Grand Delusions

Yes, people really are still saying stuff like that. The nonsense about reconciliation proceeds from a total misunderstanding of the Senate rules. Reconciliation can only be used for budgetary adjustments in existing programs, not to create new ones. While reconciliation does create some opportunity for bootstrapping, using reconciliation still only makes sense if one is advocating passage of the Senate bill as is, and then fixing it through this process. But since Reconciliation cannot be used to create new programs, I'm not even sure that using it to add a public option to the Senate bill would be permissible after it passes.

If it passes.

Sadly, I have major doubts that after last night, the Senate Bill can win a majority in the House. First, with or without last night, doing such a deal would require a level of trust that may be lacking under the best of circumstances. Secondly, a lot of balls got shrunk last night. Finally, there are still the Kucinich types who will vote to kill Health Care Reform in order to save it, even though starting all over again will not result in a more liberal bill, and probably won’t result in any bill at all.

Politics is the art of the possible. The bill which almost became law was sausage, but it was better than going hungry.

Republicans are still following the Bill Kristol strategy they used to kill the Clinton Plan in the 90s. They don’t want to help mold a health care plan, they want to kill it. Their “solutions” are invariably less regulation and letting the marketplace continue to do its magic, even though the Adam Smith logic of an informed market’s rational unseen hand cannot work when people are making decisions about their own life and death.

If there is a middle ground between Republican type market based solutions and Democratic ideas like Single Payer and Public Options, we are already there with the current plan. There is really no place left to go, and if there was, the Republicans would continue to find some excuse to reject it.

A best case scenario for bi-partisanship is finding a couple of Republicans to buy off in the manner of a Nelson or Landreau, but even though there are some who do lack any level of integrity, the fear of being Scozzafazzed will keep their ethics in place. Bi-partisanship won’t work, nor will Buy-Partisanship.

As I said the other day, in the 90s, Republicans successfully deployed an attack on the Clinton Health Care Plan. Their major argument was that if one supported the Clinton Plan, we would all be forced into HMO’s. Their basis argument was the status quo might be unpleasant, but we are used to it. They based their campaign against The Clinton Health Care Plan on fear of the unknown. And they won.

But, of course, change came anyway, and people were forced into HMOs. The difference was that instead of being able to mold the future ourselves in a manner which might have resulted in some improvements, the marketplace was allowed to work its magic, in ways that far exceeded in their misery the worst nightmare scenarios propounded by Republicans about the Clinton Plan. Instead of molding the future, the future molded us.

As I noted, the Republican strategy was a mostly about getting everyone to focus on something in the status quo they might lose, instead of upon what they might lose regardless, and what they might gain.

And it worked. Health Care Reform went virtually unmentioned for two decades.

Scott Brown’s victory was not about a Right Wing version of "Change We Can Believe In". Republicans have discovered that "Change" is the thing that voters fear the most. In fact, Brown's campaign was explicitly premised on the idea of ending the Democrats' 60 vote majority, thereby creating gridlock and presrving the staus quo. The winning slogan last night in Massachusetts was "Change We Can Avoid."