The preliminaries are finally over in the battle to finally, finally, finally- 97 years after Teddy Roosevelt first proposed it- pass comprehensive health care reform. I think the right sports analogy to use is the extended, exhausting, NBA playoffs: after 82 regular season games, 16 playoff teams play in a best-of-7 series to get to the second round, and then the remaining eight teams play best-of-seven to get into the conference finals for another exhausting best of-7 series. I think that's about where we're at, the conference finals, where the coming days will seem like a long tiring 7-game series that is only the preparation for the even more intense final championship round.
I am excited, though, because this is a whole lot further than we got to when I was in the White House health care war room in 1994. We got the bill out of some of the committees, but never out of Senate Finance, and never had a realistic chance to have a floor fight.
So now come the machinations and maneuvering to figure out how to merge the two bills in the Senate and three in the House. The strategy now looks to be to get through on the Senate side with the 60 Democrats and maybe Snowe, but to continue to hold reconciliation (where you only need 51 votes) out as an option if needed once the conference committee comes back.
As I had predicted awhile back, Baucus' initial bill in Senate Finance was an ugly mutt of compromises and decisions, but it got a little better in the committee process, as he gave the progressives on the committee a few solid improvements here and there. Reid will now merge the two bills, and I am convinced that he will work to create a better bill in the process, and then we have the floor fight and finally conference committee. At every stage, I think progressives have the ability, if they stick together and negotiate well, to make progress.
On the highest profile and incredibly important public option issue, I believe we are now well-positioned to have a public option in the final bill. We have come a long way since those summer months where all the conventional wisdom repeatedly said the public option was dead, but I think we are now at a position where the biggest question is more likely to be how good the public option is, not whether we will have one. There will continue to be conservative Democrats who want to placate insurers and Olympia Snowe by dropping the public option, but I think progressives can stop that from happening. The key, as it has always been from the first day of this fight, is for progressives, especially in the House, to stay together and stay strong in the negotiations. In fact, I will go so far as to say this: progressives should not panic if the Senate bill isn't great on the public option issue, and Democrats in general shouldn't panic if the conference committee is a long drawn-out affair with lots of fussing and fighting. We have come too far not to get a bill, and as long as House progressives stay strong and stay together, that bill will have to include a pubic option.
The conference finals are about to begin, but I'm not going to tell you to pull up a seat, because we need every progressive to stay in the game (yes, I will torture this metaphor to the end). It is only because of the progressive movement that health care has been on the agenda, and only because of that movement that the debate has not drifted inexorably to the right. We have a shot at passing a strong bill that will actually cover all Americans and create competition and a check on the power of the insurance industry. We have a shot at making history. Let's stay on the court until the victory is won.
There is a lot of discussion right now about how Senators from small states hold too much power compared to the percent of population they represent. There's a lot of truth to this. Alex MacGillis of The Washington Post wrote in an analysis column in their Sunday Outlook section, and David Sirota and Nathan Newman have done good pieces on the topic as well. The simple facts are that the key gang of six negotiating health care in the Senate Finance Committee represent less than 3% of the nation's population; that the 10 largest states are home to over half the country's population but represent only 20% of the Senate; the 21 smallest states together have less total population than California does.
It's good that people are raising these issues, and pointing out this unfairness. The plain fact of the matter, though, is that absent a constitutional convention suddenly being held, there is no changing this particular injustice. It would take 2/3 of the Senate, after all, to pass a constitutional amendment to restructure the Senate, and virtually all of the Senators from small states would vote against it. So we are stuck for now.
What we ought to be focused on instead are strategies that might work.
With all of this hateful and violent rhetoric going on, I haven't seen one Republican leader asking for people to cool their rhetoric, or heard them condemn any of these tactics. My question for Republican party, and their allies at conservative media companies that employ the kind of people making these remarks: what exactly would have to be said for you to distance yourself from these people? How far would someone have to go before you got uncomfortable with it? What would have to said before Fox News considered firing someone?
If Glenn Beck actually directly called for the assassination of someone, would it bother you guys? If Rush Limbaugh just screamed a racial insult referring to the President of the United States into his microphone, would it make you pause at all? If Lou Dobbs went so far as to call for the murder of random Hispanics in the street, would CNN consider firing him? If Michael Savage actually encouraged a caller to his show to go blow up a federal building like Timothy McVeigh did, would any republicans suggest he pull his rhetoric back a bit?
The scary thing to me about what's going on right now in this country is not the violence, because this country has always had violent extremists, and we've survived as a country and democracy. What concerns me, though, is that the Republicans seem to have crossed some kind of line to where they actually tolerate and even defend all this violence. They have stopped doing that now, and are even egging the violence on now in some cases. I fear the answer to my question- what would it take for you to condemn the hatefulness- because the answer seems to be that there is nothing that could happen that would make them say "Stop!" And that's a very scary thing for a democracy.
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