This morning the Wall Street Journal, as should surprise no one, editorializes against using the reconciliation process to pass healthcare reform and quotes this nugget:
Democrats are only resorting to it now because their plan is in so much political trouble—within their own party, and even more among the general public—and because they’ve failed to make their case through persuasion.
“They know that this will take courage,” Nancy Pelosi said in an interview over the weekend, speaking of the Members she’ll try to strong-arm. “It took courage to pass Social Security. It took courage to pass Medicare,” the Speaker continued. “But the American people need it, why are we here? We’re not here just to self-perpetuate our service in Congress.”
Bold words for a woman sitting in one of the safest of safe seats in the Congress. I also note that both Social Security and Medicare were passed by majorities of both political parties in both houses of Congress. Can anyone reasonably claim that will be the case with the version of healthcare reform making its way through the Congress now?
Imagine this. Democrats pass their vision of healthcare reform which none but the most sanguine genuinely believe will do much other than increase healthcare spending and they pass it via the reconciliation process. In doing so not only will they have gone against the counsel of senior members of their own party (Robert Byrd within the last year and Joe Biden just a few years ago), they will have done it against the opinion of the American people. In November voters, angered by the lack of due attention to the more pressing problems of the financial system and employment not to mention this exercise in power politics, vote in Republican majorities in both houses of Congress.
In January 2011 there might be a new Speaker of the House and a new Senate majority leader and there would be no credible barriers to that new Congress using every device of power politics to overturn everything the present Congress has accomplished to date and thwart anything the president might wish to accomplish in the future.
It’s not a perfect parallel but I’m reminded of Thomas More’s speech in Robert Bolt’s play, A Man for All Seasons:
Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country’s planted thick with laws from coast to coast — man’s laws, not God’s — and if you cut them down — and you’re just the man to do it — do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake.
I think that Democrats should think twice before enacting such a sweeping piece of social legislation on a straight party line basis. Not all seats are as safe as Speaker Pelosi’s House seat and that includes the speaker’s chair.
Dave,
Consider this:
1. Democrats are caught in a pickle. If they don’t pass it, after all the effort put in, they’ll be punished by the base. They know they are going to lose seats this election cycle regardless, so why not pass it and keep the base happy?
2. Democrats are betting that this measure won’t be rolled back and, judging from history, they are probably right. Entitlements, once passed, tend to stick, plus there will be an Obama veto to meet any effort at repeal. Just look at the Democrats and Bush policies. For instance, Democrats complain incessantly about the Bush tax cuts yet they’ve yet to introduce legislation to repeal them. They complain about how Bush didn’t pay for Medicare part D, but they’ve not cared enough to do anything about it. The most the Democrats can muster are some attempts to roll-back or add some additional taxes on the wealthy. The GoP is likely to act similarly – it will be a convenient political talking point but little else. I think the most we can expect is amendments to the legislation and not repeal.
First of all, reconciliation is not nearly the big deal people are making it out to be. After all, it’s not really needed. The House can pass the Senate bill, period, and be done with it.
Second, what’s the big deal about party line votes? People make a fetish of bipartisanship in their words but actions speak differently. Nobody’s ever been kicked out of office on the basis of party line votes.
Third, the health care bill is a huge weapon in November. Every Democrat who votes for health care can tie their opponent to being in favor of letting insurance companies drop people for pre-existing conditions, etc. If the economy is bad in November, and I suspect that it will be, I think you will find that safety net programs like health care will be more popular on the margins, as people uneasily eye their unemployed neighbors and start thinking about what might happen to their own families if they lose their job.
Outside the beltway, people don’t vote on process issues.
What would happen if the reconciliation vote failed? Most people would assume by the way the media is twisting it that we’d have no health care bill, when the truth is we’d have the Senate bill. The reconciliation vote is actually on fairly minor details.
To become law the bill must be passed by a majority of each house of the Congress and signed by the president. At this point the House has enacted a bill and the Senate has enacted a different bill. If reconciliation isn’t used or fails and a majority in the House does not pass the Senate’s bill, healthcare reform in its present form fails.
As I understood it, the first step in reconciliation would be for the House to pass the Senate bill.
That is, not reconciliation in general, but in this case. Basically the House would want a guarantee from the Senate that after they pass the Senate bill, the Senate would use reconciliation to change it to the compromise bill.
From here (and many other places):
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/president-obama-democrats-reconciliation-rules-needed/story?id=9995953
sam, part of the issue is that the Senate cannot make a guarantee on reconciliation under the Byrd rule. That rule, as I understand it, authorizes a line by line “point of order” objection to whether the specific item relates to the budget or is instead extraneous. The parliamentarian makes the rule and even when reconciliation has been used in the past, not every provision was allowed. So, the concern is that portions of the healthcare bill would not pass. Which ones?
PD – understood. I think what people are missing in general is that the House WILL pass the Senate bill first if they are to proceed with reconciliation. They will not try to pass a fresh bill through reconciliation. A difference bill is much more benign than a whole health care bill and stands a much better chance of conforming to the senate rules on the use of reconciliation.
I wonder if the house will have the votes. They barely passed their own HCR bill and it seems like a real possibility that an altered Senate bill might not pass the house.
Forgot to include a link to this analysis.
Andy’s link to Timothy Noah is a good one. It points out how the the abortion language probably can’t pass through reconciliation, but doesn’t ask the larger issue of what would be the greater ramifications if abortion became a simple majority issue through any HCR precedent?
(I saw Charlie Cook the other night run through the numbers pretty close to what Noah is predicting)
I dunno, I tend to favor gridlock. All this, well we can do all this stuff, to me says, “We can do all this stuff to mess things up further.”
For example, anyone see the article about how we are setting things for an even larger financial crisis to come?
http://abcnews.go.com/Business/economists-warn-financial-us-economy/story?id=9990828
Classic case of moral hazard/time inconsistency. And now breaking the cycle will also likely be very painful because to do so one has to become credible and to do that means you have NOT bail them out when things go pear shaped.
But what do I know, I’m just suffering from a psychopathology. Just ask our resident creative genius who has millions in intellectual property (ergo he’s a genius).
Let them try. There’s an immense amount of inertia in American politics – it may be difficult to start a major program, but once it’s started it is extremely difficult to vote it out without a very promising alternative (particularly if the Democrats are smart and put the “subsidy” side in first).
That might very well happen anyways, due to the economy and unemployment. Considering that the last time they ditched health care reform led to a record defeat for them, they might as well go for it and let the chips fall where they may.
If we lose Congress it won’t be over HCR let alone the process. It will be over unemployment and the bailouts. If unemployment suddenly drops 2 points the Dems will keep Congress. If it stays where it is we’re probably screwed. Not one voter in a 100 gives a damn about senate procedure or the margin of the vote.
The GOP can’t get a rollback with Obama able to veto, and by 2012 it will be way too late. If we pass HCR it’ll stay passed.
Well, if the Democrats really wanted to avoid the supposed ugliness of reconciliation they could simply pass the Senate bill as is.
By the way I love the idea that the GOP — which has set a new record for filibuster — is concerned with the integrity of the process. They care about absolutely nothing but bringing down Obama. That’s the beginning, middle and end of their plans.
The Republicans are doing their best to defeat financial reform. Again, they support the status quo. What some call gridlock.
Steve
But you might take note that those who do are the swing voters, and they’ve been very vocal lately in the form of tea parties, and very active in elections since 2008. (Actually, they were active in 2006 and 2008 as well, which is part of why the Republicans were punished so thoroughly for going off the fiscal and policy rails.) Not many may care, but that few swings elections.
You mean they’re acting exactly like the Democrats did under Bush, as an opposition party? Shocker! You may have missed it, but both parties are partisan political organizations that care only about power. It’s in their nature; in fact, it’s the reason they exist. And neither party’s members have a lock on saintliness or evil either.
Gridlock is good, and that’s true no matter which parties are in which positions. Look, in a country attempting to broadly represent a large and ideologically diverse group of people, government (in order to make it beneficial for each subgroup to remain in the society) simply cannot continually infuriate any significant fraction of the population. That means that change needs to be either incremental, or broadly agreed. The alternative is social instability.
The Democrats desperately want government control of health care, and will take whatever they can get that moves them closer to that goal. That is a massive change in our economic and social structure, and will impact nearly everyone in the US (everyone who’s not so wealthy or politically connected that they can just ignore whatever the government does.) The problem the Democrats have is that a narrow majority of the population have not bought into that, and a significant minority (at least 20%, maybe larger) do not want any increased government role in the health care market, and in fact would like to see the current interventions scaled back. If a narrow majority of congressmen make a sweeping change like this against such broad and vocal opposition (the way the Republicans tried with Social Security, but then backed off of), they will be punished. And it’s not necessarily clear that that punishment will stop at elections.
Jeff, have I told you lately that I love you?
No, but thanks. 🙂
The discussion here lately has been wonderful, eh?
California would be happy to hear that.
No, gridlock is bad. It undermines faith in the elected institution itself, particularly when there are problems (especially economic problems). Moreover, it encourages political power to follow other paths – one of the reasons why we had such extensive expansions in federal power in the New Deal was because long-outdated districting in the states had made state legislatures overwhelmingly dominated by minority interests (namely agricultural/rural ones, who were heavily overrepresented).
What you’re favoring just shifts even more power to the bureaucracies.
Believe it or not, sometimes a degree of social instability should be tolerated for a certain change. Both Reconstruction-Era laws and amendments, as well as the Civil Rights Era laws, were immensely disruptive to social stability, uprooting decades- and centuries’ old social orders. Should they have not been done?
Where’s your proof of this? I pointed out in a comment on an earlier post that many of the tenets of reform, including the most controversial (the “public option”, for example) have widespread support when measured among the public.
What we have here is not a determined minority trying to force reform on a reluctant majority (remember, all of these promises and more were made during 2008’s election period – and Democrats won overwhelmingly in Congress and the Presidency with them). It’s the reverse, actually – you have a determined minority blocking any effort at reform, which they can get away with because an old political compromise made 220-odd years ago, back when the federal government’s legitimacy was very iffy, gives them disproportionately large voting power in one of the two bodies that make up Congress.
It’s as bad as the “rotten boroughs” of the UK before reform, or the horribly outdated districting that characterized much of the US before the Supreme Court issued Baker v. Carr in 1962.
Kind of like the Democrats under Bush. Opposite sides of the same coin really.
Oh yeah, like reform that we are looking at will really work. Please.
You are assuming people had faith to begin with. As for the economic problems the President has very little control over the economy and Congress even less. Politics is about power and securing the benefits of that power. For example, was bailing out GM and Chrysler good? No. We’d have gotten a far, far better deal if we just said, “We’ll give you out of work autoworkers $x thousands/year for 2 or 3 years so you can re-train/re-skill and find new jobs, past that point you get nothing, and it will take 80% in both the House and Senate to extend this deal.” But then the UAW would be eviscerated and that is a key supporter of Obama and other Democrats. Instead we are going to keep propping up two failing corporations in an industry that has a world wide glut of production capacity. So I say, Bravo Sierra on your “confidence and faith” stuff.
You mean FDR’s naked grab at power by threatening to pack the Supreme court with up to (IIRC) 6 more justices had nothing to do with the reinterpretation of the commerce clause which pretty much gives Congress carte blanche? None at all?
Yes, I’ve heard this too. That components of reform are individually favored, but then the overall bill seems to be unsupported. How can this be?!?!?!?!? The fallacy of composition. All the components in this machine are light, therefore the machine is light. Could different people be supporting different parts and unsupportive of the remainder and so as a whole the entire bill is not something people like? Given all the theoretical and experimental work I’ve seen on how bizzare voting can be…I can sure believe it.
So what? Does that mean that the President can do whatever he likes in regards to “keeping” those promises and that voters can’t voice their dissatisfaction? I’m pretty sure Dave voted for Obama, but he seems pretty disappointed with health care reform. Is he wrong to think so and voice that opinion?
Brett,
I think that a new Constitutional Convention would be a very good thing. It would result in us having a written Constitution that we could follow, rather than simply making it up as we go along, as we do now.
Absent that, it’s revolution or incremental improvement or broad consensus. Or at the very least, it’s keepting broken things broken.
They have quite a bit, actually. For one thing, they get to pick the head of the Federal Reserve, and the Fed has immense power.
You mean aside from the loss of a major remaining part of the US’s industrial base, all the jobs associated with the business other than those of the autoworkers, further damage to the auto-states (particularly Michigan), and the likelihood that the plants owned by foreign producers will shrink and/or disappear over the following decade or two once they realize that the major force pushing for the trade-restriction laws that forced them to have American plants is gone?
Note the phrase in my post, “One of the reasons. ”
Because of widespread ignorance over what the bill actually amounts to? That’s my view, at least. Plus there’s the power of branding.
No, the point was that none of this is stuff coming completely out of the blue. The Democratic Party in general (and Obama in particular) promised virtually everything that ended up in the bill, and more, in their election platforms. And if you recall, they were voted in, overwhelmingly, even after already getting a major election victory in Congress two years before.
I brought it up because of this bizarre idea that somehow the stuff the Democrats are doing are things that the majority hates, yet that same majority voted them in, en masse, when the party was promising those exact things.
If voters want to voice their dissatisfaction, they can vote them out.
While there are some things I’d probably change in the Constitution if given the chance, a Convention would probably be very difficult. I mean, think of the first convention, done behind closed-doors for several months, then brought out and voted on. Can you imagine that actually being done in the current era? It would be a media frenzy.
Yes, and most of it is bad. They can easily send the economy into recession, getting it out on the other hand has been problematic, and then there is the inflation issue as well. In the end, the kind of control you seem to be implying just isn’t there.
Oh yes, by all means lets keep them even though we make the rest of America better off so that the UAW can keep going and Obama doesn’t lose a valuable part of his base. This is what I said when I noted that political efforts to “fix” the economy are often driven by special interest and that it does not follow that this is how we get the most “bang” for our fiscal dollars. We get propping up an industry that is facing world wide competition and production capacity that is far in excess of what the world can consume. Yes, lets keep that resource blackhole. Great idea!
There fixed it for ya. :p
Oh, its just a message thing. I don’t think so.
See, again fallacy of composition. Obama promised lots of stuff, so maybe someone voted for him becuase of X, and he’s done nothing on X, and they see what is going on with Y and its being done really badly. Y would be health care. See my example of our host. He seems quite underwhelmed with the current stab at health care reform. He also was quite disappointed in the take over of GM and Chrysler. Does that translate into general disappointment with Obama, I dunno, you’ll have to ask Dave.
Brett, when the President of the United States campaigns against his opponent’s plan to tax health care insurance premiums, why should we be surprised if a plan that includes a tax on health care insurance premiums isn’t popular? The cuts to Medicare poll unpopular, as do the penalties for being uninsured.
I think this quote from a progressive House member likely to vote against the reconciliation bill is apropos:
“That [HSA] provision ‘was, when we were in the minority, something that we fought tooth and nail to keep out [of legislation],’ Grijalva said. ‘I find that ironic — something that we had fought to keep out, and indeed were successful, gets back in as part of reconciliation. And a public option that enjoys great support in the House and up to 30 senators gets left out. That’s something I just don’t understand.'”
He certainly understands that a minority can thwart the will of a majority, but he doesn’t seem to understand how a majority can get what it wants only by capitulating to a minority. He doesn’t switch hats well.
Part of the problem with the reconciliation route is that it permits unlimited amendment proposals in the Senate, so Obama is probably smart to incorporate into the reconciliation bill Republican proposals which can garner 51 votes in the Senate. Obama gets the upside of being generous to the opposition and he avoids the delays caused by the reconciliation bill being amended and returned to the House.
I could argue that but why bother when it brings us to the same place: Dave is decrying changes in senate procedure, you’re excusing all misdeeds as natural partisanship, so it follows that reconciliation is at worst partisans acting like partisans and no sort of departure from the ordinary. I’m good with that.
No, I’m arguing that following procedure is the only thing that saves us from partisan misdeeds, that the ability of the minority to thwart the majority is the only thing standing between us and the evils of democracy (ask the Athenians after Smyrna) and that the willingness to do any damage to our civil society to pass massive changes in social structure with the barest margins is a recipe for revolution. You seem to be arguing Democrats good, Republicans bad. I’m not a tribalist or a partisan, so I’m not impressed.
Jeff:
If partisanship is the order of the day, and if you’re already in a knife fight, only a fool throws away his knife.
Have you objected strongly when the filibuster was misused? Does it concern you that the GOP is now filibustering essentially everything? Does it bother you that they now oppose policies they themselves used to champion? Or did you only become concerned when — toward the end of this particular knife fight — one side seemed to gain an advantage?
It’s not a rhetorical question, I don’t know how upset you were before this particular “fro” in the endless to and fro.
I’m impressed by people who stand on principle, not impressed by people who only stand on principle when their side is losing. 90% of people who say they’re defending a principle actually fall into that latter category. That may not be you.
I’m a Democrat who frequently supported Mr. Bush on principle. I never supported a position or policy because, in the perfect locution of Mr. DeMint, “this will be his Waterloo.” I don’t think I’m capable of expressing that sort of feeling about an American president. I’ve never wanted one to fail. But when your opposition takes a nihilist, “we will bury you,” approach to politics you’re justified in refusing to disarm unilaterally.
Ah, the ends justify the means, then. I see. OK, that was unfair. Let me try again. Yes, you are, but on the other hand, you also don’t get to then beat up on the opposition for being partisan, or claim that your side is being conciliatory, bi-partisan or non-partisan. At least, not if you want to be taken seriously.
I am not concerned about how the filibuster is used, generally. I wasn’t concerned when the Democrats used it to block everything that they could that Bush was doing, and I am not concerned that the Republicans are now using it to block everything that they can that Obama is doing. Interestingly, however, I did object when the Republicans were trying to use parliamentary tricks (remember “the nuclear option”?) to get around Democratic objections, just as I now object that Democrats are trying to use parliamentary tricks to get around Republican objections. Abuse of process is abuse of process.
You are misassuming what my “side” is, and you have yet to convince me that you are in the former category rather than the latter.
Its a fault with many partisans, yes the Republicans too which is why some of the more blinkered Righties at OTB consider me to be some sort of radical liberal.
Jeff-How then do parliamentary systems manage to work? By your reckoning, they should run roughshod over minorities and quickly fall apart. However you and many others see it, our form of government is seen by much of the rest of the world as less democratic, less representative than it ought to be. Is it any coincidence that even in Iraq, when we started from scratch, we did not use our own country as a model? In fact, has any new democracy chosen our model?
Steve
Steve, most parliamentary systems don’t have large programmatic parties duking it out. They consist of coalitions of a number of smaller parties and the real infighting goes on within the coalitions.
In my view the ongoing move towards two large programmatic parties and a significant unaligned and effectively disenfranchised group outside those two parties is extremely problematic.
A “winner take all“ system like ours is naturally inclined towards two dominant parties. There’s a name for that principle that escapes me right at the moment. However, historically those two dominant parties have been catch-alls, big tents in which very divergent views made common cause. I really don’t think much good can come of the long-time direction of the Democratic and Republican Parties.
“Steve, most parliamentary systems don’t have large programmatic parties duking it out. They consist of coalitions of a number of smaller parties and the real infighting goes on within the coalitions.”
Yup. But once they are done with their infighting, they pass their law. A minority, out of power group does not stop legislation. This works for them. If, as posited above, that the tyranny of the majority leads to legislative excess, parliamentary systems should fail, unless you have a country with many small parties, which does not describe all parliamentary based countries.
Still, I hesitate to do away with the filibuster. I think its real intent was to keep down bills that emerge from sudden passions. Say a group of Norwegians on vacation in the US kill a bunch of people and the Congress in retaliation decide to pass a bill mandating banishment of everyone with Norwegian heritage. I do not think it was intended to stop routine legislation.
BTW, I like the idea of a new Constitutional Convention.
Steve
Dave, are you thinking “first past the post”?
I actually think we need a fundamental rethink of our election system to make it less democratic and more republican. Direct election of Senators was a mistake (eliminated the political power of the States, and made the Senate into a smaller House with safer seats and more perks), and choosing electors knowing in advance who they’ll vote for for President is also a bad idea, but probably not fixable.
In my perfect world, I’d change the House so that there were a lot more members (say, one per fifty thousand population – which would require a complete rework of how they meet and debate, of course); have partisan proportional elections by state for the House; increase the Senate to 3 Senators per State, with one each chosen by the Governor, the legislature, and randomly from the voter rolls.
The idea would be to make the House more representative of people (because each member would represent fewer) and ideologies (because the elections would be partisan and proportional). So let’s say that a state is eligible for 20 representatives. Let’s further say that party A gets 34% of the vote, party B 19% of the vote, parties C through E 10% of the vote each, parties F through H 5% of the vote each and a handful of other parties get less than 5%. Then party A gets to choose 7 representatives, party B 4, parties C through E 2 each and parties F through H 1 each. It’s simpler in practice than the explanation is.
Anyway, not only do you get rid of gerrymandering that way, you also get a multi-party system, because there’s no longer a need for a majority to get any representation at all. In practice, those parties would still form into coalitions for elections like the presidential election, governors and the like, so we’d still end up with more or less stable coalitions, but there’d be a lot more ability to influence their direction if things weren’t making you happy. And because our existing rules are what they are, we wouldn’t have the problems that come with parliamentary systems of having to worry about governments falling to votes of no confidence.
I think it would be a far better electoral system for actually resolving issues because it would give us a real metric of the various factions involved. I mean, can you imagine how hard a time Bush would have had pouring on the spending (though in retrospect, it turns out he was a piker) if around 2004 or so he’d found all the big spending Republicans getting beaten by small government (but still strong defense) factions of the Republican coalition? Or how hard a time Obama would have with some of his unpopular initiatives if his biggest threat wasn’t the Republicans, but the Blue Dogs and the Greens?
All in all, like I said, I think we’d be better off with a system that moves away from first past the post elections, and from everyone being chosen the same way. We’d get better policy, more broadly acceptable. In effect, we’d get better governance, which most people seem to think is a good thing.
I think that what I was thinking about was Duverger’s Law.
I agree with you on the Senate, Jeff. I’d divide the present states into a number of smaller states, each with two senators, and increase the size of the House along the lines you suggest.
Another approach would be something like the system that Illinois used to have before we re-wrote our state constitution 30 years ago. Under the old system each district had three representatives and each voter got three votes which he or she could use to vote for one, two, three, or none of the candidates, divided any way that he or she saw fit.
That means that it was possible for a relatively small, organized, committed group to get some representatives in the state legislature. Voters could just put all of their votes behind one candidate in the district.
Great post – and a superb quote.