Years of hot air, sordid affairs, uncivilized shouting matches and general partisan rancor have conspired to lower our expectations for the political process to all-time lows. In the proverbial spectrum of activities, legislative debate now falls somewhere between rapper Kanye West's crass shenanigans at the MTV Video Music Awards and zoo apes flinging feces at tourists. Stunningly enough, however, the health care debate this summer has managed to be even worse than advertised.
So bad have the racially tinged rants and outright lies of Republican and Blue Dog opposition become that the president of the United States was reduced to wasting a portion of his most recent primetime address calming hysterical fears that his bill to expand and reform health care contained a provision for forced euthanasia of senior citizens. Apparently, the political atmosphere has been so badly poisoned that people are actually willing to believe that Congress, with an average age of 56 for the House and over 61 for the Senate would authorize a bill to kill the elderly.
When our national dialogue degenerates into a cross between such abject insanity and the sort of shocking breaches of respect and decorum typified by South Carolina Republican Joe Wilson's outburst during the President's address to Congress earlier this month, it is time for Democratic leadership to cut bait on bipartisan compromise, and pass a health care bill based solely on its preferences.
Conservative opposition has been given ample opportunity to participate constructively in the health care debate, and has consistently failed to do so. The president and Senate leadership deferred much of the control over the drafting of the Senate version of the bill to Senate Finance Committee Chair Max Baucus, D-Mont., and his much-ballyhooed Gang of Six conservative Senators (Baucus, Jeff Bingaman D-N.M., Kent Conrad D-N.D., Mike Enzi R-Wyo., Olympia Snowe R-Maine, and Chuck Grassley R-Iowa), often at the exclusion of the broader Democratic Caucus. The Gang completed its work behind schedule, and recommended a bill much more conservative (particularly with respect to hardship subsidies) than those of the other four congressional committees working on the issue. Despite these generous and unnecessary concessions, in a spectacular display of bad faith, one of the Republicans in the Gang, Enzi, suggested he would oppose the legislation that he himself helped draft.
While publicly espousing the virtues of cooperation, Republicans have privately pumped their base so full of fear and vitriol that it's doubtful that these people will trust any sort of health care bill in the near future. This is clear and transparent fear mongering, demagoguery and obstructionism. The Republicans never intended to seriously attempt reform, hoping instead to incite anger and frustration against the Democrats in next year's midterm elections.
To that end, the Republicans have irrationally rejected many sensible ideas. They refuse to even discuss a public option to compete with private insurance providers despite the White House's projections that only 5 percent of Americans would choose such a recourse and they repeatedly press for less generous government subsidies to offset the hardships imposed on Americans by the proposed individual health insurance purchase mandate. These positions further reveal their unwillingness to negotiate in good faith and their thinly veiled intent to water down the effectiveness of the reforms. A bill that forces poor Americans to buy health insurance without either offering a public option to protect them from exploitation by the insurance industry, or funds to offset the hardship, is nothing more than a tax on the poor, and is as likely to make the situation worse as it is to improve it.
Clearly, from a purely tactical standpoint, attempting to gain cooperation from a party that has everything to lose from passing a successful bill makes no sense. The Democrats don't even need Republican or Blue Dog participation to pass their preferred bill. Due to a loophole in Senate rules, they could pass whatever they want through the budget reconciliation process with only fifty-one votes, completely bypassing the dreaded filibuster. If they're smart, they'll realize that bipartisan cooperation with such a determined and disingenuous opposition is a pipe dream, and move forward to pass a bill without Republican support.