Big news broke over the weekend: Evidently, the president lit a fire under Max Baucus (D-Mont) and the Senate Finance Committee by unexpectedly announcing last week that he'd be laying out his own vision for health care reform this Wednesday. Just weeks ago, committee member Kent Conrad (D-ND) predicted the Finance Committee wouldn't have a bill until November. But Baucus circulated a legislative framework over the weekend.
Baucus's bottom line: There will be no public option. Instead, the government will spend hundreds of billions of dollars to subsidize the same old expensive, inadequate private insurance system that health care reform was supposed to reform. The insurance companies get 46 million new customers, and in return, they will pay higher taxes to offset the cost of the subsidies-a kickback to Uncle Sam.
Last week Brian Beutler of Talking Points Memo and I sat down to discuss some burning questions in health care reform: What's the president's thinking on the public option? What leverage does he have over the progressives in the House who demand single payer and/or the Blue Dogs in the senate who reject it? Why is Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) the last best hope for bipartisanship? (The transcript of our discussion has been edited for brevity and clarity.)
You said the [week of September 1] really stood out from the last month in terms of the health care debate. How so?
Maybe the last two days just stood out from the previous month. ... Obama's approval [rating] slid and popular support for the idea of healthcare reform slid. And August came to an end and the President's vacation is winding down, and suddenly the administration realizes that Congress is coming back and they are going to have to do something. And so, it seems they start leaking to a bunch of high profile reporters that they are going to perhaps ditch the public option as part of a grander move to regain control of the debate.
Are the anonymous leakers saying in so many words that they want to ditch the public option?
Well, it's unclear what they are actually going to do. The Public Option would die with dignity. [If] that is accomplished, the President could maybe win over some Republicans, grab the debate and spell out in clearer terms what he wanted [beyond] the public option. He could do this all in a big speech for Congress which is scheduled to happen Wednesday.
Isn't this just a repeat of what we saw during the week of August 20, when the White House seemed to be doing a good cop/bad cop routine where an anonymous aide would leak "to hell with the liberals and the public option" and then another adviser would say on the record how much the president loves the public option?
It could just be a replay. Once those stories came out, the picture sort of fogged up. [There were] secondary reports that the President was courting Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) again-as if maybe one Senate Republican would vote with him on health care reform. Snowe's idea [includes a] public option, but you attach it to a trigger mechanism so that it is only enacted if the rest of healthcare reform is unsuccessful at bringing down prices and expanding coverage. And that's sort of been unacceptable to reformers and progressives, but ... that might be the pound of flesh that she yields from the bill. It fits in with the picture that the leakers painted ... that the public option was no longer going to be one of the key features of the bill.
You wrote about how budget reconciliation could be used to get around the filibuster. How would that work?
The greater problem is the structure in the Senate, where legislation can pass with a majority vote-but only after Senators have debated the bill for as long as they want. As long as 60 Democrats aren't there to shut the minority up, debate can go on and on and on. [ED note: AKA filibustering.] And for every major piece of legislation you see. this happens. ...
There's this de facto 60-vote rule on most legislation, at least in this Congress and the previous Congress since the Democrats took it over. It's extremely difficult to pass a bill through just the regular procedure without either having to concede a bunch of substantive provisions ... or just give up on the bill entirely. [There are] 59 members of the Democratic caucus right now, and maybe 10 of them are mushy on the more progressive part of the President's agenda. Even if all of them are onboard, you're still one vote short of what you need to end debate. And that is why Olympia Snowe matters right now.
So the House would pass the bill and the Senate would pass a bill with budget reconciliation?
They could in theory. Budget reconciliation is sort of like a magic bullet. Every year, the Congress can pass what is known as a budget reconciliation bill. It sets new taxes, or moves money around within the federal budget to basically do what the Congress's budget lays out. It ... was made exempt from the filibuster because Congress [has to] set a budget. ... They need to make sure that money is there and can't have Senators filibustering it just because they're in a fit of peak. So that bill can't be filibustered, but at the same time, the legislation that can be passed in it has to be relevant to the budget, it has to move money around in some way.
So you can pass a lot of elements of healthcare reform in theory-you can pass subsidies to poor people and middle-income people. And you can pass Medicaid expansion, and you might even be able to pass the public option because the public option may need subsidies of its own and could drive down other costs and be a big moneysaver.
How might the president pressure progressives into accepting the bill?
My sense is that the President [will pressure] progressives to back off on the public option. But that could change. Trying to figure out what is going to happen is kind of like trying to move 23,000 moves ahead in a game of 17 dimensional chess. ...
[Obama can] say is that what he's planning will, while not perfect, help a lot of people make the healthcare system more progressive than it was. ... But it would really harm the democratic party and his presidency if the whole project failed and nothing passed. Obama doesn't have a tremendous amount of leverage. [Many] progressive members of Congress are progressive because they don't have viable challenges. They come from progressive districts, with constituents like them, approval ratings in the 60s, 70s, and they aren't going to lose to a member of the opposite party. So in that sense, they can do what they want.
How can Blue Dogs say that progressives should suck it up and vote for every bill when they are never prepared to do the same thing?
... It would at least be a good experiment, for the party and the country, for the [Blue Dogs] to be put on the spot. They believe that their jobs are on the line if they vote for controversial legislation. I don't know how those conversations go when political members of the administration confront these guys and say 'You got into politics to make the world a better place, not to just have a tenure job on Capital Hill. So you're going to vote yes on this and if you lose your jobs as a result, then you did the right thing and we'll make sure that the Democratic party infrastructure is there for you ... .' But that's not the way the party thinks. [It's a] game of building an unstoppably large coalition, and that becomes the goal in the end. And at some point you lose sight of why you are amassing this giant congressional majority and you're never willing to say, well we built this 70 whatever majority so that we could sacrifice some of these seats and do something really impressive and progressive for the good of the country.
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Recently I had the opportunity to interview Debbie Cook, the mayor of Huntington Beach, who is running for Congress in California's 46th District. Mayor Cook, who won the Primary on June 3rd, is in an uphill battle against Representative Dana Rohrabacher, a former Reagan speechwriter who has made a name for himself by being one of the most far-right members on immigration, even proposing H.R. 3722, which would have made it illegal to give someone emergency room treatment without proof of their immigration status. Yeah, that far-right.
Usually, this race wouldn't be considered high on a list of races to watch, but this time, things are a bit different. Rep. Rohrabacher isn't so popular anymore, and even the local press has mentioned his weakness stemming from his inability to bring many resources back to the district, instead focusing on issues more important to Dana, like hanging with Jack Abramoff and endorsing torture. As well, Mayor Cook is very popular in her home town, and has been campaigning quite a bit through the district. Chances are, this race could start to gain traction.
Join me below the fold for the interview, which reveals Mayor Cook to be an exceptionally bright woman well versed in many of the issues facing our country.
Glenn Greenwald, a former constitutional lawyer, began blogging in October 2005, shortly before the New York Times revealed the program of illegal NSA wiretaps begun shortly after 9/11. He wrote about the program and the lawless philosophy behind it in his first book, the Times bestseller, How Would A Patriot Act. Shocked as he was at the Bush lawlessness, he became increasingly shocked at the media's indifference, and seeming inability to even grasp either significant details or the profound moral and political issues at stake. His ongoing analysis of Republican misrule and the complicity of the media in either ignoring or misreporting it has grown deeper, and drawn increasingly more attention, particularly since his blog moved to Salon in February 2007.
His focus in Great American Hypocrites is the national scene, where an adoring press lionizes one would-be conservative moral giant after another, following the template created by John Wayne--a thrice-married, alcoholic, drug-addicted draft-dodger, considered a heroic figure because of the roles he played, particularly during WWII when bigger stars than he were fighting overseas. In California, we have our own John Wayne knock-off as governor, and equally ga-ga press that never seems to notice the enormous plot-holes in his script, such as his continued alliances with polluting industries against the health and environmental welfare of harbor area communities. By illuminating the larger, national pattern, Greenwald's new book illuminates a great deal about state and local politics as well.
We recently had the opportunity to have a conversation with Chris Metzler, director of Screening Liberally NYC's February selection, the critically acclaimed Plagues and Pleasures on the Salton Sea. We talked about Sonny Bono, John Waters and where his film fits (or doesn't fit) into the recent spate of eco-documentaries.
How did you come to this project?
Like a lot of things in life, it was purely coincidence. I grew up in the Midwest - I didn't even know that the Salton Sea existed when I moved out to Los Angeles for school - and one day, decided to take an exploratory road trip, camping with a friend and maybe checking out other parts of the dessert - you take a few wrong turns here and there, and you wind up upon this huge body of water, the Salton Sea, and just kind of quickly fall in love with it, just based on water being out in the desert in such huge amounts, but secondly, the kind of apocalyptic landscape, which was my own fascination. That's got things started. Congressman Sonny Bono had been interested in restoring the Salton Sea, seeing it as both an environmental wetland, and also a place for resorts and boating and fishing...as a result of this discussion about making Sonny's dream come true, we wanted to explore how those attempts at restoring the Salton Sea were going to go.
It seems like the residents of the Salon area have become used to extravagant promises laid at their feet every couple years, whether it be through Sonny Bono, or the [longstanding] hope it will become a large retirement community - in making the film, was that something you had to consciously overcome in gaining their trust, that you weren't going to be someone coming in with promises as happens every few years.
That was one of the difficult things that Jeff [Springer, co-director] and I anticipated from the beginning - we knew that the Salton Sea had this long history of nothing ever being done, and that most of the film and news coverage of the Salton Sea had been very negative. Given how just complicated a place this was, [we figured] it deserved some unbiased, entertaining journalism. Once we started meeting people in the community, there was something that drew them to us - we didn't have to overcome any inherent skepticism... and most embraced us from the get-go. Maybe it's just because so much of the other coverage of the Salton Sea often dealt with politicians and scientists and they really just appreciated that we were going straight ot the people who had lived in, thrived and struggled in the community for so many years.
One unique aspect of the film is that you're talking about an potential ecological crisis which, unlike a lot of the eco-documentaries that came out in the last several years, is not directly related to climate change..Have you had difficulty explaining to people this is a separate issue?
