| As you might expect, buzz over healthcare reform continues to heat up as we march towards the president's speech tomorrow.
First, not many folks think too highly of Baucus' rumored proposal floating around the Senate Finance Committee.
Ezra Klein's taken some (deserved) heat for tweeting support for Baucus' proposal, but he's the same guy that wrote this post, "What Happened to Last Year's Max Baucus?" speculating the reason behind the yawning gulf that separates Max Baucus' white paper from the recent proposals he's doling out in committee, still relevant today:
...Baucus pulled a bit of a bait-and-switch. That paper proved less his plan than his effort to articulate the Democratic consensus in such a way that Democrats were comfortable with him leading the debate. In particular, Kennedy had to be happy with that paper, because Kennedy was the threat to Baucus's leadership.
But Kennedy's illness took him out of the game. Baucus no longer needed to worry about Kennedy stealing the leadership of health-care reform away from him, which meant he stopped looking over his left shoulder. The effect was a bit like shutting down a primary challenge against Baucus: His surprising leftward lurch stopped entirely, and he drifted back to the more centrist approaches that had defined his career. It's hard to say how the process would have differed if Baucus had spent his days worrying about keeping Kennedy onboard, but it seems possible that the practical impact would have been to keep Baucus closer to the paper he'd written to attract Kennedy's support.
Makes you wonder how this debate would have gone if Kennedy hadn't gotten sick, and Clinton hadn't accepted a post as Secretary of State.
And then it's important to remember that there are two bodies in Congress, and that the House will have as much say about how reform takes place as the Senate. The LA Times has a nice little primer on the difference between the House reform bill's and what's being discussed in the Senate - which only underscores how superior the House bills are.
Also, according to The Hill, 23 House Democrats have said they won't vote for any of the reform bills that have been discussed. Pelosi can afford to lose only 38 members of her caucus total; the defection of the 23 gives the progressive bloc all the more power, as only 15 have to keep their promise to vote against any bill without the public option to kill toothless reform.
And let's not forget to poke conservatives on this issue. There's been no leadership from the right. There's been no acknowledgment that there even is a problem with health care in this country. The Republican strategy all along has been to kill this bill and continue the status quo, and by any means necessary, even if that means obfuscating, Red baiting, and stirring up racist resentment to do so. Hugh Hewitt's post is on reform is unusually bald in this regard. He admits the goal is the status quo, and he ends his post by pimping for the RNC and the NRSC: a nice reminder that the ultimate goal of TeaBagging and Hitler signs and shouting down your neighbors is to put Republicans back in Congress and back at the lobbyists' teats. |
