Jacob Hacker, the Yale professor who is considered the father of the public option, has a piece in support of the current health-care bill in Politico today. It concludes like this:
We have a once-in-a-generation moment to pass reform, and we must seize it. But what we pass must be understood as only a step — an important but ultimately incomplete step — toward the goals that the inspiring campaign for the public option embodied.
Christmas week, and we have much to be thankful for in this country. Even so, we can’t miss the solemn fact that more than health-care, gigantic though that is, was at stake in the vote-by-dark victory of Senator Harry Reid. Senator Judd Gregg has told National Review that we are now under a parliamentary system that allows supermajorities to usher in radical change without checks and balances:
Harry Reid’s health-care bill “was purchased,” says Gregg. “Our system of checks and balances is gone. We now have a government that lurches with great speed even though our system is founded upon incremental change.” And don’t hope that the House stops the runaway train, he says. “I think the House is ideologically even further to the Left than the Senate. There are many people there who are committed to taking us down the road toward nationalization.”
Let us get this straight, Senator Nelson: You voted to impose heavy financial burdens on other states under the condition that our taxpayer dollars would ensure that your state doesn’t have to pay? Sounds bad. It is bad. Nelson may get this week’s “strange new respect” award from the media (then again, his deal was so blatantly corrupt that he might not). But elsewhere it’s going over like a lead balloon.
Nelson lamely says he struck the deal because Nebraska Governor Dave Heineman expressed concern that the massive health-care bill would impose an unfunded federal mandate that would “stress the state budget.” Governor Heineman responded to Nelson’s deal this way: “Nebraskans did not ask for a special deal, only a fair deal,” Heineman said in a statement Sunday.
This process was not democracy in action. It was profoundly depressing—the secrecy, the votes in the dark of night. Robert Samuelson, perhaps the country’s best economics columnist, says that ultimately, when we know how health-care “reform” affects our lives, it will not be the legacy the Democrats want. Scant comfort. By then, we’ll be paying huge freight (for our own states, plus the tab for Nebraska) for medical care that isn’t as efficient as what we now have. Instead of extending the benefits of an excellent medical system, we will have extended the long arm of the government.
The only comfort I got over the long weekend was from a piece by Bill Kristol, who went to Wikepedia for the definition of Pyrrhic victory, the term that is being applied to the Democrats’ big win. He concluded:
So: Pyrrhus’s victory became Pyrrhic because the victorious party lost many of its supporters–but also because the opposition didn’t abate in courage, was able to gain new recruits, and had the force and resolution to go on.
We must keep fighting.
Hubris of the Week Award: To end on a lighter note, I am giving my Hubris of the Week award to Victoria Kennedy, who “humbly” asked Congress to pass this monstrosity in memory of her late husband, Senator Edward M. Kennedy.
Senator Harry Reid has “reverse-engineered” the health-care vote to take place on Christmas Eve, in the words of National Review’s Rich Lowry. Lowry has a fascinating item on how it could go down tomorrow:
This is how I understand the Senate state of play. Reid wants to unveil the bill on Saturday morning, around 7:30 a.m. That’s when 30 hours on the Defense appropriations bill expires. Reid will do it only if he is assured his 60 votes—to do otherwise would court legislative suicide. But he’s probably not there yet, or we already would have seen the bill. The chances are that he’s working multiple issues right now, given that Nelson says his concerns go beyond abortion. On Saturday morning, every hour will count. Reid has reverse-engineered this for a Christmas Eve vote. He needs to file for cloture on Saturday to make it. But he knows Republicans are going to demand that his manager’s amendment be read, and this takes time. Probably 8 or 10 hours. Reid needs to introduce the amendment early, so Republicans have no chance to push the reading past midnight, which will delay the filing of cloture until Sunday and push everything back a day and past Christmas Eve. If Reid files cloture on Saturday, then he’ll have a bunch of early-morning sessions like the one today to jam the schedule.
Frankly, I don’t think this assessment of one of the methods by which the Democratic leadership may foist health-care transformation on the rest of us is hyperbole:
[T]he proposals before us now are of such a magnitude as to transform American life and work as we have known it. To have such momentous decisions made in the backroom by a half-dozen leaders (without the public’s having a chance to comment) and then to have it rubber-stamped by obedient backbench representatives and senators who have not even asserted their prerogative to read the bills they are told to vote for — if that were to happen, then our people’s Congress would become like the lackey-filled old Soviet Parliament.
To paraphrase Hannah Arendt: For the leaders to “speak in the form of commanding” and for the rank and file to “hear in the form of obeying” is not a transaction between free people.
Whatever the motives of their leaders, it is within the power — and it is the duty — of the rank-and-file members of Congress to insist on regular legislative order. Their careers — to say nothing of the republic — may require that insistence.
The writer is Tony Blankley.
It has been reasonable to assume all along that the Democratic left would fall in line and vote for any final version of the Baucus bill before the Senate. But there are sounds of mutiny on the left. Perhaps the most astonishing critic to emerge in these later days of the debate is frequent White House visitor Andy Stern, president of the Service Employees International Union, a staunch supporter of the president.
The liberal critics may be lambasting Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson, but if it were a really good bill, they’d have picked up a few Republicans and be in good shape. But the sound of the fury is deafening:
Liberal blogs such as Daily Kos are blasting the Senate bill, especially since it dropped a government-run “public option” and killed a plan to expand Medicare. Liberal House members are venting their fury at senators who are lukewarm on the revamp, especially Connecticut independent Joe Lieberman and Nebraska Democrat Ben Nelson. Labor unions are protesting proposed taxes on high-value insurance policies.
“It’s time for a couple of obstructionist senators to get out of the way, to not put their personal and political interests ahead of…the interests of millions of people who don’t have health care right now,” said Andy Stern, president of the Service Employees International Union, part of a union backlash against the bill that burst into view Thursday.
Senator Ben Nelson is—as of this moment—still holding out against the health-care bill. He could block Harry Reid’s way to the magic 60. Politics Daily notes that what Nelson regards as insufficient language barring public funding of abortion isn’t his only drawback:
In addition to the abortion question, Nelson said he has serious concerns about what he sees as unfunded mandates for states, new taxes and the massive spending in the bill. “They way in which money is raised is not acceptable,” he said. “So if there isn’t a way to raise the money in tight times, I think you have to look at a scaled-back version.”
Senator Jim Webb of Virginia told a Richmond audience that he hasn’t made up his mind yet. I think that, pass or fail, the Democrats are in a bad spot—the unseemly way Harry Reid managed the process, the apparent lack of interest in what’s really in the bill or what the public thinks, and the buying of Senator Landrieu’s vote. It all looks bad.
You’ve got to love Senator Tom Coburn’s demanding that the 767-page amendment by the senate’s only avowed socialist, Bernie Sanders, be read aloud. It would mandate a single-payer system. Nobody thinks it’s going anywhere, but it’s nice to know that the senators will have the option of familiarizing themselves with at least one aspect of what’s under consideration. Ed Morrissey notes:
It took eighteen minutes just to get through the table of contents … for an amendment. Philip says the pace picked up a bit afterward, and the entire amendment could be read within about 12 hours. That’s twelve hours of floor time, assuming Coburn keeps withholding unanimous consent.
What does this do? It makes a hash out of Harry Reid’s plan to move the bill through the Senate by Christmas. Twelve hours of floor time for just a single amendment means that no other business can be conducted until at least Friday. Coburn apparently launched this effort in response to an attempt by Reid to shove the bill to a cloture vote without giving everyone enough time to read the bill or peruse the CBO analysis, due this week.
Originally published on National Review Online
For years, golf has been touted as a growing market: Any product, business, or contract that was golf-related was supposed to be a sure thing.
But it wasn’t really golf. It was Tiger.
When Woods had to miss months of competition last season because of his knee injury, TV viewership of golf events dropped by nearly 50 percent.
People hadn’t bought golf; they’d bought Tiger. Woods spoke to their hopes and aspirations: His was a success story marked with grace, graciousness, and conservative values. Yet the reality of his life couldn’t have been more different, and people are now looking at the ever-growing procession of girlfriends and saying, “Where did these come from?!?” The yuck factor has gotten pretty high, and it is not just Tiger, but golf itself, with all its self-deluded premises, that will take the hit.
Democrats are just starting to realize they’ve made the same mistake. They thought the 2008 election meant people bought the ideas of the Left. In fact, voters were both rejecting various policies of the last eight years — the Iraq War, runaway government spending, and so on — and embracing a fill-in-the-blank-slate version of “hope” and “change” embodied by Barack Obama.
But now that people have seen the pork-filled stimulus bill, the economy-ravaging prospects of cap-and-trade, and the authoritarian nightmare of government-run health care, they are saying, “Where did these come from? This is not what I bought.” Like Tiger’s many girlfriends, the policies that Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid hope to pass reflect reality, but they are not at all what people fell in love with or wanted to see.
Now Democrats have a choice. The Left is demanding they pass something, anything, to mobilize their base for 2010, claiming that the party lost seats in 1994 because its voters were dispirited by the failure to pass HillaryCare. But choosing to pass health care now is rather like saying to Tiger, “Go have another fling — heck, have several! You’ve already made your money and can afford to be yourself. The hell with public reaction; the public will get used to it.”
Tiger is smarter than that, as are his sponsors, who know that the damage done is almost irreversible. Salvaging the image of “Tiger” will requires huge mea culpas and timeouts. Whether motivated by his family or his future, he’s publicly sworn off the women and is trying to be what he sold himself as, both to the public and to his wife. That’s the only way he might be able to regain some of the critical trust that he squandered. And that’s the plan of a man who doesn’t have to face re-election next year.
Democrats seem to be figuring out how dangerous the path they have chosen might be. Many now view their health-care plan as politically suicidal. More sober campaign strategists might suggest that, if Democrats don’t pass this legislation, liberals can be motivated to turn out to elect more liberals as part of their caucus, while moderates and independents will be grateful that they went back to the drawing board, and Republicans will find that a key issue that motivates their own base is much diminished.
By contrast, if Democrats do pass legislation that more than 50 percent of Americans reject (many of them intensely), the Republican turnout will be extraordinary. And those Republicans will be joined by furious independents who feel betrayed that the man and the party they elected turned out to be something very different from how they were advertised.
We’ll soon learn if Democrats are willing to change their ways so that they can salvage the public’s trust, or if they are willing to sacrifice their credibility for years to come.
— Heather R. Higgins is a senior fellow at the Independent Women’s Voice and an erratic but enthusiastic golfer.
President Obama told Democrats yesterday that they were on a precipice: “We are on the precipice of an achievement that has eluded Congresses and presidents for generations.” Since this president is widely felt to be a fine wordsmith, I am going to assume that he knows what a precipice is. But Mary Katharine Ham got out the dictionary. Here are definitions:
1. a cliff with a vertical, nearly vertical, or overhanging face.
2. a situation of great peril:
If Bush had done it, the clip would have been on loop as Freudian proof of Bush’s dislike of Americans and his intention to get rid of them via risky health-care overhaul, but when the greatest orator of our time stumbles over his words, nary a newscaster will mention it.
But maybe I’m underestimating Obama. Perhaps his intent was to delve into our collective cultural memory to evoke famous, inspiring cliff imagery from American cinema as a metaphor for his great generational health-care triumph.
Ham has some great precipice pictures, including a car going over a cliff.
