Nancy Pelosi, Psephologist?

There are several reasons why Massachusetts elected the Republican on Tuesday, a topic I hope to cover if I have the time. However, one reason certainly isn't this bullshit explanation offered by Nancy Pelosi:

“There’s some fundamentals in there [the Senate HCR bill] that make it problematic for our members,” Ms. Pelosi said. “Some members say, and I respect this, some of the concerns that were expressed in Massachusetts were about certain provisions of the Senate bill. We want, obviously, to hear and heed what was said there and what is said across the country.”

Some of the concerns that were expressed in Massachusetts? If I interpret this correctly, she is, in effect, implying / suggesting that some people voted for Scott Brown because, after studying the details of the two bills, found the Senate version inferior to the House version and in opposition to their liberal proclivities, hence elected the Republican candidate to the Senate?

This reminds me of a line in the first season of The West Wing, the box set of which I have been plowing through the past week or so: "We don't need an opposition party; we're our own best opposition party".

UPDATE: Holy crap, a marginal percentage of voters for Brown did, in fact, follow the logic that Pelosi outlined above [see comments for details]. Astonishing, and Mea culpa. I still believe that, in this instance, the Dems should pass the Senate version, flawed as it is. Of course, Congress and the Administration are backpedalling from even that. In the bigger picture, the Administration should be more aggressive, a post I was working on this morning before lecturing . . .

. . . and this is consistent with a protest vote thesis, for which special elections are prime electoral contexts. I do wonder just how salient the preference for the public option was in these Brown voters however.

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Dial an Asshat

What Ari said.

I realize there's an element of hyperbole to the analogy I'm about to draw, but I just finished one of several lectures on Reconstruction that I give at the beginning of my post-Civil War survey course, so my thoughts on health care reform have a contingent, curricular shape to them today. The greatest failure of Reconstruction, of course, was the white republic's inability to perceive that the political liberty of freedpersons as well as the overall decency of their existence was undermined by the scarcity of their economic opportunities -- a scarcity that was replaced in quite short order by an enduring, multi-generational gulag of debt servitude. The economic needs of emancipated slaves were abundantly documented and entered into the public record in a great variety of ways, and yet a Congress overwhelmingly comprised of Republicans decided in relatively short order -- by 1869, really -- to scale back its efforts, operating on the mistaken belief they'd done enough. Reconstruction fizzled, and the rest of the story hardly needs reviewing.

Quite simply, the failure of Reconstruction amounts to the greatest domestic policy fuck-up in US history; a fuck-up so grand and apparently satisfying that subsequent generations of white Congressional and Presidential leadership were pleased to repeat the error, if only (for the least malicious, at least) by ignoring the problem or by dismissing remedies as too difficult or controversial to actually enact. And as it happened for so many decades, there simply weren't the votes in Congress to flesh out the 14th and 15th Amendments, or to pass anti-lynching legislation over the yowls of white supremacists. The blame for this rested largely, but not exclusively, with the Senate, where the Dyer Act or the 1957 Civil Rights Act were either asphyxiated or drained of any real force by filibusters that demeaned the entire nation. Sure, House conservatives joined in the nonsense as often as possible, but while the House might help enact terrible laws or avoid taking up decent causes, reform efforts never -- at least so far as I can tally it -- went to the House to die.

Until now, apparently. Now, there's no sense in comparing the tens of millions of uninsured Americans with the condition of emancipated slaves and the three or four generations who followed them. At the same time, however, I would suggest that the century-long inability of the US to adequately develop a comprehensive system of health insurance does rank in the same elite class of policy fuck-ups that includes our shameful, century-long avoidance of meaningful civil rights legislation. Now obviously, the Senate bill that's currently being drowned in the House bathtub is inadequate on so many counts that hardly bear repeating; it's not the analogue of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, in other words. But neither is it the analogue of the 1957 bill, which accomplished virtually nothing other than establishing a precedent for more elaborate federal action a few clicks farther down the road. The Senate health care bill seems rather to be something in between, and for the life of me I can't believe it's the House that's blowing this.

So anyway, again -- what Ari said. Call your representatives. I'm even going to give Don Young's office a futile ring tomorrow, if for no other reason than to entertain myself. Your mileage, however, may vary.

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No We Can't

While I've been trying to ignore the news for the past 24 hours, itself ironic given I did a couple live BBC radio interviews about guess what yesterday morning (which was a bit of an adventure as I am at home playing single dad to my chicken-pox addled daughter, who gracefully declined a gold plated opportunity to get on the air for the first time), two things come to mind.

1) The U.S. Senate sucks. As an institution. In class, I use the U.S. Senate as an case study of democratic institutions that aren't. Two of my classes are designed to explore the tension between theoretical conceptions of democracy (of which there are, of course, many contradictory accounts, so it can be fun for those students who bother to read a book) and empirical reality. While I have always let students reach their own conclusions, I tend to treat the U.S. Senate in a breath normally reserved for the House of Lords. It's bad enough in terms of representation that the institution is highly skewed, and the median voter as represented in the Senate is considerably to the right of the median voter as represented in the House (or in the general population).

However, to add the tacit requirement of a super majority on top of this already skewed pattern of representation is to add insult to (small d) democratic injury.

I don't make this rant as a dismayed Democrat. Indeed, as a Democrat, my natural state is dismay. I'm comfortable here. Rather, I question the institution on democratic norms. In the U.S. the students would get this, yet still want to retain the institution, thus they would, on average, logically opt to abolish the 17th Amendment. This never failed to both surprise and impress me. In the U.K., students simply want to abolish the Senate. Of course, these same students argue in favor of retaining the House of Lords, modified to make it more democratic.

2) The Democrats in the House need to get their shit together and pass the existing Senate version of HCR now, for reasons articulated by both Rob and Scott below, and that this is all we'll have for a generation on HCR. This seems to me to be the only way forward remaining. Of course, being Democrats, they can't do the sensible thing.

A little, uh, leadership from the Executive branch and that guy all about change we elected in 2008 would come in handy here. Unfortunately, all we get are noises about a version of HCR that moderate Republicans would embrace.

What's the point of having -- still -- huge majorities in the Senate, the House, and having the Executive branch again?

There are two silver linings here, and it's not that having 59 votes in the Senate is somehow better than having 60. First, Joe Leiberman is now, happily, irrelevant. Second, I have to do a couple lectures on campus next week about the current state of play in American politics, and now I have something analytical to talk about.

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