On the Contrary

The Democrats are euphoric because they have the 60 votes for the health care bill and it is hard not to get caught up in their excitement of finally overcoming the Republican no machine.  But one has to ask after the confetti settles, what was really accomplished and is now the Senate completely dysfunctional with the filibuster and the 60-vote requirement for every bill becoming the national standard?

I think what will dawn on most people if they really look at this thing is that it is not a health care reform bill, but a health welfare bill.  From my vantage point it looks like we simply added a bunch of people to health care coverage under the existing system, with no reform of the existing system.  But what do I know and it is true that there still could be a decent bill as a result of the conference committee between the House and Senate, but I doubt it.  What is even more scary are the issues raised eloquently by Howard Dean and Tavis Smiley on MSNBC’s Meet the Press.

First lets focus on what Dr. Dean brought to the table:

“Here’s the major problem, David.  We have committed–in this last week of unseemly scrambling for votes, we have committed to go down a path in this country where private insurance will be the way that we achieve universal health care.  That means we’re going to have a 30-year battle with the insurance industry every time when we try to control costs and try to get them do things.  It is not a coincidence, David Gregory, that insurance company stocks, health insurance company stocks, hit a 52-year high on Friday.  So they must know something that the rest of us don’t.

It is possible to do that.  Two other countries that I know of do that exclusively in private insurance.  It is very, very difficult. It is very, very expensive.  We are nowheres near where Switzerland and the Netherlands are in terms of their regulatory apparatus on the private insurance industry.  So I, I, I just think this is going to be a very, very difficult, tough row to hoe.”

In simple words he laid out the problem, that would be private insurance companies and they were in the drivers seat on crafting this bill.  So to think we could implement the kind of control necessary to make this system work is really a pipe dream.  But Tavis Smiley took this one step beyond and focused what has happened and what it portends for the other tough issues we face:

“And here’s the problem for me.  It’s not just, David, that we’re not getting the kind of health care that we were promised we were going to get, it’s that in the president’s first big fight with a powerful lobby in Washington, the White House lost and they lost big.  And that, I think, portends something very dangerous down the road for all the other issues we have to deal with where lobbies are going to be pushing back on the White House.”

But I do believe that you have to stand on your principle.  And with all due respect to the White House and the president, who deserves great credit for taking this issue on and pushing it further down the field than any other seven presidents have done, you still have to ask where is the principle that we started out with, and how firm have we stood on that principle?  I think that the danger of this White House is this, that the president and his team appear to be incrementalists.  I, I warned the last time I was on this program, quoting Dr. King, about taking the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. I don’t know that we get from here to there on all the issues that matter to Americans, that we sounded off on at the polls last year.  If the strategy on health care, on torture, on climate change, on the economy, is going to be one of incrementalism, that ain’t going to get it done.”

Said another way, if you compromise your principles to get a bill, any bill, there will never really be any change.  Even worse, this approach previews the failures ahead on the other great issues before us.  Of course all of this would not be necessary if the Senate still was a place for majority rule.  I have often argued that visionaries and the great changes they bring are not because of a super majority see that way forward.  It requires overcoming the conventional wisdom and getting a simple majority is hard enough.  Paul Krugman, in his column this morning (A Dangerous Dysfunction) touched on this problem and how the Senate could simply do away with this onerous requirement. Nothing in the Constitution requires a super majority.  Will we fix it?  I doubt it.  But if we don’t we are doomed to repeat the failures of the last thirty years.

“Senator Olympia Snowe, a member of the Senate Finance Committee, where the most-watched version of the health care bill is being written, said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” that the so-called public option is “universally opposed by all Republicans in the Senate” and “therefore, there’s no way to pass a plan that includes the public option.””  The New York Times article went on to say, “A new government insurance has been roundly opposed by the health care and insurance industries, and Republicans have argued that it would create an alternative to employer-sponsored private plans that will lure millions of insured workers away and lead to a dysfunctional single-payer plan.”

If the Republicans and the health care and insurance industries don’t like it, it must be a good idea.  So it is clear who is in charge of health care reform, and it is not the Democrats.  Senator Snowe is, of course, referring to the filibuster requirement of 60 votes.  But one has to remind the Democrats that our democracy as defined in our Constitution does not require 60 votes for a health care bill.  The Constitution is clear about what actions require a super majority, but lets each house set its own rules, thus the filibuster in the Senate. The Democrats have tied their own hands because they have failed to call the Republican’s bluff and stand firm for what they believe will work.  They seem to work under the impression that half a loaf is good enough when in fact it may just worsen the situation.  I wonder how the Republican Party would fare if the Democrats stood firm on a Public Option and forced the Republicans to actually conduct a filibuster, exposing their nihilist approach to our problems for all to see.

Senator Snowe went on to say scuttling the public option for good “could give real momentum to building a consensus on other issues.”  Read the words “real momentum to building a consensus on other issues” as meaning do it the Republican and health industry way so that the bill enrolls lots more people, but does nothing to really correct the massive cost growth problem. Building consensus with Republicans has really worked well for the Democrats in the past, hasn’t it?  If they are stupid enough to go down this road again they deserve to be out of power.

Republicans mean only one thing when they say bipartisan, and that is do it our way.  Real negotiations would have been insisting on a single payer system and then compromising to a public option.  As it is, President Obama and his band of weak-kneed advisors gave up the single payer system before the game began, have not stood firm for the public option, and then made side deals with the health care industry to try to defuse opposition.  It was a stupid play when they could have used the opposition to their advantage.  It is unlikely now that we will get any real health care reform that makes a difference or put in place the incentives to control costs, unless the Democrats decide to fight the filibuster.  Will they?  I don’t think they have the guts.  It has always been their fatal flaw that Republicans have turned to their advantage.

What we need is a strong public option and a real look at how unlimited health care incentivizes unlimited spending.  Probably a mix of public and private insurance such as France has is the optimum approach (See Roger Cohen op-ed, Get Real on Health Care),  with a look at how to make consumers more discerning about how they spend their health care dollars (How American Health Care Killed My Father).  If Congress brings anything forward without a public option, it should be killed because it doesn’t address the underlying problem of mushrooming costs and has no mechanism to control the private industry by competition.  We need to stand firm for what is right and will work, not half measures that may cover a few more but bankrupts all of us in the end.

With Arlen Specter’s switch to the Democratic Party, one has to wonder what is going on.  Well for one thing with the Republican Party only representing 21% of the population and shrinking, the math for the primary in Pennsylvania was fairly straightforward.  He could not win the primary against a hard-line conservative, but could probably win the general election.  So from this calculation, it was the only choice for a chance to survive.  But this raises all kinds of issues.

First is how Pennsylvania would see this.  From the Democratic point of view, they had a good chance to run a more liberal Democrat to win against a hard-line conservative.  This scenario presented the Democrats with someone more supportive of their agenda. Whoever was going to run for that seat from the Democratic Party in Pennsylvania must feel like he just got his legs cut out from under him.  Is Senator Specter moderate enough to be elected?  I don’t know and this is the chance the Democrats are taking.

The press is making a big deal about getting the 60th vote in the Senate to be filibuster proof, but it is a foolish claim.  Senator Specter will vote as he always does, and that is independently.  Additionally, the Democratic Party has a large spectrum of political beliefs from liberal to conservative.  They usually don’t vote in a block.  It may help, but probably not when it really counts.

Here is the really sad thing.  There is no room for moderate Republicans in the Republican Party.  They have moved to a party of litmus tests for the radical right.  On the other hand, the Democratic Party is really a party of three camps.  You have the very liberal side, which is how the Republicans paint everyone in the Democratic Party and is actually a small minority of it; then you have the moderates who are really progressives, which is the majority of the party; and then you have the conservative Democrats who really can not be distinguished from moderate Republicans a few years ago.  No there aren’t any socialists in there.  The Republican Party is being made irrelevant by their hard-line dogma, which they refuse to examine.  More about that in a moment.

The final issue that is raised by Senator Specter’s defection is what does this say about primary elections?  If the primaries are really a function of the hard left and the hard right, the nation is not getting choices that represent their views.  If hard-line Democrats or hard-line Republicans control the primaries, the choices we all get at election time are no choice at all.  In this environment where the Republican Party is a small and radicalized party, it may be time to rethink open primaries.  California is moving in that direction at the behest of the Republicans here because they feel disenfranchised in a Democrat controlled State legislature.  But they may rue their plan when they find out that the independents will vote most of their radical brethren out of office and instead move much more to the center.  In my small mind I would like to see an open primary and top two run off for the office in November even if it turns out they are both from the same party..

Finally, what do the Republicans have to do to stem what is going to be an ongoing desertion of their party members?  First they have to understand, as well as the press, that the middle is in the Democratic Party and the Republicans are a right fringe party.  If Arlen Specter is center right and he has moved to the Democratic Party, just where do you think the center is?

I listened to Michelle Bernard, a conservative political analyst on MSNBC, tell us that the Republicans need to find their soul: “That doesn’t mean Republicans should give up their belief in limited government or free markets. I don’t think that’s the case at all. But the Republican Party needs to find a way to reach out to many, many people, not just the religious right.” The problem with that prescription is that in order to reach out to more people, their basic belief in limited government and the free market needs major modifications and just dropping the right wing and the religious nuts isn’t going to solve that because it just makes them smaller without solving the root problem.  Limited government and what they mean by free markets is no longer selling in the market place.

First, right now we are having two immediate crises, economic and medical (swine flu).  In both cases the people expect our government to be there to resolve these crises.  How does that fit into limited government?   Republicans want to starve so it will never have the resources to help anyone.  Remember Katrina?  If this argument is going to have any credibility at all in the future, then the Republicans have to stop their knee jerk reaction to government programs and understand that government is part of the solution.  Then looking at what is appropriate to government and what is appropriate to the private sector might have a little more credence.  The swine flu epidemic is a case in point.  They cut funds for the CDC and preparation for just such a disaster.  Now they see a need, but their present ideology doesn’t allow for government planning and funding of the results of that planning.  By hating all things government except the military, thinking the private sector will provide all the solutions, the are emasculating the very solutions people are crying out for and we have found we need to address many of our complex problems that face us in our future.

On the free market thing, who ever said Democrats were against the free market?  What this is code for is little or no regulation or interference in business.  Think about the economic crisis we are in and then consider why no regulation is such a jim dandy idea.  It is out of touch with the reality of what is happening around us and our changing world.  A moderate approach, which may I add many Democrats are proposing, is smart regulations.  If Republicans could get off their “No” soapbox and say that the free market needs some fixing and requires more regulations to make our economy more stable, then we can have an honest debate on what those controls should be.    But they still hold to climate change isn’t happening, regulation of the environment is unnecessary, anything that impacts business is bad, and government is bad at everything.  These beliefs make them irrelevant in today’s world.  And it is forcing moderates to move to the Democratic Party where dissent and real debate are still allowed and real solutions to our problems can be proposed.

So what have is real diversity of both race and ideas in the Democratic party on all issues from health care to stimulus.  The Republicans have become the party of the white southern bigot.  The Republican Party has made themselves irrelevant by their hard-line, no compromise positions and until they change their own ideology to reflect a changing world, they are irrelevant.  The only way they are going to appeal to a wider electorate is take this radical step to reinvent themselves.  I don’t think they can do it because it requires tolerance and they don’t have any.  It’s like giving up religion for them and they are Republican bible thumpers.  Without their dogmatic beliefs, their world would crumble.  Suprise!  It is crumbling.

This week as the nation we face some, and I would say the biggest challenges of our short history, and what we get in Washington is political circus.  Of course it is grist for the media bozos who love this stuff over substantial issues.  Why is that you ask when we are facing some of the biggest choices we are going to have to make?  Because opinion in these soap operas masquerades as journalism and does not require the discipline of doing your homework.  A prime example was in the San Francisco Chronicle Editorial pages where they claimed that the Secretary of the Senate had grounds to send Blagojevich appointee Roland Burris packing because his appointment letter wasn’t signed by the Illinois Secretary of State.  There are two problems with this statement, first of which is that the Secretary of State has no approval authority, just a requirement to sign the appointment letter.  The second is that Rule 2 of the Standing Rules of the Senate is only a recommended procedure.  At least if you are going to give us an opinion, have it based on reality.  But here are the other related follies that are distracting us from our real business:

• Harry Reid is an idiot – Harry Reid is George Bush in Democratic clothing.  By that I mean he is not a deep strategic thinker.  Any fool could have figured out that his promise to not seat any appointment of Governor Blagojevich would put him in a box with no way out.  The fallacy of this stand is detailed in my blog, “The Rule of Law”, but let me just reiterate that if the Senate gets in the business of nitpicking duly appointed or elected officials from the states, we are going to go down a political road that won’t be pretty.  Even Diane Feinstein figured this out.  Harry has made other stands that he has later had to retract and he just makes the Democrats look stupid and weak.  In the meantime they will finally roll over and look stupid once again.  If I were Burris, I would not agree to the “not run in 2010” compromise.  I have no horse in this race, but the Senate needs to stay out of the State’s business.  Illinois has already shown how capable they are of making fools of themselves.
• Diane Feinstein is a prima donna – That is probably an unfair characterization since most Senators having become use to their exercise of power are prima donnas.  I have been somewhat prejudiced against her since she supported the Patriot Act and said she would support a Constitutional amendment banning flag burning, a true assault on free speech.  But her being miffed about President-Elect Obama’s choice of Leon Panetta to lead the CIA since she wasn’t consulted, was true pouting.  Reminds me of Robert Reich’s description of his confirmation process for Secretary of Labor.  He had studied all the issues and was ready in his confirmation hearings to show he had a command of all the issues.  That is when he figured out what the process was really about, genuflecting to power in the Senate.   I like Rachel Maddow’s opinion of this pick:  Obama doesn’t want anyone tainted with Bush administration policies, whether that be torture or violations of our constitutional rights.  Diane Feinstein and her pick for that position, Jane Harmon, may have gone along with the flow a little too much and stood by while our Constitution was trashed.  Time for some new blood.
• In Minnesota, what is the issue? – In Minnesota, Al Franken was certified the winner, but Republican Norm Coleman filed suit.  This one is a no-brainer.  While this is being contested, the Senate cannot seat Franken because Republicans with their filibuster friend will refuse to seat him.  What I would like to know is what is the real basis of Norm Coleman’s suit.  More to the point are the votes Norm Coleman is contesting likely to give him the seat?  Oh excuse me that would take real investigative reporting requiring work and opinions are so much easier.  I don’t fault Norm Coleman for filing suit in an election that close, I would just like to find out if he is being prudent or not.
• Super majorities are being badly abused – The contested elections above all have one thing in common, power.  The Democrats can no longer get the 60 Demos to prevent a filibuster (Thank you Georgia and the backwards South, if you people had your way we would be a theocracy), but they can get close (59).  This is critical to moving the country forward and enacting Obama’s agenda without too much obstructionism from the Republicans.  But the 60 vote super majority rule in the Senate makes it sound like the Democrats didn’t win in November and gives the Republicans way too much power to thwart change.  We face the same problem here in California where it takes two-thirds of the State Senate to pass a budget making a handful of ideological Republicans in charge of our ship of state.  I am sorry, but this is just stupid.  Change is hard and in the organizations I have worked in (large federal bureaucratic organizations) you are never going to get a super majority to agree to anything.  So let’s get real.  If you want to make a fundamental change in rights, that should take a super majority.  For all other issues, simply majority rules. Otherwise, when the people speak in election, it is then thwarted by these stupid rules.   If you want to see how counter productive this is, just watch California go broke.
• Caroline Kennedy – Maureen Dowd wrote a great column Wednesday in the New York times (Sweet on Caroline), and made a similar point that I did in my blog on 12/15, “Three Things to Pay Attention To” (also addresses the Blagojevich issue),  which is that if you are judging Caroline on her ability to be a politician, ability to slap backs, say sound bytes, and be disingenuous, then she is unqualified.  But if you want someone who is genuine, has not compromised her values, then it might just be a breath of fresh air in the Senate.

Won’t it be nice when we are done with these sideshows and start a real discussion about what sort of economic stimulus will move us forward and build our future?  I’ll give you a hint:  Tax cuts are a waste of our money.  Care to debate it?