Left to right: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg, Cliff Owen/Associated Press John A. Boehner, the House minority leader, called President Obama’s health care proposal a “back room deal.”On Monday, President Obama outlined a legislative plan to overhaul health care. His blueprint, which tilts toward the Senate bill, is unlikely to win support from Republicans, or even be used as the basis for a compromise. Representative John Boehner of Ohio, the House Minority Leader, called the plan a “back room deal” that “doubles down on the same failed approach that will drive up premiums, destroy jobs, raise taxes and slash Medicare benefits.”
Should the president not bother seeking Republican support, and push this plan through Congress with the budget reconciliation process, which needs only 51 votes? What are the political risks of doing so?
Do Something
Glenn Greenwald, a former constitutional lawyer, is a columnist at Salon.com and the author, most recently, of “Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics.”
President Obama, in introducing his own health care proposal, exposed a transparent, year-long sham. White House loyalists insisted for months that the president genuinely supported a public option, but they told progressives that there could be no public option in the final bill even though more than 50 Democratic Senators supported it and even though the public option consistently polled as being very popular with Americans.
It’s clear that the filibuster is a convenient excuse Democrats use to justify their inaction.
Why not? Because, they argued, the public option lacked the 60 votes needed to overcome a filibuster, and there was simply nothing the White House could do to change that.
But the plan President Obama unveiled does not include a public option. If he were truly in favor of it, why would he exclude it from his own plan?
That question is especially difficult to answer now that (a) it is widely assumed that the only way health care reform can pass the Senate is through the reconciliation process, which circumvents filibusters and thus requires only 50, rather than 60, votes for passage, and (b) numerous Democrat Senators support a public option through reconciliation.
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It now seems obvious that White House’s claim of support for the public option was a pretense used to placate the progressive base (in fact, it seems committed to excluding the public option very likely because it would provide real competition to the health insurance industry and is thus vehemently opposed by the industry and its lobbyists).
Proponents of filibuster reform typically argue that the 60-vote requirement impedes valuable legislation. But it seems clear that the filibuster is a convenient excuse Democrats use to justify their inaction (we’d like to pass it but can’t because, sadly, we just don’t have 60 votes). As the health care debacle demonstrates, even with that obstacle removed, the White House still refuse to push for progressive provisions.
The notion that Republicans might support real health care reform is an even bigger sham. What does the G.O.P. need to do to make clear that they will never, under any circumstances, help the President enact needed legislation?
They’ve all but declared their central mission to be sabotaging Obama’s agenda, particularly on health care. Voters want to see the Democrats do something meaningful with the political power they were given; they care far less about process and “bipartisanship,” which is a preoccupation among Beltway pundits and nobody else.
Given that prospects for bipartisan support for health reform is nonexistent, the only sensible course is for the White House to push for and the Senate to pass a progressive bill that voters want, not the most so-called “centrist” legislation that most pleases corporatist and lobbyist interests.
If the Democrats’ claims all year long were remotely true, then robust reform (including a public option) can easily pass the Senate with 51 votes through the reconciliation process. There is no reason for Democrats to avoid that, and every reason for them to pursue it.
A Big Mistake
Megan McArdle blogs at Asymmetrical Information on The Atlantic magazine Web site.
If the Democrats use budget reconciliation to bypass the Republicans, they will be making a big mistake.
The longer Democrats have talked, the more firmly the voters have rejected their ideas.
Reconciliation is not meant to handle these sorts of problems; it’s meant to help Congress get revenues in line with outlays without letting protracted negotiations push us into a budget crisis. It’s not possible to do any sort of comprehensive, rational overhaul of the Senate health bill — which after all, was intended to be the opening salvo in a negotiation, not the final bill.
More broadly, for all that Democrats are declaring that they have a mandate, it’s pretty clear that the public does not want them to pass any of the health care bills on the table — which has to include the Obama plan, since it is only a minor tweak on the existing proposals. Polls have shown more Americans opposing passage than supporting it since early summer, and opposition has risen fairly steadily over time.
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While President Obama promised health care reform during the election, the plan he ran on was much different than the one he is hoping to sign into law. Most notably, it contains an individual mandate, which he opposed during his campaign — and which the American public opposes. The individual mandate, along with the hefty price tag, are the two factors that Americans who oppose the legislation are most worried about.
Of course, sometimes politicians have to do the right thing rather than the popular thing. But this cannot be a blanket authority to ignore the desires of one’s constituents.
Democrats have had plenty of time to make their case. They have failed to do so. The longer they have talked, the more firmly the voters have rejected their ideas. If Congress goes ahead anyway, they will pay a terrible political price.
Many progressives are pushing the notion that having already once voted for it, Democrats will pay that political price no matter what, so they might as well pass it. That ignores several factors. First, a hated bill that failed last December is not going to engender the same ire as a hated bill that passed in May.
Second, Republicans will capitalize on the use of the reconcilation process, characterizing it as a procedural trick. And third, the provisions that go into effect early, like forbidding insurers to discriminate on the basis of pre-existing conditions, are probably going to push up the cost of coverage in the short run.
It’s far from clear that Democrats have the votes to pass anything close to this bill, even through reconciliation. Pro-life Democrats in the House may not go along with the Senate bill, which has more liberal language on abortion.
But even if they eventually go along, Speaker Pelosi could still be short of the votes she needs, thanks to attrition. To pass the Senate bill, she will probably need to flip a significant number of “no” voters into the “yes” column. Since most of the “no” voters come from relatively conservative districts, this is tantamount to asking them to commit political suicide.
What the Founders Would Do
Steven Hill is director of the Political Reform Program of the New America Foundation and author, mostly recently, of “Europe’s Promise: Why the European Way is the Best Hope in an Insecure Age.”
Yes, President Obama should push his health care package through the Senate via the reconciliation process. Indeed, it is imperative that he do so for two reasons.
Too much is at stake to allow health care reform to be undermined by the quirky rules of the Senate.
First, because the U.S. badly needs health care reform. And second, to restore the constitutional principle of “majority rule” that has been thwarted in the filibuster-gone-wild Senate.
The recent news that Anthem Blue Cross is planning to jack up individual premiums as much as 40 percent is just the latest example of our failing health care system. Spiraling costs is one of the gravest threats to the federal budget and our national economy, placing American consumers as well as businesses at a competitive disadvantage with their international counterparts.
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Our country can no longer afford to be the only industrialized nation that does not have universal health coverage. Too much is at stake to allow health care reform to be undermined by the quirky rules of the Senate.
Beyond the immediate health care crisis, a more fundamental principle is at stake. That is the notion that the majority should rule. Nowhere is it written in the Constitution that a super majority of 60 out of 100 votes is needed to pass legislation in the Senate.
The filibuster is merely a peculiarity of antiquated Senate tradition that once protected slaveholding states. Indeed, James Madison and Alexander Hamilton warned about the creation of any legislative body which “contradicts the fundamental maxim of republican government, which requires that the sense of the majority should prevail” (Hamilton, Federalist Paper number 22).
The problem with super majority thresholds is that they allow a minority to exercise a veto over what the vast majority wants. Currently, the 41 Republican senators represent barely a third of the nation’s populace yet they can strangle any legislation favored by senators representing the other two-thirds. The resulting paralysis has undermined the Senate’s credibility as a deliberative body and resulted in a constitutional crisis.
Very few national legislatures require a super majority to pass legislation, though one comparable situation is in California. There, a two-thirds legislative super-majority is required to pass a budget or alter revenues, and also has resulted in paralysis and minority veto.
So by using reconciliation, President Obama will return the Senate to the original vision of the founders. And he will pass health care legislation that will allow millions of fellow Americans to enjoy a level of health care security that the president and the senators themselves already enjoy.
The Worst Case Scenario
Ramesh Ponnuru is a senior editor for National Review.
The financial crisis created a swollen Democratic majority, and it is understandable that President Obama wants to use it to enact health-care policies that Democrats have long sought — especially since he has good reason to believe that this large majority is temporary.
The Democrats could well end up with both a demoralized base and an outraged opposition.
That effort has now brought him to the point where he is contemplating pushing through a bill over the opposition of almost all Republicans, most independent voters, and some Democrats.
Democrats are considering the reconciliation maneuver in part because most of them remain convinced that this legislation greatly improves public policy. In part, they persist because most Democrats also believe that retreating would make them look weak. Democrats have already sustained the maximum possible political damage from the health-care debate, they tell one another. They may as well derive the political benefits of enacting the legislation.
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But critics of the legislation make some good points — a lot of them, actually. The legislation would add to the already vast burden of entitlements, raise implicit tax rates on low-income workers, cause states to dump more of the costs of Medicaid onto the federal government, make hiring workers more expensive, and undercut some of the best parts of Medicare.
It is not hard to envision smaller legislation that could gain bipartisan support while doing a lot of good. Such legislation might offer tax credits to help people without access to employer-based health insurance purchase policies while putting much more funding into high-risk pools for the uninsurable.
The Democrats’ political calculation is probably also mistaken. If the Democratic legislation collapses liberals will be demoralized. The intensity of conservative opposition to the Democrats will, however, diminish: It would be hard to get conservative-leaning voters mad about what the Democrats didn’t end up doing, or to persuade them that electing Republicans is an urgent necessity.
If the bill gets enacted, however, the opposition will be even more furious than it already is. Republicans will say that the Democrats have used a temporary grant of power to jam through sweeping, permanent changes over public opposition. They will be right.
There is, of course, another scenario. The Democrats continue trying to save this legislation, spending more time in keeping their unpopular bill in the news and making more deals with one another. But they can’t pass the bill anyway. The nearer in time its collapse is to the mid-term election, the greater the chance that Democrats will achieve both a demoralized base and an outraged opposition.
Establish Political Traction
Norman J. Ornstein is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.
What is the best approach, substantively and politically, for health reform?
After the summit at Blair House, President Obama should make the following announcement:
I told Republicans to bring their best ideas to the table and we would discuss and consider them, taking any that were good and helped craft a better and fairer health reform plan.
There were some very good ideas raised on Thursday. I am going to take them, including malpractice reform to reduce defensive medicine; an expansion of Health Savings Accounts to offer more individual choice to consumers; the ability for people to shop for insurance across state lines (but with minimum national standards, to prevent a race to the bottom as happened with credit cards), and incorporate them into my bill. I will then ask Majority Leader Harry Reid to bring the new bipartisan bill up for a vote in the Senate.
I hope some Republicans, after I have taken their concerns and ideas and made them a part of the bill, will join in being a part of the solution. If they cannot, I hope at least they will not join together to filibuster and allow a minority to thwart the will of the majority.
If that does not work — if somehow there are still 41 votes to filibuster — then there is much more political traction for using reconciliation to get a bill enacted into law.
