This looks good for reform. Really good. Politico and The Hill report that Bart Stupak has reached a deal to support health care reform:
Democrats have reached a deal on an executive order on abortion that could hand them a victory on healthare.
"Eight or nine" Democrats, including Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.), will announce the deal at a 4 p.m. press conference, according to an anti-abortion Democrat.
"We've changed [our votes]," said Rep. Steve Driehaus (D-Ohio).
Driehaus said he's seen the executive order and can now vote for the healthcare bill. He said Stupak has signed off, as well.
Driehaus made his remarks just a few moments ago in the Speaker's Lobby. He said the group of "eight or nine" Democrats -- including Stupak -- who had been withholding their votes plans to announce the deal at 4 p.m. in the House Radio/TV gallery.
Unless something goes awry, it's game, set, match.
Update: Stupak says "We have an agreement."
Dana Milbank is turning into the Washington Post's in-house American historian:
"This is the largest tax bill in history," the Republican leader fumed. The reform "is unjust, unworkable, stupidly drafted and wastefully financed."
And that wasn't all. This "cruel hoax," he said, this "folly" of "bungling and waste," compared poorly to the "much less expensive" and "practical measures" favored by the Republicans.
"We must repeal," the GOP leader argued. "The Republican Party is pledged to do this."
That was Republican presidential nominee Alf Landon in a September 1936 campaign speech. He based his bid for the White House on repealing Social Security.
Bad call, Alf. Republicans lost that presidential election in a landslide. By the time they finally regained the White House -- 16 years later -- their nominee, Dwight Eisenhower, had abandoned the party's repeal platform.
Loretta Sanchez, call your office:
As their whip efforts narrow to just a handful of Members, House Democratic leaders are facing an unlikely problem vote: Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D-Calif.).
Sanchez was nowhere to be found on Saturday — she was in Florida on a fundraising jaunt, two Democratic sources said — and while leaders expected her to return for the Sunday vote on final passage, they weren’t assured. What’s more, leaders now list the Orange County Democrat as a “no” vote.
Sanchez’s office did not return a request for comment Saturday evening. She cast her last vote shortly after 6 p.m. Friday and missed all seven recorded votes on Saturday, a review of the record shows.
Sanchez, by the way, is a down-the-line pro-choice liberal Democrat.
This kind of reminds me of my days organizing the office softball team. You'd spend all week nailing down commitments to show up. Then you'd give everybody directions to (and a map of) the location of the field, offer them a ride if need be, contact them the night before the game to remind them, give them your cell phone number and tell them to call if anything goes wrong. Then inevitably a couple wouldn't show up anyway. I always tried to get at least 12 people to field a 10 person team for that reason.
Presumably the Democrats are operating on the same principle. Jon Cohn's reading of their confident body language suggests they are.
per the Washington Post. They'll do a straight vote on the Senate bill and then reconcile, which is what I've wanted.
National Review's Daniel Foster complains, "We've been baited. And here's the switch." I don't think that was really the plan. But if it was, it worked! Republicans spent a week whipping themselves into a lather over a procedural maneuver they've used many, many times. It wasn't their real objection but they made it seem like the end of the world. "Demon pass," they've been calling it. And now they've wasted several days worth of ginned-up outrage.
Jonathan Bernstein dismisses my fears that the Supreme Court might overturn health care reform:
Accepting for the sake of argument that Bush v. Gore was arbitrary, I would say that if so it basically stands alone; I'm not aware of any other case in which the Court dropped in, made a decision for apparently pure political reasons, and then told everyone to ignore the logic and decision of the case as a precedent. Could they do that again with health care reform? Sure -- but if that, why not any other program that they disagree with? In which case we all have much bigger problems than the fate of health care reform.
On the other hand, what if they simply find against health care reform by changing precedent. The article referred to above is about "deem and pass," but there are also going to be legal challenges, or at least rumblings about challenges, on a whole host of substantive measures (such as the individual mandate). If the Court goes after health care by changing doctrine, either over Congressional procedure or substance, once again there are bigger problems than health care reform. In the one case, any bill passed with a self-executing rule would be in trouble, and there are lots of those; in the other, well, it would depend on what the court does, but it would be difficult to knock out health care reform without endangering plenty of other laws, many of which are very popular. That doesn't mean the Court won't do it, but only that the real problem in that case is the Court, not health care reform.
Well, first of all, I made a reference to "high-stakes Republican priorities." Let me explain what I meant by that. The Supreme Court needs legitimacy. If they went around handing down Bush v. Gore decisions every year, they'd have a crisis. They do not have limitless power. They need to husband their legitimacy and spend it on those occasions when the stakes are very high -- like, say, the Florida recount. Certainly health care reform is a dramatically higher stakes fight than any other domestic policy battle during the tenure of this court.
Second, the Court obviously needs somebody to bring it a case. Bernstein makes a joke about invalidating the 2000 election on grounds that President Obama was born in Kenya, and of course they'd never do that. They'd need a case that has some patina of legitimacy -- that is, the support of some non-nutty member of the right-wing legal establishment. They have that. They also need somebody to bring them a case. They're probably going to have that.
So at that point, the question becomes, does the Supreme Court majority make an aggressively activist ruling to hand Republicans victory on the biggest policy fight of the last forty years? Probably not, but I wouldn't be too surprised if they did. Bernstein notes that doing so would invalidate scores of other laws. And yes, he concedes, this court has previously made a one-time only ruling whose precedent would not apply to anything else, in order to get its desired result, but they've only done it one time.
Is that supposed to be reassuring? Would Bernstein advise a family member to marry John Edwards? After all, he only had that one affair.
Okay, I've finally found somebody more optimistic than me. After weeks of being more optimistic, Nate Silver has shot past me:
You'd have to give me 10-1 to bet against health care now. Even if something goes wrong, Ds may have an out by cutting deal w/Stupak.
Ten to one? I agree that the outlook appear solid and the democrats appear to have some options -- deal with Stupak, go around Stupak, maybe do something on abortion that can satisfy most of his bloc. But each of those approaches also carries some risk of going wrong. Indeed, I tale seriously the risk of abortion blowing up the bill, because there are people in the Democratic caucus who care way, way more about abortion than health care, and would rather abandon reform than permit a slight increase or reduction in the convenience of abortion for some women. David Dayen reports on some wrangling here.
I believe this will probably (around 75%) get resolved. But I see the chance of some kind of blowup as very real.
Via Ron Brownstein:
Yale University political scientist Stephen Skowronek, a shrewd student of the presidency, sees in this complex record evidence that Obama and his team are torn between consensual and confrontational leadership styles. The first, he says, stresses "the progressive reform idea of bringing everybody to the table [for] rational, pragmatic decision-making." The second argues "that you transform politics only through wrenching confrontation." Skowronek believes that the most-consequential presidents, such as Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, usually start with the first approach and evolve toward the second as they encounter entrenched resistance.
What a way to run a government:
For more than a year, the Treasury Department has grappled with a monumental global economic crisis while many of its most senior people have had to walk out of internal meetings at critical moments and have been barred from joining in-depth exchanges with foreign governments.
That's because the appointments of these officials have been blocked at times by various Republican senators. Until now, their reasons for thwarting the Treasury have been largely unknown beyond the halls of Congress.
It turns out the sources of discontent apparently were not the appointments themselves. In one case, it was a tax penalty on small businesses. In another, the passage of an anti-tobacco plan in Canada. Yet another involved a tussle over online gambling....
Some Senate GOP aides said Bunning wanted to see the Obama administration more vigorously oppose a plan by the Canadian government to ban fruit-flavored cigarettes. The Canadian initiative, which was intended to curb youth smoking, could hurt Kentucky tobacco farmers.
The rules of the Senate allow Senators to basically stop any presidential appointment at will for any reason at all. I'd love to change this arrangement, but apparently it's exactly how the Founding Fathers designed the system to work so we can't change it.
In many ways, the health care debate is a repeat over Bill Clinton's 1993 budget. The administration hailed it as a worthwhile step in restoring progressivity to the tax code and reducing the budget deficit. The opposition featured the same basic combination of apoplexy on the right and cynicism in the center.
Start with the right-wingers. Lawrence Kudlow wrote a couple weeks ago:
More spending. More tax hikes on investors, businesses, and individuals. New government boards to control prices, ration care, and redistribute income. ...
if Obamacare does pass, a future rollback will be very difficult, and American health care and economic prosperity will be put in grave jeopardy.
In 1993, Kudlow wrote:
There’s no question that President Clinton’s across-the-board tax increases on labor, capital and energy will throw a wet blanket over the recovery and depress the economy’s long run potential to grow.
Kudlow was expressing the dominant mood on the right. The Wall Street Journal published a series of editorials under the heading "The Class Warfare Economy," featuring a picture of a guillotine. When Clinton's plan passed the House of Representatives, the Journal published an editorial headlined "The Fate Of The World."
On the right, it was universally assumed that Clinton's spending cuts were phony, his tax hikes on the rich would reduce revenues, and the claim of deficit reduction would fail to materialize. The political center and among the mainstream media did not adapt the apocalyptic tone of the conservative, of course. Instead the prevailing attitude was cynicism that the budget numbers would really add up. You had reports like this, from CNN:
For all Bill Clinton's talk about no gimmicks, he quickly adapted to this smoke-and-mirrors world. His February budget proposal -- billed as a $500 billion deficit reduction package -- took credit for $45 billion in savings already ordered by previous legislation. Clinton's plan also included enough funny math and dubious assumptions that the real bottom line, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) -- the designated scorekeeper in matters fiscal -- would have been deficit reduction of just $355 billion over five years. Remarkably, the House so far has rejected much of Clinton's proposed new spending, trimming many programs and derailing a few of his other favorites, such as research on magnetic levitation trains. The Senate has made similar cuts. As a result, both houses have produced budgets more likely to come closer to that $500 billion target. Even so, the goal of deficit reduction keeps moving away like Tantalus's grapes.
The New York Times was running headlines like "Critics See Some Smoke and Mirrors in Clinton's Economic Plan." ("Questions have already been raised over the exact size of the deficit reductions Clinton's plan will produce.") Another Times article suggested:
The budget documents published today show that while the deficit would be cut by $39 billion next year and $54 billion in 1995, Government spending, now more than $1 trillion a year, would be reduced by only $5 billion next year and $6 billion in 1995. All the rest of the deficit reduction in those years would be accomplished by tax increases. Only in the last two years of Mr. Clinton's term would spending cuts begin to bite.
The specifics of the accusations were strikingly similar. The deficit targets were too modest. The Democrats were postponing the real pain. They were employing tricks and rosy scenarios. In retrospect, Clinton's deficit reduction has won over all but its most partisan critics. Obviously, the economic boom disproved the supply-side claims that the upper-bracket tax hikes would dampen economic growth. And over the next five years, federal outlays decreased by more than 2 percent of GDP, defying predictions that spending restraint would be illusory. While it's impossible to prove how much of the improvement was driven by economic growth, budget experts credit the measure with important contributions to the decline of the deficit during the 1990s. Allen Schick, in his book "The Federal Budget: Politics, Policy, Process," concludes:
Liquidating the deficit ranks as one of the supreme budgetary accomplishments in American history...
economic good times alone do not account for the budget's unexpected turnaround....
Although the surplus would not have emerged in the 1990's without a cooperative economy, it also would not have occurred if budget makers had repeated the policy mistakes of the 1980's.
With health care reform, the charges are repeated over and over again. The answer, in sum, is that the accusations of phony savings are almost entirely bunk. Once stripped of transparently fake accusations, such as claiming health care reform is hiding the cost of physician reimbursements that would happen even if there was no health care reform, the even debatable quibbles with the Congressional Budget office score are minimal. Moreover, the conservatives have totally ignored the long-term cost saving potential of the multiple delivery-system reforms that will attempt to force medical providers to adopt efficient practices. CBO has declined to credit these reforms with saving money because they're new approaches, and CBO takes a very cautious approach toward scoring reforms that lack a proven record of success. But to assume that all will completely fail is wildly pessimistic. In short, the right-wing critics have taken a "heads I win, tails you lose" approach to the CBO score. They pick apart the things that CBO scores as reducing the deficit, and take for granted the accuracy of CBO's extreme caution toward delivery system reforms.
Like in 1993, the sheer single-mindedness of the conservative echo chamber has dragged the center of the debate rightward. In the face of monotonous complaints about phony numbers, moderates have been defensive about the cost-saving potential of Obamacare. The CBO numbers may not be entirely correct but they're reasonable, we say. They should have done more, but at least they've done something. Hey, maybe the delivery reforms might help some.
I believe that, over time, considered opinion will view the fiscal responsibility of Obamacare quite favorably. The hysteria of the right and the disappointment of the liberals and moderates will fade, and what's left will be a bill that not only establishes a right to medical care but, over time, begins to arrest the unsustainable rate of medical inflation. By the standards of what out political system can accomplish -- with its multiple veto points, supermajorities, weak party discipline and powerful special interests -- this will be remembered as a seminal achievement.
Today's Wall Street Journal editorial:
This is what happens when a willful President and his party try to govern America from the ideological left, imposing a reckless expansion of the entitlement state that most Americans, and even dozens of Democrats in Congress, clearly despise.
Latest Kaiser Health Care Tracking Poll:
The March Kaiser Health Tracking Poll finds the public still divided on health reform legislation, with 46 percent of Americans backing the reform proposals on Capitol Hill, 42 percent opposing them and 12 percent saying they aren't sure.
I'm no public opinion expert, but I think this means the Journal is wrong, unless you define "despise" in such a way as to include all the bill's opponents and many of its supports.
The politics of an abortion deal are tricky. Here's how it would work. Pro-life Democrats would vote for health care reform, and then they'd take a subsequent vote sometime later this year to codify the Henry Hyde language ensuring that federal money does not subsidize abortion.
Republicans, naturally, want to make that very difficult. So they're putting out word that they would never vote for such a measure. I have two points to make. First of all, once the health care bill has passed, what incentive do they have to vote against abortion restrictions? The have an incentive to say so now, to spook anti-abortion Democrats into voting no, but I fail to see their incentive two months from now should the bill become law.
Second, let's suppose they follow up with this threat: anti-abortion Republicans join with pro-choice Dems to vote down the abortion restrictions. This would presuppose that anti-abortion Republicans care more about maximizing political discomfort for anti-abortion Democrats than in actually minimizing abortion.
This may indeed be the case. Ramesh Ponnuru in National Review argues that anti-abortion Democrats are going to lose their label if they vote for health care reform:
It is the bulk of pro-lifers—and in particular the ones most active on the issue—who define that label for political purposes. Who are these people more likely to side with and trust in this dispute? The National Right to Life Committee
, or Commonweal? The Catholic bishops—most of whom support national health insurance—or the Catholic Health Association? The Democrats who are bucking their party, or the ones who are going along with it? Laura Ingraham or Ruth Marcus?
This vote is career-defining, and as NR editorialized the other day, any politician who supports this bill is forfeiting the pro-life label.
Maybe no such thing would happen to anti-abortion Republicans who vote down the Hyde language in order to make life hard for Democrats. To me that would demonstrate that the bulk of the anti-abortion movement is fundamentally acting as an arm of the Republican Party. They certainly have sensible political grounds to do so. But the notion that these groups should be according deference as independent moral arbiters of the cause by anti-abortion voters seems pretty specious. For an anti-abortion Democrat to lose the support of the national Right to Life Committee because Republicans killed an anti-abortion measure just means that the Committee wants to help Republicans.
