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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Deep Thought

The verdict of the people is clear. If they want to avoid further backlash, Democrats should resist the urge to take rash legislative action before a Republican Congress is seated next January.

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Things I Don't Understand

Although I'm hardly a rational choice purist, I tend to think that political actors operate according to logics that are essentially intelligible, and that they more or less respond to obvious costs and benefits. I'm not, by and large, compelled by arguments that treat an entire subset of political actors as morons; if politicians are doing something that appears to me to be stupid, I'm very often inclined to think that I don't sufficiently understand the situation, and the costs and benefits involved.

And so now, here are two things that I don't understand. I don't understand how House Democrats think that a better outcome will result from scrapping the Senate bill and starting over. While much can be accomplished in reconciliation, passing the Senate bill doesn't preclude that strategy, and in any case reconciliation has procedural and substantive drawbacks as a method of passing legislation. I certainly don't understand the idea of "calling the Senate's bluff" by pushing reform through piecemeal; the Republicans aren't bluffing, and they have both the capacity and the will to prevent action. I do get the anger. The House bill itself already represented a substantial compromise from what progressives wanted and believed was possible, and after all there's only so much shit you're prepared to eat. Still, I don't see that it's going to get any better, especially since Senate Democrats have proceeded to go wobbly, and might not even manage 51 for the key parts of the bill.

And here's the other thing that I don't understand; I don't get how anyone in the White House thinks that something useful can be achieved through bipartisanship. This makes far less sense than what the House Democrats appear to believe. It's simply insane, at this point, to treat the Republican Party as an institution that's interested in policy. Even if you do manage to make sufficient concessions to flip one or two Senate Republicans, you're not going to get any movement from the House Republican caucus. Moreover, if the White House doesn't think that it can keep progressive House Democrats in line for the current Senate bill, then how in Jeebus' name can it possibly believe that progressives will go along with the much, much worse legislation that is likely to result from a bipartisan compromise?

And so I don't get it. I've always been pretty dismissive of the idea that the Democrats can lose my vote; for me, the difference between the lesser and greater evils is always relevant, and so I'll tend to support whichever candidate is more progressive, even if I find the substantive views repellent. But if the Democrats manage to fuck this up, I'm not sure I'm on the bus anymore. I'll have to stop paying attention to politics and (shudder) do some actual work.

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