All Life Is Problem Solving

A few weeks back I did a diary called “Mis-directed Fury.” It focused on the reaction to the State opt-out idea on health care reform at FDL, and basically made the point that there are a lot more important things to get furious about than the State opt-out proposal. Today we have another explosion of angst and bile, this time at the report of Joe Lieberman’s intention to filibuster with the Republican opponents of health care reform legislation if the Senate bill contains Harry Reid’s highly constrained Public Option with a State opt-out. Meanwhile, everyone I’ve seen writing, or heard talking, about this ignores Reid’s continuing commitment to the 60-vote game, and his refusal, thus far, to start talking about using “reconciliation” or “the nuclear option” to get a really strong PO bill through the Senate with a majority vote. [Read more →]

The general reaction to Harry Reid’s announcement that he is including a public option in the Senate health care reform bill, along with a State opt-out has been to praise Harry for his courage and for “standing up for the American people.” Jane Hamsher, however, expresses her misgivings about the State level opt-out, because it has the potential of denying the PO to many needy people, most probably concentrated in Red States, and she points that “the devil is in the details” of the State opt-out. We know very little about those details at this writing. But it seems likely that the States won’t be able to opt-out until after the PO is operative, most probably in 2013, and people in each State have some experience with it. Then the States would have until 2014 to opt-out. [Read more →]

Deficit Hawkism is the ideology that prioritizes bringing tax revenues and Government expenditures into balance ahead of other far more essential national needs and priorities. This “old time religion” used to be the exclusive province of Republicans, and was particularly important in hindering America’s recovery from the great depression of the 1930s and particularly for the do little or nothing activities of the early ’30s that led to the infamous “Hoovervilles,” and other excesses of that period. FDR’s program and the experience of WWII when truly massive deficits finally ended the depression, persuaded most Democrats that eliminating deficits are not a major priority of the Federal Government. However, during the 1970s, President Carter, when running, had criticized President Ford for his failure to control inflation and unemployment. To control inflation, Carter emphasized attempts to balance the budget, prioritizing this ahead of his efforts to reduce unemployment, or pass health care reform, or cope with any other traditional priorities of Democratic Administrations. While he had limited success in both reducing inflation and unemployment, the Democratic Party itself began to emphasize its “fiscal responsibility,” perhaps to align itself with the Administration, and defend itself from Republican attacks on them as the “tax and spend” Party. [Read more →]

Matt Taibbi calls for a run by Elizabeth Warren for the Presidency in 2012. Why? For these reasons. 1) Obama, who ran a wonderful campaign for the presidency isn’t doing well. He hasn’t closed Guantanamo, or stopped incursions of the Government into civil liberties. He’s done a terrible job with the banking bailout, and hasn’t done very much about implementing new regulations. He’s done badly on health care reform. 2) the Democratic Party as currently constituted is more comfortable with its Wall Street, health insurance, and pharmaceutical industry constituents than they are with their voters with whom they’ve lost touch. 3) The Democratic Party no longer has a policy that makes any sense about income distribution and the kind of country we want to be. And 4), and more generally: [Read more →]

I think “groupthink” is a general pattern in this Administration. Not the simple groupthink that considers only one alternative and never discusses anything else, but a more complex sort of groupthink about frames.

Obama looks at alternatives in deciding on policy, alright. And he appears to be rational in his consideration of them. So far, so good. It’s a real departure from Bush’s “shoot from the hip,” gut-decided decisions, and follow-the-leader approach. But when he begins to consider issues, he generally seems to have made a pre-decision on the frame he will use for decision making. Alternatives that are outside his frame are “off the table” and not really open for discussion within the Administration. The limits of his frames, also, seem to be determined by political judgments that come from his gut, and that he does not arrive at through as rational a process as he uses after his pre-decision on a frame is made. [Read more →]

The intensity of debate on health insurance reform is building towards a climax as public and blogosphere pressure increases rapidly on the President and both Houses of Congress. In particular, Harry Reid is facing intense pressure, reportedly from the Administration, Nevada Democrats spurred on by blogosphere-generated telephone campaigns, progressive interest groups, and both progressive and conservative Democrats in the Senate, to do what they’d like him to. The point at issue is whether Harry Reid ought to include a public option in the Senate bill he is now shaping based on the products of the HELP and Finance committees. And if he ought to include one, then what kind of PO should he include?

The blogosphere and progressive interest groups, in particular, are doing their best to counter insurance company lobbying and to demand a “robust” or “strong PO” from Harry Reid. There’s something strange about this effort however. And it is that the people and groups doing the pressuring aren’t telling Harry what exactly they want in the way of a PO, even when they tell him that writing in a PO is a moral choice. As I’ve said in a previous diary, the PO is a general label for many, many variations. One person’s robust PO, is another person’s sell-out, or dog. Many folks are upbraiding Harry and threatening him with defeat in the next election either subtly or very directly. But very few are telling him exactly what he must write into the bill to assuage their forthcoming wrath. Apparently, they think Harry is a mind reader who knows automatically what a “robust” or “strong PO” is. Or perhaps they believe that if they remain vague about what they want, Harry will be so frightened that he will pass a stronger PO than anybody imagines he would ever consider? [Read more →]

A few months ago, Kip Sullivan wrote a terrific piece in which he called out the leaders of the public option community for not informing the public that the public option provisions appearing in the HR 3200 and Senate HELP bills were vastly different from Jacob Hacker’s public option proposal that PO leadership had been advocating for. Kip’s view, with which I agree, is that PO partisans should have been vigorous in clarifying the distinctions between the PO they were advocating for initially, and the quite different PO provisions they were now describing as “robust,” and were beginning to support. Kip believes that failure to make these distinctions is disingenuous, and that it has been contributing to the confusion about the public option many people have expressed in polls. [Read more →]

In my last post, I railed against the 60 vote frame and outlined the “nuclear option” procedure which allows escape from that requirement for passing reform and also makes clear that the frame that 60 votes are necessary is at best a half-truth, and at worst a lie. Of course, I didn’t expect that post to change the world, or even have much influence on it. That post, and previous ones I’ve done on the subject of the filibuster are just the best I can do to try to change it. They’re an obligation. Part of a longer term effort to do my part to restore a vanishing democracy in the United States. This post, too, is part of that effort.

The 60-vote frame is just as vigorous this week as it was last week. Ceci Connolly, a prominent member of WaPo’s “framing” (i.e. “reporting”) health care team, today characterized the Senate’s problem as one of stitching together a complex bill that would somehow include something that could be called a PO, but still be capable of getting 60 votes. The frame has shifted slightly from a few weeks ago, because the latest polling results at WaPo show a steady rise in support for the PO since August. But I guess the support for it is not high enough, as we’ll see, to lead the Post to do a good job of explaining,  the existence of alternatives to the 60 vote frame. [Read more →]

A number of diaries at Firedog Lake today, frame the coming phase of the legislative process in terms of the need for 60 votes to get cloture and pass the PO. For example here’s a quote from one of today’s diaries by David Dayen:

“Left out of this story is the fact that any amendment to the bill on the Senate floor would in all likelihood need a cloture vote – in other words, 60 votes – in order to pass. Therefore the placement of the public option inside or outside of the merged bill is crucial, as there are probably not 60 votes to either insert it or remove it from the legislation. So allowing an amendment as a “compromise” is not really a compromise at all.” [Read more →]

He’ll deserve the credit, he’ll deserve the blame, and Harry Mason Reid, not Nikolai Ivanovitch Lubachevski, is his name. And don’t let him try to tell you any differently, because it’s just not so.

Here’s the way things can play out now. Harry Reid, under cover of merging the Senate HELP and Finance Committee bills, can pretty much write anything he wants. He can really merge these two bills, and create any one of a variety of mergers, or he can substitute Bernie Sanders’ single-payer S 703, or even write a Senate version of the Conyers/Kucinich HR 676 single-payer bill. The other people he’s included in the merging process: Chris Dodd, Max Baucus, the President’s representatives, Empress Snowe, have no formal authority in this situation. They can advise him. They can figuratively stamp their feet, or express encouraging words, or express opinions about process and content. But he’s the only one in authority to decide what the bill that goes to the floor will look like. So, again, he will deserve the credit, or the blame for its content. [Read more →]