One of the biggest differences between insiders and outsiders is this question: why can't they just get it done? And both sides of the divide have a point.
The single biggest complaint I hear by non-DC insiders is the sheer dysfunction of Washington. Whether it's Jon Stewart's very funny interview with Joe Biden the other day, or bloggers attacking Harry Reid for not just wrapping the health care issue up by going to reconciliation, people not involved in the day to day DC maneuvering and negotiating don't understand why all this is so hard and takes so long. Insiders get very grumpy about this attitude, because they have to deal every day with the complications of the Senate procedural rules, the egos and turf battles of the powerful committee chairs, and the traditions and clubbiness of the Senate.
I have a lot of sympathy for people on both sides of the divide. Having served in the White House, and been in DC for 17 years now, I know how hard it is to get things done in this town. And having read my share of history books, I know how hard it is to get big things done in general - it just doesn't happen very often, and it is never ever easy or painless. But I also know this: if Democrats don't deliver now, there will be no excuses. They have to find a way to deliver the goods. History, the media, activists, and voters will offer them no mercy if they can't get health reform done this time around.
So if failure is not an option, and there are four holdout Democrats in the Senate blocking the way to getting a reform bill the rest of the Democratic Party can live with, what is to be done?
A lot of people, including me, have been saying for a while that those four Senators would probably eventually force Reid to use the reconciliation process, where you only need 51 votes, and in the end they still might because there might be no other option. But a lot of the more liberal Democrats in the Senate (including Harkin, Rockefeller, and Schumer) have started arguing against that option. Their reasons include that the bill would have to be dramatically scaled back to fit within the reconciliation rule, the process would likely be slowed down making pending legislation tougher to pass, and that the bill would have to be referred to Kent Conrad's rather conservative budget committee where all kinds of bad things might happen to it. There are also an undetermined number of otherwise more progressive Senators such as Robert Byrd and Russ Feingold who believe putting health care in reconciliation violates the spirit of reconciliation rules, and would vote against the bill on principle.
These are pretty compelling arguments, so my view is that progressives should not be demanding that Harry Reid put this bill through the reconciliation process. In the end, he may have no other choice, but to demand that before he has had the chance to pursue every other option makes no sense to me. To say Harry Reid - or the President or anyone else - can just force the bill through no matter what is simply not true. The American government, just doesn't work that way. Not even LBJ, the greatest leg-breaker the Senate and Presidency have ever seen, could government by fiat - even with huge Democratic majorities he had to compromise on a range of issues to get things done.
So it's not going to be done by fiat, and we shouldn't care which method is used to get there, but make no mistake: one way or another, the Democrats have to deliver. Failure is not an option, and no excuse will be valid. One way or another, through procedural magic, carrots, sticks, very big sticks, this has to get done. Through cajoling, persuasion, pork, compromise, leg-breaking, or nuclear options, this has to get done.
Once upon a time, bipartisanship was not an illusion. It wasn't a panacea. It wasn't the key to getting most things done. But it was a good bet that if something needed doing, there would be at least some bipartisan support. In most cases, it just wasn't that hard to get. And that very fact meant that it wasn't a constant fetish, the way it is in Versailles nowadays. One reason for that was that the two parties had a non-trivial amount of ideological overlap, which is most consistently mapped by first dimension of the DW-Nominate scale. In those days--the first eight years of the 1960s, for example, here's what overlap in ideology in the US looked like:
In sharp contrast, here's the disappearing ideological overlap in the Senate the first eight years of the 2000s:
BTW, that's no overlap at all in the last two congresses before Obama took office. So the idea of getting "bipartisan support" as a prerequisite and a priority for any piece of legislation in this sort of political environment is nothing short of crazy. It is, in effect, a unilateral surrender of the majority to the minority, so long as the minority holds its ideological ground. And that is precisely what we have been seeing since Obama took office last January.
On July 11, Nick Berning, from Friends of the Earth, wrote a diary here, "Progressive Block Needed on Clean Energy Legislation in Senate". In it, he argued for the need to create a progressive block of Senators who demand a set of bottom-line objectives be met by any energy/climate legislation:
Because of the dire threat climate destabilization poses to our economy and quality of life, as well as global security and stability, we simply must do better than the House bill that puts a hard-to-change, ill-advised system in place. At a minimum, any bill the Senate passes should:
1. Maintain the EPA's existing authority to use the Clean Air Act to regulate coal-fired power plants, which the House-passed bill undermines. (Coal is the #1 source of global warming pollution in the world.)
2. Bring about a true transition to clean energy. One current Senate proposal (the bill that passed the Senate Energy Committee) would produce no more clean energy than business-as-usual scenarios. That's a disaster that must be fixed.
3. Prevent gaming by Wall Street. There's a reason Wall Street has 130 lobbyists working full time on climate change. Within years, the carbon trading system created by the House bill could become the biggest derivatives market in the world, subject to "subprime carbon" and speculation. This needs to be remedied.
4. Lay the groundwork for an international solution to global warming. A key phase of international negotiations under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change is slated to culminate in December in Copenhagen. The emissions reduction targets in the House-passed bill are so weak (and are further undermined by offset loopholes), and the bill's funding for international solutions is so meager, that the bill is incompatible with a fair, effective global agreement. Developing countries are rightly rejecting these proposals, which is why the G8 failed to agree on emissions reductions targets in Italy this week.
While I agree whole-heartedly with what Nick wrote, in writing an article for Random Lengths News, two other strategies emerged as compatible with and reinforcing this approach. The first is already well under way, the campaign for a global day of action on October 24 by 350.org. The second is only the germ of an idea, based on some comments, and some of the work done on working with local officials raising awareness and starting to shape policies below state level. I'll discuss both these strategies a little more fully on the flip.
Of all the hurdles facing healthcare reform in 2009, the U.S. Senate is arguably the most formidable. But the prospects for passing a healthcare bill this year have brightened noticeably over the past few days, thanks to a senate seat pickup in Minnesota, solidifying support for the budget reconciliation strategy, and tentative overtures towards bipartisanship from key Republicans.
With all of the (deserved) flak that the US congress in general, and the senate in particular, has been receiving around these parts, I just wanted to give the Senate kudos for extending the federal hate crime law to GLBT individuals, and for attaching it to the Iraq spending bill, where it will be less likely to be vetoed. Now let's see if it stays on the house version. Good job for today, dems.
