While I will try my best to remain cautious on the hopes of HCR passing the house tomorrow, things do appear to be looking pretty good. There's a lot to be said for momentum in these kinds of situations, and while the Democrats were pretty incompetent for long stretches of last year, it's been an impressive week of headline-grabbing vote turns and big ballsy talk. This legislation will be good and helpful and corrective; maybe not the Canadian dream, but a damn sight better than what exists now, and we should, as progressive people, all be pretty happy about it. So, assuming it passes, who should we thank?Well, Nancy Pelosi:
During a mid-February conference call with top House Democrats, Pelosi made it clear she would accept nothing short of a big-bang health care push – dismissing the White House chief of staff as an “incrementalist.”I've been reading Path to Power over the last month, a truly excellent book on a level I can barely describe, and I just finished a chapter on Sam Rayburn. Rayburn was an ass-kicking, vote-getting, progressive-legislating machine, the kind of guy who grew up mad and populist and turned that anger into a long and worthy stream of accomplishments (he created the SEC, for example). In short, Rayburn was the kind of guy whose absence is keenly felt in an age of Democratic incompetence and spinelessness. I was talking with John Macleod about that fact, debating the reasons why there are no politicians today who are admirable both as legislators as well as humans beings. John was characteristically pessimistic, so there wasn't much in the conversation, but my thinking was that it probably has to do with the media and campaign environments as they currently exist, forcing politicians to tack to whatever extreme and intransigent opinion will generate funds and screen time.
Pelosi even coined a term to describe Emanuel’s scaled-down approach: “Kiddie Care,” according to a person privy to the call.
Pelosi’s remark was more than just a diss. It sent a clear signal to House leadership that Pelosi wouldn’t compromise – and it coincided with Obama’s own decision to renew his push for an all-encompassing bill after weeks of confusion and discussion.
In the end, Pelosi, Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) braved a political backlash to pursue comprehensive reform, green-lighting a two-step reconciliation process that requires the House to approve a Senate health bill reviled by many House Democrats.
I was even going to write a post on this, on how the new media environment has really had a negative overall effect on legislative efficiency, when I started to read about Nancy Pelosi's role in the last few months, reeling health care back in from the edge of the world. Then I got to thinking about the House over the last session, and what kind of things we've seen passed - a decent climate change bill, health care reform with a public option, the stimulus, 288 other bills the Senate has yet to act on. Nancy Pelosi is one awesome lady! She's been grinding out tons and tons of nice progressive legislation over the last year, often at great political expense, often knowing the Senate is so broken that the legislation may never even get to Obama's desk, often knowing that she is exposing a significant portion of her caucus to risky votes. No one can accuse her of not trying to take advantage of the moment, and no one can accuse her of lacking the stones to push through the reform she believes is right. So here's to Madame Speaker: if, by this time tomorrow, she's passed the Senate bill and the fixes, someone should really name a building after her.
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All that I can say is this: thank fucking God. I have given HCR nothing but hell and yet, at the end of the road, I am nothing if not relieved. That the bill is a good one is almost less satisfying than the fact that the Democrats passed it. They beat the Republicans.
ReplyDeleteIt's possible to beat the Republicans!
Though I can't be sure, I have the almost imperceptible zygote of a feeling that the Republicans may, in fact, have made enough of a mistake in their choice of rhetoric as to jeopardize their electoral chances in 2010. They're of course promising to campaign on repealing the bill, their spin machines having almost immediately begun screeching that HCR is political suicide. Yet as Paul Krugman said in his op-ed piece for the day, healthcare bills are contentious before passed and extremely popular after. The Republicans also promised hell and high water after Medicare, and have they come even close to repealing that?
Because they approached HCR with the bloodthirstiness of maddened, zombified hyenas, it's going to be extremely difficult for them to dive for the center once the bill does not bring to pass pogroms of our loved ones and revolutionary vanguardism. I'm not ruling the GOP out, not by any means; they are monopolists in their own little dysfunctional markets. With a captive audience of the ignorant, violent, hate-filled and terrified, they do not lack at all for unquestioning loyalty in the United States. But how extreme are they willing to go before they realize that they've lost any credibility on the national scene?
What I worry about with this bill is that a great deal of the benefits will not come online until 2013. If that's the case, that gives the Republicans a good two and a half years to trash the thing based on the old talking points. Luckily, a few of the initiatives do get put in place almost immediately (http://crooksandliars.com/karoli/what-you-get-when-hcr-passes), but it still makes me nervous for a number of reasons. First, will they be enough to sway the voting public and second, on top of addressing the more odious practices of the insurance industry, do they provide any meaningful cap on premiums in the meantime? That is to say, will the Republicans be able to point to even higher premium inflation as the fault of the bill?
ReplyDeleteAlso, I wonder if Medicare had to go through the same instilation period.
Not to gloom your doom, but the majority of the bill's most ambitious provisions won't actually come into effect until 2014. The exchange is supposed to be phased in between now and then, though, and there's no date given for when the Federal Office of Personnel Management will make available its healthcare plans. I think the best way for the Democrats to use the bill to their advantage in the meantime is to lean hard on Republican obstructionism in the lead-up to the mid-terms. Brad DeLong excerpted some of the responses to HCR's passage by (relatively) moderate Republican commentators, and it looks like they are ruing the party's hardline stance and their capitulation to the hardliners themselves. It may very well be that this cements factional divides in the GOP and weakens their thusfar lockstep party discipline.
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