Making Blue Dogs Blue

The Hill reports that the Speaker will respond to pressure from progressives and move the health care bill back to the left when she merges the competing measures from committee:

Speaker Pelosi is nixing a deal she cut with centrists to advance health reform, said a source familiar with negotiations.

Pelosi’s decision to abandon the agreement that was made with a group of Blue Dogs to get the bill out of committee would steer the healthcare legislation back to the left as she prepares for a floor vote.

Pelosi is planning to include a government-run public option in the House version of the healthcare bill. She wants to model it on Medicare, with providers getting reimbursed on a scale pegged to Medicare rates.

"The speaker is full-steam-ahead," said a senior Democratic aide.

Let's be clear who broke the agreement. The Blue Dogs and Waxman negotiated a deal to water down the public option but still include it in a final bill. Mike Ross came back from recess and said he could not support a public option whatsoever. At that point, the deal ended. And Ross, secure with his payoff from a pharmacy chain from a couple years back, has nobody to blame but himself.

This puts the House bill in the best negotiating position for the inevitable conference committee. Obviously the public option is a compromise in itself, but further grinding it into nothing would have made it nearly impossible to defend its inclusion in conference. Pelosi is determined to have the House be an equal player in this debate, and that starts by her passing the best bill possible from her chamber.

In other good news, the single-payer bill, HR 676, will finally get a score from the Congressional Budget Office. This score could be an excellent tool for advocates down the road, and it's sad that it's taken this long for such a score to be calculated.

The People's House

One of the more persistent problems with our democracy is the distance between politicians and the people. This is exacerbated by the gradual increase of the constituency, since the House of Representatives has not been expanded in almost 100 years. In the Senate it's far worse, as equal protection laws are violated on a daily basis, with my representation in California equaling the representation of Wyoming, despite this state having 74 times as many people in it. This problem of unequal representation exists in the House as well, and a group of lawyers have organized a challenge to the status quo, calling for an expansion of the House to address these inequities.

The most populous district in America right now, according to the latest Census data, is Nevada’s 3rd District, where 960,000 people are represented in the House by just one member. All of Montana’s 958,000 people likewise have just one vote in the House. By contrast, 523,000 in Wyoming get the same voting power, as do the 527,000 in one of Rhode Island’s two districts and the 531,000 in the other.

That 400,000-person disparity between top and bottom has generated a federal court challenge that is set to be filed Thursday in Mississippi, charging that the system effectively disenfranchises people in certain states. The lawsuit asks the courts to order the House to fix the problem by increasing its size from 435 seats to at least 932, or perhaps as many as 1,761. That way, the plaintiffs argue, every state can have districts that are close to parity.

“When you look at the data, those are pretty wide disparities,” said Scott Scharpen, a former health care financial consultant from California who has organized the court challenge. “As an American looking at it objectively, how can we continue with a system where certain voters’ voting power is substantially smaller than others’?”

No incumbent will really want to change a system that dilutes their own power. They won't even sign off on giving DC voting rights in the House and expanding the body to 437 (there's an extra member for Utah in that compromise measure). But for decades, this was standard practice, with the House expanding from 65 members to 435. Other countries have governing bodies of up to 600 members despite having smaller countries. Our Congressional districts hold 700,000 people on average, which is just incredibly unwieldy. This would also rejigger the Electoral College in Presidential elections, as each state gets electoral votes based on their number of Representatives. Adding seats to shrink Congressional districts would dilute the inequity of the Senate in those elections and move us closer to a one-person, one-vote standard there.

Really we should have a unicameral legislature and a national popular vote for President, but those are a way off. The Supreme Court has never weighed in on mandating additional House members, and given the current makeup, not much good may come of that either. But it's time to build a political coalition for these changes. The bigger a Congressional district gets, the further removed that member of Congress gets from the people. It leads to Blue Dogs who don't vote their districts but can fake it using campaign contributions from corporate interests. It makes it harder for challengers to raise their profile. If you want to spark something TRULY populist, contra the teabaggers, it would be to expand the House of Representatives.

SAFRA Passes House

SAFRA, the student loan bill to end the privatization of loans already backed by the government, passed the House just now by a vote of 253-171. 6 Republicans (Buchanan, Cao, Johson (IL), Petri, Platts, Ros-Lehtinen) voted yes; 4 Democrats (Boyd, Herseth Sandlin, McMahon, Kanjorski) voted no. Considering that Stephanie Herseth-Sandlin is from the wholly owned banking state of South Dakota, that's impressive party unity, probably because it's indefensible not to be for this bill. As Gail Collins explains today:

It would simplify the federally guaranteed loan system, save an estimated $87 billion over 10 years and use that money to increase aid to low-income students, improve community colleges and raise standards for early childhood education.

Let us stop here and recall how the current loan system works:

1) Federal government provides private banks with capital.

2) Federal government pays private banks a subsidy to lend that capital to students.

3) Federal government guarantees said loans so the banks don't have any risk.

And now, the proposed reform:

1) The federal government makes the loans.

Wow. You really do wonder why nobody came up with this idea before.

Given all of the other profit centers that the banking industry has opened up, and the clear logic of the bill, maybe they figured they can't stop this one. If it runs into trouble in the Senate, it could easily move through reconciliation since the whole point of it is to end wasteful subsidies to the private lending market, which expand the deficit. I think there will be 50 votes for this, as Pell Grants are popular, the private loan market serves no purpose whatsoever, and another part of the bill offers challenge grants for early childhood education, another broadly popular priority.

So I believe we are going to see this change in higher education. And millions of college-age students, many of whom supported Barack Obama in record numbers, will recognize this almost immediately in higher Pell grants, cheaper loans and simpler forms. Savvy play, as well as a good policy.

Wishing He Could Take It Back, Maybe?

Rep. Joe Wilson is trailing his 2010 opponent in a snap poll taken days after his outburst on the House floor.

Republican Congressman Joe Wilson trails challenger Rob Miller 44-43 in the wake of his shouting out ‘you lie’ during President Obama’s speech to Congress on Wednesday night. Wilson defeated Miller 54-46 in the 2008 election.

62% of voters in his district say they disapprove of Wilson’s actions while just 29% think they were ok. While there is consensus on that, respondents were pretty divided about whether the substance of his comment- that Obama was lying- is correct. 42% say they think the President was lying while 46% believe he was not.

Wilson’s approval rating comes in at 41%, with 47% of voters disapproving of his job performance. He gets good marks from 68% of Republicans, 38% of independents, and 11% of Democrats.

“In a matter of seconds Joe Wilson turned himself from a safe incumbent into one of the most vulnerable Republicans in the country for 2010,” said Dean Debnam, President of Public Policy Polling.

In an almost more important statistic, Obama has an approval rating of 50% in this lean-conservative district, better than what he yielded here (45%) in 2008.

Meanwhile, Democrats are prepping the full-on hissy, in a rare show of political savvy.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi has agreed the House should vote next week on scolding Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.) for his outburst during President Barack Obama's speech unless he apologies on the floor of the House.

"There was a violation of the rules of the House," said Pelosi spokesman Brendan Daly. "It needs to be resolved by an apology or a resolution."

A Democrat, likely House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), will introduce a "resolution of disapproval" Monday or Tuesday unless Wilson formally apologizes on the House floor. The House returns Monday.

This isn't censure, but a resolution that forces people on the record. Some Democrats would claim that this distracts from the overall goal of health care, but I disagree for a couple reasons. One, the media's focused on it anyway and there's no stopping their soccer scrum. Two, this puts Republicans in a rough position and a tough vote and that's always desirable. Three, it highlights the obstructionism of Republicans in a way that looks bad for them contrasted with the President's speech.

I don't know if it will matter ultimately, both to the overall health care debate or to Wilson's chances in 2010, which is a long way off. But it rides an activist-driven wave, which is always good. Now if Max Baucus and Kent Conrad can stop caving to Wilson's demands...

UPDATE: Other outlets are calling it censure.

A Compromise In The Other Direction

While the deal reached between Henry Waxman and a core group of Blue Dog Democrats on the health care bill in the House Energy and Commerce Committee was reported as offering modest concessions, in truth the subsidies would have really dried up for families making between 300-400% of federal poverty level. Progressives revolted, mainly because the subsidy climb-downs attack the larger idea of offering affordable health insurance for everyone, the central goal of the program. So they revolted, and Waxman had to re-bargain with everyone to get a decent compromise of the compromise.

Liberals and a small core of conservative Democrats set aside long-standing ideological differences early Friday to cut a deal that should allow the House Energy and Commerce Committee to approve a sweeping health care bill, breaking a two-week deadlock that threatened President Barack Obama’s top domestic priority.

Blue Dog Democrats on the committee, who are the linchpin in the House health care debate, agreed to allow their liberal colleagues to cut billions from existing government-funded health care programs in order to restore some $50 billion to $65 billion in subsidies set aside in the bill to help middle-income families purchase coverage.

This final agreement should clear the way for committee passage later today. Energy and Commerce is the last of the three House committees to consider the bill, so passage will put the package in the hands of party leaders for a titanic fight when Congress returns in the fall over the government's role in health care [...]

The Blue Dogs preserved one of their main objectives: de-coupling the so-called public plans from Medicare, a change that gives health care providers the right to negotiate payments with the government.

Those rates were only scheduled for the first three years anyhow. My guess is that will be returned when the House bills get merged from all three committees in September, especially if progressives keep up the pressure. What's important now is to get the Energy and Commerce bill out of committee.

Let's understand how this happened. Blue Dogs held out for a deal. Progressives, instead of taking it to get the larger goal, revolted and got 57 names on a letter vowing not to support any Blue Dog compromise. The Blue Dogs, who came into this wanting to kill the public plan option, ending up voting it out of committee in Energy and Commerce and allowing for expanded subsidies. And progressives are STILL not satisfied, as it should be, because Medicare rates and providers should be tied to the public plan over its entire lifespan, and the plan (and the insurance exchange) should be available to everyone regardless of employer.

Moreover, the liberals also expressed a political concern, saying House leaders had compromised too early. “Under the agreement, private insurers are coming off unscathed,” said Representative Peter Welch, Democrat of Vermont.

He added, “They do quite well — too well, frankly.”

Representative Eliot L. Engel, Democrat of New York, said, “The public plan was eviscerated” under the deal announced Wednesday to get the bill moving again in the Energy and Commerce Committee.

Mr. Engel was less than enthusiastic about the resulting legislation. “It’s not a terrible bill,” he said, “but it’s not what I had hoped for.”

There was an abortion policy amendment in the committee that tries to split the difference by affirming that insurers "would not be required or forbidden to cover abortion." I'd prefer that the public plan be accorded the same benefits toward the most widely used outpatient procedure in America that 90% of all private plans cover, and we'll see where that debate goes.

Also hurting the Blue Dogs' cause is this WaPo front-pager, almost unquestionably meant to coincide with progressive discontent over the compromise, showing the amount of health industry money these so-called fiscal conservatives are swimming in.

The roiling debate about health-care reform has been a boon to the political fortunes of Ross and 51 other members of the Blue Dog Coalition, who have become key brokers in shaping legislation in the House. Objections from the group resulted in a compromise bill announced this week that includes higher payments for rural providers and softens a public insurance option that industry groups object to. The deal also would allow states to set up nonprofit cooperatives to offer coverage, a Republican-generated idea that insurers favor as an alternative to a public insurance option.

At the same time, the group has set a record pace for fundraising this year through its political action committee, surpassing other congressional leadership PACs in collecting more than $1.1 million through June. More than half the money came from the health-care, insurance and financial services industries, marking a notable surge in donations from those sectors compared with earlier years, according to an analysis by the Center for Public Integrity.

A look at career contribution patterns also shows that typical Blue Dogs receive significantly more money -- about 25 percent -- from the health-care and insurance sectors than other Democrats, putting them closer to Republicans in attracting industry support.

Most of the major corporations and trade groups in those sectors are regular contributors to the Blue Dog PAC. They include drugmakers such as Pfizer and Novartis; insurers such as WellPoint and Northwestern Mutual Life; and industry organizations such as America's Health Insurance Plans. The American Medical Association also has been one of the top contributors to individual Blue Dog members over the past 20 years.

Progressives are running the absolute right game in the House, forcing compromises in their direction and making sure they will be heard in this debate. Unfortunately, on the other side of the Capitol, you have health care policy literally in the hands of Chuck Grassley, who is promising his party he won't strike a deal on any bill with Democrats while SITTING IN ON MEETINGS AIMED AT STRIKING A DEAL in the Senate Finance Committee. The unicameral legislature concept is looking better and better every day.

Reproductive Health In The House Bill

Following up on an earlier item, Dana Goldstein takes a look at the House Tri-Committee health care bill, with respect to reproductive rights:

• An expert medical commission led by the surgeon general will decide what services must be covered by the public plan and all private plans operating within the new Health Insurance Exchanges. This is a victory for reproductive rights organizations, which were worried that if such decisions were left up to the Health and Human Services secretary, access to contraceptives and abortion would be limited under future anti-choice administrations.

• The bill mentions "family planning" coverage both in the context of Medicaid and the public plan, but uses a definition of "family planning" that excludes abortion. So it refers explicitly to contraceptive coverage, but not to abortion coverage.

• Yet according to Democrats' summary of the bill, the public plan will "meet the same benefit requirements and comply with the same insurance market reforms as private plans." This could be interpreted as friendly to contraception and even abortion coverage within the public plan, since 90 percent of all current private health plans cover abortion at least in some cases, and 89 percent cover contraception.

• Medicaid currently covers only very poor women and their kids. Under this plan, all individuals and families within 133 percent of poverty are eligible for the program, a huge expansion. But as expected, nothing in the bill appears to threaten the Hyde Amendment, which currently bans Medicaid from paying for abortions. So we could be looking at a public plan that has generous reproductive health coverage, alongside a Medicaid plan for the poorest Americans that continues to severely limit states when it comes to abortion and contraception benefits.

Goldstein has written about how Democrats don't have the votes to overturn the Hyde Amendment right now. The question is whether the other side has the votes to extend it. Just this morning I heard a Louisiana Congresscritter fulminating about "taxpayer-funded abortions," despite the fact that the public plan in the House bill is designed to be self-sustaining, meaning that not one dime of taxpayer funding would go to anything the public plan covers. I'm waiting for this to go full-blown and hear everyone in the conservative noise machine go to 11 on it. We'll have to be ready.

Tri-Committee Bill Released

I should mention that the Tri-Committee health care reform bill from the House has been released, and rather than bend to the dictates of marginalized Blue Dogs who value their relationships with the health care industry over their constituents, they created a pretty darn good bill. It's not perfect, of course, but it represents a far better bill on the left flank than, say, the Waxman-Markey bill did.

I'll post the brief on what the reform bill does for consumers:

LOWER COSTS
• No more co-pays or deductibles for preventive care
• No more rate increases for pre-existing conditions, gender, or occupation
• An annual cap on your out-of-pocket expenses
• Group rates of a national pool if you buy your own plan
• Guaranteed, affordable oral, hearing, and vision care for your kids

GREATER CHOICE
• Keep your doctor, and your current plan, if you like them
• More choice, with a high quality public health insurance option competing with private insurers

HIGHER QUALITY
• You and your doctors make health care decisions — not insurance companies
• More family doctors and nurses will enter the workforce, helping guarantee access
• Mental health care must be covered

STABILITY & PEACE OF MIND
• No more coverage denials for pre-existing conditions
• No more lifetime limits on how much insurance companies will pay
• No reason to ever make a job or life decision again based on health care coverage

The "national pool" refers to the insurance exchange, which is a hard concept to put into bullet points, but this is a pretty good list of how the average Americans would benefit from this plan.

As to the specifics, here's Ezra Klein, Scarecrow, Mcjoan and Jon Cohn. You'll notice a consensus. 97% of the population would get covered in 10 years. The subsidies are 400% of poverty and Medicaid gets expanded to 133% of poverty - both more generous subsidies than the Senate bills. Insurers are regulated against denying coverage for pre-existing condition or rescission, and the benefits floor is pretty decent. There are caps on out-of-pocket expenses, and efforts at controlling costs. It includes an individual mandate and an employer mandate that gets exempted for certain-sized small businesses. About the worst thing you can say about the bill is that some of the good stuff doesn't happen fast enough (to keep the size of the cost down):

I do have one, not minor concern: It will be a while before people see the best stuff. Most of the major elements--the insurance exchange, the subsidies, the insurance regulations, the public plan--won't come online until 2013 or later. This is, I believe, also true of counterpart bills in the Senate.

There's a sound policy rationale for going slow; it takes a lot of work to set up exchanges, regulations, and the like. But four years is a long time. And I suspect money has a lot to do with the pace. Slower implementation makes it possible to keep the price tag to around $1 trillion.

On the bright side, some provisions--filling in the Medicare drug donut hole, bolsteirng the primary care workforce, among others--would start in the next two years.

The cost of the bill, scored by the CBO at around $1 trillion dollars over 10 years, gets paid with $500 billion in internal cost savings and around $500 billion in new revenues, mostly with a surtax on the wealthy. I prefer other methods, but let's get real about this:

The details haven't been released yet, but most (if not all) of the families that fall under Rangel's tax plan will also be in this 1% range.

These are families that paid a lower rate in 2006 (the last date of available data) than they did 15 years ago. That's not an argument for upping the taxes, of course. But it puts it in perspective. (Confession: If you go back to the Reagan years, the top effective rate is lower. But the current rate is still below the historical average.)

News reports have anticipated Rangel proposing a 1-3% surtax. Even a 3% increase across the board will leave an effective rate lower than it was in 1995.

The President approves of the general approach of the House bill, and the Education and Labor Committee will start markup this week. The bill text is here and a summary is here.

We're off and running.

...more on the surtax from Tim Foley.

Obama's Role In The Health Care Debate

Michael Tomasky says it's time for Obama to knock skulls over health care reform, and he's right. Congress will find this issue difficult to steer unless the President uses some of his political capital, because of the peculiarities of that institution.

Simply put, legislators are rarely courageous. They're not leaders. They're followers. They don't like doing risky things. They like doing things they know are popular.

Think about it. When a case emerges that puts a new twist on, say, child molestation, legislators rush forward with new laws meant to address the problem. The public will back them, and child molesters don't have a lobby.

But changing the country's healthcare system? That's big, and terrifying. It requires taking chances, doing things a new way. Legislators hate that.

In the healthcare case, we can add an ideological element to this. Democratic legislators currently in Congress now have served almost their entire careers during an age of conservative dominance. They've been trained over the course of two or three decades to hear and respond to certain dog whistles.

Lower taxes. Breathe out. Good. More regulation. Tense up. Risky. Free market. Smile. Good. Government. Clench teeth. Scary.

I'm telling you, legislators "reason" in those flash-card sequences. Then, the next thing they think of is their district or state, and they rarely think about the new votes a courageous stand might win them. Instead, they focus nervously on where they might lose votes (and local political, financial and editorial support) as a result of doing something out of the ordinary.

Third, they think of their Washington donor base, and exactly how much money taking an unorthodox position will cost them. Most of them know down to the dollar.

I don't think it's quite as bad as Bill Maher puts it, but yes, it's pretty bad. So Obama clearly has to get involved. And he's starting to do that, with a press conference coming up today, the ABC town hall (although that may come at the issue from the right), and generally a longer shadow cast over the debate. Whether he takes charge now or later, clearly he's edging in to take charge at some appointed moment.

For now, the White House should have as little to do as possible with the various legislative products. Let the committees absorb the blows of the bad weeks. Let the early coalitions present themselves. Let the Republicans show their strategy in the mark-up sessions. Let the CBO score all the different options. Let the legislature familiarize itself with different revenue options. Wait. Wait and wait and wait. Wait until Congress has pushed this as far upfield as it's able.

Then open up the White House. Then have Obama on TV. Then have Rahm on the phone with legislators. Then take Olympia Snowe for a ride on Marine One. The White House can exert explosive force on a piece of legislation, but it can only do so effectively for a short period of time. That was the mistake Clinton White House made in 1994. By the time their legislation was near reality, administration officials were so deeply involved that they couldn't add external momentum. It is not a mistake that Rahm Emmanuel, who watched it all happen firsthand, means to repeat.

But what form will this take? I don't see him as the guy saying "I will veto any bill that doesn't include X," which is what's needed at some point. I think this is a very innovative way to drive the debate, with thousands of horror stories that can be deployed to rebut conservatives or inform the press.

In a major new effort to throw Obama’s campaign apparatus into the push for health care reform, the White House’s political operation is set to launch a massive new online data bank of thousands of health care stories, which will be spread around the country via Obama’s extensive email list, officials familiar with the project tell me.

The new “health care story bank” — as it’s dubbed by Organizing for America, Obama’s reconfigured political and campaign operation run out of the DNC — is perhaps the most ambitious test case yet determining whether the technological apparatus that fueled Obama’s campaign can succeed in driving Obama’s governing agenda [...]

These stories, which OFA had been collecting on its Web site but had not released, will be disseminated to the massive OFA email list, in hopes that campaign-style organizers around the country will use powerful first-hand anecdotes to argue the case for reform — and to push back on opponents’ talking points. There will also be a tool that allow users to flag particular stories as deserving of more attention.

If you collect enough anecdotes, maybe the plural will in FACT be data.

As much as Obama can drive the health care debate, so can a Progressive Block. Conservative Democrats get so much purchase in Washington partially because the town is wired for conservatives, but also because they have the numbers and the will to stop legislation or allow it to move forward. Progressives also have those numbers, but not the will. Until Progressives align themselves, and say forcefully that no legislation will move without their satisfaction, nothing will change on the dynamic in Congress. Conservatives will hijack the debate and force concessions that water down the President's campaign agenda, one which the public voted for in record numbers

Time and time again, conservative Democrats representing between 10% and 25% of their chamber's Democratic caucus have formed a block, joined with Republicans, and successfully weakened, severely threatened, or entirely blocked key elements of the progressive legislative agenda. They were successful in every case despite the ostensible, public support for that agenda by the Obama administration [...]

Instead of 60 votes in the Senate, what progressives need is Democratic control of both branches of Congress, control of the White House, and a progressive block of at least 13 Senators and 45 House members that will vote against Democratic legislation unless their demands are met. What we need is our own version of the Blue Dogs and Evan Bayh's "conservodem" Senate group that is large enough, and staunch enough, to be able to block Democratic legislation by joining with Republicans.

We need this group to draw hard lines in the sand for the two biggest legislative priorities of 2009: health care and climate change. The group needs to make it clear that, if their demands are not met, then no climate change or health care legislation of any sort will be passed. Demands like:

Health care: A public health insurance option that is immediately available to all Americans.
Climate change: Restoring the EPA's ability to regulate carbon and renewable energy targets that surpass those put in place by China..

We actually have this in health care; the Progressive Caucus has vowed to vote against anything that doesn't have a strong public option. So I question the President-centric view of how health care can work. Progressives in the House can drive this as well.

Waxman-Markey Off The Gurney, Onto The Floor

All of a sudden, we're going to have the Waxman-Markey bill on the floor of the US House, as early as Friday, even as negotiations continue with rural Dems who want to keep extracting whatever they can from the bill. It's a very odd moment, considering that the bill was literally called "dead" over the weekend.

The speaker filed the legislation with the Rules Committee on Monday night, her spokesman said, even though its authors, Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Massachusetts Rep. Ed Markey, are still working out a deal with Agriculture Committee Chairman Collin Peterson.

"The bill has been filed tonight with the Rules Committee," Pelosi spokesman Drew Hammill said in an e-mail. "There are some issues still under discussion, but we are confident we can resolve them by the time the bill goes to the floor on Friday."

The speaker, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), Waxman and Peterson "have all agreed on this approach for moving this historic climate change and clean energy jobs bill," Hammill continued.

The Hill speculates on whether it has the votes. I suppose the surprise vote has its merits, in that the opposition is diffuse and unready for a major fight. Then again, the allies of this bill, environmentalists, are at odds over whether it makes sense to pass at all:

Some believe the bill is so deeply flawed it might actually make matters worse; disillusionment with the bill is causing fierce recriminations within the environmental movement and has led to a knockdown, drag-out fight within the Sierra Club.

“This situation represents much more than just a normal legislative fight,” says former Sierra Club president Larry Fahn, who as a current board member has argued that the bill has been watered down to the point of being unsalvageable. “It’s about the core of what we’re now fighting for, and who we are.” [...]

Many environmentalists blame Waxman-Markey’s flaws on the United States Climate Action Partnership (US-CAP), a coalition of industry and moderate environmental groups such as the Natural Resources Defense Council that, during the last years of the Bush administration, quietly hammered out what has become the bill’s framework. Sierra Club board member M.K. Dorsey, a professor of global environmental policy at Dartmouth, calls the environmentalists in US-CAP “well-meaning liberals who do not pay enough attention to political economy.” He adds: “They got out-maneuvered, they got hoodwinked, because they were in over their head.”

US-CAP’s approach hasn’t shifted along with the political climate in Washington, says Michelle Chan, a program director with Friends of the Earth (FoE), a left-of-center environmental group. Given that US-CAP’s environmental members “signed a deal in blood” with companies such as Shell and Duke Energy before the election, “the new politics of Obama never played out in this scenario,” she says. “So the deal doesn't move the ball forward now. We're stuck.”

Other enviros disagree. “I absolutely do not know what people are smoking when they argue that the political climate is different now,” counters Manik Roy, vice president for federal government outreach at the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, a founding member of US-CAP. “We have huge parts of this country that generate electricity from coal, and that are very dependent on manufacturing—none of that has changed.” Nor has the American public’s willingness to overcome those interests, he adds. “Poll after poll is showing that we don’t have a critical mass in this country who are concerned about the urgency of climate change. Until that changes, I think this bill is truly the best we can get in this economic environment.”

I'm not sure where I fall on this argument, and it seems amazing to me that the bill will hit the floor while that conversation plays out. Of course, passing the House and getting to the President's desk are two different things, and even if this gets through the House, it will probably sit on a shelf for a while as the Senate deals with health care.

I don't really have a good recommendation on how to handle this: Waxman-Markey is the only game in town, yet it is certainly flawed in many key respects.

Slightly Less Queasy On Health Care

The House health care bill has been received favorably by advocates and, more importantly, the President:

Today, the Chairs of several Committees in the House of Representatives unveiled their health care reform proposal. This proposal would improve the affordability, availability, and quality of health care and represents a major step toward the our goal of fixing what is broken about health care while building on what works.

Jon Cohn has more. At some point, Obama needs to stop giving favorable nods at the Congress and step hard into this debate. But I feel better about this today than yesterday. Doctors are nodding toward working with Obama, and they are the most respected constituency on this issue. Just getting the AMA to back off and not follow the Chamber of Commerce, wackjob Betsy McCaughey (it's amazing she's running the same shtick from 1993 all over again) and other right-wing groups who want to keep the status quo would be positive.

Igor Volsky has a great comparison of the three bills - the House tri-committee bill, the Senate Finance Committee and the Senate HELP Committee. If we can get it through HELP, two of them will include a public option. Basically it comes down to a freshman Democratic Senator fulfilling Ted Kennedy's lifelong dream:

With Ted Kennedy too sick to come down to DC and make the committee vote, Democrats will need every Senator on the HELP committee to produce a strong bill, a bill that fights for what Teddy Kennedy has been fighting for his entire life. The last holdout is Kay Hagan, who represents a state (NC) that is one of the worst in the country in terms of percent of people without health insurance. The insurance companies are lobbying Hagan against the bill, because they don't like having to compete with a public option. My simple question is this: Teddy Kennedy is too sick to be there, Senator Hagan, so he is relying on your vote for the issue that he has fought for passionately his entire life. Will you betray him to help the insurance companies? You need to make up your mind now.

Sounds like a simple question for Kay Hagan.

Let's Not Give The People What They Want

Blanche Lincoln just can't get behind a public option in health care.

U.S. Sen. Blanche Lincoln, D-Ark., says she prefers private insurance cooperatives to a government-run provider that would compete with the private sector in reforming the nation’s health care system.

“We want to keep what works in the private industry and make it better,” Lincoln told Arkansas reporters in a conference call today. “There’s a lot of discussion about what else we might need that we can’t get from the private sector.”

The senator left the door open to supporting a government-option, though she acknowledged she has reservations.

“One of our biggest concerns is that it doesn’t need to be a government plan that usurps that ability to compete in the marketplace, which I’m concerned that a totally government-run option would do,” she said.

This really doesn't make any sense, other than in the sense that Blanche Lincoln values corporate contributors over her constituents, and doesn't feel that the public can hold her accountable as long as she raises enough money. Because the public plan is wildly popular. In most cases, a wildly popular issue would be precisely the one that could yield bipartisan support. But if that issue is in any way progressive, suddenly, public opinion doesn't matter anymore.

And not only is the idea of a public option popular in the abstract, the inclusion of a robust public option would save a lot of money and thus allow the congress to minimize its reliance on unpopular measures like tax increases. But suddenly here public opinion becomes irrelevant. You never hear a Blue Dog say “my seat is so vulnerable that I can’t afford not to back a super-popular public plan.” Ben Nelson’s not talking about how if Democrats want to stay viable in red states they need to robustly back a 70-20 issue like the public plan. The WSJ doesn’t run a headline saying “Opposition to Public Option Spells Political Trouble for Republicans.” Public opinion, in other words, can be a reason to eschew sound progressive policy but never a reason to enact it.

Exactly. There are these etched in stone "political realities," designed by elites, that say you just cannot cross corporate power. And so we hear nonsense about "fiscal responsibility" as a means to deny the most fiscally responsible option. And we hear that we "have to protect the free market" while denying the choice that would strengthen that market. The public option is nothing so much as trust-busting. And the elites want to keep together the trust.

Meanwhile, the three committees working on this in the House have really stepped up. They released a discussion draft based on the work of all of the relevant Chairmen, which includes a robust public option to keep insurers honest and allow for experimentation in the marketplace. Initially, the plan utilizes Medicare bargaining rates to ramp up, and then will use cost control plans to provide better coverage and more effective care.

I would prefer a single-payer system. But this actually is a significant step, and worth fighting for: a health care plan that offers lower costs, higher quality and better choice. During the press conference (on C-SPAN 3, not cable, because who gives a crap about health care, right?), John Dingell brought up the hearing in the House on rescission, the practice of insurers dropping people the moment they get sick, sometimes for technical violations on their applications like misspelling their name.

An investigation by the House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations showed that health insurers WellPoint Inc., UnitedHealth Group and Assurant Inc. canceled the coverage of more than 20,000 people, allowing the companies to avoid paying more than $300 million in medical claims over a five-year period [...]

Late in the hearing, Stupak, the committee chairman, put the executives on the spot. Stupak asked each of them whether he would at least commit his company to immediately stop rescissions except where they could show "intentional fraud."

The answer from all three executives:

"No."

Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.) said that a public insurance plan should be a part of any overhaul because it would force private companies to treat consumers fairly or risk losing them.

"This is precisely why we need a public option," Dingell said.

Here's the YouTube of that hearing. It should have 10 million hits by the end of next week.



Here's a Splicd version of the moment where they all refuse to commit to stop rescinding people when they get sick.

TEN MILLION VIEWS.

Crackdown Ordered Up

Ali Khamenei's speech during Friday prayers do not bode well for the protestors in the streets. Here's Jim Sleeper:

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's speech gives a virtual green light to the thuggish -- and massive -- Basij militia. It also raises the "moral" and Iranian constitutional ante on future demonstrations. From now on, demonstrations aren't legitimate petitioning for redress of grievances. They're civil disobedience - and, in Iran, something worse.

In civil-disobedience, you break a law non-violently and accept the legal penalty, to show that it's the unjust law that has betrayed the constitution, not your breaking a bad law publicly in order to defend the very rule of law. But in Iran, demonstrating will now require even more moral and physical courage than it did yesterday, or than civil disobedience does here. It will be cast as disobedience to the constitution itself - to the "Supreme Leader."

Watch the first 20 seconds of his speech and see his listeners' quintessentially fascist salutes, and you know what's coming.

To say that Khamenei warned the protestors is kind of an understatement. He's probably just going to expand the tactics that have already been put into place in the smaller cities where there is no international media.

However, Juan Cole sees green shoots:

AFP estimated the size of the demonstration as similar to the one on Monday. Some reporters thought a million people came out on Monday, though I prefer to be conservative on crowds, since it is easy to overestimate their size. Several hundred thousand, perhaps half a million, would be impressive enough. Such massive numbers of discontented urbanites tell you that change may well be in the air. The 2006 demonstration by an estimated 500,000 people in Los Angeles against immigration restrictions on Latinos (a la Tom Tancredo et al.) was in retrospect a harbinger of big trouble for the Republican Party in national US politics [...]

The clerical hierarchy is itself increasingly split. It might have been expected that disgraced Grand Ayatollah Husayn Ali Montazeri, now under house arrest, would issue a letter in support of the protests. (Montazeri was once heir apparent to Imam Ruhollah Khomeini but his criticisms of regime practices and of clerical dictatorship led to his marginalization and ultimately arrest.) But former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani is alleged to be trying to drum up support for Mousavi among senior clerics in the holy city of Qom. There are persistent rumors that reformist Ayatollah Yusuf Sani'i has given legal rulings that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is not president of Iran [...]

The regime, surely fearing a popular revolution of the sort that toppled the shah in 1978-79, is using carrots and sticks to try to deal with an unpredictable situation. So far, however, both inducements and crackdowns have been a pittance. Several hundred protest leaders have been arrested, but when you've got hundreds of thousands out in the streets every day, a few hundred arrests don't mean much and clearly aren't intimidating anyone. In fact, they backfire by angering the protesters and ensuring they return the next day. The arrest of ailing former foreign minister Ibrahim Yazdi at his hospital was particularly cruel. Some rumors have it that the regime was forced to release him back to the hospital, so poor is his health.

Babak Rahimi, in Tehran, sees the situation as being as unpredictable as that of fall 1978 when it was not apparent whether the shah would survive or the regime would fall.

I'd like to think that this could tip in the way of popular reform, but Tiananmen seems more likely to me.

Meanwhile, at the same time that Iranian regime leaders are accusing the US of meddling and making themselves look foolish, the US Congress plans to meddle with a nonbinding resolution today supporting the demonstrators, which seems somewhat benign but just plays into the hardliner's hands. NIAC explains.

This measure is almost guaranteed to pass–probably with an overwhelming number of votes–which will unfortunately put the Congress directly at odds with the White House in responding to the crisis in Iran. Up to now, the President has been very cautious not to be seen as choosing one side over the other in the election dispute, saying he doesn’t want the US to become the story inside Iran. But the Congress seems poised to speak out more vocally on the subject, choosing to come down squarely on the side of the dissidents [...]

As we’ve been saying for some time now, the President has it right here. Though of course everyone supports free and fair democracies, Iran is a country in flux at the moment. If US political figures come out in strong support for Mousavi, then what? Won’t Ahmadinejad just use that to declare Mousavi is a puppet of the West? That certainly won’t do much to help the cause for reform in Iran.

This isn't about it. We shouldn't offer the opportunity to make it that way.

...Henry goddam Kissinger supports the President's stance, ferchrissakes.

The House Gives Thumbs-Up To Obama's War

The White House muscled through a bill yesterday in the House of Representatives that provides $106 billion dollars in supplemental funding, much of it for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also a controversial measure adding $5 billion to a line of credit for the IMF, some pandemic flu funding, a bunch of planes that the Air Force never even requested, and a Christmas tree of other proposals. The final margin was 226-202, with 32 Democrats sticking to their positions and voting no (5 Republicans voted yes). Fortunately the photo-suppression amendment was stripped out of the bill, a small but important victory (although I can't seem to gather whether or not it was stuffed into the bill regulating tobacco). There's also a major initiative in the bill called "cash for clunkers," which I want to address in a separate post.

Jane Hamsher did some amazing work getting the White House to sweat over this, and she ought to be commended for it. Rahm Emanuel really backed himself into a corner by putting the IMF funding inside the war spending bill. Democrats in tough districts got forked - support the bill and you voted for bailing out European banks, oppose it and you voted to abandon troops on the battlefield. I suppose the same could be said for Republicans, but Democrats pulling the "he voted against the troops" trick never seems to work. As for stopping the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, clearly we have about 30 votes for that in the House, which is kind of pitiful. Jane was able to do the work she did by leveraging Republican opposition.

Just remember:

They had to hold it open 10 extra minutes and after the Dems hit 218 and there were five GOP votes that scurried in under the wire.

We made the President of the United States himself whip to get the votes.

We tried to make the Dems fight like this when Bush was in office to stop funding the war, but they wouldn't--so we did it ourselves.

I'm very proud to have worked with every single one of you. This was going to be a rout. They had to work for it.

Let's do it again.

I wish the timeline language was in the Iraq part of the funding, since the Administration has repeatedly vowed to honor the status of forces agreement. And an endgame strategy in the incomparably difficult maze in Afghanistan would also be nice. But it's now Obama's war, and should it go awry, he'll receive a deserved amount of blame.

A nice reform for Congress, though one that would never happen, would be to end the practice of adding unrelated riders to must-pass spending bills.

Priorities, Pt. II

The House passed a budget resolution tonight, one that largely contours to Barack Obama's outline, on a vote of 233-196, with all Republicans opposed. The President responded favorably, saying that "Tonight, the House of Representatives took another step toward rebuilding our struggling economy." But that was but one of a host of budgets that were voted upon today.

The Progressive Caucus advanced a plan to spend hundreds of billions more on domestic programs than Obama, while cutting back on his defense budget. It failed, 348-84.

Next came a proposal from the conservative Republican Study Conference that would have cut Obama's domestic spending proposals, and reduced taxes. It was defeated, 322-111.

The Congressional Black Caucus proposed immediately repealing Bush-era tax cuts for wealthy taxpayers, while adding a new tax on couples making over $1 million. It called for greater spending on domestic programs,including education, transportation and job training. It fell, 318-113.

House Republicans presented a comprehensive alternative, including a provision to eliminate the current traditional Medicare program as an option for anyone currently under 55. Upon turning 65, their Medicare coverage would come only from plans operated by private insurance companies. Their costs would be paid at least in part with government funds.

Supporters said the change would prevent Medicare from going broke.

The Republican budget was rejected 293-137. More than three dozen members of the GOP rank and file voted against it, and several officials said the internal opposition stemmed in large measure from controversy surrounding the Medicare proposal.

Good to know that eliminating Medicare is more popular in the House of Representatives than cutting one dime of that defense budget. But at least we're closing the gap!

How Dare You Hand Me $25 Billion Dollars!

There was a House hearing with CEOs of the top banks today, where the banksters took a mostly conciliatory tone.

The banking executives said they were aware of the ill will that surrounded them.

“It is abundantly clear that we are here amidst broad public anger at our industry,” said Lloyd C. Blankfein, the chief of Goldman Sachs. “Many people believe — and, in many cases, justifiably so — that Wall Street lost sight of its larger public obligations.”

Lawmakers brought up the overarching question of the day. “What did you do with the new money?” asked Gary L. Ackerman, Democrat of New York, who said it seemed to him that the banks were not loaning out the funds they received from government.

Each of the bankers outlined the ways in which they had used the government capital. Goldman, for instance, increased its financing to clients like Sallie Mae and Verizon Wireless. Morgan Stanley said it had made $10.6 billion in new commercial loans and $650 million in loan commitments to consumers.

And the bankers were emphatic that they were continuing to make loans.

“We have every incentive to lend,” said Kenneth D. Lewis, the chief executive of Bank of America. “And despite the recessionary headwinds, we are lending.”

The claim is that the credit crunch is the fault of the secondary market and not the banks, which is actually plausible. But this is the part that gets me.

At the House Financial Services Committee hearing minutes ago, Rep. Joe Baca (D-CA-43) asked the following question:

"How do you feel about the bailout? Do you feel that the bailout was necessary?"

I thought that was just about the biggest softball I'd ever heard. Imagine my surprise!

Lloyd Blankfein, CEO, Goldman Sachs:

"I don't necessarily think it was necessary at the time, but -- and this was said at the time -- they were looking ahead at an emerging recession that was going to get worse, and for prudential reasons, it was necessary for the systemic safety and soundness. And as subsequent events have borne out, I think it has provided safety and soundness, and taken some of the risk away from the system."

Ken Lewis, CEO, Bank of America:

"I actually agree. I know at the time we did not feel like we needed the 15 billion. But I think in light of the severity of the recession, and in light of the speed at which the economy deteriorated, I think we have lent more money because we had the TARP funds and that level of capital."

Like we did these people a favor for paying them off after they nearly sunk the global economy. And this isn't the first time the banksters have grumbled about all that money they were being handed. In fact, today's New York Times quotes executives who want to return the money and get the government off their backs:

Even before the government announced its latest efforts to fix the troubled banking industry on Tuesday, executives at Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley said they wanted to repay the money quickly. Both banks received $10 billion under the first rescue plan last fall.

Paying back all those funds would be difficult in this tough economic environment. But banking executives worry that the government may intrude further into their businesses as long as they are beholden to Washington.

“We just think that operating our business without the government capital would be an easier thing to do,” said David A. Viniar, the chief financial officer of Goldman. “We’d be under less scrutiny, and under less pressure. Not that we’d be out of the public eye; we’re still going to be in the public eye.”

Please. There is no way a bunch of insolvent banks can even make it without government help. If there was, the loans would be repaid tomorrow. They can't raise the equity that needs to be offered to taxpayers in place of their money. And let's get to what this is really about - banksters want to save their precious bonuses, the ones they've been handing out to their employees without even hesitating, despite playing with taxpayer money. The claim in the House session today was that TARP money didn't go toward bonuses, which makes no sense whatsoever since money in the hands of the bank is money in the hands of the bank no matter where it came from. They and their friends in the Republican caucus are indignant that they can be told how much to earn (Republicans had no problem telling union auto workers how much they could earn, by the way). They want to be free to reward their friends and colleagues with bonuses... I mean retention payments:

Two Wall Street firms that received at least $60 billion in government bailout funds will be rewarding their financial advisers with controversial retention payments, the terms of which one senior executive described as "very generous" in audio obtained by the Huffington Post.

The soon-to-be-merged financial giants -- Morgan Stanley and Citigroup's Smith Barney -- announced the payments during an internal conference call last week, but warned advisers against describing them in terms that would cause PR headaches.

"There will be a retention award. Please do not call it a bonus," said James Gorman, co-president of Morgan Stanley. "It is not a bonus. It is an award. And it recognizes the importance of keeping our team in place as we go through this integration."

Banksters are indignant that they actually have to be accountable to anyone. They'd rather have to lay off entire floors of office workers than have to give back their precious penthouses.

UPDATE: MoveOn did a nice action on the Hill today, seeking answers and accountability from the banksters. Good luck with that.

Presidents Nelson, Collins Upbeat After Saving Bipartisanship

Washington (BP) - Presidents Susan Collins, the historic first female President, and Ben Nelson, the historic first Nebraskan President (OK, Ford, but he was only born there), were reported in good spirits after working long into the night to save bipartisanship on the $780 billion dollar stimulus package. Just three weeks after their inauguration, they were able to avert the bipartisanship crisis and come together to restore the faith of everyone working as on-air or print talent in the media industry in the vicinity of Georgetown, Bethesda, MD and Arlongton, VA.

Sen. Ben Nelson, a Democrat from Nebraska and one of the chief negotiators of the plan, said senators had trimmed the plan to $827 billion in tax cuts and spending on infrastructure, housing and other programs that would create or save jobs.

"We trimmed the fat, fried the bacon and milked the sacred cows," Nelson said as debate began.

According to several senators, the revised version of the plan axed money for school construction and nearly $90 million for fighting pandemic flu, among other things.

Remaining in the plan are tax incentives for small businesses, a one-year fix of the unpopular alternative-minimum tax and tax-relief for low- and middle-income families, said Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, who was the most prominent Republican negotiator in the bipartisan talks.

"Our country faces a grave economic crisis and the American people want us to work together," she said. "They don't want to see us dividing along partisan lines on the most serious crisis facing our country."

Making the recovery bill safe for tax cuts and free of wasteful spending like $40 billion in aid to states which will now have to lay off hundreds of thousands of workers was "a very liberating process," Presidents Nelson and Collins said before repairing to separate corners of the White House with their families. "It feels good to have that sense of accomplishment that comes with kicking firefighters and teachers out onto the street and seeing others slip into poverty," Nelson and Collins said in unison. "They said it couldn't be done!" The Presidents offered a list of wasteful nonsense that was excised:

In addition to the large cut in state aid, the Senate agreement would cut nearly $20 billion proposed for school construction; $8 billion to refurbish federal buildings and make them more energy efficient; $1 billion for the early childhood program Head Start; and $2 billion from a plan to expand broadband data networks in rural and underserved areas.

Collins and Nelson's chief of staff, former Illinois Congressman Rahm Emanuel, was singled out for praise:

Obama endorsed the moderates' effort and brought its leaders -- Sens. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.), Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) -- to the White House to discuss their proposed cuts. White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel attended the final meetings in Reid's office last night to work out lingering differences. Before Emanuel arrived, Collins said, Democrats were advocating $63 billion in cuts. "Then Rahm got involved, and a much better proposal came forward," she said.

Once the expected Senate passage is completed, the bill will move to a conference committee with the House of Representatives, whose leader, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, called the new package "very damaging" and said she was very much opposed to the cuts. House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn was quoted as saying, "I don't think much of what the Senate is doing." In response, Presidents Collins and Nelson retorted, "Who died and elected them President?"

In other news, state Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) and his team won the Illinois Legislature pick-up basketball game last night by the score of 65-53.

Bredesen? End Of Health Care Reform As We Know It

Getting back into the talk about who will run HHS, the name Phil Bredesen has come up, which makes me stumble around as if I've been punched in the face.

As governor, Bredesen presided over some drastic cuts to TennCare, Tennessee's once innovative effort to reform Medicaid. I wrote about these in my book, Sick:

...it was a Democratic governor who would succeed in enacting the most sweeping cuts: Phil Bredesen of Tennessee. Bredesen knew a thing or two about health care: before getting into politics, he had made his fortune by founding a company called HealthAmerica—one of the fi rst commercial HMOs to cash in on managed care during the late 1980s. This experience, plus his confi dence in his own intellectual abilities (he had a physics degree from Harvard), convinced him that he could wring new efficiencies from Tennessee’s Medicaid system, just as his HMO had generated financial savings—and hefty profits—in the private market.

A lot of what Bredesen proposed to do—such as reducing fraud by providers and recipients, and improving the use of information technology—made sense. But when those quick fixes didn’t bring the TennCare budget under control, he unveiled a more straightforward plan: he would simply slash the program. More than 100,000 people who had qualified for TennCare because they were “medically needy” would lose their coverage altogether. Those allowed to remain in the program would have to make do with more limited benefi ts. The biggest change would be in the coverage of prescription drugs. “The sad reality is that we can’t afford TennCare in its current form,” Bredesen said. “It pains me to set this process in motion, but I won’t let TennCare bankrupt our state. This is the option of last resort.”

While Bredesen undoubtedly faced tough circumstances, he didn't exactly distinguish himself by coming up with creative solutions--or fighting for people who, after all, were among Tennessee's most vulnerable citizens. As liberal advocates protested planned cuts, he fought bitterly with them, threatening even more draconian measures if they wouldn't buy into his programme.

That's not the only reason Bredesen worries me, though. Another concern is characterological. He is typical of the top figures in the health industry I've met over the years: Self-made entrepreneurs a bit too convinced of their own brilliance, completely unaware that the strategies for making private insurers profitable don't help--and often hurt--the sicker, poorer people whom insurance should ideally protect. Their biggest fans are often people who know a ton about health care at the macro level, but haven't spent much time observing it on the ground--where reality is often messier than the statistics suggest.

Ezra Klein has more. I mean, Democrats are already telling America to forget about single payer (hopefully team single payer will have something to say about that), but under Bredesen, you'd basically have to forget about even decent incremental reform.

One bit of good news on that incremental front: the House passed SCHIP today for a second time, and as this bill is in line with the Senate version, it will in all likelihood be signed into law tonight. This is actually pretty good incremental reform, not the kind you'd get with Phil frackin' Bredesen.

...wait, I found somebody worse than Bredesen for HHS. Jim Cooper. The guy that killed the 1994 reform. Think "bigger giveaway to special interests".

No Taxation Without Representation

Residents of DC may finally get a vote in the House under a compromise plan that was reintroduced in the Congress today.

The D.C. House Voting Rights Act will be reintroduced by Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton, Democrat and the District's non-voting House member, and Sens. Joe Lieberman, Connecticut independent, and Orrin G. Hatch, Utah Republican.

The legislation would give one House vote to the District and a fourth one to Utah, which narrowly missed getting an additional seat after the last U.S. Census. Utah, which traditionally leans to the right politically, now has one Democrat and two Republicans in the House and is the next to receive a new seat based on the last census.

"Men and women of the District have fought bravely in our wars, many giving their lives in defense of our country, yet they have no vote on the serious questions of war and peace," Mr. Lieberman said.

If the bill makes it through Congress, it will increase the number of House members for the first time in 96 years.

Obama was a co-sponsor of this bill in the last Congress. He would support it, and with expanded numbers in the Senate, where it got 57 votes the last time around, I would guess that it has a very good chance of passage.

It's absurd that it's taken this long and requires this compromise with Utah. DC got electoral college representation in 1961, and a voting rights Constitutional amendment passed the Congress in 1978 (it failed to get 3/4 of the states to ratify within the seven-year window). It's absurd that we have 581,000 Americans with no voting representation in Congress. If 580,000 white people in Oklahoma were being denied voting rights, you can bet this would have been cleared up by now.

If anything, the proposal isn't bold enough. To rebut the Constitutionality claims, you could give DC statehood and create a small federal district around the White House and government buildings that wouldn't disenfranchise a single American. DC has more residents than Wyoming, so it's not an exceptional scenario. If that was too politically thorny you could retrocede that portion into Virginia or Maryland, and create the same federal district. Furthermore, since the House hasn't expanded their ranks in 96 years and yet the population has doubled many times over, it would make a lot of sense to expand the Congress to 500 members or more, to put the representatives closer to the people they represent.

But this bill at the very least would be an improvement and a victory for democracy. What is being done right now is unconscionable.

America, Your Stimulus Package

I'm sorry, American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan.

In the next two weeks, the House will consider the American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan, which makes long-term investments that are worthy, needed, fully-screened, and based on merit, not politics. Developed with priorities shared by President-elect Obama, the plan will create or save 3 to 4 million American jobs, with an estimated 90 percent of the jobs created in the private sector—getting the American economy moving in the short term and making investments for a stronger economy in the long term. The Chairman’s mark (draft legislation) will be circulated and posted online later today and next week the Ways and Means Committee, Energy and Commerce Committee, and Appropriations Committee will mark-up the legislation.

The bill is actually up here, and if you don't speak Congress, a more readable report is here. The big takeaway is that we're up to an $825 billion dollar package, with 2/3 for investment and 1/3 for tax cuts. That's less than before, and the taxes are more focused on energy and middle-class tax relief than broad corporate cuts, but my sense is that's still a bit out of balance.

There are quite a bit of safeguards in the plan. It mandates no pet projects or earmarks (for now), with full transparency. In addition to Inspector General reviews, monthly reporting, whistleblower protections and competitive bidding, there will be a government website showing where all the stimulus money is headed, and the public will be able to oversee the spending. In addition, all the contracts will be going online, leading to this funny exchange:

ORSZAG: We plan to create a Web site that will contain information about the contracts and include PDFs or contracts themselves, and also financial information about the contracts.

LIEBERMAN: Define PDFs.

Sigh.

Chris Bowers has a very good rundown of where the spending is headed, and so does the aforementioned report from the Appropriations Committee. Practically every sector is going to be seeing a portion of this money, with major expenditures for health care, education, energy and the environment. There is unemployment relief and food stamp increases in the bill, which is good. There is a section called the "State Fiscal Stabilization Fund" that earmarks $79 billion to help the states. That too is good. But overall, this looks more like an omnibus appropriations bill than a targeted spending effort. That's not necessarily bad. But it has people like David Sirota upset.

The Post says the package "includes about $85 billion worth of infrastructure spending, most for highway and bridge construction." That's it - $85 billion in an $850 billion bill.

$85 billion for infrastructure in a nation that now regularly sees bridge collapses, steam pipe explosions, sink holes, dam failures, levee breaks and blackouts.

$85 billion at a time when Obama is demanding another $350 billion blank check for Wall Street.

$85 billion when the American Society of Civil Engineers says we need $1.6 trillion.

$85 billion in the same package that could include hundreds of billions of dollars in corporate tax cuts - many for the banks that created the economic mess. This, at a time when U.S. News & World Report notes that a new poll shows 81 percent of Americans are ready to pay higher taxes to fund significant infrastructure investments.

As Matt Yglesias notes, there is an error in thinking that the stimulus bill alone can solve our infrastructure problem - it can't, and we need to be thinking long-term about how we fund infrastructure (reforming the highway bill to get more money for transit and rail would be a good start). Also, flood control, a key infrastructure need, is included in the energy and environment spending, so there's some overlap here.

In general, this is decent but could be better, and given the drift already in the direction of more spending and less taxes, I would hope for that to continue. However, it's worth noting that everyone and his mother is going to be looking for a piece of the action here, and so "stimulus" could start to look a lot like "bailout" as it grows. Diligence is required.

Fulfilling The Promise Of The Kerry '04 Campaign

The House is going to take up SCHIP again this week. Providing health care to all children is a noble goal, and I trust it will be enacted, but given how much further the plans and goals for universal health care went throughout the general election campaign, it's hard to work up much enthusiasm for it. John Kerry ran on covering all children and catastrophic health services, so in essence this bill catches up to him. Nevertheless, it ought to pass, because at $5 billion dollars, it's a very cost-effective way to expand health care coverage. Children are relatively cheap to cover, and a healthy childhood can lead to a healthy life. Christy Hardin Smith knocks down the objections:

Look for the usual screeching from "scary immigrant" wingnut corners. Fiscal responsibility may be the underpinning, but fiscal conservatism doesn't exactly tug at wingnutty heartstrings these days, or beat the shouting tom toms like scary brown people obviously do. Sad.

From a public health perspective, though, immunization for children entering the country seems logical to me: prevention of the spread of potentially virulent and communicable diseases brought into the country is just plain common sense. How about you?

SCHIP provides a safety net of health care for the most vulnerable in our society. Given the current economic climate, more and more families are going to fall into the cracks -- meaning children who could use health care now to correct a problem which may just get worse over time could use a hand.

Expanding the social safety net at this troubled time is a no-brainer. I look forward to passage of the SCHIP expansion, incremental though the progress may be.