Irreconcilable Differences

One of the more annoying tropes of the past few weeks, as it has become more and more likely that the Democrats will finally get their act together and inch past the goal line on health care reform, is the idea that budget reconciliation is somehow ”unprecedented” and “extreme” and ”jamming it through.”

This is bullshit, plain and simple. A few points:

First, it is, without question, not unprecedented. Even that dastardly Mainstream Media know this:

Second and more imporantly, the Democrats have already passed health care reform. All that’s left to do is find a way to reconcile (not exactly what “budget reconciliation” means, but we’ll get to that) the House and Senate bills. The difficulty is that since the Second Boston Massacre — WHICH CHANGED EVERYTHING DIDN’T YOU KNOW – the Democrats no longer have 60 votes in the Senate to pass an amended bill.

With the Senate GOP voting in lockstep against everything, the only way to get anything close to the (again, already-)passed bills to the President’s desk is for the House to pass the Senate’s bill. There are significant differences between the two, but the foundation is largely the same. What matters now is whether Pelosi and co. can get enough “no” votes to switch to “yes.” (And at least fewer “yes” votes to switch to “no.”) That is literally all that matters for health care to pass. Reconciliation is only a small part of the bargain between the House and the Senate to get that done.

If you watch CNN, however, you’ll see Mary Matalin, who is about as pleasant as bedbugs, drone on about how reconciliation is a travesty of democracy and will destroy the Democrats’ majority come November. Every other cable news network will carry another loathesome version of the same drivel. You’ll read more of this in the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal and in a thousand witless posts on the Corner.

It’s all a big red herring.

Budget reconciliation, as I understand it, is just a patch for legislation that has already been approved. Because budget-related legislation is so complicated, involving so many committees, the budget reconciliation process allows policy changes to entitlements (such as MEDICARE) and tax laws to be passed in a streamlined, unfilibusterable way, to avoid total gridlock. After all, the federal government’s gotta have a budget, one way or another. If you’re really interested in the procedure, the House Rules Committee has a nicely dense summary.

In the case of health care reform, reconciliation will allow the Senate to appease House members’ concerns about things like affordability and the Medicare Part D “donut hole,” but not, since it’s not budget-related, things like the Stupak abortion language and the structure of the insurance exchanges. Still, still, still: all that matters is that the House pass the Senate bill.

The point is that reconciliation is the icing, not the cake. It doesn’t even actually have to happen for reform to pass. The worst fears of conservatives arrive earlier – health care reform is a few House votes away from becoming law. (I suspect the rumors of a smaller compromise bill are a political feint. Obama said as much yesterday.) The furor over reconciliation is merely a last-ditch effort on the part of Republicans to squeeze a little more political blood from the fight. They aim to tar Obama as a partisan, so they can run against him and his “socialized medicine” in the fall. Let them. Health care reform is too important, and too close, to be sacrificed on the altar of politics. The ineptitude of the Democrats over the past year has already guaranteed a bloody midterms. And the hubristic failure of Rove’s “permanent majority” should have Democrats realizing that huge majorities are unsustainable anyway.

Besides, if they don’t get health care reform passed, the Democrats are really screwed in November. They couldn’t be that stupid, could they?

Good-Bayh

Evan Bayh announced his retirement from the Senate today. Good riddance. Even though, per Nate Silver, Bayh is a relatively valuable vote when he bothers to vote with his party (rather than undermine it), he’s actually the worst kind of entitled “centrist” whose principles change with the political winds; the worst kind of legacy politician whose celebrity gave him near-perfect electoral security while accomplishing absolutely nothing; and — wouldn’t you know it? — the worst kind of turncoat, who waits until the day before the filing deadline to announce his retirement. Screwing over the Democratic Party: the only legacy Bayh can be proud of.

Josh Marshall sums up Bayh’s oh-so-high degree of integrity nicely:

[L]et’s not paper over the fact that he says our national government is broken. And his decision is to walk away.

How Do You Solve A Problem Like The Senate?

Since we can’t just get rid of the damn thing (outrageous!), Christopher Beam offers eight ways to reform Senate rules, none of which will ever happen, because of Senate rules:

[T]he odds of streamlining the Senate anytime soon are low, thanks to a central paradox: Changing the rules surrounding the supermajority (60 votes) requires an even greater supermajority (67 votes). As of now, the political will simply isn’t there.

Blogs and Pieces

Enough about the “Snowmaggedon” already:

• At the Atlantic, Michael Kinsley makes a great point about the difference between condescension and simply, you know, believing you’re right. Marc Aminder, meanwhile, breaks down Sarah Palin’s paradigm, which is basically appearing as a victim of condescendsion. Imagine that.
• At ThinkProgress, Matt Yglesias throws some cold water on the popularity of the Tea Party movement and tears to pieces Marc Thiessen’s gross dissembling on torture. Thiessen’s angry response is laughable.
• Nate Silver, writing at FiveThirtyEight, proves a point that can’t be made often enough: Obama’s policies have, on the whole, been more popular that not. “[T]he votes taken by the Republican Congress have far more often been out of step with those of the median voter.”
• In New York politics, uncertainty abounds. Governor David Paterson will resign very soon, or he won’t. Hiram Monserrate, who probably slashed his girlfriend’s face with broken glass, may finally be expelled from the State Senate, or not.
• Hipster puppies!

Why I Am Not A Conservative

A major topic of this blog since its inception has been the vacuous, uninformed nature of right-wing political discourse. I bemoan this fact because I believe in a robust dialogue, and as a temperament I believe conservatism has much to offer our politics. But what passes for conservatism these days is, in my opinion, a mostly content-free ideology. It’s nice to have this confirmed on my own blog.

A reader named Karl Keller has been commenting, quite passionately, on a few recent posts. I don’t know who Karl Keller is or anything about him, but since I want to take my readers’ dissents seriously, I thought his comments deserve a detailed response, which I try to make after the jump.

(more…)

The State of Our Union Is… Sassy!

The State of the Union is so overhyped. The speech rarely has any substantive political effect, and it’s important to remember that Obama’s first-year problem has not, depite the past month, been one of narrative. Matt Yglesias makes a great point today:

[W]hat we’ve learned time and again over the past year is that there’s only so far that great speeches get you. [...] Obama seized the mantle of responsibility, pragmatism, and seriousness while challenging the GOP to show some good faith and willingness to be a constructive partner in government. But what he’s never been able to do is to generate the kind of specific, concrete political pressure on incumbent Republican senators that inspires them to vote “yes” on his bills or confirm his nominees. And nothing in his speech changes that dynamic.

It wasn’t a great speech, but it didn’t need to be. No speech is every going to change Olympia Snowe’s vote, or make Lieberman less of an asshole. But what I saw, and what I think the American people saw, was a pissed-off President not afraid to call out his enemies. He’s angry, and so are we! It was a brilliant piece of performance art. Watching Boehner and Cantor smirk through Obama’s rousing defense of the stimulus and bailouts and tax cuts served as a reminder of the fact that the Republicans are simply refusing to legislate. They’re not doing their jobs, and they’re incredibly unpopular because of it! There’s a reason Obama is far more popular than anyone in Congress, and, pace Scott Brown, it’s decidedly not because Americans are against health care reform. The triumph of last night was the return of 2008 Obama, just when we need him.

(more…)

Can the Party of ‘No’ Keep It Up?

Yesterday, I wrote about the Republican strategy of stonewalling the President and the Democrats on every major policy issue. It has been fairly successful for them! But short-term political wins do not necessarily yield long-term political gain. Jonathan Bernstein explains why rejectionism is a dangerous game:

What’s the cost to Republicans?  First, on policy, they lose the ability to negotiate on behalf of their important constituency groups; as we’ve seen, this can have the effect of actually driving some of these groups (the doctors, for example) right out of the party.  Second, embracing the crazy yields, well, the crazy in charge of your party.  Republicans stand to gain in the 2010 cycle because the economy is lousy, because Democrats have a lot of exposure after two terrific cycles, and because the party of the president almost always does badly in midterms.  If, however, Republicans nominate candidates who have embraced the crazy, they will be far more vulnerable to counterattacks than if they nominate good, solid candidates (and not every Democratic candidate will emulate Martha Coakley and not get around to attacking crazy things that their opponents say until the last 48 hours).

However, no one is going to listen to advice like that.  Republicans are invested in a particular interpretation of 1994, and yesterday’s election is only going to reinforce that interpretation, whether it’s correct or not.

Creative Obstruction

The political fallout from Scott Brown’s insurgent win has me thinking about the nature of our democracy. The way the republic is set up, if a large enough group of legislators—say, hypothetically, the Senate Republican caucus—simply chooses not to negotiate in good faith with the other side, offering only ideological proposals that have no basis in reality—say, hypothetically, deficit reduction and no cuts to Medicare—they can completely obstruct the agenda of even a huge majority like that the Democrats currently have (and will continue to have, don’t let’s forget, even in the wake of the Brown-out).

There is a certain brash creativity to this.

The Republicans stated, quite loudly, as soon as President Obama announced his intention to pursue health care reform in early 2009, that they would kill it. Straight up said it. A moderate few pretended to negotiate, but according to Harry Reid “it was a waste of time dealing with [Republican Senator Olympia Snowe] because she had no intention of ever working anything out.” The GOP can claim to have offered alternative legislation, but look at Jim DeMint’s proposals and try to tell me with a straight face that they would solve any problems. You can’t.

The Republicans’ capacity to obstruct has much to do with Senate rules and procedures. Use of the filibuster has jumped to historical highs in the past few years. There are many people, myself included, who believe that America might be better off if the Senate were simply abolished. If wishes were horses…

The broader point is that American democracy is imperfect, and always will be. A small minority can, with audacity and consistency, stop the government in its tracks. That old dinosaur The Village Voice captured it best today with their headline: “Scott Brown Wins Mass. Race, Giving GOP 41-59 Majority in the Senate.”

All eyes now turn to Obama. His reaction will determine how the Democrats will govern with only a 19-seat majority in the Senate. I leave you, for a dash of hope, with Jonathan Chait:

Here is what I think will happen. The shock and panic will play itself out over a few days. Then the Democrats will assess the situation and realize that letting health care die represents their worst possible option. And then they will make a deal to pass the Senate bill through the House. I am not positive this will happen, but it’s my bet, because elected officials at the national level, dim though they can be, are usually shrewd enough to recognize their political self-interest.

In the meantime, the display of hysteria is actually disgusting.

Sixty

Reid got there, and it’s a staggering achievement.

Politically speaking, I think Jonathan Chait has the most interesting take on what happened. Over the summer, during the heyday of the tea parties, it looked like health care reform was doomed, or at least eviscerated. Obama’s insistence on a bipartisan bill gave Republicans free rein to negotiate in bad faith. And boy did they.

Would you look at how that turned out! As Chait writes, “The Republicans eschewed a halfway compromise and put all their chips on an all or nothing campaign to defeat health care and Obama’s presidency. It was an audacious gamble. They lost.” A gamble for which we should be forever grateful.

Of course it’s not a perfect bill. Did you expect it to be? If so, there’s a bridge I’d like to sell you. (It goes To Nowhere.) But the package we got is certainly better than nothing; it’s better than what we could have gotten if the GOP hadn’t been so brazen; and it lays the groundwork for incremental improvement. Here’s what’s in it now. Marc Ambinder—one of the smartest observers in Washington—even thinks that what the President will sign, after conference, will be more progressive than the Senate bill:

The bill that Obama signs will be “better” from the standpoint of liberal activists than the bill that the Senate is going to pass. It will contain more subsidies…probably some version of a trigger for some sort of insurance competitive mechanism…a reinstatement of mandatory cost controls for hospitals…and even tighter restrictions on insurers.

It is, after all, the most wonderful time of the year. Know hope.

Walking Straight Into the Echo Chamber, or Why Sarah Palin Gets Away With It

It’s too easy to anger the mind.

I was catching up on my growing pile of New Yorkers this weekend when I came across a book review by Elizabeth Kolbert that got me to thinking about Sarah Palin and her whole phony “death panels” meme, which she reiterated on Saturday on her Facebook page. (Screw the MSM!)

First thought: I can’t believe I just went to Sarah Palin’s Facebook page.

Second thought: Anger. People believe this?

The occasion for Palin’s screed, of course, was the House vote on the health care reform bill. “What’s in this bill?” she “wrote.” “The ‘death panel’ provision is in it.”

Needless to say, this is still not what end-of-life counseling means. It has never meant what Palin claims it means. “Death panels” is a nefarious phrase—willfully misleading, politically expedient, morally repugnant. It’s a retreat to the cowardice of empty polemic. In other words: vintage Palin.

But why do so many people believe her? Why does she continue to get away with it?

(more…)