Shorter Chuck Todd: It’s only big news if the Democrats fail!
I guess he didn’t pick up on the fact that if they had failed to get the 60 votes, HCR would, for all intents and purposes, be dead in the short run, as the Republicans would filibuster. That is why this is such a big deal- they have overcome the obstructionism of the GOP, and the debate can advance.
Although in fairness to Chuck, he may be more concerned with why Obama didn’t reach out more to President McCain. Not to be too subjective, or anything.
*** Update ***
Can anyone imagine the feeding frenzy for the next two weeks if they had failed to get 60 and advance the debate? Can you imagine the Sunday shows tomorrow? Can you imagine all the headlines speculating if Obama was a lame duck? “Senate fails to advance health care reform. Is Obama’s entire agenda at risk?” and “Obama’s signature legislation killed in Senate. Can he recover?” and “Republicans, spurred by sagging Obama poll numbers and grass roots support from tea party, stop Obama administration in their tracks.”
And Chuck Todd would be leading the goddamned charge with that crap.
Chuck Todd explains in Twitterific form what the Village really thinks. Does he not understand how the legislative process works? Nope. Does he remember that it was a Blue Dog Royal Senator named Max Baucus that helped pass Bush's tax cuts and medicare drug plan:
Some Democrats think Mr. Baucus betrayed the party in 2001 when he supported President George W. Bush's tax cuts, and in 2003 when he was one of two Democrats to help Republicans pass a Medicare prescription drug plan.
If George Bush had failed at getting these through, would Todd be questioning the conservative movement? Nope. They would be telling America that since they elected Bush, the Democrats were traitors to America. But when a Democrat is President all the Villagers look forward to is failure.
In the 2006 cycle the candidate who attracted the most support from Blue America donors was Ned Lamont, with his campaign that served notice on the Democratic Establishment that the grassroots was unwilling to just eat up whatever crap it was served up from Inside the Beltway hacks. Blue America raised over $77,000 for him in our first year in action. The following cycle, saw another inspiring progressive primary challenger, Donna Edwards, attract the most donors and the largest amount (almost $65,000). It may be too early to tell, but it looks like 2010 cycle will mark the year of Alan Grayson. It's still only 2009 but Blue America has already raised over $30,000 for him-- without having even made an official endorsement! We've been collecting contributions for him at No Means No, a page dedicated to members of Congress who voted against Obama's supplemental war budget in June, and at Getting Grayson's Back, a page dedicated to standing up for him when he got GOP noses out of joint by telling the truth about their health care obstructionism.
Today Blue America is joining a netroots money bomb effort on behalf of Grayson, urging our community to band together and answer the Inside-the-Beltway and Villager mentality that says there's no room for a plainspoken truth-teller like Grayson in Congress. Nevermind, they tell you, that he studied economics at Harvard, then worked as an economist, then studied law at Harvard and then successfully pursued war profiteers and Bush cronies in Iraq-- even before being elected to Congress in a Republican district and becoming the scourge of banksters and assorted evil-doers dragged before the House Financial Services committee. No, to the Villagers, he's all about "outlandish rhetoric;" he's "the left's Michele Bachmann;" he's "pugilistic" and a "wing nut."
Rep. Grayson joins us below in the comments section where you can see for yourself he's quickly become the favorite member of Congress of Democrats and independents from across the country. And please, help out with the money bomb today.
This is what I hate having to explain to my relatives and friends abroad in Europe about politics in the US. We know that global warming is a fact. We know that our actions, if they didn't cause global warming, definitely exacerbate it. We know that we must reduce our dependency on oil, for both ecological and political/strategic reasons. And yet, what we are able to do is hampered so predictably by the Republican party:
But Boxer cannot hold the markup unless at least two Republicans show up, and EPW ranking member James Inhofe (R-Okla.) signaled that he has unanimous support among the panel’s minority members to boycott the session until they get more data on the legislation from U.S. EPA and the Congressional Budget Office.
Inhofe said he will wait for Boxer to file an official notice of the markup — expected today — before responding with his own declaration of the GOP’s markup strategy.
“As soon as we find out what her announcement is and what she wants to do, we’ll have our response,” Inhofe told E&E last night. “We’ll have our unanimous expression ready.”
Sadly, this is a continuation of the GOP’s longstanding strategy of delaying clean energy legislation:
Last year during the debate over the Climate Security Act, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell demanded that the entire 491 page bill be read on the floor of the United States Senate. A strategy memo was leaked at the time detailing the Republican strategy for delaying the bill as much as humanly possible.
While this Republican obstructionism is not necessarily surprising, it is especially egregious this time. Here are a few things about this episode that struck me:
Is it really as simple as "I don't know anyone like that"? Because this is a huge crisis for millions. The longer the Republicans bottle up the unemployment benefits extension (for no other reason than they can), the more people without other options fall off the unemployment rolls.
You'd think someone in the media might see that as an important story. But maybe when journalists started getting hired from Ivy League schools, they lost any interest in what happens to the paycheck class.
Gee, I hope not. But I'd love to see some evidence to the contrary. The media should be out front, shaming these people:
In a conference call with reporters today, three Democratic Senators charged Republicans with obstructionism in all aspects of public policy, particularly stopping the Senate from passing a bill that would extend unemployment to millions of Americans, at a time when 7,000 Americans a day are losing their benefits.
Sens. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI), Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) and Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) vowed to move forward with a motion to proceed on the unemployment bill, tied up with non-germane amendments (about things like ACORN funding and E-Verify which have already been voted on in the Senate in other forms) from Republicans that “amount to a political agenda” in Stabenow’s words, as soon as tomorrow. “The votes are there to pass this bill,” said Shaheen. Stabenow said that the bill could have passed a few weeks ago.
Asked by Mike Lillis of the Washington Independent, who has a writeup on this up, why the Senate cannot just plow forward on this bill, given their 60-vote majority in the Senate, Stabenow answered that “you can only do this one at a time.” She countered that Republicans have slow-walked practically all critical legislation since 2007, forcing cloture votes on ordinary measures to take up floor time and generally obstruct the legislation. Obstructionism in the Senate is not limited to filibusters, but also procedural actions when filibusters can be overcome. The result is a slow crawl that creates anxiety among Democrats and liberals and emboldens Republicans to claim that Democrats are running a “do-nothing” Congress. It’s a neat trick.
Democrats hope for a final vote on this bill by the end of the week.
Yesterday Arlen Specter was back at his old media home, Fox News, singing a new tune, dancing the Lieberman shuffle, calling the GOP "a party of obstructionism." Well, he's got that right; they are. And until consistent polling showed that a right-wing extremist, Club For Growth head Pat Toomey, would kick his ass from Chester to Erie and from Waynesville to Carbondale in the Republican primary, Specter was very much a part of that obstructionist machine. Staring into the eyes of political mortality, Specter cut a deal with the White House to jump the fence and "become" a Democrat. He made the purely opportunistic switch on April 28. And here he was two weeks later on Meet The Press letting Pennsylvania voters know exactly what kind of a "Democrat" he would be:
Today he was calling his old colleagues obstructionists on the exact same issue for doing precisely what he was doing, although he has also bragged about how he will also vote with Republicans against Employees Free Choice. (The only difference is that he takes even more in thinly-veiled bribes from the Medical-Industrial Complex--$4,266,393, the most of any member of Congress who didn't run for president-- and Big Insurance--$1,058,655-- than most of them do.) Oh... and there's one more difference: Admiral Joe Sestak. Joe Sestak's constant pressure on behalf of working families has pushed Specter away from his unswerving support for his corporate donors. Petrified of being defeated in the Democratic primary, Specter sounds like he's almost a Democrat.
It was in the spring of 2006 that Blue America first started following Admiral Sestak as he sought, successfully, to dislodge another corrupt Republican barnacle obstructing progress in Washington, Curt Weldon. He was one of the first candidates our PAC ever endorsed and we have been immensely impressed by something that has distinguished Rep. Sestak from almost all the other members of Congress we've worked with. He is a critical thinker who seems to relish a debate of ideas. We don't always agree on every single issue but he never gets all brittle and uptight when challenged and he is always eager for input and eager to go through the thought processes that led him to make a decision. If there's one thing I've learned since starting Blue America, it's that no one is buying a member of Congress with an endorsement and no member of Congress will agree with you on every single vote. (Barney Frank once famously said even you wouldn't agree with you on every single vote.) What we do look for is someone with a sterling character who is open-minded, courageous and with inherently progressive sympathies. That's why we've continued to support Joe Sestak and why we asked him to come over to Crooks and Liars today for a live chat. He'll be joining us this afternoon at 3pm (PT), 6pm back in Pennsylvania. And he's bringing along another ole Blue America friend, Ned Lamont.
When I spoke to Rep. Sestak on the phone last week about the health-care debate, he was very forceful. "I'm going to have a very difficult time if I'm asked to vote for a bill that doesn't have a public option," he began. "I support a public option so that individuals are no longer stuck in insurance markets with no choices and no competition to bring down costs... I want to end unfair rationing by insurance company executives, like the small business owner who came into my District office because to complain about not being able to purchase insurance for herself or her employees because she had ovarian cancer ten years ago... As vice-chairman of the small business committee, I understand the need to reduce health care costs for small businesses. Only 62% of all small firms (less than 200 employees) offer health insurance, as compared to 99% of large firms. When they do offer insurance, it costs roughly 18% more than for larger employers."
You can find the rest of Specter's real health care record at DownWithTyranny. Meanwhile, please join us in the comments section below for our chat with Joe Sestak and Ned Lamont. After you've heard them out, if you'd like to sign up as a volunteer or donate to Rep. Sestak's election fund, you can do it on his website.
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Sen. Arlen Specter told Fox News' Chris Wallace that the Republican Party was the party of "no, no, no" when it comes to passing meaningful health care reform. While Specter believes the public option is "gaining momentum" within the Democratic Party, the GOP is the "party of obstructionism," said Specter.
UPDATE: Joe Sestak and Ned Lamont will be on C&L live chatting with us tomorrow, Monday Oct. 19th at 3pm PST/6pm EST so don't miss it.
I had a very interesting tête-à-tête last week that I thought I'd share. As you may have guessed, I'm on the email distro lists for all the major Sunday shows and cable news networks, and I get email notifications for who the scheduled guests will be as well as transcripts, p.r. pieces and the like. Last week, when ABC sent me an email that John McCain was going to be their guest again, I sent back a snarky reply asking if they ever had John Kerry on after he lost the election to George Bush as often as they've had McCain, and why, when there are so many actual issues about which the public needs to be informed, they gave so much air time to GOP obstructionism. Normally, I shoot off those emails just as a private protest, but this time, I got a reply back from the executive producer:
Thanks very much for your email. I’d have to take issue with your suggestion that “so much time is given to GOP obstructionism.” Week to week we maintain a balance between Democratic and Republican guests. It’s not always a perfect balance – airtime often tips toward the party in power because the mission of our program is to ask questions of those who are in decision making and policy making roles. Our guest selection is also determined by the news stories we cover. As the ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee Senator McCain is clearly the appropriate Republican guest to follow the Secretary of Defense in a discussion of US Afghanistan policy.
Well, if you've ever seen me in the comments, you have to know I'm not going to let a steaming pile of Village B.S. like that go unchallenged:
Thanks for your response.
The notion of a "balance" between Democratic and Republican guests is a false equivalence too often used in lieu of actual journalism. If you put brought on a creationist to discuss the fossil record with Stephen Jay Gould, are you serving your viewership well for balance?
How about instead of reducing every issue to a simplistic binary equation of Republican vs. Democrat, you seek to actually inform your viewership with people who have real background in Afghanistan or could bring a different (and not partisan) perspective? For example, Paul Rieckhoff of IAVA could discuss it from a soldier's POV. As a blogger involved in many journalism listservs, I personally could put you in touch with people far more versed in the history and the actualities in Afghanistan which would provide far more cogent and *informative* information than you will see from the man who tried to tell Americans that Baghdad was as safe as Main Street with his contingent of soldiers and helicopters guarding him.
Further, your insistence that this is the best person to follow up on Gates is disingenuous at best, when looked at the history of who THIS WEEK has booked. I've been a media analyst and political advocate for several years and my memory is not that short. John Kerry was on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee during Bush's presidency. How often did you ask Sen. Kerry on to discuss foreign policy as a response to Bush? Rarely.
And why is McCain on as *a response*? Why isn't he on first and then give Gates--as the person who can actually make policy, as opposed to the minority party--the opportunity to address the issues afterwards? Because air time tips to the party in power? Last time I checked, Americans have pretty decisively said that they weren't happy with the GOP being the party in power, not that we can tell from your bookings. It's bad enough that you give air time to George Will every week to spread disinformation (and if you'd like, I'm only too happy to provide you with at least 10 examples in the last year of things George Will has been factually wrong about), but to actually tell me that air time tips to the party in power when you have notoriously been favoring Republicans makes me question how forthright you're being about your booking choices. Let's see you book a Democratic blogger even once to "balance" your egregious booking of the completely factually-challenged Michelle Malkin. Or maybe it's just that *informing* your viewership is secondary.
Funnily enough, the producer didn't really have much response to that, simply thanking me for the input. Honestly, I wasn't really happy with the dismissive little pat on the head from the Villager who thought that little blogger me couldn't understand why McCain was a reasonable booking. So I thought I'd give him a suggestion as to real balance:
Here is a segment I would LOVE to see you do with Sen. McCain: why don't you invite my colleague, David Neiwert, author of The Eliminationists, on to discuss how the violent rhetoric that used to be relegated to the fringes of the Republican Party which has been mainstreamed since Obama's election and let Sen McCain respond to that? After all, he is the one who brought Sarah Palin to the national stage (and as I recall, actually said on your program that Palin was his "soul mate" after having only had one phone conversation and a short meeting with her before asking her on the ticket) and there is no other politician who has tapped so proficiently into that zeitgeist. I think it would be beneficial for Americans to hear someone of Sen. McCain's gravitas and stature disavow the kind of violent and racist rhetoric we've all seen. I'm more than happy to provide you with contact information for Mr. Neiwert if you are so inclined.
But if you're not interested in putting Sen. McCain on the spot, perhaps next time you do a show on the problems we're facing in Afghanistan, the "balance" you seek would be better achieved by putting on a politician who favors withdrawal, like Rep. Alan Grayson, instead of two hawks who will both say that the most important thing is "winning" in Afghanistan without actually explaining what "winning" means or how we can achieve it militarily. Where's the balance in that for your viewers?
Are you surprised that he had no response to that? Nah, me neither. I don't know if it impacted him at all, but I'm hoping that from now on he has a small voice inside his head reminding him that some of his viewers actually think critically and realize how badly he's--and all the rest of the bobblehead media--doing his job.
Do you remember tug-of-wars from your childhood? I remember the adult in charge lining up us kids by height and then going down the line, alternating which team we would be on, to ensure that neither side was unfairly stacked. That notion of balancing the sides to make things fair has morphed in modern media to this simplistic binary equation of Republican vs. Democrat. But it's a false equivalence, because it assumes a completely valid argument on both sides, and as we chronicle daily here at C&L, rarely do we see sensible, much less valid, arguments coming from the right to make the "balance" actually informative. Instead we get death panels, socialicommunistmarxism, concern trollism over deficit spending and the Olympic Games.
This week, despite the fact that bills are coming out of committees on health care reform, the bobbleheads have decided we need to talk about Afghanistan. So we have National Security Adviser Jim Jones on Face the Nation and State of the Union, UN Ambassador Susan Rice on Meet the Press and former CENTCOM Commander Anthony Zinni on Face the Nation. The economy will also get big play, with former Fed Chair Alan Greenspan on This Week and Sen. Barbara Boxer and Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm on State of the Union to talk unemployment. But never fear, health care will be discussed, with of course, the media's version of "balance" of putting Party of No members John Kyl, Lindsey Graham, Saxby Chambliss and John Cornyn on to obsfuscate some more. One bright note in the morning, Rachel Maddow will be back on Meet the Press roundtable, so we have a chance of some reasonable discussion there. That is, if the Davids--Gregory and Brooks--give her a chance to talk.
ABC's "This Week" - Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan; Sens. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and John Cornyn, R-Texas.
CBS' "Face the Nation" - National security adviser James Jones; Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich.; retired Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni; Rep. Ike Skelton, D-Mo.
NBC's "Meet the Press" - Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.
NBC's "The Chris Matthews Show" - Panel: Bob Woodward, Katty Kay, Elisabeth Bumiller, Howard Fineman. Topics: Will President Obama send an additional 40,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan? Will Israel attack nuclear facilities in Iran without U.S. consent? Meter Questions: Was the anti-Obama venom unavoidable? YES: 6 NO: 6; Has Obama Got Command Back? YES: 12 No: 0.
CNN's "State of the Union" - Jones; Sens. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., and Jon Kyl, R-Ariz.; Gov. Jennifer Granholm, D-Mich.
CNN's "Fareed Zakaria GPS" - The United States holds its first one-on-one talks with Iran in decades. Will this new diplomatic approach work? Hear what our panelists have to say. Plus, the author of a controversial UN report on the Israel-Gaza conflict earlier this year. Finally, an interview with the President of Columbia on everything from the war on drugs to free markets and US relations.
"Fox News Sunday" - Sens. Evan Bayh, D-Ind., Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga., and Bob Casey, D-Pa.
Russell Wheeler, visiting fellow in Governance Studies at The Brookings Institution, predicts trouble for Obama's judicial nominees.
This Jeffrey Toobin piece in the latest New Yorker illustrates what I predict will be the fatal flaw of the Obama administration: this strange, intellectualized fixation with a non-partisan strategy that is in no way supported by the results on the ground - nor is it an appropriate response to the electorate, which overwhelmingly rejected Republican policies.
The president doesn't yet seem to understand that the continued opposition to his choices doesn't have anything to do with his choices. It's Republican obstructionism, plain and simple. (Although Orrin Hatch contends: "He started it!" Uh huh. Go take a nap, Orrin, you nasty old coot.)
The Obama Administration wanted to send a message with the President’s first nomination to a federal court. “There was a real conscious decision to use that first appointment to say, ‘This is a new way of doing things. This is a post-partisan choice,’ ” one White House official involved in the process told me. “Our strategy was to show that our judges could get Republican support.” So on March 17th President Obama nominated David Hamilton, the chief federal district-court judge in Indianapolis, to the Seventh Circuit court of appeals. Hamilton had been vetted with care. After fifteen years of service on the trial bench, he had won the highest rating from the American Bar Association; Richard Lugar, the senior senator from Indiana and a leading Republican, was supportive; and Hamilton’s status as a nephew of Lee Hamilton, a well-respected former local congressman, gave him deep connections. The hope was that Hamilton’s appointment would begin a profound and rapid change in the confirmation process and in the federal judiciary itself.
[...] “The unifying quality that we are looking for is excellence, but also diversity, and diversity in the broadest sense of the word,” another Administration official said. “We are looking for experiential diversity, not just race and gender. We want people who are not the usual suspects, not just judges and prosecutors but public defenders and lawyers in private practice.” Yet Hamilton and Sotomayor are the usual suspects—both sitting judges, who had already been confirmed by the Senate. Of Obama’s seven nominees to the circuit courts, six are federal district-court judges. The group includes Gerard Lynch, a former Columbia Law School professor and New York federal prosecutor, and Andre Davis, who was nominated to the Fourth Circuit by Bill Clinton. (At the time, Republicans blocked any vote on Davis.) Two of the seven are African-American; two are women; all but one are in their fifties. (None are openly gay.) The one non-judge is Jane Stranch, who has represented labor unions and other clients at a Nashville law firm and is nominated for the Sixth Circuit. They are conventional, qualified, and undramatic choices, who were named, at least in part, because they were seen as likely to be quickly confirmed.
But then, as the first White House official put it, “Hamilton blew up.” Conservatives seized on a 2005 case, in which Hamilton ruled to strike down the daily invocation at the Indiana legislature because its repeated references to Jesus Christ violated the establishment clause of the First Amendment. Hamilton had also ruled to invalidate a part of Indiana’s abortion law that required women to make two visits to a doctor before undergoing the procedure. In June, Hamilton was approved by the Judiciary Committee on a straight party-line vote, twelve to seven, but his nomination has not yet been brought to the Senate floor. Some Republicans have already vowed a filibuster. (Republican threats of extended debate on nominees can stop the Democratic majority from bringing any of them up for votes.)
“The reaction to Hamilton certainly has given people pause here,” the second White House official said. “If they are going to stop David Hamilton, then who won’t they stop?”
See what I mean? Why are they surprised? Why do they constantly split the difference on everything, watering down any meaningful differences? If I were making these decisions, I'd be pushing the most liberal judges I could find, and make the Republicans explain over and over why they don't want judges who rule in favor of working people. Why would you throw away that opportunity?
Republicans in the Senate have not allowed a vote on any of the other nominees, either. So far, the only Obama nominee who has been confirmed to a lifetime federal judgeship is Sotomayor. The stalemate provides a revealing glimpse of the environment in Washington. Obama advisers (and Democratic Senate sources) aver that all the nominees, even Hamilton, will be confirmed eventually, but contrary to the President’s early hope the struggle for his judges is likely to be long and contentious.
“The President did not set a good example when he was in the Senate,” Orrin Hatch, the senior Republican senator from Utah, told me, pointing to Obama’s votes against the confirmation of John G. Roberts, Jr., and Samuel A. Alito, Jr., to the Supreme Court. “You have to be a partisan ideologue not to support Roberts,” Hatch said. “There is a really big push on by partisan Republicans to use the same things that they did against us.” Hatch himself, who had voted for Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer, and every other Supreme Court nominee in his Senate career, voted against Sotomayor. (The vote for her confirmation was sixty-eight to thirty-one.)
I think it's pretty clear by now that saving money really isn't the motivation behind Blue Dog obstructionism:
July 28 (Bloomberg) -- The last time a president tried to overhaul U.S. health care, Americans were spending $912 billion on the system and 40 million were uninsured. Today they’re spending $2.5 trillion and almost 50 million lack coverage.
President Barack Obama’s effort to revamp the system faces resistance from lawmakers of both parties who warn that the more than $1 trillion cost of the plan will break the budget at a time when the government already faces record deficits.
“Despite what President Obama claims, the bill he is promoting today will make health care even more expensive,” House Minority Leader John Boehner said last week when the president visited Boehner’s home state of Ohio.
The experience of the 15 years since Bill Clinton failed to win passage of legislation suggests that the price of inaction may be even higher than the cost of Obama’s plan.
Congress refused to touch the issue for a decade after the collapse of Clinton’s 1994 bid. A similar outcome this year would likely add millions to the ranks of the uninsured, boost costs for businesses and workers, and do nothing about what may be the top threat to the government’s long-term fiscal health, proponents of the plan argue.
“The budgetary implications of doing nothing are continued exponential growth in health-care costs, a steadily increasing health-care share of GNP, an eventual bankruptcy of the Medicare trust fund, and health-care costs becoming a prohibitive share of the federal budget,” Lawrence Summers, head of the National Economic Council, said in an interview.
Health-insurance premiums for families have risen 119 percent since 1999, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, a Menlo Park, California-based policy-research firm. Inflation has risen 28.5 percent over that period, according to the Labor Department.
Premium costs are projected to rise another 9 percent next year, an increase that 42 percent of employers plan to pass on to their workers, according to a report last month by PricewaterhouseCoopers. That’s likely to further squeeze millions of Americans who find themselves in high-deductible insurance plans as wages stagnate because of the recession.
Earnings per hour climbed by a 0.7 percent pace on average over the last three months, the Labor Department said earlier this month, the smallest gain since the agency began keeping records in 1964. Meanwhile, the share of insured workers with at least a $1,000 deductible has almost doubled since 2006 to 18 percent, according to Kaiser.
For companies, the cost of health care “appears to be borne by the employees in the form of forgone wage increases and by consumers in the form of higher prices,” according to an October 2007 research paper by economists Victor Fuchs and John Shoven of Stanford University.
Some companies say the rising costs are also hurting them.
“Health reform could not be more critical,” Mike Duke, president of Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the nation’s largest private employer, said in a letter last month to Obama. “Reforming health care is necessary not just to improve the health of all Americans, but also to remove the burden that is crushing America’s businesses.”
For Louis Gerstner, former head of International Business Machines Corp., failure to curb medical-care costs will have a devastating, ripple effect.
The word I'm hearing is that Rep. Henry Waxman kicked the Blue Dogs around over their health care obstructionism and the earlier reports of a deal being dead in the HOUSE is not the case. The Hill is reporting along those lines:
Chairman Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) says there is "no alternative" but to have healthcare legislation bypass his Energy and Commerce Committee if Blue Dog Democrats don't accept a deal worked out Friday.Waxman is now playing a game of legislative chicken with the Blue Dogs. He's hoping the inclusion of a study on Medicare reimbursement rates in the healthcare overhaul will be enough to placate the centrist Democrats, who say the government program short-changes hospitals and physicians in their rural districts.
If that’s not, the seven Blue Dogs could join with the committee's Republicans to "eviscerate" healthcare reform, and that’s something Waxman will not tolerate.
"I won't allow them to hand over control of our committee to Republicans," Waxman told reporters.
"I don’t see what other alternative we have, because we're not going to let them empower Republicans on the committee."
Is there anyone wondering why Waxman took over the EC&C Committee from Dingle? If he hadn't then the Blue Dogs would be running the show. Waxman is an excellent at legislature and obviously knew he needed to get things done.
The truth is that the Blue Dogs are slaves to entrenched power, serving the interests of powerful lobbies rather than the middle-income voters in their districts. Cutting subsidies to 300% of poverty level from 400% would make health care less affordable to working people - and it's only being considered in the House because Blue Dogs want to protect those making half a million a year from a surtax.
Which is why Waxman is absolutely in the right to do this. The Blue Dogs, cheered on by Republicans, are simply standing in the way of progress. You can tell because their arguments lack logic and coherence. They apparently got the President's MedPAC proposal in the bill, as part of a larger deal over reducing regional disparities in Medicare reimbursements, but other measures that reduce costs they resist. And measures that increase costs they favor. They exist at this point to be nothing more than sand in the gears.
At some point, I think you do have to pull the trigger. Matt Yglesias makes the moral case, that good legislation matters more than good process.
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George Voinovich is retiring from Congress next year, and I guess that means he can feel free to let a few things slip out. In this clip from CNBC, he admits what we've known all along - that opposition to the President is driving opposition to health care reform. Republicans know that if a Democratic President expands access to health care more than any time since Medicare, and lowers individual costs for most people, he will reap rewards. So their strategy, as revealed previously by internal memos and Jim "Waterloo" DeMint, is to obstruct reform to deny the President a "win", thusly turning the uninsured and the poor into pawns in a political game.
Most of Voinovich's remarks are of the fiscal scold variety, claiming that we cannot afford the cost of government (something I forget hearing from Voinovich when he voted to authorize a war in Iraq that cost three trillion dollars), but here's the key moment at around 4:25:
QUESTIONER: ...on health care, how much of this disagreement with the Administration is about the policy of health care and how to fix it, and how much of it is Republicans' obvious and understandable desire to declaw the President politically? How much of that does fit into the equation.
VOINOVICH: I think it's about 50/50, but I will tell you this...
He then claims that some Republicans want to work "on a bipartisan basis" on health care, but that's pretty much the death knell right there.
Democrats are right to jump all over this and expose the GOP as obstructionists. We've known this for some time with the record number of filibusters, but haven't gotten it out to the public. On a high-profile issue like health care, it should be radioactive to obstruct for political reasons and deny millions of people the right to have quality, affordable care.
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On Countdown we get some straight talk from Howard Dean about health care reform and the ridiculous talk of the need for bipartisanship with the Party of No. Not so much about the bought and sold Democratic Senators who are not in favor of a public option.
Olbermann: If there are two polls in a week that show seventy percent, nearly three quarters support for some form of government generated health insurance, why is Sen. Feinstein encountering resistance from other Senate Democrats?
Dean: One of the problems in the Senate is it becomes about the Senate instead of what's good for the country. The idea that forty members of the determined minority can obstruct what seventy three percent of Americans want is ridiculous. And you've got to put aside this notion that bipartisanship is always good. Bipartisanship is a good thing when both sides want to work together, but they don't.
The Republicans just want to kill this bill, just like they tried to kill Medicare and the Democrats have got to stand up to them. If we learned anything in the last four years, you only win when you stand up to obstructionism, and the Democrats have got to get their act together and move forward with this.
A health insurance plan without a public health insurance option is not health care reform and they need to get this done.
Dean goes on to say that the Democrats in the Senate need to get out of the bubble they live in. He also says that the American public will think it "looks" like the Democratic Senators support the health insurance industry instead of the American people if they don't get some real reform passed. I'd take Dean to task for that. It doesn't just look like they are....they are and that's the real problem here.
Dean's message is correct though. "Let the American people choose." The President needs to be willing to take on his own party if anything is going to get done with health care reform that isn't window dressing and more of the status quo. It's really pitiful that the Congress is arguing about even having a public option when what they really should be doing is supporting a single payer plan if they cared about the American people and our economy. We can't afford to keep lining insurance company CEO's pockets and paying for insurance companies to figure out ways to deny care.
The Baseline Scenario: Bankruptcy cramdowns defeated in the Senate...zero Republican support, natch. This had nothing to do with what would be best for the country as a whole, but everything to do with what the banks wanted.
What a complete and utter tool. On C-Span's Newsmakers show this weekend, Roy Blunt blames Nancy Pelosi for how little the 110th Congress has accomplished. Now I have my issues with Pelosi's priorities and leadership, but let's call a tool a tool. The reason that so little has been passed is that the Republicans have been playing these stupid partisan games (and Blunt, John Ashcroft's and Tom DeLay's personally groomed protege, knows exactly how to do it) and basically fighting every bit of legislation that comes along. Can you say obstructionism, Roy? (.pdf) I knew that you could.
And then to prove that the Republicans are serious about being as difficult as possible, Blunt admits that the Republicans have every intent to shut down Congress after the summer recess unless the Democrats allow for off-shore drilling rights. But it's the Democrats' fault. I can't believe how dishonest this guy is...and of course, since he's being interviewed by a Washington Times journalist, no actual facts will be proffered.
We've discussed the fallacy of the off-shore drilling doing anything to help our energy crisis...a perfect example of the Shock Doctrine being pushed upon us. Yes, our gas is expensive, relatively speaking, for us (but compared to Europe, still a bargain). No actual increase in supply would happen for at least 5-10 years, no guarantee that resource would go to offset Americans' costs (rather than going on the global market to the highest bidder) and the disaster waiting to happen of oil spills in sensitive ecological areas makes it a smart choice for the Democrats to take a stand. The only benefits go to oil companies and I'd say they're doing fine right now.
So it's up to the Democrats (hear me, Pelosi?) to get in front of this and make sure the American people know that Blunt & Co. want to shut down the government to put more money in the bank accounts of oil companies. That's all that needs to be said.
