Health-Care Reform, Part 2

In my last post, I argued the U.S. has a hard time getting major social legislation like health care passed because we don’t have a parliamentary system and have — for mostly good reasons — multiple checks on central government authority. Yet, those checks can be dizzying and depressing. As the old saying goes: “Laws are like sausages. You should never watch them being made.” So the inability to act, especially in the Senate, is partly by design, and partly because of what is happening to the Republican party.

Politicians — schooled by Newt Gringrich — aim to make government not work. Their most obvious tactic is filibustering — which can only be stopped by 60 votes (cloture). This means when Republicans routinely threaten to filibuster they routinely prevent majority votes, transforming all of government from majority rule to minority rule. In the last Congress, 139 cloture motions had to be filed to overcome Republican blocking — almost 2.5 times the previous record for any Congressional session, ever. Norman Orenstein, a conservative scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, says these  procedures are “unprecedented” and are “bringing government to its knees.”

So, sadly, the Republicans are barely pretending to negotiate health care in good faith. Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina said, “If we’re able to stop Obama on this (health care) it will be his Waterloo.” George Voinovich of Ohio admitted Republican opposition to health care is about “50-50″ based on a desire to defeat the Democrats politically.

And Charles Grassley was home in Iowa telling people that “you have every right to fear…. We should not have a government program that determines if you’re going to pull the plug on grandma.”  (Hypocricy detector! In 2003, Grassley voted in favor of the end-of-life counseling provisions Republicans are now defaming as “death panels.”) Grassley also sent fund-raising letters touting his opposition to health-care reform even while he was participating in marathon bipartisan discussions in the Senate, and while Obama was actively seeking his support.

So we can accept the Senate is slow; but it’s hard to accept Republicans who are hellbent on preventing a simple up-or-down majority vote on health reform. They are using all sorts of tactics: asking for CBO scoring, flooding bills with amendments, and insisting on slow reading of legislative language. They hope the delays will make health reform collapse; they don’t want to hand the Democrats and Obama a historic victory: they oppose popular health reform because it is popular.

Sausage alert. The Democrats will likely use budget reconciliation and other tactics to get a bill passed. You don’t have to enjoy your sausages, but stomach them! We will likely get health care reform, and in my next post, I’ll describe what will likely be in the bill and what will likely be left out.