RSS Feed MenuMickey Kaus makes an important point this morning: let the record show it was the left wing of the Democratic party that bailed on healthcare reform first.
Three more points:
1) We’re going to hear a lot in the years to come about how the threat of the filibuster stopped healthcare reform. If true, that’s true only in a very roundabout way. The threat of filibuster compelled the Senate to write a more moderate and potentially more acceptable bill, against which the Democratic left rebelled. But the proximate cause of healthcare reform’s current troubles is the left rebellion, not Republican resistance.
2) There’s always one reliable way to over-ride a filibuster: mobilize public opinion. In February 1917, when isolationist senators filibustered legislation to arm merchant ships, President Wilson crushed them by direct appeal to the public: “A little group of willful men, representing no opinion but their own, have rendered the great government of the United States helpless and contemptible,” he said in a March 4 address. A month later, the U.S. had gone beyond arming merchant ships – it was at war. But you can only appeal to the public if the public supports the underlying cause. Obamacare’s problem is ultimately not the Senate, but the country.
3) Let’s never forget that it takes only 51 votes to change the Senate rules and abolish the filibuster altogether. The Dems have those 51 and then some. If healthcare reform fails, they have nobody to blame but themselves. And the country will have only them to blame too. The argument, “those mean Republicans stopped us,” will carry zero weight. Compared to Obama’s other adversaries, the Republican senators are not so tough and not so mean. If they are too much for him, maybe he’s the wrong man for the job.
4) On the other hand, the Obama team does have some consolation: all those left-wing journalists excoriating his plan’s timidity will lament it after it’s dead, just as they now lament their failure to accept the plans offered by President George H.W. Bush in 1991 (!) and Richard Nixon in 1974 (!!!). Even better: when President Chelsea Clinton is pushing healthcare reform sometime about 2035, the progressives will be able wistfully to urge Democrats to rally round so as to send a signing pen to ex President Obama at his retirement villa in Hawaii.
oldgal // Jan 25, 2010 at 9:40 am
If healthcare reform fails it is because we have a dysfunctional, incompetent congress most of whom are unwilling to put the good of the country ahead of the good of their party or their reelection and who seem incapable of putting together good legislation.
Mandos // Jan 25, 2010 at 9:45 am
I for one believe the Senate bill—which is a completely inconsistent disaster of a bill that doesn’t actually solve most of the problems with US health care, which can only be solved by getting rid of the insurance companies—should pass. However, it was the filibuster that made the bill one that could better have been written by lemurs on typewriters. If it weren’t for the filibuster, there could have been some kind of public option or some means of phasing the insurance companies out of existence.
ChelseaCare will have to involve direct expropriation and a constitutional amendment to overcome the problems that would exist by then.
James Cody // Jan 25, 2010 at 10:20 am
I still remember when David Frum was on Rachel Maddow and argued that Maddow demeaned public debate with her style of sarcasm, mockery, and ridicule, which did nothing but embolden your own side, piss off the other side, goose ratings (or book sales or print subscription levels or whatever), and completely failed to persuade the gettable middle that likes things like facts, reason, and dispassionate argument.
I sure am glad that Frum hasn’t sunk himself to Maddow’s level.
sinz54 // Jan 25, 2010 at 11:10 am
The Democrats had a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. If they were unified, they could pass anything they wanted and the GOP couldn’t stop them.
Obamacare’s problem is Obama.
You cited Wilson making a direct appeal to the public. Did Obama make a direct appeal to the public to support the Senate bill? (Or the House bill, for that matter?) No. At the very beginning, he decided the right way to go about this was to just toss the ball to Congress and let them sort it all out, while he sits in the Oval Office issuing “Attaboys” and “Keep up the good work” to them.
Not only didn’t the House and Senate sort it all out in time to prevent the loss of the Senate’s filibuster-proof majority now, but that also focused the public’s attention on the sausage-making process. All the side deals made all around to get the 60 Senators on board–especially the outright bribe to Nebraska–turned off the public.
Sausage-making was part of all the great liberal legislation of the past. The difference was that the public’s attention was focused on the President’s shepherding the legislation through, not on the sausage-making.
When there’s a Republican president in the White House, liberals rant about “the imperial Presidency.” OK, liberals, with Obama you got what you wanted–a NON-imperial Presidency. A Presidency that sees itself as a moral leader and administrator, not as a leader of the government.
We had one of those before: Jimmy Carter. And we all remember how his presidency turned out.
balconesfault // Jan 25, 2010 at 12:30 pm
If they were unified, they could pass anything they wanted and the GOP couldn’t stop them.
But you realize what you’re saying – that would require complete, unyielding party discipline.
And the Democrats will never have that.
With a Republican President, would you ever have had Republican Senators joining a filibuster against legislation that he announced was critical to his agenda? Of course not. With a Republican President, would you ever have had Republican Congressmen doing major rewrites of his proposed legislation, the way Democrats did with healthcare, and look to be doing with finance reform? Of course not.
Democracy will always be messier under a Democratic President and Congress. It’s because they will never march in lockstep. Just the nature of the beast.
anniemargret // Jan 25, 2010 at 5:56 pm
I hate it…but I have to agree somewhat with Sinz. Obama is going to be faulted here, because he didn’t not grab the reins when he had the power to do so. He allowed the other side to frame the issue in the way they wanted it framed, which was FEAR.
Therefore, before the average American got thinking how it would affect their lives, the good which it would do for the average working American, the Republicans raised the fear factor over and over again. I told my husband last summer that the Obama and the Dems were not getting ahead of the game, waiting too long to re-direct and re-inform.
That so many Americans now cannot fully explain what exactly the healthcare reform entails and why it is good, rather than scary, is exactly what’s wrong.
And I am deeply disappointed that Obama and his staff didn’t see this one coming.
Kanzeon // Jan 25, 2010 at 8:09 pm
David, I assume you’re against this bill.
I assume you support all of those who have worked to ensure its failure.
It may be just me, but it sounds more than a little snarky and childish to work to defeat what you believe to be a bad policy, in concert with a host of allies who spent millions of dollars in opposition, and then place the blame to the proponents of the policy, instead of granting credit to your allies.
mlindroo // Jan 26, 2010 at 4:53 am
David Frum:
> There’s always one reliable way to over-ride a filibuster: mobilize public opinion.
Don’t be ridiculous, David. It’s true that health care reform has not been polling well for some time now, but I attribute this to the discussion being about hypothetical “death panels” rather than a concrete plan.
“Public opinion” means something different to 40 GOP Senators (most of them from the South and the sparsely populated West) than it does to the rest of the country. My point is that the GOP was no more likely to collaborate with the Dems in early 2009 despite the fact Obama & co. were way ahead in the opinion polls. Why should they, as long as the Republican base at home was adamantly opposed to making any concessions??
Sinz54 wrote:
> At the very beginning, he decided the right way to go about this was to just toss the ball
> to Congress and let them sort it all out, while he sits in the Oval Office issuing “Attaboys”
> and “Keep up the good work” to them.
Well, hindsight is 50-50. Let’s not forget that HillaryCare drew criticism from Democrats in Congress, who demanded more input and eventually offered a number of competing plans of their own. From a tactical point of view (if nothing else), it makes perfect sense to have the likes of Ben Nelson, Max Baucus and Olympia Snowe do most of the planning since the Senate remains the main roadblock to progress and no health care reform is possible without their consent anyway.
—
Anyway, this bill isn’t dead yet… The Dems just need one more, lousy vote where achieving a simple majority is enough — or possibly two votes in case the House first wants to fix some flaws through the reconciliation process. Considering the the Dems already have paid the price for health care reform and will be heavily criticized for it by the Tea Party crowd in November regardless of what happens, it seems inconceivable that a majority of Democrats decide not to approve the Senate bill in the end… If Democrats allow this bill to expire without signing it, there is 0% chance they will ever benefit from it politically.
MARCU$
partyofdeath2010 // Jan 26, 2010 at 9:20 am
You’ve got to be kidding, right? You’re making a point about how to break a filibuster by mobilizing public opinion, and your example is 93 years old? If would be an invalid if it were any date before Faux News started spewing its lies, designed to kill as many people with preexisting conditions as possible. I guess this must make them feel superior. Or maybe they’re afraid that if a ghetto kid with a congenital heart defect got proper treatment, Rush might have to wait an additional 15 minutes to get his illicit Oxycontin prescriptions filled.
It’s ironic that the right is willing to go to any lengths to protect a fetus, but is completely unwilling to provide even basic insurance post-birth.
Kostya // Jan 26, 2010 at 10:12 am
It isn’t the Dems, the GOP, Obama, liberals, conservatives, the filibuster, or any other group, person, ideology or procedure that killed “health care” reform. The bills themselves are to blame. The private health care insurance industry in this country is a failure (if the goal is to cover everyone at the least possible cost). That the government forces people to buy into it, the idea the forms the bills’ foundations, is anti-capitalistic, anti-American and unconstitutional.
The bills passed in Congress will not make us healthier, will not fix the health insurance industry and will not lower the cost of health care. The blame for our failure introduce practical solutions to fix our health care mess goes far beyond the rounding up of the usual suspects.