the effect of the ruling as a whole) or completely unconstitutional, since it ruled against the government’s first line of defense, the Constitution’s interstate-commerce clause.

But evidently–and
as a non-lawyer, I certainly did not know this–it is law settled in
1895 that “every reasonable construction must be resorted to, in order
to save a statute from unconstitutionality”; and so the finding that the
law is constitutional on one instead of two grounds is sufficient.

As I understand it,
the Government failed in its attempt to include health care in
interstate commerce because the Constitution’s interstate-commerce
clause allows the government to regulate existing interstate commerce,
but not to simply create a whole class of interstate commerce. This is
the source of Justice Scalia’s comment that if you can force people to
buy health care, you can force them to buy broccoli; and sure enough, the
ruling mentions broccoli. (Gotta love SCOTUS humor!)

But the Court rightly understood that a tax is different from a criminal
penalty, and noted that since everybody agrees that the government has
the authority to use tax policy to incentivize (for example) education
and home ownership (and, I would add, marriage), then using tax policy
to incentivize a health insurance purchase is within the government’s
legitimate authority.

Or, as the Court put it: “Whether the mandate can be upheld under the Commerce Clause is a question about the scope of federal authority. Its answer depends on whether Congress can exercise what all acknowledge to be the novel course of directing individuals to purchase insurance. Congress’s use of the Taxing Clause to encourage buying something is, by contrast, not new. Tax incentives already promote, for example, purchasing homes and professional educations. . . . Sustaining the mandate as a tax depends only on whether Congress has properly exercised its taxing power to encourage purchasing health insurance, not whether it can. Upholding the individual mandate under the Taxing Clause thus does not recognize any new federal power. It determines that Congress has used an existing one.”

I don’t often have the opportunity to say “I told you so,” but in this
case it appears I can: in fact, I had called it a year previously. On
July 8, 2011, I sent the following in an email exchange with my cousin
Dick:

“I suspect that the only way to really reform the health care system is a
single-payer plan; but to small-government advocates, such a plan is
anathema.  History will decide whether going for what was achievable
(Obamacare) was the right way to go. . . . Lost in the argument (to the
shame of Democrats, I think) is that a tax isn’t the same as a fine. A
fine implies that a behavior has been criminalized to some degree; a tax
doesn’t. So I would argue that what Obamacare has is incentivized
coverage rather than ‘mandatory coverage.’ And that seems to make sense
to me.

“One of the main things driving up the cost of the health care system for
the rest of us is mandatory indigent care. Assuming we don’t want to see
bodies piling up in emergency room dumpsters, we will continue to pay
for people who can’t pay for their own care and don’t have insurance,
either by choice or necessity.  This constitutes a sort of tax that we
are all paying, and Medicaid is tax-supported as well. Obamacare seems
to let those who can’t or won’t get insurance pay a tax and subsidize
the purchase of insurance for those who will; and in concept, at least,
that seems fair to me.”

In the SCOTUS ruling, Chief Justice Roberts seems to have said the same thing.

Apple – the new Microsquash?

The comic strip Bloom County used to refer to a computer giant named “Microsquash,” a punning label referring of course to Microsoft’s dominant position in the computer industry . I won’t accuse the folks in Redmond of misty-eyed benevolence, but some folks assign mystical qualities to Apple–qualities which I’m not sure the Cupertino brand deserves.

I’ve been following a discussion on NEA’s LinkedIn group about the value of iPads as an instructional tool. Note that the online reference was to “iPads,” not “tablets.”

Am I the only one troubled by the brand identity inherent in these discussions? I have to give credit to Apple for its work with the education market; but schools are being used to help sell a single product line.

We need to teach the prudent and humane use of technology as well as how to maximize its potential. But when we select one company’s product, parents and students perceive us as endorsing that brand, a fact not lost on technology vendors. This ethical dilemma didn’t exist prior to the introduction of modern educational technology.

I’m not anti-Apple: I myself have and use both an iPad and an Android tablet. And yes, I know that the operating systems developed by Google and Microsoft are single-brand products as well. I’ll concede that Apple’s closed supply chain means greater control by them and less frustration for users. But it also means that Apple has a far more visible brand identity.

Outside the schools, the technological ecosystem is highly diverse. My concern is that kids will graduate unprepared for it.

At least when we talk with kids and the community, let’s call a tablet a tablet, a phone a phone, and a computer a computer. Let’s not use “iPad,” iPhone,” and “iBook” as generic terms. On the other hand, “iPod” may be safe: from what I hear, it may be a category unto itself.

Jack H. Framke, 1920-2012

I received news a few weeks ago that my organ teacher, Jack Framke, passed away in Glendale, Arizona, on February 29. (I almost wrote “former organ teacher,” but then I realized that in many ways, Jack continues to teach me how to make music.)

I started piano lessons early in school (in first grade, I think, but my mother remembered it as second grade, and I’m reluctant to question her recall). Performing in recitals and talent shows were important parts of my growing up. I enjoyed playing, but I have never had a lot of discipline and I was never very good at practicing.

We had a piano at the house, and for many years a Hammond C-2, which was eventually replaced by a B-3. But although I was able to bang out a tune on the organ, I never really knew how to play it–and in my early years my feet couldn’t reach the pedals anyway. Eventually, though, I followed my sister Judy in taking lessons from Jack Framke.

By that time I had learned most of the basics of reading music, and I was somewhat surprised at my first lesson when Jack put a simplified piece of music in front of me: it had a single staff with a key signature, a time signature, a one-note melody line, and some unusual markings above the melody line. He explained that these were the chords: I was to play the main chord notes (the tonic and dominant notes, I later learned) on the pedals, the chords on the lower keyboard with my left hand, and the melody on the upper keyboard with my right hand.

I didn’t know the term at the time, but what he was teaching me was how to play from a lead sheet, and that instruction was very different from the more classical training I had received as a piano student. It’s the basis for the way jazz and pop musicians play, and it literally changed my musical life. Jack taught me chord theory, and chord substitutions, and how to figure out the underlying chord structure of a piece of traditionally-written music.

Over the next five years, I worked closely with Jack, eventually demonstrating for the local Hammond distributor in a teenaged organ ensemble called the Metro-Gnomes (groan). One year, the Metro-Gnomes played at the Chicagoland Music Festival at Soldier Field, which remains the largest audience I have ever performed for and gave me the opportunity to meet bandleaders Pete Fountain and Wayne King. Jack also helped me prepare my entry in the 1965 organ competition at the Illinois State Fair. (My splashy arrangement of “Seventy-six Trombones” came in second to a performance of Bach’s “Toccata and Fugue in D-Minor.”) When the chorus at St. Patrick High School needed an organist, I tried out for the job and got it. (Not that there was a lot of competition. This gig typically meant playing about two songs a year: the rest of the time, I joined the baritones while John “Chisels” Larsen accompanied on the piano.) Meanwhile, one thing led to another, because if it had a keyboard, Jack could teach it. He had piano students, and he also taught the vibraphone, marimba, and xylophone, on which the player uses mallets to strike bars arranged like keys. So when St. Pat’s got ready in 1966 to stage its first musical and the music director decided I should play percussion (!) in the orchestra, Jack supplemented the organ lessons with mallet lessons for a few months, and I was able to play nine instruments in the percussion session for our production of Oliver! As with so many things, this had a lasting influence. I decided I liked musicals: in my senior year, St. Pat’s staged a musical called Fiorello, and this time I was in the cast. Not only were these shows important to me socially, they helped shape my career. In college, I became an accompanist for the John Carroll University Glee Club, applying some of the lead-sheet techniques on the piano. During my senior year of college, at the interview that led to my first teaching job, the principal looked over my list of school activities. He noted that I had been a newspaper editor and had performed in shows, and asked which I would be interested in: advising the school paper or directing the school musicals. (“Neither” wasn’t an option.) I chose the musicals, and began a career in which I directed hundreds of students in over thirty plays and musicals. That career likely wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t played the xylophone in a school musical, using lessons improbably provided by my organ teacher. The organ lessons had ended when I reached my senior year of high school and prepared to move to Cleveland. I began my own adult life and wondered occasionally about my old organ teacher, but I never acted on those wonderings: never tried the old number in Chicago or called at Jack and Irene’s apartment on Belmont. But about twenty years ago, I used some new thing called the “World Wide Web” to do a search, and found a Jack Framke living in Arizona. I knew that after Irene and music, Jack’s next love was golf, and that they play a lot of golf in Arizona. I took a chance and got in touch, and found out that the Jack Framke living in Glendale, Arizona, was indeed my old organ teacher. We corresponded and exchanged Christmas cards for years, and in February 2010 I visited Jack and Irene in Glendale with my sister and brother-in-law, Jane and John. At nearly 90, Jack was still playing and still teaching. He had lost none of his energy and none of his enthusiasm for music, and he delighted in demonstrating the capabilities of some pretty sophisticated modern digital organs and keyboards. He was still playing golf just about every day, and when he took us to lunch at his country club, everybody knew who he was. I learned at our luncheon that Jack had gone to Lane Tech High School in Chicago, and had played saxophone in the jazz band there. He worked with a few bands out of high school and eventually used what he learned from that experience to start teaching students. So his own musical training was based more on playing than on studying. I’ve done most of my own adult music-making in churches, not clubs. I play the piano more than the organ, and the organs I do play are a far cry from the Hammond B-3 we had at home. But when I work out chords with guitarists, transpose a song to make it easier for the congregation to sing, or improvise an extension of a hymn, I’m using skills that Jack taught me. I am grateful to have known him, and to have had the opportunity to get back in touch with him so many years later.