If It Screams, It Leads

I've attended a couple town halls out here in Southern California, and I found them all to be teabag-free. They were also invisible in the national debate. I wondered about, in those higher-profile cases of teabaggery, the utility of a random sample of screamers showing up at a meeting on a weeknight in terms of public opinion at large. Now, E.J. Dionne tells us that it was a sample within a sample - that the cable nets were looking for some action, and we all went right along with them. This is the most important column of the day.

Health-care reform is said to be in trouble partly because of those raucous August town-hall meetings in which Democratic members of Congress were besieged by shouters opposed to change.

But what if our media-created impression of the meetings is wrong? What if the highly publicized screamers represented only a fraction of public opinion? What if most of the town halls were populated by citizens who respectfully but firmly expressed a mixture of support, concern and doubt?

There is an overwhelming case that the electronic media went out of their way to cover the noise and ignored the calmer (and from television's point of view "boring") encounters between elected representatives and their constituents.

I figured this to be the case, but confess to not being vocal enough about it. Dionne actually finds the smoking gun here:

Over the past week, I've spoken with Democratic House members, most from highly contested districts, about what happened in their town halls. None would deny polls showing that the health-reform cause lost ground last month, but little of the probing civility that characterized so many of their forums was ever seen on television [...]

Rep. Frank Kratovil hails from a very conservative district that includes Maryland's Eastern Shore and says it didn't bother him that he was hung in effigy in July by a right-wing group. "As a former prosecutor, I consider that to be mild," he said with a chuckle. The episode, he added, was not at all typical of his town-hall meetings, where "most of the people were there to express legitimate concerns about the bill, wondering about how it was going to impact them" and wanting "to know the truth about some of the things that were being said about the bill."

The most disturbing account came from Rep. David Price of North Carolina, who spoke with a stringer for one of the television networks at a large town-hall meeting he held in Durham.

The stringer said he was one of 10 people around the country assigned to watch such encounters. Price said he was told flatly: "Your meeting doesn't get covered unless it blows up." As it happens, the Durham audience was broadly sympathetic to reform efforts. No "news" there. (emphasis mine)

Dammit, dammit, dammit. And too much of the blogosphere fell for this, by the way.

Covering conflict is basically what cable news does, whether it's two talking heads in the studio or footage of a car chase. Their job is to sensationalize and titillate and draw eyeballs. In this case, they told a false narrative about a nation rising up against health care, and it led to a general impression that health care reform was becoming unpopular, which led to... polls showing reform becoming less popular. Keep this in mind when you hear the story about the bitten finger today on an endless loop.

The media will of course tell you they're bystanders, documenters, observers. Dionne's column puts the lie to that. They wrote a story for the month of August and then found the footage to justify it. And then people not engaged with the process watch a few selected soundbites from town hall meetings and figure something must be wrong with the policy if it inspires so much hatred.

Your liberal media. Watch the health industry ads skyrocket as a token of thanks for their attempt to kill health care reform.

Gibbs Invokes The Brooks Brothers Riots

We now have Robert Gibbs openly calling this the Brooks Brothers Brigade. That's a start.

Q: Are you concerned at what appears to be well-orchestrated protesting of health care reform at town halls as derailing your message?

GIBBS: NO, I get asked every day about the myriad of things that could be derailing our message. I would point out that I don't know what all those guys were doing, what were they called, the Brooks Brothers Brigade in Florida in 2000, appear to have rented a similar bus and are appearing together at town hall meetings throughout the country

Q: They seem to be pretty widespread.

GIBBS: I seem to see some commonality in who pops up in some of these things.
Q: Like individuals?

GIBBS: Yeah.

Q: Really?

GIBBS: Yeah.

Q: Can you discuss names or ....

GIBBS: I don't have names but I think you can see quite a bit of similarity between who shows up where.

He's clearly trying to lead the horses of the press corps to water, not that they'll drink. But the industry groups are admitting their role in activating the protests.

...incidentally, if you want to follow these riots yourself, and maybe even produce a macaca moment, I've posted an embed of FDL's widget of upcoming town hall meetings all over the country. Check the right-hand column.

The K Street Lynch Mobs

Jane has the deets on Freedomworks, the lobbyist-funded group activating the teabag rallies at health care town halls across the country. Somehow CBS, with its large cadre of producers and researchers, put a Freedom Works spokesman on its air last night without disclosing their ties, but a blogger with virtually no staff can uncover all this useful information about the organization.

Freedomworks isn't some "organic grassroots" outfit. It's run by former Republican House Majority Leader Dick Armey -- corporate lobbyist, global warming denier and ladie's man. The President and CEO of Freedomworks is Matt Kibbee, who was trained by Lee Atwater. Kibbe was behind the attempt to get Ralph Nader put on the ballot in Oregon in 2004, prompting a complaint to the FEC of illegal collusion with the GOP.

Steve Forbes is on the FreedomWorks board. As Paul Krugman noted, their money comes from the Koch, Scaife, Bradley, Olin nexus, as well as other reliable funders of right wing infrastructure including Exxon Mobil.

Freedomworks has a long history of skunk works. In 2004, a woman who identified herself as a "single mother" in Iowa, Sandra Jacques, appeared at a George Bush town hall and gushed about his plan to privatize Social Security. She left out the part about being an employee of Freedomworks, who were lobbying on the issue at the time.

David Koch is also Chairman of the other major outfit heavily involved in these "organic" uprisings, Americans for Prosperity, whose members lynched Democrat Frank Kratovil in effigy. Koch is the 19th richest man in the world. They recently renamed the New York State Theater in Lincoln Center the David H. Koch Theater.

These aren't just some organizations that these guys gave money to. They run them.

Americans for Prosperity, incidentally, are on the record about busing their people to rally against reform in 13 states.

Brian Beutler of TPMDC - again, with resources not nearly as large as CBS - has a lot more. He notes the role of Conservatives for Patients Rights, founded and funded by Rick Scott, a disgraced former head of the Columbia/HCA health-care company who paid the largest fine in US history, $1.7 billion dollars, for overcharging state and federal health plans. This guy has sunk millions of dollars of health industry money into anti-reform ads, and if you read Beutler's piece, they are clearly orchestrating this "organic" uprising among the teabaggers.

The people on the ground may have their own extremist, anti-government beliefs. But they are being activated by corporate lobbyist-backed astroturf groups.

UPDATE: This is a very, very good point from Ezra, and I've noticed this too at most of the meetings I've attended:

I've been attending health-care panels and events on a pretty regular basis for four or five years now. Each event, of course, is its own precious snowflake, with its own set of graphs and bullet points and dweebish jokes. But one thing is perfectly predictable: The Q&A session will be dominated by single-payer activists asking about HR 676.

There's not a mystery as to why this happens: Single-payer activists are very well organized, and they make a point to dispatch their people to these events and get their members to the microphone and ensure that their perspective is heard. But as the bills under consideration suggest, politicians have had no problem ignoring the single-payer grassroots. Max Baucus ruled out their participation on day one. The media hasn't shown the slightest inclination to cover their presence at event after event after event.

To extend this a bit, 15 million people protested the Iraq war and the coverage was virtually nil. Lobbyists bus 100 people into a Congressional town hall and the media hypes the "Tehran-like" atmosphere of them. Groups of people at town hall meetings are not perfect indicators of the overall attitudes of a population, and even among the town halls, traditional media highlights and politicians respond to very selective segments of those groups.

Rope. Tree. Justice.

A peek into the minds of the teabaggers.

From Burt Prelutsky's August 3 Townhall.com column:

When it comes to our national security, keeping the likes of Barbara Boxer, Barney Frank and John Kerry in the loop would be the height of insanity. The only loop appropriate for most of the ninnies in Congress is one hanging from the branch of a very tall tree.

So far as I can tell, the only real difference between members of Congress and cockroaches is that one of the two species has a few more legs than the other.

Every Republican officeholder should be asked the question: are you with civil discourse, or with those advocating the lynching of Democratic politicians?

Health care will not be won by putting out bullet-pointed debunks. It will be won by calling attention to lobbyist-supported and -funded lynch mobs.

...we know where these riots will take place. They can be documented. The ringleaders can be questioned. They can be asked about Obama's birth certificate. They can be asked about Democrats (with the expected answer something like the call for lynching above). They can discredit themselves with their own words.

Going Into Overtime

The successful Cash for Clunkers program is coming down to the wire in the Senate. They have until the end of the week to pass the bill before they head into an August recess. But if they try to change the bill from what the House passed already - which was just a straight extension - the bills would have to be reconciled, and that would require the House coming back from its recess. Otherwise, it'll get signed into law too late for the program to stay in business. What will Sen. Reid do?

The $2 billion cash infusion granted Friday by the House to the overwhelmed cash-for-clunkers program must be accepted by the Senate this week without amendments — or it won’t be signed into law until September.

The House has adjourned for its summer recess, and some Senate lawmakers want to change the bill, which will likely force Reid into a days-long cloture process.

And that's in addition to trying to move the Sonia Sotomayor confirmation, which will probably take multiple days of floor debate, even though the outcome is assured. There's simply no way the Senate can plow through all that by the deadline of Thursday night. It's not possible.

Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) said his party will push a go-slow approach on cash-for-clunkers so that the program’s solvency and effectiveness can be examined. Without knowing how many claims are still in the pipeline, Kyl suggested a similar mistake could be made again.

“We need to have a time-out to see how much money was spent,” Kyl said. “Before you authorize more money, wouldn’t you like to know how much you’ve spent and how it took to spend it, and what kind of things you might want to do to modify it?” [...]

The GOP staffers pointed to Democrats like Dianne Feinstein of California, Claire McCaskill of Missouri and Mark Warner of Virginia, who in recent days have all expressed skepticism about the program. However, Feinstein and GOP Sen. Susan Collins (Maine) indicated on Monday evening they will support the measure. Warner wants the program to have higher mileage requirements while McCaskill has sounded skeptical about how it will be funded.

But other Democrats strike a common refrain: The sudden demand on the cash-for-clunkers program proves it is working.

With Feinstein and Collins singing off after seeing the unexpected increases in fuel efficiency coming from this program, it's safe to say that this has a good chance of passage. But Republicans will obstruct, and slow down, and gum up the works, and try to add amendments and poison pills, all the while saying that they just have to get home for the August recess. And so a program with demonstrable success that has led to the highest light vehicle sales in a year might get scrapped because of the old stopwatch.

What a wonderful political system we have.

The Guerrilla Meeting Strategy And Counter-Strategy

Some smart people in Washington had better come up with a way to counteract these lobbyist-organized mobs. Lloyd Doggett did decent enough job on Hardball today.

Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-TX) said his health care town hall this weekend was a "mob scene" filled with people from outside the neighborhood who were brought in by the Republican and Libertarian parties.

Their purpose was not "just to get their own voice heard, but to ensure other people weren't heard," he told Chris Matthews on Hardball. "I think these folks are really desperate to stop health reform." [...]

Doggett also compared the protesters to birthers and secessionists.

"It's the same fanaticism I saw on Saturday," he said. He claimed most of the protesters weren't from the neighborhood, but were brought in by the Republican and Libertarian parties.

The protest was one of several at town halls across the country this weekend and over the past few weeks.

One protester carried a sign with a picture of a marble tombstone engraved with Doggett's name, he said.

Later on in the same show, Matthews marveled at the passion and intensity of the protestors, without mentioning what Doggett told him a half-hour earlier, that rioters were bused in from out of town, and without mentioning the organized lobbying effort to build fake grassroots movements to disrupt meetings by whatever means possible. Likewise, other media weathervanes are claiming that such town hall vigilantism is a Democratic idea (!), although I appreciate Ambinder's admission that "the press will be complicit in telling the story" because the riots make for better visuals.

Congressman Patrick Murphy appeared to handle his town meetings pretty well, and really it isn't about the spectacle, the theater, but how Democrats use them as cover to return to the beliefs they already hold. Any politician who tells you they "listen to their constituents" and then talk about a town hall meeting with 100 or 200 people is engaging in terrible polling, and really selecting to get a preferred result.

Maybe members of Congress have to be aware of what's happening in the room, as we used to say in comedy, and flat-out state that an organized group in the meeting seeks to disrupt the proceedings. Republican supporters on the stump last fall didn't do themselves any favors, revealing an ugly underbelly of extremism and violence. I would highlight it. Make it personal.

Constituent Letter Grifting

Last week, we learned about astroforging, the practice of corporate lobbyists forging letters from local advocacy groups that line up with corporate goals. More evidence has been uncovered today showing the widespread nature of this practice.

Joseph Richardson received a letter from Sen. Kent Conrad (D-ND) in reply to a letter that he never sent:



Richardson never wrote such a letter, and he never would. Calling himself a “vocal member” of the North Dakota Alliance for Renewable Energy, Richardson told ThinkProgress that he is an ACES supporter and even wrote a letter to Rep. Earl Pomeroy (D-ND) calling on the congressman to support clean energy reform.

Bonner and Associates, the company nailed initially, has been engaged in this deception for well over 20 years. And as long as they got away with it, I'm sure they'd continue. It turns out that Bonner is linked to the clean coal lobby:

The Sierra Club today urged Attorney General Eric Holder to launch an investigation into the activities of a lobbying firm that has been linked to fake letters urging Rep. Tom Perriello (D-Va.) to vote against the climate bill [...]

The request stems from a newspaper report last week that Bonner & Associates sent letters to Perriello's office that were made to look as if they came from Creciendo Juntos, a Charlottesville-based Hispanic advocacy group. Perriello staffers also received similarly worded letters that were designed to look as if they came from the Albemarle-Charlottesville branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

The letters, which urged Perriello to oppose the House climate bill ( H.R. 2454 ), used the letterhead of the two groups but were signed by individuals who are not affiliated with the organizations ( E&ENews PM , July 31).

The group American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity acknowledged this afternoon that it had contracted Bonner & Associates earlier to perform "limited outreach," but the advocacy group denounced the firm's actions.

It's insane that Democratic lawmakers are going out of their way to label the August recess as "consequential" for health care based on the reaction of constituents in districts, when this nasty little episode shows how it's all just theater and lies.

UPDATE: Think Progress has corrected this story. Conrad's office miscategorized their response letter. The Perriello set of letters, however, are certainly real, which is to say fake. Brad Johnson has more.

The Sticking Fingers In Ears And Yelling "La-La-La" Strategy

Both sides have decided to mobilize in member districts throughout August over health care policy. Democrats have settled on banging the hell out of the insurance companies - mostly with the insurance companies' blessing, I'm sure, if the end result is an individual mandate and a forced market for 46 million new policies without a public option to contend with. The Republican strategy is literally to yell at the top of their lungs.

Who needs civility and intelligent discourse when we have confused mobs of far-right activists organized by corporate lobbyists?

The House has been in recess for only a few days, but we're already seeing the results of the right-wing efforts.

This past weekend, Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-TX) was the latest victim of the right's strategy, where protesters followed him and chanted "just say no" to health care.

Texas has the highest uninsured rate in the nation and stands to be among the most to gain from Obama's health care plan. "[N]early 6 million Texans, including the one in six U.S. uninsured children who live there, could get health insurance for the first time if the plan is enacted." [...]

An angry crowd also exploded at Sen. Arlen Specter (D-PA) and Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius. The Philadelphia Daily News reports, "They wore bumper stickers on their foreheads. They carried signs. They shouted insults at notable American figures -- and each other. Loudly."

This isn't just about intimidating lawmakers, it's also about exercising something of a heckler's veto -- if the mob can prevent an honest discussion of health care reform, people who'll benefit from the legislation won't learn what it's in it for them and why the conservative arguments are wrong.

This is the culmination of decades of the devolution of American discourse, through talk radio and cable news, that now results in consideration of the most momumental policy in a generation being reduced to sloganeering and loud chants. The corporate lobbyists funding and directing the right wing know that they can take advantage of chaos and push through lies and distortions much easier. And they figure they can set the wobblier Democratic members to the ground just by shouting at them.

Sadly, they're probably right.

Under The Wire

The House Energy and Commerce Committee passed out their health care bill by a bare margin, 31-28, as the Blue Dog deal held and the set of amended amendments that progressives demanded return to the bill got put in place as well.

In an unusual move before the final vote, Waxman halted the markup to have a closed-door meeting with Democrats on his panel – presumably to make sure he had the votes to pass the bill.

The final vote was 31-28, with five Democrats opposing the measure. Democrats who voted no were Reps. Rick Boucher (Va.), Bart Stupak (Mich.), Jim Matheson (Utah), John Barrow (Ga.) and Charles Melancon (La.). All Republicans rejected the bill [...]

Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) indicated on Friday that some of the most hard-fought provisions of the healthcare bill -- including parts meant to appease conservative Democrats -- could change by the time the final measure reaches the House floor.

"I have three chairmen to deal with," Pelosi said. "We have three committees that have to look at it."

As it turns out, the committee has about 60 or so amendments left to deal with, but they couldn't eat one day into their summer break, so they'll clean that up when they get back, apparently. How the Speaker can merge the bills together while 60 amendments sit in one committee before a vote is tricky, but fortunately nobody understands the details of this stuff anyway. The best practice would actually be for one large committee, perhaps an ad hoc committee, to deal with legislation of this type, even if it's big.

Anyway, it looks like progress, and I have no doubts that the House will vote on a decent enough bill when they get back from the recess. The success of it will be determined by the resolve of the Democratic caucus and the success of efforts to convince lawmakers when they are home in their districts.

...Amendments and roll call votes available here.

Finding The Target

As I said in the last post, astroturf groups are going to be out in force in August, creating mini-Brooks Brothers riots all over the country, harassing members of Congress, doing whatever they can to be the squeakiest wheel in the hopes of drowning out support for health care reform. So how will Democrats respond?

With polls suggesting that public support is sagging for President Obama's push to overhaul health care, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer said the party will use the August break to make a strong sales pitch to middle-class voters.

"We're going to be on the air. We're going to be in the neighborhoods," said Hoyer, D-Md. "Our members are going to now have the opportunity to go home ... and say to their constituents, 'Look, this is what we're doing. This is why it's good for you and your family.' " [...]

A House Democratic memo obtained by USA TODAY shows the steps the party is taking to coordinate its message over the break. Lawmakers are encouraged to hold town-hall-style meetings, post videos on the Internet and find small-business owners "whose testimony can provide a powerful narrative," the memo states.

And it looks like Democrats have settled on a message, one that I guess works as well as any other - bash the hell out of insurance companies.

"Remove them from between you and your doctor. No discrimination for pre-existing conditions. No dropping your coverage because you get sick. No more job or life decisions made based on loss of coverage. No need to change doctors or plans. No co-pays for preventive care. No excessive out-of-pocket expenses, deductibles, or co-pays. No yearly or lifetime cost caps on what insurance companies cover."

According to the memo, they've coordinated this strategy with the Obama administration and a number of sympathetic groups. "The Leadership is working in close coordination with the White House and outside groups (including but not limited to HCAN, Families USA, AFSCME, SEIU, AARP, etc.) to ensure complementary efforts during August."

Those groups have literally hundreds if not thousands of events planned in August, and they're digging in against opponents of reform, Republican or Democrats. You already hear the fruits of this rhetorical shift, from health care reform to health insurance reform. Nancy Pelosi called insurance companies "the villains" in this debate. The President has also shifted the debate toward insurers versus consumers, a "people versus the powerful" maneuver.

President Obama has framed the health-care debate in Washington as a campaign against insurance companies whose irresponsible actions, he repeatedly says, must be reined in to control costs and improve patient care. In North Carolina this week, he told an audience that the existing system "works well for the insurance industry, but it doesn't always work well for you."

The message is no accident, as the president's chief pollster made clear in a rare public speech last month. Joel Benenson told the Economic Club of Canada that extensive polling revealed to the White House what many there had guessed: People hate insurance companies.

"Take the public plan, for example," Benenson said. "Initial reaction to it wasn't as positive as it is now. . . . But we figured out that people like the idea of competition versus the insurance company, and that's why you get a number like 72 percent supporting it."

Hitting insurance companies must poll off the charts. And it's certainly better than having to discuss the intracacies of the employer deduction or MedPAC. Obama said in his interview with Karen Tumulty that he's struggled with relating the urgency of reform to the public in clear, simple terms. He's decided to go with a battle with the insurance industry, something that appeals to both the base and has resonance for most people. It's probably the right choice, even if it is shorthand. Scaling back and targeting the rhetoric can actually move forward the policy.

Obviously we have to keep this up for the next month.

Enzi Invents New Six-Member Unicameral Parliament, Appoints Self Prime Minister

Steve Benen hit this yesterday, but I just noticed it. Mike Enzi, like most Senators, finds himself very, very important. So much so that he believes the November election leading to 60 Democratic Senators, 258 Democratic House members and a Democratic President sent the message that his word must be law.

With liberal Democrats on and off the Finance Committee already angling to pull the measure to the left when it is combined with a rival passed by the Health Committee, Enzi indicated his support is contingent on Democratic leaders leaving any Finance Committee agreement intact.

“I also need commitments from Sen. [Harry] Reid [D-Nev.] and Speaker Pelosi, as well as the administration, that the bipartisan agreements reached in the Finance Committee will survive in a final bill that goes to the president,” Enzi said.

There are six Senators involved in the Baucus caucus in the Senate Finance Committee. Together they represent about 2.8% of the total US population.

Let's add in some additional facts. Five Congressional Committees are working on health care legislation. The legislative process works like this: the bills coming out of the committees in the respective chambers are merged into single bills for a floor vote. Senators and House members have the opportunity to offer amendments. Those amendments are voted up or down, then there are final votes on passage of the bill in the House and the Senate. The bills coming out of the respective chambers go to a conference committee, where they are merged, with the details ironed out, and then returned to each chamber for a final vote.

That's how government works.

Mike Enzi's conception of government is this: Mike Enzi agrees to a compromise with 6% of the total Senate representing 2.8% of the population, and it becomes law.

I will say that his version has speed on its side.

The bill Enzi wants to fast track has a favorable CBO score going for it, reportedly costing under $1 trillion over 10 years and covering 95% of all Americans. But the only way to do that is to cut subsidies to the bone, making coverage unaffordable; or to phase in the program later in the ten-year budget window, maintaining the current broken, crappy system for as long as possible. It also apparently eliminates the successful Children's Health Insurance Program.

And by the way, they can't get it done until after the August recess.

Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, and Sen. Michael Enzi, R-Wyoming, dropped the bombshell news to CNN and two other reporters in Capitol hallways Wednesday night. They have spent weeks behind closed doors, trying to hammer out an agreement with their Democratic counterparts on the Senate Finance Committee but said too many issues remain unresolved, making it virtually impossible for them to sign on to a deal before the break.

“There are a lot of tough decisions to make and they aren’t going to be made real quickly,” Grassley said late Wednesday when asked whether negotiators should kick their talks over to September.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nevada, had already postponed Senate floor action on health care legislation until the fall, but Democrats had hoped the Senate Finance Committee could finish its work before the summer break. In fact, one senior Democratic source said meeting that deadline was the central thrust of the president’s meeting with Reid and Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, D-Montana, last Friday [...]

Enzi, a soft-spoken conservative, was furious about headlines Wednesday morning that suggested he was close to reaching a deal with the Democrats.

“I felt my reputation was in danger,” he said.

In Enzi's world, signing on to a compromise with Democrats would ruin his reputation. So obviously we should just let him set the policy by himself. After all, 189,046 voted for him last year.

The silver lining here is that liberal Democrats in the House are resisting going along with this nonsense. From CongressDaily (sub. req.):

A trumpeted healthcare reform agreement with conservative House Democrats set off a firestorm of criticism from the party's liberal wing Wednesday, pushing back proceedings in a key committee and casting doubt on the strength of the leadership-backed accord.

Leaders and White House officials worked for days to reach an agreement with Blue Dogs, who had been holding up the legislation in the Energy and Commerce Committee because of concerns about cost, burdens on small business and a public insurance option [...]

"There's angst; there's questions; there's some anger," Rep. Eliot Engel, D-N.Y., a member of the Energy and Commerce Committee, said of the meetings with Waxman. "The question is, have we given up too much for the goals that we need?" he said of the agreement. "I don't want to see the insurance companies subsidized by middle-income taxpayers."

The Progressive Caucus called the Waxman/Blue Dog deal "unacceptable" and vowed to defeat such a compromise on the House floor.

Meanwhile, in the best news I've heard in years, Senate Democrats are making threats to Max Baucus' committee chair.

In an apparent warning to Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.), some liberal Democrats have suggested a secret-ballot vote every two years on whether or not to strip committee chairmen of their gavels [...]

"Every two years the caucus could have a secret ballot on whether a chairman should continue, yes or no," said Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), the chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee. "If the ‘no’s win, [the chairman’s] out [...]

Some senators suggest privately that Baucus might be more open to persuasion if his chairmanship is subject to regular votes.

Another senior Democratic senator endorsed Harkin’s suggestion but declined to speak on the record for fear of angering Baucus.

"Put me down as a yes, but if you use my name I’ll send a SWAT team after you," said the lawmaker when asked about a biennial referendum on chairmen.

Civil rights legislation in the 1960s didn't move forward until the House Rules Committee chair, a segregationist Southern Democrat, saw his power neutered by an expansion of the committee. Process changes often precede policy changes. Sen. Baucus, take note.

Energy And Commerce To Mark Up - HC Out Of All Committees By The Recess

After reports overnight of no deal with House Blue Dogs, now there are reports of a compromise being reached and a markup session in the Energy and Commerce Committee scheduled for just a couple hours from now.

Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) has cut a deal to reconvene his committee and vote on the Democrats' sweeping health care bill, with a goal of completing work by the time lawmakers leave town for the summer on Friday.

There won’t be a vote before the full House before the August recess, but the committee breakthrough – after tense negotiations with Blue Dog Democrats – is a significant step for the Democrats.

"After two weeks of very long and intense negotiations, I'm proud to report that we've reached an agreement that will allow health care reform to move forward," said Arkansas Rep. Mike Ross, a top negotiator for Blue Dog Democrats on the Energy and Commerce Committee.

After all this, the Blue Dogs will only allow four of their members to vote on this package in committee.

And here's what they got for their troubles:

The Blue Dogs also succeeded in cutting $100 billion from the overall cost of the bill, bringing the total price tag under $1 trillion. The legislation will now exempt small businesses with a payroll less than $500,000 from paying for any government-sponsored health coverage - double the $250,000 in the initial draft. Doctors and other health care providers would also be allowed to negotiate their payment rates with the government-sponsored health care arm.

The new version of the bill also has a breakthrough on the concept of health care “co-ops,” seen by some as an alternative to a public plan. States would be allowed to create co-ops for residents to buy private insurance. But the Waxman-Ross deal will also keeps the "public option" of government-sponsored health care.

That first paragraph has internal contradictions all over it. The Blue Dogs "succeeded" in cutting costs from the bill - but the two subjects mentioned ADD to the bill's costs. Exempting more small businesses from the employer mandate means less money from small businesses that do not provide insurance for their employees. And allowing providers to negotiate payment rates with the public option, as well as opt out of the network, means higher costs and less choice for individuals who purchase their plans. It's not really fiscally responsible. It also doesn't explain where those cuts came from. I'm hearing that this comes through "enhanced delivery system reforms" and cutting the expansion of Medicaid as well as the "affordability credits" for those who lack insurance. I'm guessing that they lowered the subsidy level to 300% of the federal poverty line. Matt Yglesias argues that not many people in between 300-400% FPL lack insurance, but it would still provide an additional burden on their bank accounts.

Where would this compromise leave health care reform? All three committees in the House will have passed their bills, but members would go home for recess while those bills get merged by the leadership. That puts the House trajectory on line with the Senate, where the Finance Committee is making progress toward a goal of passing their bill out before the recess. So in that intervening month, while progressives and conservatives do hand-to-hand combat in town hall meetings and on the airwaves, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid have to figure out what to keep in and out of the various bills, for floor votes in September.

Meanwhile, the White House has released eight guarantees that would emerge from any health care bill, which all sound like insurance reform, the line they've been using recently, and which don't include anything to really transform the system.

* No Discrimination for Pre-Existing Conditions: Insurance companies will be prohibited from refusing you coverage because of your medical history.

* No Exorbitant Out-of-Pocket Expenses, Deductibles or Co-Pays: Insurance companies will have to abide by yearly caps on how much they can charge for out-of-pocket expenses.

* No Cost-Sharing for Preventive Care: Insurance companies must fully cover, without charge, regular checkups and tests that help you prevent illness, such as mammograms or eye and foot exams for diabetics.

* No Dropping of Coverage for Seriously Ill: Insurance companies will be prohibited from dropping or watering down insurance coverage for those who become seriously ill.

* No Gender Discrimination: Insurance companies will be prohibited from charging you more because of your gender.

* No Annual or Lifetime Caps on Coverage: Insurance companies will be prevented from placing annual or lifetime caps on the coverage you receive.

* Extended Coverage for Young Adults: Children would continue to be eligible for family coverage through the age of 26.

* Guaranteed Insurance Renewal: Insurance companies will be required to renew any policy as long as the policyholder pays their premium in full. Insurance companies won't be allowed to refuse renewal because someone became sick.

OK. These are all solid reforms that would help a lot of people. But they are incremental reforms at the edge of the policy. I understand the thinking - these are the consumer-based reforms people will actually see. But they'd see a public option in competition with an industry that currently denies coverage and does everything they can to get out of paying for treatment. I fear that nothing more fundamental is being attempted out of a fetishistic need for bipartisanship that trumps common sense and the actual prevailing political reality.

Over at Senate Finance, judging by the reports coming of the committee, a solonic gang of six -- three Democrats, including chairman Max Baucus of Montana, and three Republicans, including ranking member Charles Grassley of Iowa -- are turning out a bill whose resemblance to anything the president has championed is accidental and incidental. To secure Republican support, they oppose a public plan. To secure Republican support, they oppose employer mandates, even on the largest corporations. (And many of America's biggest employers are retailers with a proven record of not providing coverage to their workers: Wal-Mart, our largest, employs 1.4 million Americans, most of whom it does not cover.) The solonic six may end up requiring employers to fund subsidies for employees who need them, but that could create the bureaucratic nightmare to end all bureaucratic nightmares -- 700,000 Wal-Mart employees, say, bringing their tax returns to work so management can investigate ("You sure you reported all your income?") and stall ("Doesn't your spouse work at Home Depot? Why don't they pay the subsidy?") and investigate and stall.

Sounds like a plan to secure universal coverage by the middle of the next century [...]

Problem is, bipartisanship ain't what it used to be, and for one fundamental reason: Republicans ain't what they used to be. It's true that there was considerable Republican congressional support, back in the day, for Social Security and Medicare. But in the '30s, there were progressive Republicans who stood to the left of the Democrats. Nebraska Republican George Norris, who for decades called for establishing public power companies to compete with price-gouging private companies, was the father of the Tennessee Valley Authority. In the '60s, Rockefeller Republicans supported civil rights legislation and Medicare.

Today, no such Republicans exist. In New England and New York, historically the home of GOP moderates, Republicans occupy just two of 51 House seats. Nationally, the party is dominated by Southern neo-Dixiecrats. In their book "Off Center," political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson compared congressional Republicans of different eras and concluded that a Republican House member in 2003 with a voting record that placed him at the median of his party was 73 percent more conservative than the median GOP member of the early '70s.

Max Baucus, then, isn't negotiating universal coverage with the party of Everett Dirksen, in which many members supported Medicare. He's negotiating it with the party of Barry Goldwater, who was dead set against Medicare. It's a fool's errand that is creating a plan that's a marvel of ineffectuality and self-negation -- a latter-day Missouri Compromise that reconciles opposites at the cost of good policy. Obama should thank the solonic six for their work, and, as much as is politically practicable, ignore it.

Exactly. You don't negotiate with crazy.

There's still a fight to be had on the public option, the design of the insurance exchanges in which a public option sits, and several other features. Ultimately the Blue Dogs appear more nervous than obstructionist, so August will be consequential. I hope OFA is ready.

...Really, negotiate with this?

This unidentified man decided he was doing the Tea Party-anti-reform effort a real solid by hanging freshman Maryland Democratic Rep. Frank Kratovil in effigy [note the creepily expert knotted noose] with a placard "Congress Traitors The American [and a word that looks like "idol"].

The event — a rally in Salisbury, Md. on the Eastern Shore — was attended by members of the business-funded Americans for Prosperity, a group that includes James Miller, a Federal Trade Commission chairman and budget director during the Reagan administration.

...More info on the Waxman-Blue Dog deal. They lowered the rate of the subsidy between 300-400% FPL, rather than eliminating it. And as stated above, the public option remains, albeit weakened because it can't use Medicare bargaining rates at all, but rates negotiated by the Health and Human Services Secretary.

Vote Or No Vote

Politico reported on a letter that claimed no floor vote in the House on health care before the August recess. Nancy Pelosi disputed the letter and said a floor vote and a delay in the recess remained possible.

I think everyone knows there will be no vote and just don't want to break it to anyone yet.

Why the Congress would break for a month at this time, given the state of things, is just insane.

The Guns Of August

Now that Mad Max Baucus has dropped his pile of dung into the health care debate, it's an open question whether allowing the August recess to happen may be the only hope for the bill at all. The story of conservatives bird-dogging their representatives and striking the fear of God into them so that they never think about passing health care reform again is only one side of the story. Sure, the RNC will spend money on the air in certain Congressional districts, but so will the DNC, and key allies like MoveOn and Americans United for Change. And the ground efforts by teabaggers and right-wing front groups can certainly be matched throughout the country by heavy hitters like OFA. Robert Reich may be despondent but this could be the part where the game gets fun. However, the principles we're fighting for need to be delineated, and that's where things might break down. Calling for vague "reform" will get you vague reform, and also probably health insurance choices that are benefit-poor, unaffordable and too few in number. Everyone's idiosyncratic, but I think that Reich's options are a decent place to start:

First, the House must enact a bill before August recess even if the Senate is unable to -- and the House bill should include the four key elements that have already emerged from House committees: (1) a public plan option, (2) a mandate on all but the smallest employers to provide their employees with health insurance or else pay a tax or fee (so-called "pay or play"), (3) a requirement that every individual and family buy health insurance, coupled with subsidies for families up to 300 or 400 times the poverty level in order to make sure it's affordable to them; and (4) a small surtax on the top 1 percent of earners or families to help pay for this subsidy ("tax the wealthy so all Americans can stay healthy.")

If a tax on insurance company policies (which would really just incentivize them to offer less expensive ones, getting the federal government off the hook for the giant employer deduction) sells easier and raises as much money as a surtax on the wealthy, so be it. I think America is worth paying for, but YMMV, and you have to actually make the argument about progressive taxation to lay the groundwork. The public plan option, IMO, must be available to as many people as possible by breaking the firewall and allowing people with employer coverage to opt into it. It also needs a provider network. And the subsidies have to be at 400% FPL on a sliding scale.

The trouble is that nobody's working off the same script. What's most likely to happen, if successful, is that Congresscritters become terrified at the prospect of passing nothing, but pass something inadequate. That could have very negative consequences, or actually positive ones, considering there's four years until full implementation to rework what's bad and make it good.

Why Postponing Health Care Hurts Climate Change

Another factor to breaking for a three-week recess before finishing work on the health care bill is that it pushes everything back in the queue. There are serious efforts to arrive at legislation on financial regulation, as well as the Senate's version of a climate and energy bill already passed by the House, that now necessarily get moved aside. And in the meantime, energy and activist attention goes away from those priorities. It gives know-nothings like George Will more time to sow doubt and throw up meaningless statistics to make verifiably false claims about the condition of the planet. Even people who are on the side of doing something about climate change have contributed to this by raising unfounded fears about speculation in the cap and trade market and the dangers of Wall Street involvement (simply put, there are mechanisms to ban derivatives in Waxman-Markey, and the survival of the planet outranks the desire to deny profit to those trading carbon). It gives lobbyists more time to marshal their forces against anything but the status quo. And unlike with health care, where the progressive movement has focused for some time, on climate change the denialists are much further along in their activism, and delay actually will sap the fortitude of lawmakers.

The opposition to Waxman-Markey did a good job with phone calls to House members. They at least matched the calls that enviros and progressives delivered — though I’m told an analysis shows that most of their calls were out-of-state, while most of ours were in state. Still, that’s one reason we didn’t get more votes.

The climate destroyers are keeping up their attack on vulnerable House members — even if it means eating their own (see “Honey, I shrunk the GOP, Part 1: Conservatives vow to purge all members who support clean energy or science-based policy”).

The good news is that The Hill reports, “A coalition of labor, environmental and veterans groups is spending serious money to make sure Democrats who supported the cap-and-trade legislation have political cover.” Very important stuff, for sure — after all, the House is going to have to vote again on some House-Senate conference version of this bill in early 2010 assuming the Senate acts.

But we should be equaling, if not beating, calls to key senators right now. Heck, I’m told that Senators who aren’t even really swing votes are getting more than 100 calls a day opposing climate action. And those matter too, in terms of how even Senators on our side gauge public sentiment and how much they are willing to fight for the strongest possible bill.

That has a cumulative effect, even if members of the Senate want to pass good legislation. And hanging House members out to dry who voted for Waxman-Markey with nothing to show for it will damage them in 2010. Right now, the Senate is engaged in a zero-sum game, and at the end of the year, they might welcome having those three weeks back when they look at what they failed to produce.

Bad Time For A Recess

I was on NPR's Tell Me More this morning (sorry for the late word!), and you can listen to it here. In it I talked about the insanity of Congress taking a three-week break in August when the reform bills are reaching a critical point. While Congress goes home for three weeks, 145,000 people will lose their health care, and with such a sense of urgency, it makes no sense for Congress to let up on the gas, especially when we've debated this issue for 60 years or more. Ezra Klein shares my concern:

The August deadline, I fear, is actually getting a bit confused. The point isn't that the bill needs to be done by Aug. 6, and no other date will do. It's not about an arbitrary point on the calender. If Aug. 16 were no different than Aug. 6, it wouldn't matter which date saw the completion of the process. But Aug. 16 is not the same as Aug. 6. Aug. 16 is part of Congress's month-long vacation.

Right now, whatever its dysfunctions, there's a certain rhythm to health-care reform on the Hill. The committees have been working on this for months. There's back-and-forth with the Congressional Budget Office, there are ad hoc coalitions of interested senators, there are negotiations and amendments and draft proposals and discussions. It's not pretty stuff, as each day's headlines show. But it's the stuff of progress. To be so close to a finished product and a mark-up and a vote and then, for no actual reason, abruptly stop, is insane. It means a cessation to discussions, negotiations, relationships, hearings, to the work of legislating. It means that the hard work of creating this policy will stop for a month and give way to the politics of fighting over it. That's not healthy. "Ideas can melt in the sun," Nancy Pelosi said when I interviewed her Wednesday, "especially in August."

That's important. It's not that I believe progressives fear losing a "battle of ideas" with conservatives in members' districts over health care - I actually think the progressive activist class will get out to town hall meetings and agitate. Progressives are winning the ad wars, and great ads like this will continue. And Organizing for America was practically invented for this kind of outcome. The difference is that Chris Cillizza will for a month write about the big political brouhaha over health care instead of the Congress coming to a negotiated agreement. You'll see tea partiers in the streets and basically political theater.

The President says that the important thing is now to keep working and he does recognize the importance of not wasting one day of delay. And Sen. Reid does expect the Senate Finance Committee to finish their bill by August 7. But this is a mistake, for political reasons in addition to stalling the policy.

...One of my colleagues on the radio today, Blue Dog Henry Cuellar, objected to my characterization that the recess is a "vacation," saying it's an opportunity to listen to his constituents. You can also do that with, I don't know, a phone. But this means that he'll certainly be listening to gauge where to go with his vote. So Kevin Drum is right - if Obama's email list ever needed to be put to use, it's now. They should flood their Representatives' offices.

Delay, Delay, Delay

When Jim DeMint is pleased about anything you've done in Congress, look out country. That's the effect of Harry Reid's statement today, putting off a final vote on a health care bill until after the August recess. In addition to this being potentially bad for the policy, although I'm not convinced of that, the politics are terrible, as Ezra Klein noted in a WaPo chat today.

Point Pleasant, NJ: So what are the odds of getting health care reform out of the House and Senate by the August recess? And will they postpone the recess until it gets done?

Ezra Klein: Out of the House? Quite high. Out of the Senate? That's where things get trickier. And I think that's a real shame. The problem here, incidentally, is not the date but the recess. Right now, all the committees are working, talking, in the groove on this. To take a month off when they're nearing the finish line? It's nuts.

I don't think the odds in the House are particularly high unless the Senate Finance Committee releases its bill soon.

The President has the ability to focus attention on this. Today in Cleveland, he said in reaction to Reid's call for delay, "That's okay. I just want people to keep on working. Just keep working." The crowd cheered. And if that can be translated into a call to stop the recess and continue to work toward a solution, that would be great. An Administration aide told CNN today that "Reid's announcement does not change Obama's timetable, with the president still wanting House and Senate votes before the upcoming recess." The only way to do that is with no recess.

It makes no sense politically to leave town and slow momentum on this bill. It plays right into the hands of the obstructionists.

Pelosi: No Health Care Bill, No Recess

On Monday John Amato asked the President a fairly self-evident question. Since there is a desire to pass health care reform this year, since Republicans want to use the August recess to distract and delay, shouldn't Congress forego that recess and continue work on the bill? The President dodged the question. But over the next 48 hours, the media got the message on this option, and started asking members of Congress about it. Yesterday Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) indicated he would be willing to stay in Washington in August to hammer out a deal. And today, the House Speaker agreed. And she actually has the ability to put that into place.

Asked at a press conference whether she'd support keeping the House of Representatives in session into the August recess to complete work on health care reform, Speaker Nancy Pelosi was fairly adamant.

"I think 70 percent of the American people would want that," she said. "I want a bill."

That could prove crucial if Blue Dogs hold up House Democrats' health care bill in the Energy and Commerce Committee much longer. The House is scheduled to adjourn on August 3rd. Whether or not she pushes that date back, though, it sounds like she's confident a bill will pass whenever it comes to the floor.

Blue Dogs in the House don't want to walk the plank until the Senate Finance Committee reveals its bill, and in particular how it deals with cost controls and paying for the expenditures. But Pelosi thinks she'll have the votes, though she may tweak the bill to move closer to what the Senate recommends. Foregoing the August recess makes it less possible for the Finance Committee to keep delaying and forces Congress to knuckle down on the bill.

Slinkerwink writes:

You know what happens if they allow health care reform to be delayed until after the August recess? These Members go home, they get hit by hundreds of TV ads from the murder-by-spreadsheet industry, and they get phone calls from angry voters about "socialized health care." Then they come back, scared to pass real health care reform, so they end up passing health care reform that may not include a public option or a national insurance exchange. The stakes are very high this week.

We have to keep up the phone calls from yesterday. We've got to let Members of Congress, the Democratic leadership, and the White House know that we don't want them to go on vacation in August until they deal with health care reform FIRST. We can't have them be scared by the Blue Dog Democrats and the lying Republicans into cutting back subsidies for Americans, getting rid of the national insurance exchange, and putting in state-based co-ops into the health care reform package.

Please keep up with the phone calls to the Democratic leadership, the three chairmen of the House committees, the leaders of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, the members of the Energy and Commerce Committee, and the White House today!

The numbers are at the link.

I don't totally agree with the idea that members of Congress will get whacked if they go home in August - those who favor reform will show up at those meetings, too. But there are a lot of reasons to argue against delay, which simply slows momentum. It turns out that Republicans enacted a pro forma one-week delay on voting for Sonia Sotomayor in the Senate Judiciary Committee just so they could push out her confirmation vote on the floor an extra week, taking up time for the Senate and delaying the bill further. All of this could go away simply by eliminating the three-week August recess and forcing Congress to keep doing their job. It's smart politics in addition to smart policy.

No recess. Spread the word.

...Sen. Jay Rockefeller just said he'd stay in Washington to work on reform. Dick Durbin, by contrast, doesn't think the Senate will have a bill by the recess. There's an easy answer for that - don't have the recess.

Obama Cracks Down On The Blue Dogs

The President met with key Blue Dog Democrats on the House Energy and Commerce Committee last night, and they appear to have reached an agreement on the MedPAC reform that the White House has been pushing to get Medicare structural issues out of politics and into the hands of independent observers that can work to lower costs system-wide.

The White House's proposal to strengthen the Medicare Payment Advisory Committee, which makes recommendations on how Medicare pays health care providers, won support from Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) and Rep. Frank Pallone (D-NJ), according to Rep. Mike Ross (D-AR), but they haven't finalized an agreement.

"We came out of the meeting with an understanding that we're moving in that direction, based on the fact that the CBO tells us that it's the biggest single item we can address as it relates to cost containment," Ross told Dow Jones.

Ross also said they agree with Obama's four main goals for health care reform, according to Politico.

"He said it must be deficit neutral. He said it must contain cost and reduce health care inflation. He said we've got to cover as many people as we possibly can, making health insurance affordable for them. And that we need insurance reform, that we've got to cover pre-existing conditions. We share all of those principles, all those concerns," Ross said.

Kevin Drum likes the idea and agrees that rate setting should get nowhere near Congressional appropriators. Just the President's engagement on this issue is winning converts, as Blue Dogs assess their own self-preservation and recognize that Democrats either hang together or hang separately, with those in vulnerable districts like them the first in the noose.

Does the MedPAC inclusion turn the House bill into a bill that cuts costs? Some experts believe it does even without MedPAC reform, and that the CBO is just being too conservative. Of course, the CBO probably won't score something like MedPAC reform in the bill anyway, and then skittish Blue Dogs will claim that did nothing to control costs. Then there's this problem, which I hadn't fully grasped:

...the cost of expanding coverage--that is, strengthening Medicaid and giving people subsidies with which they can purchase insurance--comes to a little over $1 trillion over ten years. The House bill raises a roughly equal amount of money through a combination of savings within the health system (changes to Medicare reimbursement, etc.) and an income tax surtax on very wealthy people. So it's deficit neutral in that sense. (what about the money employers who don't provide health care would pay, is that included in this?)

The "but" is because of what's called the "sustainable growth rate" or SGR. Every year, there is supposed to be an automatic reduction in Medicare payments to physicians. Every year, Congress at the last second postpones the cut, because it would have a drastic effect on physician incomes and perhaps (as a result) the availability of physician services. Obama and the Democrats said they it's time to 'fess up and admit that nobody is going to allow those cuts to take place. But doing that means we're on the hook for another $200 billion in spending over the next ten years.

Some would say you have to include that in the cost of a reform plan, particularly since that promise was a key reason the American Medical Association now says it supports reform. And if you do that, the House plan does not pay for itself. It's in the red for about $200 billion over ten years. (I'm rounding figures to keep it simple.)

Others would say it's essentially a separate expenditure--an obligation we were already forced to meet and that shouldn't be added to the price tag of reform. The wonks say "it's baked in the cake already."

So that must be where conservatives are getting that number, although Nancy Pelosi sent out a press release three days ago that says paygo legislation will cover that SGR and even produce a surplus. It sounds like the AMT patch that gets added every year to save middle-income taxpayers $80 billion dollars. We never outright fix these things, and our overall budget suffers because numbers-crunchers expect that money to be there before Congress pulls out the rug.

With all of these knotty questions, I don't think anyone should be surprised that the timeline is slipping. The House may be able to pass a bill, and the Senate Finance Committee may be able to come up with some agreement, by the August break.

Which begs the question, why go on break at all? We have this enormous bill that's central to our economy, a deadline to deal with it either as a standalone or through budget reconciliation, and the Congress wants to go home for three weeks? In three weeks in America, 143,250 people lose their health care on average, 53,000 slip into bankruptcy for medical reasons, and 1,265 die without coverage. Why go on recess? Staying to finish the job would alleviate the worry of Reps. "getting hammered" in their districts (though I actually don't think it would go that way) and would keep on the timeline that the White House wants.

No recess.

Forward Movement By Staying In DC

Ron Wyden just said on Andrea Mitchell that he would be prepared to put off the August recess to get health care done. The President would not commit to that in his conference call with bloggers, but I think it's a good idea. The House doesn't want to vote before the Senate. I think that's clear. The Blue Dogs, who are meeting with the President today, don't want to take a tough vote that they might not have to take, depending on the Senate Finance Committee's proposals. At the same time, I think even Democrats who are essentially conservative understand that their days are numbered if nothing passes. The reason Jim DeMint's quote about "Obama's Waterloo" is so powerful, the reason that internal GOP memos calling on Republicans to "engage in every activity" to slow down a bill, with the concurrent notion that it would sink the Democratic agenda and the Democratic President, is because it's fundamentally correct. Certainly the President knows that, that's why he's using it as a rallying cry. And the lesson of 1994 is that, with an unpopular President, the first group to pay the price in midterm elections are the same moderate Democrats resisting passage.

There's another former congressman who was frequently associated with the centrists and who learned this lesson rather well. Before Rahm Emmanuel was Barack Obama's chief of staff, he was in Congress trying to get guys like Minnick elected. In September of 2007, he gave an interview to Politico on the lessons he learned from 1994. “You’ve got to have a plan for universal coverage," Emmanuel said. "But you also have to have some product at the end of the process you can deliver.” You may not win, in other words. But you cannot fail to pass a bill.

Emmanuel has carried that lesson with him into the Obama White House. "The only thing that's not negotiable is success," he likes to say. The worst outcome for the party -- in part because it's the worst outcome for its marginal members -- is defeat. Voters punish defeat. That's what happened to Minnick's Democratic predecessor in Idaho's First District, Larry LaRocco. LaRocco captured the seat in 1990 only to lose it in 1994, the last time Democrats failed to sign a health-care reform bill. It's possible, of course, that LaRocco would have lost his seat with or without health-care reform. But it's evidence that a bill not passing was not a great outcome for Idaho's lonely Democratic congressman. If you're a centrist in a district that doesn't like Democrats and events turn your constituents further against your party, your odds of survival are very poor.

This may mean that Democrats get a bill that isn't particularly good, which would eventually bite back at them as well, but over a longer time horizon and with the ability to tweak in the interim.

The best way to make everyone happy is to push back the deadline but keep everyone in Washington to work on it. It shows that Congress is diligent and willing to work out the details. If everyone's worried about reaction in the districts (which I think is a bit unfounded) during the recess, don't have one! Stay on schedule by continuing to work.