All Life Is Problem Solving

Olympia Snowe, our modern-day Hamlet, decided to vote in favor of getting the Baucus bill out of committee. This insignificant action in itself (if she had voted against the bill it still would have passed in committee 13-10), was celebrated by the MSM all day long today, as the coming of at least a bit of bipartisanship, and also as providing “cover” for Democrats like Mary Landrieu, Ben Nelson, and other “blue dogs” to vote for any health care reform travesty that also gets her vote, and still be in good shape with voters in their States. (Though why they ought to or do a care a bit about what one Republican Senator from Maine thinks is never elucidated by these commentators.)

Even more importantly, this vote of Snowe’s created a blizzard of commentary about the Democrats now having some hope of getting “the 60 votes necessary” to get health care reform passed, and that therefore they should resist using such “under-handed” procedural tricks as “reconciliation” (requiring only a majority), to get health insurance reform passed. However, as a number of people have written lately, including Jane Hamsher, Chris Bowers, and myself, 60 votes are not necessary to pass health care reform. 60 votes are only necessary to invoke cloture and end a filibuster. However, the practice of the filibuster can itself be ended with only 51 votes, or more precisely, 50 votes from Senators, plus one vote from the Vice President of the United States. So 60 votes are not even necessary to end filibusters. All that is necessary for that is a willingness and determination to end the filibuster once and for all.

So, as Chris Bowers has said, the claim that 60 votes are needed to pass health care reform is just a lie. It is a story invented by people who prioritize Senate procedural customs more highly than they do health care reform, and who don’t want to admit to the American people that it is within their power and authority to end the filibuster at any time, and to enable health insurance reform to occur with only 50 + 1 votes in the Senate.

Make no mistake, those telling this lie, prize retaining the filibuster more highly than they prize ending the 45,000 fatalities every year due to lack of insurance, or ending the more than one million bankruptcies due to health care bills that people can’t pay, or ending the many divorces annually that are caused by the current health insurance system, or ending all the stress people feel when their claims are denied by the insurance companies or when they are denied insurance due to preexisting conditions, or ending the domination of the lives of sick Americans by the health insurance companies and their bureaucrats.

However, the American people do not prize the filibuster in the same way. They do not care whether the filibuster continues or is ended. To them the filibuster is part of the arcania of Government that they do not understand. But, if because of the filibuster, they get a health care reform that won’t go into effect until 2013, or one that will cost more than they are paying now, or one that won’t control the accelerating costs of health insurance, or one that will force them to pay more in co-pays and deductibles than they pay now, or one that forces them to keep employer-based private insurance that they do not like, or one that doesn’t provide them with a public health insurance option; then they won’t forgive the Senate, or the President, or the Democrats in future elections, when they claim credit for a bill that delivers these outcomes, and then say that it was the best they could do because of the sacred filibuster that they refused to get around by just ending it, and with it, the “requirement” for 60 votes.

Over the next few days and weeks we will see all sorts of people bleating about the importance of having 60 votes, and the resulting need to compromise with Snowe, Lieberman, Nelson, Landrieu, Blanche Lincoln, Kent Conrad and other blue dogs and “moderate” Republicans, in order to get any health care reform at all. While this lie circulates all around us we need to combat it by telling the truth and by saying that it is a lie that we need 60 votes, and also a lie that we need their votes. Democrats don’t. All they need to do is what is necessary to keep their promise of effective health care reform. And if that means getting rid of the filibuster, then so be it. It will be good riddance to the greatest procedural enemy of reform and progressivism in the US Senate.

(Also posted at firedoglake.com where there may be more comments)