Is the White House being too clever by half with its hardball tactics on health-care reform?
“The Chicago approach to governing” is what Republican senator Judd Gregg calls the White House’s tactics on health-care reform: “You’re talking about running over the minority, putting them in cement, and throwing them in the Chicago River.” Gregg is referring to the administration’s plan to use reconciliation, an obscure parliamentary procedure, to pass health-care legislation this year. He isn’t alone; Republicans are up in arms over reconciliation. But the White House itself should be worried about the plan, which could result in reforms far more radical than it envisions.
Read my full City Journal essay on reconciliation here.
8 responses so far
1 balconesfault // May 15, 2009 at 11:01 am
Then again, the Republican Party could actually make a public effort to engage in the healthcare reform debate, rather than staking out a “no” position and acting as if any movement from that position is capitulation.
2 kroner // May 15, 2009 at 11:32 am
Wait so the claim is that reconciliation will back fire on the President because the bill will be too liberal? It’s hard to imagine that such a bill would be against the President’s liking, just against yours. Besides, they’ll have to come up with something that the most conservative of the least conservative 50 democrats will still vote for, and that line isn’t particularly liberal. At the end of the day, anything that gets passed, even with reconciliation, has the support of the majority of the representatives elected by the American people to legislate on their behalf, which last time I checked is the way things are supposed to work, despite Judd Gregg’s whining.
3 ModerateGal // May 15, 2009 at 1:39 pm
Dear Dr. Gratzer, Enough with the melodrama already. Encourage your conservative politicians to get involved and work on your behalf instead of sulking in the corner.
4 Tenek // May 15, 2009 at 1:57 pm
The Republican senators try to filibuster everything under the sun, and it’s the Democrats who are going to play hardball by using its one-year cooldown. Sigh.
5 midcon // May 15, 2009 at 2:05 pm
Come on David, reconciliation has been used by both parties in the past – notably during the Reagan adminstration.
“The 1981 reconciliation bill, which encompassed legislative language from thirteen different committees in response to savings instructions mandated by the Senate, produced a legislative result that would have been impossible to achieve if each committee had reported an individual bill on subject matter solely within its own jurisdiction. By using a procedure that permitted packaging of the savings, Congress was able to consider President Reagans economic program as a whole, resistant to the type of special interest pressures that would have scuttled the savings if they had been proposed in piecemeal fashion.”
- Senator Howard H. Baker, Jr., then Senate Majority Leader (Winter, 1983)
While reconciliation is a bad deal for citizens, where does the “Chicago style of governing” come from? If you are going to write about reconciliation, write about how defeats the representative and deliberative process. Not about how the Republicans are being shafted. More and more the “New Majority” is sounding like the “New Minority” With barely 20% of the electorate who identify themselves as Republicans, if you want to speak to the New Majority, you had better start talking to Independents.
6 ModerateGal // May 15, 2009 at 2:49 pm
Well, I’m not even sure that “New Minority” fits. More like “New Whine-ority.” The Republican party needs more ideas and more action and less whining and complaining.
I want to hear Dr. Gratzer’s ideas on how to bring healthcare coverage to all American citizens.
7 midcon // May 15, 2009 at 4:55 pm
New Whinority just might be a better phrase. As soon as I start seeing the factionalism that masquerades as our governance and political process, I can tell we are back to the same old song. The newness is wearing off this new majority.
8 ottovbvs // May 16, 2009 at 6:17 am
This is an archetypal bit of in beltway whining. Reconciliation was used constantly by Republicans to pass contentious legislation so there’s no real case against it philosophically. There’s also the reality that no one outside of political junkies knows what it means. The legislation will pass, the country will move on. As for Judd Gregg, he sounds like an hysterical teenager with his hyperbolic language.
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