Pufferfish

Xanadu Or Bust

If only Obama had channeled the rage of deadender progressives in his public comments, then Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson would beg for mercy and demand a much stronger public option. Did I get that right? If Obama wasn't weak and ineffective (or if he had the stones of St. Hillary of Clinton) then he could bend the will of a couple senators who would just assume that health care reform drifted away into the ether so they could concentrate on less controversial legislation. Is that what the far left is selling? Never mind senate rules and the unfortunate fact that having the exact number of votes you need means every Senator in the Democratic caucus is a walking filibuster. I guess this is what happens when you're a once-in-an-every-other generation candidate. People figure Obama can turn water into wine and Lieberman into a decent human being.

I need to smoke more drugs just to keep up with the hallucinations coming from the left. Talk about getting the vapors:

Joe Lieberman's reckless decision to blow up last week's compromise has had exactly the impact many of us predicted. Much of the left has flipped into vicious, angry opposition to the bill. Is that because the Medicare buy-in, a good but limited policy, has disappeared from the bill? Ostensibly. But not really. If you don't believe the bill has cost controls, Medicare buy-in was not an answer to your concerns. If you believe the mandate is bad policy, letting the small slice of exchange-users between 55 and 64 choose public insurance did not answer your fears.

Lieberman has tossed the process into chaos. But the short-term satisfactions won't overwhelm the long-term judgments. Lieberman is "point person" because he has appointed himself the 60th senator. Every other member of the Democratic caucus could have done the same, but most all have judged the underlying bill more important than their disagreements with it. Lieberman did the opposite, and there's little evidence that he actually had disagreements with the bill so much as dislike for some of its supporters.

Of the many things I find incredible about this freak out, it's the flimsy rationale that losing a weak-ass public option will turn us all into slaves to insurance corporatism. Unreal.

Blue Dogs

Some things I will never understand:

Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) muscled a $154 billion jobs bill through the House on Wednesday evening just before Congress departed for a holiday recess. With the vote in serious doubt until seconds before it was gaveled to a close, Pelosi worked the floor furiously, imploring her caucus to stick with her and move the measure through.

The bill passed 217-212, but when the time on the clock expired, it was losing 208-212. A few minutes later, when it hit 214-213 and then 215-213, someone shouted "gavel it!" from the Democratic side. A bill doesn't need the full 218 to pass -- only a simple majority of those voting. The presiding officer took the suggestion and closed the vote.

Not a single Republican approved of the bill.

The slim margin is strong evidence that deficit hawks have momentum in the ideological battle between one camp that demands more spending on job creation and another, dominated by the GOP and Blue Dog Democrats, calling for immediate reductions in the deficit. Even the fact that the money was being redirected from Wall Street couldn't sway 38 Democrats, who voted with the Republicans.

It's rather amazing to watch Democrats reflexively cower when a Republican operative merely whispers "fiscally irresponsible" as if those words ensure electoral disaster. People vote on the economy. And not even that. They vote on the job they have, whether they like it, and whether they think the country is going "in the right direction." Whatever the hell that ephemeral notion of group-think positivity means. What people don't do is consider the deficit's impact on borrowing and the consequential deflationary aspects in relation to international economic trends. At least, they haven't to this point, which helps explain how we've arrived at a $11 trillion national debt. Yet this continues to escape Democrats who allow themselves to be hamstrung by a governing philosophy that Republicans themselves don't bother adhering to when controlling the purse strings.

In recent decades the GOP has routinely demonstrated its inability to manage the federal budget. The atrocities are well documented. That's doubly true for the George W Bush administration, when the GOP found a way to take a thriving economy, plus a federal surplus and nearly turn it into Great Depression 2.0 (check out that chart, which also shows spurring a bit of economic growth, perhaps through a Jobs Bill, would do quite a bit to help rein in the deficit).  Point of fact: Nobody sucks at fiscal responsibility more than the Republican Party. But that doesn't prevent mealymouthed Blue Dogs from trying to shield themselves from not only a false charge, but an empty one:

O'Neill, fired in a shakeup of Bush's economic team in December 2002, raised objections to a new round of tax cuts and said the president balked at his more aggressive plan to combat corporate crime after a string of accounting scandals because of opposition from "the corporate crowd," a key constituency.

O'Neill said he tried to warn Vice President Dick Cheney that growing budget deficits-expected to top $500 billion this fiscal year alone-posed a threat to the economy. Cheney cut him off. "You know, Paul, Reagan proved deficits don't matter," he said, according to excerpts. Cheney continued: "We won the midterms (congressional elections). This is our due." A month later, Cheney told the Treasury secretary he was fired.

Cheney wasn't talking about economic policy and channeling his inner Nouriel Roubini. Deficits. Don't. Matter? Of course they do, at least with regard to long-tern economic strength. What Cheney was talking about is the politics of deficit spending and the fact that voters don't punish politicians for going into the red. What they punish voters for is a bad jobs report. And that's exactly what Blue Dogs tried to ensure by voting against the House's Jobs Bill. There are times, like this, when deficit spending is urgently necessary. And it's moments like this when I figure it isn't worth saving Blue Dogs from themselves.

Question Of The Moment

Can the Democrats govern?

There are those who say that Democrats shouldn't favor any system that continues to include private insurers. Good luck with that. I've been covering these issues for 40 years and I've come to this conclusion: anything that actually helps people is good, whether or not it fits into an ideological pattern. Covering 30 million more people is good. Preventing private insurers the ability to deny coverage to countless others is also good. Those who stand against these essential principles because of an ideological conceit--whether it be Joe Lieberman's opposition to a public option, Ben Nelson's opposition to abortion funding or Democracy for America's opposition to an individual mandate--are proving a point that conservatives have long made: that Democrats are too feckless to govern.

One could almost say that it's time to set aside these childish things. Speaking of, maybe it's time for that someone to speak up, talk loudly, and start swinging a big damn stick.

Kill Bill

If I didn't know better, I'd assume Howard Dean's cartoonish rhetoric is a fairly transparent attempt to provide cover for moderate Democrats just before the big compromise and subsequent vote. Unengaged headline readers will simply figure the bill must not be too liberal if the dude who lost it in a corn field is now having a similar meltdown. Dean's rally cry doesn't come close to connecting with reality. And he no doubt knows that the fate of flamed-out major legislation is to be banished for a generation. Just ask Bill Clinton. With that, put me down for what Cesca said:

A family of four earning $38,500 will qualify for subsidies that will reduce insurance premiums from around $9,880 annually to around $2,000. A family of four earing $60,000 will see their annual premium reduced from $9,880 to around $5,240 via subsidies in the Senate bill. This is very important. Do we endeavor to yank these subsidies away by killing the bill, or do we pass the subsidies and work to improve the bill?

Also too, Yglesias has a nifty chart.

-- Update --

Just because this is a "win" for insurance companies doesn't mean a lot of other people aren't winners:

[If] I could construct a system in which insurers spent 90 percent of every premium dollar on medical care, never discriminated against another sick applicant, began exerting real pressure for providers to bring down costs, vastly simplified their billing systems, made it easier to compare plans and access consumer ratings, and generally worked more like companies in a competitive market rather than companies in a non-functional market, I would take that deal. And if you told me that the price of that deal was that insurers would move from being the 86th most profitable industry to being the 53rd most profitable industry, I would still take that deal. And that may be the exact deal we're getting. The profit motive is not, in and of itself, a bad thing.

Nope, this isn't the best way to use tax dollars to make sure everyone has health insurance. But it's the best we can do with this Congress. A plague on both of our Houses...

Original Intent

I mean, really:

The founding fathers said nothing about the filibuster or about Senate super-majorities. [...]

Elections matter, and if the Republicans manage to elect a president and 54 or 57 senators, they'd have won the right to enact their agenda. Whether I agreed with it is irrelevant. As I've written many times, the problem may be healthcare in the immediate instance, but the larger problem is that the system has broken down.

The problem isn't Lieberman insomuch as it's the rules that Lieberman's been able to take advantage of. The 60 vote threshold means not only are we giving a wildly disproportionate amount of governing power to state's with an inordinate number of Lion's Den truck stops, but the indifference to reasonable representative democracy has created an opening for starlets like Joey Lieberman to step up and get their picture in the paper.

For all those exulting Lieberfreude and hoping to expel the little trollop from the caucus, well, it's never as easy as it seems. Is it?

The administration has been open about his role in the climate bill as Lieberman, Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) are huddling five times a week on the legislation that will ultimately hit the Senate floor.

A Congressional source described Lieberman as "incredibly engaged" on the issue, and said his position is even arguably "progressive."

That doesn't mean we're not going to be served up another Lieberman special when cap and trade hits the senate floor. But the sad upshot to all this is that Lieberman remains a necessary egomaniac, unreliant on DCCC dollars to get re-elected. Here's the silver-lining:

Disappointed progressives may be wondering whether their efforts were a waste. They most decidedly were not. The campaign for the public option pushed the entire debate to the left -- and, to use a military metaphor, it diverted enemy fire away from the rest of the bill. If Lieberman and his allies didn't have the public option to attack, they would have tried to gut the subsidies, the exchanges, or some other key element. They would have hacked away at the bill, until it left more people uninsured and more people under-insured. The public option is the reason that didn't happen.

I'm amazed that giving money to poor people didn't draw more fire. Along with insurance reform, that's the win.

-- Update --

Looks like there's some on the left trying hard to be relevant:

The bloggers who are focused on political organizing and pulling Dems to the left mostly seem to want to kill the bill, while the wonkier types want to salvage it because they think it contains real reform and can act as a foundation for further achievements.

In the former camp are bloggers like Markos Moulitsas, former House candidate Darcy Burner, and the Firedoglake crew. They mostly deride the bill as a giveaway to the insurance companies that does nothing for consumers. A quick rundown of their opinions right here.

I'll stick with the wonks.

On The Droopster

Not sure what to say about Lieberman that hasn't already been said. But this from Jon Chait is different:

I think one answer here is that Lieberman isn't actually all that smart. He speaks, and seems to think, exclusively in terms of generalities and broad statements of principle. But there's little evidence that he's a sharp or clear thinker, and certainly no evidence that he knows or cares about the details of health care reform. At one point during the 2000 recount, the Gore campaign explained to Lieberman why lowering standards for military ballots would be totally unfair and illegal, and Lieberman proceeded to go on television and subvert the campaign's position. Gore loyalists interpreted this as a sellout, but perhaps the more plausible explanation was that Lieberman -- who, after all, badly wanted to be vice-President -- just didn't understand the details of the Gore position well enough to defend it. The guy was taken apart by Dick Cheney in the 2000 veep debate.

I suspect that Lieberman is the beneficiary, or possibly the victim, of a cultural stereotype that Jews are smart and good with numbers. Trust me, it's not true. If Senator Smith from Idaho was angering Democrats by spewing uninformed platitudes, most liberals would deride him as an idiot. With Lieberman, we all suspect it's part of a plan.

Unprincipled and stupid works for me.

And as far as the cathartic move of booting Lieberman from the caucus goes I can't say I'm completely opposed, though it will never happen. My hesitance would be that in doing so we'd risk losing his vote on cap and trade. But then whose to say we already have it?

Freedom!

Jane Hamsher goes all William Wallace:

It’s time that people took off the rose colored glasses and faced the fact that Obama’s “leadership” on health care was empty and passive. He went for the corporate-friendly “win” that enriches the insurance and drug companies, just as he has enriched the banks and failed to hold them to account. Those who look first to others as scapegoats for his actions have apparently not come to grips with the fact that as President of the United States, he’s a very powerful man who is not using that power to advance the progressive agenda they attribute to him.

Best part of the "passive" complaint is that Hamsher states a few graphs earlier that Obama has been "intimately involved in the process of crafting the health care bill." So, uh, apparently he's passively orchestrating the whole thing.

Anyway, I find it odd that someone positioned as a steely-eyed realist is continually let down by candidates once they get into office. I get that Hamsher has her shtick: a) get Democrats elected and b) get better Democrats elected. But we're getting close to poisoning the well here. From the outset this entire process has been an elaborate dance to figure out how to pay for reform without significantly cutting into the profits of private industries. Yet people who know this continually act betrayed every time a Blue Dog member of Congress leg humps an industry talking point. I guess its what you have to do to rile up the troops. But count me out. I'm fine with a reform package that covers everyone while laying the groundwork for expanding cheaper insurance in the future. (Lowering the Medicare age is an obvious Trojan Horse on that front, which is why it's probably not happening.)

Like it or not, politics is the art of the possible. And Obama is on the cusp of accomplishing what was previous not possible. Liberals screaming reform should be done in one fell swoop and that anything short of Obama and Emanuel throwing on war paint and charging up Capitol Hill on a suicide run need to dial it down. We elect presidents, not kings.

Give 'Em ... Heck

I enjoy ripping Harry Reid as much as the next effete liberal. And generally I regard his leadership style to have been stripped straight from the playbook of French generals. The next time he forces his members to live in a state of constant fear as a result of fostering an environment of irrational, random terror (a la former Minority Leader Tom Delay) will be the first. But when it comes to questioning Reid's manhood it's also important to keep in mind the sheer size and scope of health care reform and the makeup of the Democratic Senate caucus.

Passing tax cuts like the Republicans did in 2001 through reconciliation was a nice parliamentary trick that since has been banned. No longer can the Senate use a simple majority to approve legislation that will add to the deficit. Now going the reconciliation route is much harder while making for bad PR. It should never be the first option. So not only are the rules different, but the radioactive nature of the legislation is different. Who the hell doesn't want a tax cut? At a certain point the need to get 60 votes to prevent a filibuster has to be weighed against the understandable desire of liberal bloggers to command an all-out assault on Blue Dogs. Recognition has to be paid to the fact that this country isn't sharing a border with Sweden and Ben Nelson is a Democrat with an address in a state that takes 4-H way too seriously:

That's not to diminish the importance of 60 seats: If Democrats didn't have 60 seats, then passing health-care reform (or anything big) through the normal Senate order would simply be impossible because Republicans would kill it no matter what they were promised. Because Democrats do have 60 seats, passing health-care reform (or anything big) means making a lot of unpleasant compromises with the few members of your coalition who will scuttle the bill if their demands aren't met.

Democrats don't have 60 votes so much as they have 56 votes with the option for four or five more. And exercising that option is not a pleasant or dignity-preserving experience.

That's the ball game. Sixty seats has never ensured 60 votes. Governing is hard. Certainly harder than writing Twitter-esque blog posts that make the process sound overly simple. Getting Olympia Snowe on board protects the right flank of Democratic Senators in deep red states. With that said, sure Harry Reid is a ginormous wimp and a large part of me agrees with this sentiment: "I'll take a Chuck Schumer-run Senate with 57 Democrats (bye bye Reid, Lieberman, and Lincoln) than a Harry Reid-run one with 75 Democrats." In fact, I've basically said those very words while verbally-sparring with Reid apologists during happy hours.

But flexing a giant liberal boner doesn't escape the fact that 60 votes are needed to defeat a filibuster on health care reform and 60 seats are what we have. It's an oddity to see liberals demand the same deference of their members toward party leaders that Republicans expect. It's even odder still when you consider how far to the right this country remains in many respects and how ideologically diverse the Democratic Party is.

As a result of agreeing in principle to an imperfect piece of legislation it looks like we're on the cusp of passing sweeping health care reform. FDR couldn't do it. Neither LBJ. But still the base acts betrayed, wailing for the purity that a simpleton like George W. Bush could deliver with a simple idea like cutting taxes. I guess the base is playing its part. But sometimes it's worth pointing out that Harry Reid is also playing his:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid appeared before the Judiciary Committee today in an unusual capacity: as a witness. He was there to argue that the Senate should repeal the insurance industry's exemption from anti-trust statutes (an exemption that they share only with Major League Baseball). "Insurance companies have become so large they dominate entire regions of the country," Reid said. "They have become so powerful they block start-up businesses from entering the market, and they put smaller companies out of business. They have become so dominant that they dictate business practices. They are so influential that they exert tremendous influence over public policy.”

But Reid isn't an expert on anti-trust law, and as Senate Majority Leader, he doesn't spur legislative action by testifying before Senate Committees. He was really there to send a clear and unmistakable signal to the insurance industry in the aftermath of Monday's assault on health-care reform: Attack us, and we'll hurt you. Badly.

And now that I've given a glancing defense of Reid, I'm looking forward to him caving during reform negotiations.

-- Update --

No sooner do I write this:

So it comes as some surprise that two prominent progressive figures, approached by TPMDC, said that much has changed since the summer--and particularly in the last couple weeks--and that Reid is working the inside game for the public option.

"Reid and/or his staff has been in practically hourly conversations with a whole set of progressive players re how best to make sure we position ourselves to get a strong public option coming out of conference committee," said one progressive strategist, who asked not to be named. "He hasn't made any final procedural decisions yet RE how to get that done, but he's having really honest conversations [about] all his major options, pros and cons of each, etc. I'm actually pretty impressed, at least right now."

Enter Droopy Dog

By voting in favor of the health care bill today, Olympia Snowe announced she would like to be a player among a small group of senators and White House staffers who are basically going to decide the final piece of legislation that gets voted on by the full Senate. And which the House will then ceremoniously accept.

Had Snowe voted against the bill, the debate would have moved even further away from her, making her involvement in the final product all but an afterthought.  Given her party's insanity and the fact that she represents a blue state, it's always been more likely than not that Snowe would support reform. This vote keeps the White House's focus on Snowe, especially when considering that if she were to back out now, it would give the GOP a poster-child when it tries to label the final bill as "partisan." What Snowe wants she'll likely get, which means Dems will have to do some major cajoling to get her to move away from her trigger option.

But with what the Senate gives it also takes away. While lots of attention has been paid to Blue Dogs and Snowe during this debate, we apparently weren't giving little Joey Lieberman enough love. Today Lieberman announced he wasn't happy with the Baucus bill:

Connecticut is home to numerous insurance companies, and of course insurers have suddenly gone to war on health care reform. That may be a factor. My read is that Lieberman remains furious at the party for endorsing Democratic nominee Ned Lamont for the Senate in 2006 over Lieberman's independent candidacy. Lieberman, of course, campaigned hard against Obama in 2008, and probably would enjoy the vindication of seeing Obama's presidency fail For months I've been predicting that the Democrats will pass health care reform because they're not going to cut their own throat. But Lieberman is an independent. A failed Democratic presidency wouldn't necessarily bring him down with it in 2012. It might even help.

It was only a few months ago that Obama was fighting back an insurgency among Democrats to try and get Lieberman thrown out of the party caucus, no doubt with a crucial health care vote in mind. And this is how Lieberman repays him. Let the bribing begin.

Option This

I have to say that the hot idea of the moment -- creating a national public health care option that state's can opt out of -- sounds pretty damn good:

A health care compromise that would establish a national public option for insurance coverage that individual states could opt out of, is being "very seriously considered" by Senate Democrats, a key Democratic lawmakers said on Thursday.

Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) told MSNBC that he and his colleagues have discussed the "opt-out" public option compromise as a way to get a bill past a Republican filibuster. The proposal is designed to get the support of progressive members of the Democratic Caucus -- who are committed to a government-run insurance option -- and conservative Democrats who are worried about what a public plan would have on the private markets in their states.

This all assumes the public option is big enough to do the job it's designed to do and actually drive down costs. Of course, if you're of a progressive mind and live in a red state then this idea would leave you high and dry. But the Schadenfreude in me says too bad. Sorry.

Look at it this way: if the public option works as well as liberals think it will, then eventually conservative states will get around to opting into the public plan. Meanwhile, the rest of the country doesn't have to be dragged down by the self-inflicted stupidity of what is now a vocal but rather small minority terrified of cheaper health care insurance. There's also the added bonus of beating Republicans over the head with the public option during red state elections. Picture a moderate Democrat in Alabama raising money and making the opt-in a big part of his platform in a major state-wide race. Winning at the ballot box would do more to advance liberalism than a swift federal mandate.

Hell, I might like this idea enough to advocate for an opt-out clause in every major federal program. What liberal isn't sick of hearing Republicans bitch about the excesses of federal spending while red states gladly accept a disproportionate number of dollars for Medicare, Social Security, public education, unemployment. The list goes on and on. I'm all for these morons putting their federally subsidized tax dollars where their mouths are and letting them slide into a third world abyss.