Ever since Al Franken parked his rear end in the Democrats’ 60th U.S. Senate seat, the conventional wisdom has held that no matter how much of a fuss the Republicans kicked up this summer and fall, some form of healthcare legislation was bound to reach President Obama’s desk. Taking the midterm election of 1994 as a template for what happens when Democrats spend a year on healthcare and don’t pass anything, party leaders have insisted that such a fiasco must not be repeated, no matter how mediocre a bill eventually emerges. So now that the House has wrapped up its business – taking what was already a warm bucket of piss and vomiting all over it with the Stupak amendment – a nation that not-so-narrowly voted for this agenda turns its lonely eyes to the Senate and screams, “Could you people please just get on with it?”
And the self-proclaimed “world’s greatest deliberative body” responds, “Not so fast.” The House bill is “dead on arrival,” says Lindsay Graham. “I won’t let the public option come to a vote,” says Joe Lieberman. “We’re ready to take the whole Democratic Party down, rather than vote for a package that might cost us a small percentage of voters in our backwater states,” say Ben Nelson and Blanche Lincoln. (Or, at least, they may as well be saying it.) No one at this moment has a clue how the Senate will proceed, or when – not even its majority leader, Harry Reid, who was against the public option before he was for it, and may soon be against it again.
But you know what? That’s all OK, because I can’t imagine there’s anybody out there who is actually happy with the House bill. Truth be told, there may be a grand total of 43 such folks – those being the Democrats who voted for the bill after also voting for the Stupak amendment, which bars the inclusion of abortion coverage in any health-insurance plan that participates in the new purchasing exchanges. Already we’ve seen a similar number of progressive Dems insist they won’t vote for final passage of the bill if the abortion measure isn’t stripped out in conference. But even if both chambers eventually agree on a bill, it will undoubtedly cost too much, cover too few (and make some pay too much to buy in), start too late (the new exchanges are delayed til 2013, simply to keep the bill’s 10-year cost projections down), and be positively loathed by far too many.
In other words, Obama and Congress have screwed the pooch completely on this bill. They should pass it anyway. (more…)
Still, any political analyst with, say, 15 years of hindsight will tell you that “Specter the Defector’s” move across the aisle (he’s done this before, having become a Republican to run against his boss for Philadelphia district attorney in 1965) is just as likely to haunt Democrats as they approach next year’s midterm elections. It was perhaps the perfect political calculation — You want a filibuster-proof majority? Well, I want to save my electoral ass! – but Specter’s presence in the Democratic caucus probably won’t engender a profound shift in his political beliefs. He says he’s still against the Employee Free Choice Act (i.e., card-check unionization votes), though he’s already flip-flopped on the issue once – he voted for it last year, then announced his opposition as Pennsylvania right-wingers held an AK-47 to his head. He’s opposing Obama’s appointee as legal counsel in the Justice Department. Just last night, he voted against Obama’s 2010 budget proposal because he doesn’t like the rules it establishes for debating health-care reform in the fall. 