Showdown In The House

There's an important meeting today in the House of Representatives, where progressives and Blue Dogs will likely show their cards on health care reform.

The Blue Dog Coalition is engaged in a member-to-member whip operation in the House, beginning with a survey of its 52 lawmakers, to find out where they stand on critical health care issues. The principal focus is the public insurance option, but the canvass also touches on various tax and revenue increase proposals to pay for reform.

For the first time since they formed in 1995, the Blue Dogs have been out-organized by their liberal counterparts. The Congressional Progressive Caucus completed its first survey and began whipping back in the spring. They launched a final whip count last week that will be finished by Wednesday evening.

The whip count builds on an earlier letter that 60 members of the progressive caucus signed, pledging to oppose any health care bill without a "robust public option."

"We're going back to those people and saying, 'Hey, are you still with the letter?'" said Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-Ariz.), co-chair of the CPC. "And if there's been slippage, how much? And if we have a committed core, how many?"

Grijalva is asking members to back the public option all the way through the process, not simply on the first vote on the House floor.

The count comes in advance of a critical House Democratic caucus meeting Thursday morning in the Capitol, where leadership will take their own whip count. The fate of the public option in the House will be largely determined by the parallel whip efforts -- and how aggressive each bloc is in pushing for its priorities. In other words, it comes down to which pack wants it more, the Blue Dogs or the progressives.

So far, Grijalva has intimated that he still has the votes, although he hasn't delivered an exact count. Blue Dogs are trying to bait Pelosi by claiming she doesn't have the votes for the bill as currently constructed, but we'll probably know that by tonight. For Pelosi's part, she has a plan to start finalizing the bill after the meeting, with a possible floor debate on the public option. However, she shot down the trigger today as "an excuse for not doing anything."

The Blue Dogs are also whining about not being protected from tough votes, because the mission of public service is to come up with the most bland, inoffensive legislation possible and not to do anything that might make anyone mad. That's the picture of leadership. These ConservaDems either don't understand politics very well or are just being opaque about their true feelings.

Politically vulnerable Democrats say Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other House leaders aren’t offering them the protection from tough votes that they did in the last Congress.

Conservative Democrats fear that dozens of members could be swept out of their districts in the midterm election next year, and that fear has been intensifying in recent weeks.

Between a tough vote on a climate change bill that many don’t expect to become law and a leftward push on healthcare legislation, Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) critics within her caucus say she’s left the so-called “majority makers” exposed.

“She keeps trying to push an unpopular package,” said Rep. Gene Taylor (D-Miss.), a centrist Blue Dog Democrat, referring to healthcare. “I think it’s fair to say they were better at it before.”

Another Blue Dog lawmaker put it more bluntly.

“They’re seriously endangering their majority,” said the Blue Dog, who requested anonymity. “With the increased margin and a [Democratic] president, there seems to be a different feeling.”

What would endanger the majority are two things - no health care bill, or a health care package without a public option, which translates into a health care package that nobody in the country would like. What you would have left is an individual mandate to force people to shell out money to private insurers only, without the price controls to make that insurance affordable, a recipe for a continued skyrocketing of premiums. People interface the health care market primarily through those premiums as long as they remain healthy, and without competition in the insurance market it's going to be hard to dial them downward. There is currently no provision forcing insurers to lower premiums as a function of lowered overall health care delivery system costs. Only competition will provide that.

As I've said, the insistence on the public option is a self-preservation strategy. Rahm Emanuel might want to throw up his hands and pretend that only Congress decides on it, but he may want to get involved. As someone who claims to have brought the Democrats the House and Senate, he should know a thing or two about losing a majority. He could also recall 1994, when he worked in the Clinton White House and pushed NAFTA on the Congress, and watched as conservative Democrats from rural districts, who lost the trust of the people through selling out their jobs, were the first in line to fall from the Gingrichites. Failure to energize the base and provide something tangible for people could produce a similar result.

Pelosi Starting To Warm To The Trigger...

It looks like all the Washington gossip has gotten to Nancy Pelosi, seen today trying to thread the needle on triggers.

But I said it before and I'll say it again: The health insurance industry, which is out there fighting the public option tooth and nail because it does increase competition, which they don't want. They'd be better getting a public option now than one that is triggered because if you have a triggered public option, it's because the insurance industry has demonstrated that they're not cooperating, they're not doing the right thing, and I think they'll have a tougher public option to deal with.

She's trying to keep progressive activists on her side by saying that she would only accept a trigger that would bring into existence something like Medicare for All. But that assumes the trigger would be written in such a way that it could ever conceivably get pulled. And I think we all now that's not how this works. The formula for pulling the trigger would get debated endlessly, insurers would sue based on their version of the formula, and conservatives would call it a government takeover of health care and the beginning of the death panels and all the things you saw on display in August.

Pelosi's trying to sell a dead fish as a pet. There's nothing called a "triggered public option" that will satisfy progressives who think the market for health insurance is irreparably broken and private insurers are not to be trusted. Triggers are a Washington type of solution, where the solution isn't offered, but gives everyone involved something they think they can run on down the road.

As Paul Krugman describes well, the politics of reform without a public option will be extremely damaging to the Democratic Party for years to come.

Remember, to make reform work we have to have an individual mandate. And everything I see says that there will be a major backlash against the idea of forcing people to buy insurance from the existing companies. That backlash was part of what got Obama the nomination! Having the public option offers a defense against that backlash.

What worries me is not so much that the backlash would stop reform from passing, as that it would store up trouble for the not-too-distant future. Imagine that reform passes, but that premiums shoot up (or even keep rising at the rates of the past decade.) Then you could all too easily have many people blaming Obama et al for forcing them into this increasingly unaffordable system. A trigger might fix this — but the funny thing about such triggers is that they almost never get pulled.

Let me add a sort of larger point: aside from the essentially circular political arguments — centrist Democrats insisting that the public option must be dropped to get the votes of centrist Democrats — the argument against the public option boils down to the fact that it’s bad because it is, horrors, a government program. And sooner or later Democrats have to take a stand against Reaganism — against the presumption that if the government does it, it’s bad.

But they're not doing that. They're sensing an opportunity to pass something, anything, and because Olympia Snowe supports triggers, they figure most ConservaDems will agree. So we have the half a loaf caucus in the House telling Democrats that they'll have to accept whatever the Senate rams down their throats. (The Senate could actually pass a public option as a deficit reduction play through reconciliation right now - but nobody wants you to know that.)

Rahm Emanuel was been pushing for triggers since well before the summer. It protects the insurance industry while allowing everyone to pretend they passed a strong bill. And that means industry will still line the pockets of Democrats as a token of thanks for preserving the status quo.

That's the decision for people to make when they assess this - whether to endorse that.

As If They Had A Choice

The NYT reports that "Democrats Seem Set to Go It Alone on a Health Bill". In plain English, this means that "Democrats want a health bill." There was never going to be Republican support for anything calling itself health reform that Democrats and the President would support. You could whittle and whittle and whittle the bill down to nothing and it wouldn't matter. Somebody in Washington finally figured this out:

Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff, said the heated opposition was evidence that Republicans had made a political calculation to draw a line against any health care changes, the latest in a string of major administration proposals that Republicans have opposed.

“The Republican leadership,” Mr. Emanuel said, “has made a strategic decision that defeating President Obama’s health care proposal is more important for their political goals than solving the health insurance problems that Americans face every day.”

Ya think? Jon Kyl said yesterday that “There is no way that Republicans are going to support a trillion-dollar-plus bill.” Chuck Grassley admitted that he wouldn't vote for his own compromise and legitimized the "death panels" smear despite having voted for it in the past. You're just figuring out that Republicans view their jobs as blocking any legislation at all costs?

We're starting to hear this meme from the right that liberals are interested in negotiation and compromise with Iran and North Korea, but not with Republicans. Well, we've done the negotiations. They led to nothing for months. And the meme itself is false.

In foreign policy, liberals often believe that disputes with foreign actors can and should be settled through negotiation and compromise. That's because international relations isn't a zero-sum affair. Conflict is costly to both parties, good relations bring benefits to both parties, so disagreement is generally amenable to compromise. Ideological disagreement isn't zero-sum either. Neither conservatives nor progressives are wedded to principles that require defense of wasteful Medicare spending. But partisan politics is zero-sum. A 'win' for the Democrats is a 'loss' for Republicans. And the predominant thinking in the Republican Party at the moment is that inflicting legislative defeats on Democrats will lead to electoral defeats for Democrats. That makes the GOP hard to bargain with.

I would say "impossible." They're convinced it's 1994, and they're not needed by virtue of the numbers.

So where to go from here? Well, Democrats in the Senate could demand that their members join no Republican filibuster of any health care measure supported by a majority of their ranks. They can choose to not support the final bill if they wish. They should not keep it from a final vote. That's the simple solution. If that process winds us up with a public option in the House and a weak co-op option in the Senate, the conference committee could actually produce a positive result, provided Harry Reid puts the people on the conference with jurisdiction over the bill, like health subcommittee chair in the Finance Committee Jay Rockefeller (strong public option supporter) and retirement and aging subcommittee chair in the HELP Committee Barbara Mikulski (supporter).

That bill would easily pass the House. The Senate is trickier. But the conference report can't be amended. It can't be changed, or held up in committee. It can be filibustered, and it can be voted against. Those are the options. If three Democrats opposed the legislation and wanted to kill it, they would literally have to filibuster it (this is assuming that Democrats have 60 votes, which is not certain given Kennedy's health). That would be a very hard thing to do at that stage in the game. It would isolate the obstructionists, ensuring funded primary challenges and the enduring enmity of the Senate leadership and the White House. Kent Conrad can say that there aren't enough votes for a public option and imply that he's just protecting the final bill from defeat. But is he willing to be one of those "no" votes? Is he willing to filibuster? That's a different game indeed.

At this point, no Democratic Senator has committed to joining a Republican filibuster, an important distinction. The conservaDems should be asked if they plan to do so.

If that fails and President Nelson (who likes to shout at public option supporters in the media off camera) or some other newly elected President tries to torpedo the bill, there's the option of splitting reform into two bills, with the filibuster-able stuff in one bill, and stuff relevant to the budget packed into a bill that can be achieved with 50 votes in budget reconciliation. That makes those provisions likely to be subject to a sunset, but once a public option, expanded Medicaid, increasing subsidies and other budget-relevant things get enacted, I submit it will be hard for any Congress to allow them to expire. Failing that, there's the straight reconciliation path, which contra Chris Matthews is not "blowing up Senate rules" but part of them (someone who's never talked a word about Senate rules in his whole career should probably not start now), but which could get messy if elements not relevant to the budget got excised.

Or, Democrats could behave like Republicans and rule by fear and questioning opponents' patriotism. But that's, er, unlikely.

The point being, there are options, and lots more open up when you recognize the large majorities in both houses of Congress cancel the need for bipartisanship inside Washington.

A Chip They Should Not Bargain

Everyone's freaking out about Kathleen Sebelius' statements about the public option on CNN over the weekend. I'm actually quite pleased that the conversation is moving back toward this, rather than the media obsessing over old conservatives shouting or people holding signs that confirm their ignorance. At least we're back to the policy. And talking about a health care reform with or without a public option in some way presumes a health care reform law. So maybe the teabagger protests have outlived their theatrical usefulness and everyone's ready to move on.

As to the specifics: Sebelius said that the public option was "not the essential element" in any reform. Which is of course true, based on the legislation they crafted. A bill where the public option would be an essential element would be a single payer bill. The bill that the White House and Congress put together relies far more on mandates and regulation, with a weak, walled-off public option that can only attract customers from the individual market and select small businesses thrown in to allow for "choice and competition," in their parlance. It's MassCare, which, depending on who you talk to, doesn't constrain costs enough or works pretty well. And MassCare does not have a public option. That part of reform was pretty much always designed as a bargaining chip, in the context of this legislation. And the White House has been bargaining with it consistently over a number of months.

As far as I can tell, there's been no change in the administration's position. It has always supported a public plan option. It has never claimed it essential, or the only path to competition in the insurance market. The one deviation came in July, when Obama said the words "must include" in a sentence that also had the words "public option." But it's not clear whether he was talking about the health insurance exchange or the public option. And that only happened, to my knowledge, once. That statement, not this one, was the deviation.

Try as we might to pin them down, the White House will never, ever, ever view a public insurance option as essential to passing a bill. Or anything else, for that matter, other than abstractions about "controlling costs" and "providing affordability." They want something to pass. Something they can call health care reform and tout as a victory after 40 years of defeats. If they think the best path to getting that through Congress is dropping the public option, they'll enthusiastically endorse such an approach. If they think it's not dispensable because 64 liberals in the House won't pass a bill without it, they'll have to keep it. The space in between, where the House doesn't compromise any further below a public option and the Senate doesn't allow anything beyond co-ops, is what Matt Yglesias describes as the legislative dead zone. This is basically the question House progressives must ask themselves:

If it comes right down to it and the senate is prepared to pass a bill that:

(a) subjects insurance companies to tough new restrictions,
(b) taxes employers who don’t provide decent health insurance to their employees,
(c) creates a new regulated marketplace in which individuals and small business employees can buy quality health insurance,
(d) expands Medicaid eligibility, and
(e) offers subsidies to ensure the affordability of insurance for middle class families

I have a hard time believing that House liberals will really kill the bill. But maybe they will.

This is where Mr. Krugman comes in today, comparing the plan on offer to what is occurring in Switzerland, where everyone must buy insurance, lower-income residents get subsidies, and the insurance companies have very strict regulations by which they must abide.

So where does Obamacare fit into all this? Basically, it’s a plan to Swissify America, using regulation and subsidies to ensure universal coverage.

If we were starting from scratch we probably wouldn’t have chosen this route. True “socialized medicine” would undoubtedly cost less, and a straightforward extension of Medicare-type coverage to all Americans would probably be cheaper than a Swiss-style system. That’s why I and others believe that a true public option competing with private insurers is extremely important: otherwise, rising costs could all too easily undermine the whole effort.

But a Swiss-style system of universal coverage would be a vast improvement on what we have now. And we already know that such systems work.

(One thing nobody who endorses this type of plan talks about is the fact that we have no national regulatory framework for health insurance companies, and the regulatory vigor in the states, where they are now regulated, varies widely from one to the other, so the plan on offer would either have to create a large new bureaucracy to accompany that regulation of insurers, or rely on the balkanized state approach. Neither is ideal.)

The public option could be an element of a Swiss-style system, but not the essential one. In essence, there's very little daylight between what Krugman says and what Sebelius said yesterday. So, what is one to think?

Those trying to minimize the importance of a public option are only looking at the one currently up for discussion, which is not available to anyone who gets coverage through an employer. That's not really a big enough market to change insurance company behavior anyway, which is why I favor the kind of plan offered by Ron Wyden, where employees can opt out of their coverage and buy into the insurance exchange. In fact, we have historically seen a government program like the public option refined and tweaked once it came into existence, from Social Security to Medicare. So we should not view it as static.

Which is why it's important to include it now. Sure, the public option could be added in future years as a deficit reduction element, much as MassCare is considering going to fee-for-service medicine after getting their universal system in place. But we're having the conversation now, and including a government-managed element in isolation down the road would allow everyone to train their guns very directly. This will not be the last health care reform bill in the history of America, but it's certainly the one with the most potential to codify something like a public option into law. And all the action for doing that is in the Senate - the White House will go along with whatever can pass.

...also, too: this is bigger than health care reform, it's about the progressive wing of the party being credible on standing their ground. That has implications on a host of issues.

The Dog Days Of Health Care Reform

Maxine Waters has basically had enough.

WATSON: Is the President and Rahm Emanuel -- former member of the House -- are they treading too lightly here, are they not bringing out the big stick against some of those Blue Dog Democrats and saying "we've got a once in a four-decade opportunity to get this passed, everyone knows how easy it is for momentum to dissipate, you guys have to get on board and we've got to go forward and make sure that everyone has better health care, is covered, and hopefully better quality of outcome?

WATERS: Well that may be difficult for Rahm Emanuel, because don't forget -- he recruited most of them. As when he was over in the Congress, in the leadership, Rahm Emanuel recruited more conservative members and based on some of the information I'm getting, they told them that they could vote the way they wanted to vote, that they would not interfere with what was considered their philosophy about some of these things. So, now the chickens have come home to roost.

I'm sure Emanuel would counter that, without his recruitment, those would be Republican seats right now, and how would that help us. Well, a good number of those Blue Dogs wouldn't be blocking Democratic bills in committee, for one thing.

Waters says she's holding strong on blocking a bill without a public option.

KERY ELEVELD: There are reports out of the Senate Finance Committee today that they may be dropping the public option in their negotiations. Do you think that's going to sell in the House?

WATERS: No. As a matter of fact, that's a kill for sure for the progressives. For the majority, I think, of our members a public option is a compromise -- we wanted single payer as you know, and we backed off because they said that was going to be impossible to do. Again they brought up the more conservative elements, etc. etc., and so we will not support any bill that does not have a public option in it.

We always hear about the tricky politics for the Blue Dogs or Democrats in moderate districts. In this case, the politics are tricky for progressives in safe seats. If they don't hold firm, I have little doubt that THEY will see primary challenges from the left. Whether or not they'll succeed is another matter, but you can see how a primary challenge has turned Arlen Specter into a progressive lefty. Progressives have political interests in getting something good done as well. And as George Miller says, the Baucus bill just doesn't cut it:

Part of the problem, as I suggested earlier, is that the news out of the Senate has widened a rift between House liberals and Blue Dogs. Rep. George MIller (D-CA), chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, and an author of House health care legislation, isn't at all pleased with the watered down reform bill the Senate Finance Committee is set to propose.

"I don't think that adds up to health care reform. It doesn't add up to insurance reform. It doesn't add up to keeping costs down. I don't know what the hell that adds up to," Miller said.

Basically, this is a massive game of chicken between moderates and liberals. The moderates figure liberals will back down, based on past experience. The liberals think the moderates will do the same. What the liberals have going for them is the fact, plain fact, that a defeat of health care reform will drag down the party, and the most vulnerable seats, frankly, are occupied by those same moderates. If health care reform passes, certain lawmakers could lose seats in very particular circumstances. But if reform fails, only one group is certain to go down with it - the Blue Dogs.

Forget Bipartisanship

The Senate HELP committee held four weeks of markup hearings on their health care bill. They accepted 160 Republican amendments. They allowed virtually every amendment, every concern of Republicans to a free and open vote. And in the end, the bill split entirely along party lines.

A Senate committee became the first congressional panel to advance healthcare reform legislation this year, marking a significant step toward the achievement of President Obama's foremost domestic initiative.

On a party-line, 13-10 tally, the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee voted to move its portion of the upper chamber's healthcare reform legislation to the floor [...]

HELP Committee ranking member Mike Enzi (R-Wyo.) slammed the bill and the partisan nature of the panel's proceedings. "The bill lays the groundwork for a government takeover of healthcare," Enzi said.

I don't know how many times you have to say this. Republicans will not vote for health care reform. If so much as one of them does, I would be stunned. And it appears that the political staff in the White House understands this as well.

Both Axelrod and White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel said taking a partisan route to enacting major health-care legislation isn’t the president’s preferred choice. Yet in separate interviews, each man left that option open.

“We’d like to do it with the votes of members of both parties,” Axelrod said. “But the worst result would be to not get health-care reform done.” [...]

Emanuel, making a theoretical case for a party-line vote, offered a definition of bipartisanship based not on roll-call votes but on whether Democrats have accepted Republican ideas during the process of negotiations.

He said Democrats already have passed that test, pointing to Republican amendments that the Democratic-controlled Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee has adopted.

“That’s a test of bipartisanship -- whether you took ideas from both parties,” Emanuel said. “At the end of the day, the test isn’t whether they voted for it,” he said, referring to Republicans. “The test is whether the final product represented some of their ideas. And I think it will.”

Now Republicans will stick out their pinkies and rattle their teacups about the shocking partisanship on display, and whine about how they've been shut out of the process. But they would always say that, and predictably, it's not true.

This is the right approach, and now the President needs to collect the votes necessary for passage. Organizing for America released an ad today that will air in key states, targeting moderate Democrats and a few moderate Republicans, and imploring them to get health care done. It has no specifics, but collects a series of health care horror stories and shows the broken nature of the current system.



This will be the toughest lift of the Obama Presidency, but if he really wants it, he can get it done.

...Here's the acting chair of the HELP Committee, Chris Dodd, offering to accept 64 amendments by unanimous consent, but the Republican leader refuses to allow it in an effort to drag out the process. This is the minority's entire raison d'etre on this bill.

Everyone's Leaving Their Options Open

Lynn Woolsey let Rahm Emanuel have it yesterday over his comments on a trigger for the public option. I get the sense that Rahm still craves capitulating to the insurance companies on this one, but he's being invited to recognize the contours of the debate, and the fact that there aren't enough votes for a health care bill without a public insurance option.

White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel reassured House Democrats on Tuesday night that President Barack Obama strongly backs a government-run health insurance plan, seeking to quell a firestorm among liberals upset at Emanuel’s comments in the Wall Street Journal that suggested such a plan could be delayed.

Progressive Caucus Co-Chairwoman Lynn Woolsey (D-Calif.) warned Emanuel that he would lose the caucus’ votes if the White House compromised on the issue and included a “trigger” that could delay a public insurance plan indefinitely. The trigger idea is backed by conservative Democrats but is anathema to liberals.

“We have compromised enough, and we are not going to compromise on any kind of trigger game,” Woolsey said she told Emanuel. “People clapped all over the place. We mean it, and not just progressives.”

House Energy and Commerce Chairman Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) said he was reassured by Emanuel. “He doesn’t stand by that trigger,” Waxman said. “He said the president and his administration and he are for a public plan as one of the options.”

Of course, Emanuel stands by the public plan as "one of the options." They have no line in the sand drawn on that, and everything's open to negotiation. Still, if the Progressive Block holds, even a weasel like Emanuel can figure out the math. They cannot take progressive votes on this for granted, and that's a good message to push.

The other message getting pushed over in the Senate by Harry Reid and the leadership is a variation on Bernie Sanders' suggestion, that all Democrats in the caucus should agree not to join Republican filibusters as a matter of course and out of respect for the majority's agenda. The most conservative Democrats don't agree, incidentally.

Landrieu:

However, she flatly refused to rule out filibustering any bill, including health care and climate change legislation. “I’m going to keep an open mind, but I am not committing to any procedural straitjackets one way or another,” she said.

Nelson:

“I’m not a closed mind on cloture, but if it’s an abuse of procedure, if it’s somebody trying to put a poison pill into a bill, or if it’s something that would be pre-emptive of Nebraska law, or something that rises to extraordinary circumstances, then I’ve always reserved the right to vote against cloture,” Nelson said.

Reid's next step should be to remind his colleagues of the tools available to him as Majority Leader. Namely - not approving any bills of individual Senators for floor votes; throwing members off of prized committees in the next session; refusing to contribute to members' re-election campaigns through the DSCC; not respecting members' holds on legislation; using manager's amendments to simply rewrite bills coming out of members' committees; and on and on. These were some of the tools of persuasion used in the 1950s and 1960s, under far more preocedural hurdles, to pass progressive legislation:

I recently read a book called "The Liberal Hour" about the Great Society. And the authors there made the point that one of the important underlying factors to Johnson's ability to move Civil Rights legislation and Medicare and Medicaid was a change House Speaker Sam Rayburn made to the Rules Committee when John F. Kennedy was president. He expanded it to give it a more liberal majority. And there have been a couple moments like this where legislative change is preceded by procedural change.

One of the things that brings up is that it's interesting how central the filibuster has become to not only how the Senate operates, but also how the House operates, as much of the legislating is done in recognition that it'll have to pass the Senate. As political scientists will tell you, of course, this centrality of the filibuster is actually a relatively recent innovation. So I'm curious how much you think it's actually possible to achieve these changes under the current system. Even with a popular new president and a large House majority and 60 Democrats in the Senate, it seems unlikely we'll actually solve these underlying problems. We might get legislation. But it's not likely to avert the existence-level fiscal threat from health-care reform or the existence level environmental threat from climate change. But if not now, then when? And if Congress can't respond to challenges of that magnitude, doesn't it suggest that something is quite wrong?

I think we need to be open-minded and think about the possibility in changes of process as well as policies. We shouldn't be so burdened by the past that we can't face the future. The seniority system in the House was traditionally dictated by members who didn't like the speaker having so much power over the committees. But when I came to Congress, if you were the senior member, you became chairman no matter how competent you were, no matter how in sync you were with the majority caucus. That was enormously advantageous for many of the Dixiecrats who remained Democrat for that reason, to take advantage of the seniority, but who aligned themselves on policy with the Republicans, and created a situation where even when Democrats had large margins, there was this sort of Southern Democrat-Republican coalition that ruled.

The fight by Sam Rayburn to allow the Rules Committee to be controlled by the leadership was an enormous and brutal fight, but a necessary one. The chairman before that time was Judge Smith from Virginia, who wouldn't let civil rights legislation go to the House floor because he was a segregationist himself. That meant that even when the Judiciary Committee proposed a bill for civil rights, members of the House couldn't vote on it.

There are anti-democratic rules that need to be changed. In some ways, the filibuster is an issue we might want to look at more closely. It is a two-edged sword. But I come from California, where to pass a budget you need a two-thirds vote. And they've been unable to pass a budget for years now able to deal with the fiscal problems. And it has thrown the state into chaos because they can't get the two-thirds vote.

The filibuster used to be a two-thirds requirement, and it wasn't until 1975 that they changed it to 60 votes. Well, that was a move in the right direction. For sure.

This speaks more to the ability to recognize the ability for procedural change, but the other story of the 1950s and 1960s was how the Master of the Senate, Lyndon Johnson, used everything at his disposal to break 2/3 majorities, unlock the strangehold from Dixiecrats over major committees, and generally pass his agenda, as Majority Leader and then as President. Political leaders have more power than most people think they realize today. So while Mary Landrieu and Rahm Emanuel and Ben Nelson and Max Baucus think they can have their way in the Senate, it's simply untrue. This begs the question as to whether the leadership WANTS to hold their conservative flank accountable. It's the question of what their priorities are.

...Evan Bayh, too.

Learning To Count

This has been a consequential day in the health care debate, and it all started when Rahm Emanuel opened his trap and tried to turn the public option trigger into the compromise, rather than the public option being the compromise between nothing and single payer. First the White House tried to staunch the bleeding, with the President shifting the emphasis (but not really deviating from what Rahm said all that much). The advocacy groups pounced at the mention of the trigger. Sam Smith reported that Rahm has been looking to cave on this point for months:

It was, White House aides insist, far from a commitment to a trigger option. But a source close to the administration, who has been in contact with the White House on health care matters, said that Emanuel has been "floating" the trigger compromise since January.

"Rahm's problem with this is he is on the more conservative end of the Democratic Party and he is a very political guy," the source added. "He is working for a way out without a bloody fight. The problem is he doesn't mind taking that fight to the left. And what I worry could happen is the left will just quit."

Bernie Sanders confronted Emanuel directly, vowing that he had plenty of votes to scuttle any bill that didn't include a public option, and in fact taking aim at the bill being pushed through the Senate Finance Committee, which doesn't even have so much as a trigger:

"I think that it is fair to say that there are a number of us who would not be voting for anything resembling a Baucus-type plan as we understand it right now," the senator told the Huffington Post, referring to Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus' effort at constructing a reform bill [...]

"Emanuel is dead wrong," Sanders said. "The triggers are meaningless. The American people have shown in poll after poll their contempt for private health insurance companies. They don't trust them and for good reason.

"Now, where we are right now politically is the HELP Committee, of which I'm a member, is going to bring forth a public plan," Sanders added. "The House of Representatives is supporting a public plan. And President Obama ran for office talking about a strong public plan. Why, with that political reality of the American people wanting it, the House going forward, the Senate HELP Committee going forward, would Rahm Emanuel suggest that we would compromise on this issue?"

More significantly, Harry Reid basically told Baucus that his watering-down efforts will only end in failure, and he will lose too many Democratic votes in the exchange.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) on Tuesday ordered Finance Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) to drop a proposal to tax health benefits and stop chasing Republican votes on a massive health care reform bill.

Reid, whose leadership is considered crucial if President Barack Obama is to deliver on his promise of enacting health care reform this year, offered the directive to Baucus through an intermediary after consulting with Senate Democratic leaders during Tuesday morning’s regularly scheduled leadership meeting. Baucus was meeting with Finance ranking member Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) Tuesday afternoon to relay the information.

According to Democratic sources, Reid told Baucus that taxing health benefits and failing to include a strong government-run insurance option of some sort in his bill would cost 10 to 15 Democratic votes; Reid told Baucus it wasn’t worth securing the support of Grassley and at best a few additional Republicans.

I don't think capping the employer deduction (which is not really taxing health-care benefits) is so horrible, but it's clearly a non-starter, to the extent that the House prefers a surtax on the wealthy to get the proper funding. And what's not said here is that all the other sops to the right that Baucus has smashed into his bill don't sit well with Democrats either and would not pass the Senate, including the removal of a public option.

Even more interesting than all that is Raul Grijalva's letter to the White House today on behalf of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, saying flat-out that the caucus will not support any health care reform bill without a "robust public option plan, akin to Medicare." And there's this extremely interesting line:

Public opinion polls show that 76% of Americans want a robust public plan option and I will stand in solidarity with them. Moreover, I consider it unacceptable for any of the cost savings that you are negotiating with hospitals and other sectors of the health care industry to be made contingent upon a robust public plan option not being included in the final legislation.

This is what I was getting at earlier today, that these deals with stakeholders are coming with some strings. Grijalva comes out and says it.

There's a lot of good news here, though of course this isn't over. The White House has learned that they absolutely don't have the votes for a plan without the public option, and hopefully this will carry over to other elements of the debate. I can envision a world with a public option but not enough subsidies, no changes to Medicaid and a health insurance exchange that isn't strong enough to force competition. And there will be other pitfalls: this notion of denying legal abortion funding inside the health insurance exchanges is horrific, for example. And there's the matter of cost, which Republicans are playing up by touting yet another inaccurate CBO score today. But what we see today is the liberals in Congress and the progressive movement standing up to announce that they will not be rolled. Not this time. The centrists threatening the Obama agenda will have to pay a price.

We're a long way from home, with lots of lobbying, both corporate and grassroots (go Mainers!), to follow. But the left is standing up, for now. Let's help them.

Rahm Is Desperate To Cave

In The Wall Street Journal, Rahm Emanuel explained how he could live with a trigger option on the public plan:

It is more important that health-care legislation inject stiff competition among insurance plans than it is for Congress to create a pure government-run option, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel said.

"The goal is to have a means and a mechanism to keep the private insurers honest," he said in an interview. "The goal is non-negotiable; the path is" negotiable [...]

One of the most contentious issues is whether to create a public health-insurance plan to compete with private companies.

Mr. Emanuel said one of several ways to meet Mr. Obama's goals is a mechanism under which a public plan is introduced only if the marketplace fails to provide sufficient competition on its own. He noted that congressional Republicans crafted a similar trigger mechanism when they created a prescription-drug benefit for Medicare in 2003. In that case, private competition has been judged sufficient and the public option has never gone into effect.

The President quickly walked back the comment, saying that "one of the best ways to bring down costs, provide more choices, and assure quality is a public option that will force the insurance companies to compete and keep them honest."

It's curious that Emanuel cites the trigger in the prescription drug benefit. That has never been tripped, and indeed the White House needed to strike a deal with the pharmaceutical industry to lower costs under Medicare Part D. So a lack of competition unnecessarily raised profits for the industry by at least $80 billion (the cost of the deal) over a decade, and there's STILL no public drug company option. These triggers are Washington compromises designed to never meet the standard where they would have to be tapped.

Emanuel's orientation is to accommodate centrists and kick liberals. He's been doing it since he entered politics. There's plenty of elements to health care just as important as a public option, but that's the most controversial, and so the Chief of Staff wants to cave on it to reach a compromise. The other issues, like the health insurance exchanges, the subsidies for the poor, Medicaid eligibility, the baseline level of care, etc., isn't getting the same attention, so Emanuel figures he can just strangle them behind closed doors. With the public plan, a high-profile issue, Emanuel probably thinks he has to lay the groundwork for a capitulation. Or, he's maybe lowering expectations, so Chuck Schumer can rush in and dictate the process, watering down the public plan down to a "level-playing field" piece of insignificance. But Rahm's problem is exactly the same as during the Clinton Administration:

If short-term pressures to accommodate concerns about the deficit curb Obama's ambitions, the result could be not only disaffection among progressives but also disappointment among the less ideologically inclined. Despite their skepticism about government, most in this latter constituency want Washington to foster economic expansion and improve their health coverage.

The president will thus have to balance worries about losing some moderate support against the larger danger of failing to achieve the sweeping change he promised. The obvious path for Obama -- the one he is likely to take -- is first to achieve his reforms, particularly in health care, and later to pivot to dealing with the deficit, once the economy starts improving. (Obsessing about the deficit in a downturn is not a recipe for recovery.) And centrist Democrats in Congress could usefully recall that the party's inability to deliver on Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign pledges, particularly on health care, led to a stunning defeat two years later that decimated its moderates and liberals alike.

In his first six months, Obama showed he was up to the job. This summer will test his ability to make agonizing choices -- and make them stick.

The public won't be bullshitted by a bill, any bill. People will need a tangible benefit, and for better or worse, that has become the public plan. Those who stand in the way will have trouble reclaiming their legitimacy.

The Chief Of Staff Of Looking Forward Not Backward

Rahm Emanuel wants us all to just forget about the people who tortured in our name, those who authorized it, the ones who created the justifications and underpinnings for it, the entire torture regime:



Never mind the moral backflips you have to make to let people off the hook for torture. Never mind the fact that the interrogators did not even follow the guidelines and meager safeguards set out in the OLC memos - Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times in one month. Let's put all of that aside for a second. Rahm Emanuel is calling on the President and the Justice Department to willingly break the law.

US President Barack Obama's decision not to prosecute CIA agents who used torture tactics is a violation of international law, a UN expert says.

The UN special rapporteur on torture, Manfred Nowak, says the US is bound under the UN Convention against Torture to prosecute those who engage in it.

Mr Obama released four "torture memos" outlining harsh interrogation methods sanctioned by the Bush administration.
Mr Nowak has called for an independent review and compensation for victims.

"The United States, like all other states that are part of the UN convention against torture, is committed to conducting criminal investigations of torture and to bringing all persons against whom there is sound evidence to court," Mr Nowak told the Austrian daily Der Standard.

Maybe the President should clarify his position. According to his chief of staff, the President and the Attorney General are committed to breaking international law. Once again, we see that covering up past crimes does nothing but entangle the current executive in the crimes themselves.

Meanwhile, regarding the impeachment of Torture Judge Jay Bybee, Claire McCaskill is now on the record considering it.

What’s scary to me, Chris, is that one of them got a lifetime appointment on a federal bench. Yikes! You know, a lawyer that’s responsible for this kind of advice that clearly went too far in terms of stretching what our law is. It worries me that he’s sitting on the federal bench right now.

She then said she doesn’t want to “look in the rearview mirror.” Asked by host Chris Wallace whether she would favor the impeachment of the judge, Jay Bybee, McCaskill responded, “I don’t know. I think we have to look at it.”

McCaskill is not a wild-eyed lefty. Like any American with a conscience, she understands the failing of having the man who signed those memos sitting judgment on the federal bench. It is time to impeach.

Israeli Pressure Points

I'm just dubious about Rahm Emanuel saying this.

Yedioth Achronoth, the largest circulation daily in Israel, reports today that President Obama intends to see the two-state solution signed, sealed and delivered during his first term.

Rahm Emanuel told an (unnamed) Jewish leader; "In the next four years there is going to be a permanent status arrangement between Israel and the Palestinians on the basis of two states for two peoples, and it doesn't matter to us at all who is prime minister."

He also said that the United States will exert pressure to see that deal is put into place. "Any treatment of the Iranian nuclear problem will be contingent upon progress in the negotiations and an Israeli withdrawal from West Bank territory," the paper reports Emanuel as saying. In other words, US sympathy for Israel's position vis a vis Iran depends on Israel's willingness to live up to its commitment to get out of the West Bank and permit the establishment of a Palestinian state there, in Gaza, and East Jerusalem.

Clearly, the US would have to find some point of leverage to get this hardline Israeli government to agree to a two-state solution. Netanyahu and Lieberman are macho neocons who rebuff any talk of a Palestinian state. But would Emanuel really hold up Iranian negotiations as an attempt to force Israel to the bargaining table? That seems like a dangerous game to me. I believe that the US would push Israel away from bombing the Iranian nuclear facilities, but not hold up multilateral agreements.

Anyway, there's a very clear point of leverage for the Israelis - billions of dollars in American aid. That Emanuel didn't go there speaks to the power of the Israel lobby - although J Street is catching up fast. And considering that most American Jews support a two-state solution, clearly they would also support bringing some American pressure to bear. But you just cannot touch Israeli money - or offer Palestinian aid, apparently.

Meanwhile, Israel is really isolating themselves from the world community by refusing to cooperate with a UN inquiry into human rights violations during the Gaza war. Maybe this is another pressure point?

Good News For Bloggers, Rod Blagojevich Is Back In The News!

As expected, Patrick Fitzgerald indicted Rod Blagojevich and multiple aides, including his own brother, on corruption charges including (but not limited to) the selling of Barack Obama's Senate seat.

Federal prosecutors expanded their case against former Gov. Rod Blagojevich today in an indictment that drew more of his closest aides into the scandal and adds new schemes to the list of charges against him: Pocketing money funneled through his wife through a phony real estate job. Shaking down a powerful congressman. Running the state as a racket.

Coming nearly four months after federal agents roused a sitting governor out of his Northwest Side home in a predawn arrest -- and weeks after lawmakers dumped him from power -- today's indictment of Blagojevich, his brother and four former top insiders could have been anti-climactic.

Instead, prosecutors added a few more chapters to the Blagojevich saga, further pulling his family into the pay-to-play conspiracy, revealing yet more confidants had turned on him and suggesting he was intent on corruption before he was even sworn in. The indictment carries a potentially lengthy prison sentence and possible forfeiture of his family home should Blagojevich be convicted [...]

Blagojevich was indicted on 16 racketeering, fraud and extortion counts. Among the new, damaging allegations were that Blagojevich delayed a $2 million grant to a public charter school while trying to extort campaign cash from now-White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and threatened to withhold future state business from financial institutions that refused to hire his wife.

Blagojevich's effort to profit, both personally and for his Friends of Blagojevich campaign fund, was so pervasive that federal prosecutors labeled the racketeering scheme the "Blagojevich Enterprise."

When you have a nickname for your stealing, you're doing a lot of stealing.

More on the attempted shakedown of Rahm Emanuel here. For the record, Emanuel rejected it, and good for him. But his involvement in the case does mean that other things may come up in the discovery phase. At this point, however, I'll stress that Rahm looks clean.

The breadth of the corruption is pretty staggering, even for Illinois. Meanwhile Blagojevich was down at Disney World yesterday. Apparently, Fitz applied RICO statutes to some of this, meaning that the Feds could confiscate Blago's property. In short, he's in big trouble.

Democrats Find The Nut

I think it is a very positive sign that Democrats are painting their bretheren on the other side of the aisle into a serious corner by asserting very loudly that the Republican Party is the party of Limbaugh. This is no longer the musings of a few bloggers or a section of the left but a calculated strategy at the top level of the party.

SCHIEFFER: Who do you think now speaks for the Republican Party?

EMANUEL: You just named him: it is Rush Limbaugh. He has laid out his vision, in my view. And he said it clearly. I compliment him for that. He's been very up front and I compliment him for that. He's not hiding. He's asked for President Obama and called for President Obama to fail. That's his view. And that's what he has enunciated. And whenever a Republican criticizes him, they have to run back and apologize to him and say they were misunderstood. He is the voice and the intellectual force and energy behind the Republican Party. He has been up front about what he views and hasn't stepped back from that, which is he hopes for failure. He said it and I compliment him for his honesty. But that's their philosophy that is enunciated by Rush Limbaugh and I think that's the wrong philosophy for America.

The right-wing noise machine has consistently taken figures like Ward Churchill or Michael Moore or Some Guy With A Sign Somewhere and elevated them to leadership of the Democratic Party. The only difference in doing the same with Rush Limbaugh is that, in his case, it's actually true. His closing speech to the largest conservative gathering in America, which practically every 2012 Presidential candidate in the GOP attended, is proof of this. Tom Schaller writes:

Strip away the platitudes and cheap applause lines about freedom, self-reliance and the virtues of capitalism, and you're left with the subject that really interests Rush Limbaugh: himself. The conservative talker with the self-professed "talent on loan from God" spoke incessantly in the first person: there were more "I's" in his CPAC address than in an Idaho potato field. One clear message emerged from the speech:

"Le mouvement conservative, c'est moi."

And it's a message that makes some of the nominal leaders of the Republican Party uncomfortable.

In particular, the "I want Obama to fail" line, on which Rush has dug in his heels, is being used as a club against every Republican speaker. Eric Cantor on George Stephanopoulos' show this morning was a good example:

STEPHANOPOULOS: So the Rush Limbaugh approach of hoping the president fails is not the Eric Cantor House Republican approach?

CANTOR: George, absolutely not and I don't think anyone wants anything to fail right now, we have such challenges.

Every time an elected Republican disavows Limbaugh, they drive the base further into his arms. This is a real death spiral for the GOP. They've created a monster in talk radio, and have empowered a backlash figure who is actually unpopular outside the fringes of the base. And Democrats are no longer afraid to use Limbaugh as a weapon, which is extremely encouraging.

This is a very worthwhile project.

Being Right Is No Excuse For Being Right

Many have already said what needed to be said about Ryan Lizza's fawning profile of Rahm Emanuel, which I think was actually written by someone named "Rahm Emanuel," such is the uncritical glory. Glenn Greenwald offers the best and most thorough takedown of Lizza's article and the clear flattery-for-access exchange not unlike a People Magazine celebrity piece, although I would add Spencer Ackerman's personal Lizza experience as some context for the kind of person we're dealing with:

Remember that obnoxious intern in Shattered Glass who constantly pokes his nose into other people's business because he's desperate to be put on? That's based on Ryan. His specialty was always in schmoozing -- meeting powerful people, ingratiating himself to powerful people, trying to get something out of powerful people. He was the first person I ever met who showed off his BlackBerry. But I never had a problem with Ryan [...]

So one day I was commiserating with Ryan [...] In a moment of blowing off steam, I said to Ryan that maybe it wouldn't be the worst thing in the world if I got fired for TNR for being too left-wing. There were probably some editors who'd come to my aid if that happened, since people in The Game know what TNR is really like.

I thought nothing of it. Again, that kind of venting isn't unusual for TNR, and I heard other writers say much worse things about the place over the years. But a couple weeks later Frank asked me to have lunch with him. Great! I thought. Finally an audience with my friend-turned-editor, who seems not to have time for me anymore. We went to the sushi place on New York Avenue and 11th.

"Listen," Frank said, "I know you've been telling people that you welcome getting fired. I want to tell you how unprofessional and immature that is."

Stunning. Lizza had run to our boss and told him something I had said as a way of calming myself down. Now, here it was, ripped from context, and made into a problem between me and my editor. It was the first salvo of much fake outrage from Frank over the coming months. When I grumbled that I knew who snitched on me, Frank -- realizing he had fucked up -- urged me to let it go [...]

What I learned from this is something every journalist, every editor, every potential source and every reader should know: Ryan Lizza is not to be trusted. He will betray you, and betray you casually. Whatever helps Lizza get what he want, Lizza will do. It doesn't matter if you and he have a warm relationship. He only -- only -- cares about himself. So congratulations, Ryan! You got what you wanted. You're the New Yorker's Washington correspondent. I hope it's worth it to you to have that job, since the path that you took to get it was to become a sniveling, obsequious, deceitful coward. Or maybe that's what you've always been, and always will be.

This puts Lizza's upcoming book about the Obama Administration and the presumed softballing-for-access in its proper context.

But I want to actually focus on something inside the profile, when Emanuel attempts to rebut his critics on the left:

“They have never worked the legislative process,” Emanuel said of critics like the Times columnist Paul Krugman, who argued that Obama’s concessions to Senate Republicans—in particular, the tax cuts, which will do little to stimulate the economy—produced a package that wasn’t large enough to respond to the magnitude of the recession. “How many bills has he passed?” [...]

Now, my view is that Krugman as an economist is not wrong. But in the art of the possible, of the deal, he is wrong. He couldn’t get his legislation.”

The stimulus bill was essentially held hostage to the whims of Collins, Snowe, and Specter, but if Al Franken, the apparent winner of the disputed Minnesota Senate race, had been seated in Washington, and if Ted Kennedy, who is battling brain cancer, had been regularly available to vote, the White House would have needed only one Republican to pass the measure. “No disrespect to Paul Krugman,” Emanuel went on, “but has he figured out how to seat the Minnesota senator?” (Franken’s victory is the subject of an ongoing court challenge by his opponent, Norm Coleman, which the national Republican Party has been happy to help finance.) “Write a fucking column on how to seat the son of a bitch. I would be fascinated with that column. O.K.?” Emanuel stood up theatrically and gestured toward his seat with open palms. “Anytime they want, they can have it,” he said of those who are critical of his legislative strategies. “I give them my chair.”

Given the limits of making the Senate filibuster and Republican obstructionism generally, Emanuel may be right on the Franken point (though there's obviously a rhetorical role the White House can play in highlighting the absurdity, one they aren't playing at all). But I can't tell you how many times I've heard this kind of criticism here in California from people within the Democratic Party, that us librul ranters don't know what it means to craft policy or how to execute the art of the deal. It's the default position for those in power, to trade of their experience - and actually, the secrecy of the process - to dismiss their critics.

But Emanuel gives up a powerful point in the middle of that. As I boldfaced, he actually admits that the stimulus package wasn't big enough. That's a pretty massive point, considering that the fate of economic recovery in no small part depends on fiscal spending that meets the task. While Emanuel claims that the Administration got 90% of what they wanted, they also didn't get a package that will fit the bill. That's what Paul Krugman is getting at in his response:

Eh. The question is why Obama didn't ask for what the economy needed, then bargain from there. My view is that Collins et al would have demanded $100 billion in cuts from whatever they started from; and that's not the case he answers.

Now, all of this is conjecture, and it's entirely possible that Collins and Nelson would have driven down the cost to essentially the $800 billion where it ended. But the pre-compromised position of the bill ENSURED that it would not be enough.

And this is not the first time that Emanuel has intimated that the stimulus was insufficient. Last week he said "We clearly thought that economic activity needed more, but it was more important to get it done than argue about just that."

Ultimately it may be positive that Emanuel knows what he has done isn't sufficient; maybe it will allow him to return for more if that comes to pass. But it's a pretty interesting move to admit inadequacy and then blame the very people who were saying all along that the bill was inadequate for "not being realistic." That's some up-is-downism right there. And if the ones who are so uninformed about the political process are also admittedly the ones who were RIGHT, would it kill those august dealmakers to, I don't know, learn something from that, and maybe not negotiate with themselves anymore?

Playing With Fire

Rahm Emanuel has been strutting around lately, taking full credit for bringing the stimulus bill to term. This could be seen positively if you didn't understand his next act:

The fiscally conservative Democrats might not have been able to defeat the bill, but a large chunk of Democrats defecting on the top priority of a new Democratic president would have heaped insult on the injury inflicted by the GOP’s wall of opposition. So they huddled in the majority leader’s hideaway, and Emanuel pledged that they would see signs of Obama’s commitment to fiscal reform.

Fiscal reform is a coded word in political circles - he's talking about entitlements. And as nuts as it would be for the President to concern himself with them (in the name of "taking them off the table") during an economic free-fall, that really appears to be what's happening, if Dean Baker is to be believed.

Word has it that President Obama intends to appoint a task force the week after next which will be charged with "reforming" Social Security. According to inside gossip, the task force will be led entirely by economists who were not able to see the $8 trillion housing bubble, the collapse of which is giving the country its sharpest downturn since the Great Depression.

This effort is bizarre for several reasons. First, the economy is sinking rapidly. While President Obama's stimulus package is a good first step towards counteracting the decline, there is probably not a single economist in the country who believes that is adequate to the task. President Obama would be advised to focus his attention on getting the economy back in order instead of attacking the country's most important social program.

The second reason why this task force is strange is that Social Security doesn't need reforming. According to the Congressional Budget Office, it can pay all scheduled benefits for the next 40 years with no changes whatsoever [...]

In short, the vast majority of baby boomers will be approaching retirement with little other than their Social Security and Medicare to support them. And now President Obama is apparently prepared to appoint a commission that will attack these only remaining pillars of support.

I've tried to give the President the benefit of the doubt when hearing these rumblings. His stated goals for Social Security reform have always been progressive (like raising the payroll tax cap), and his description of Medicare's problems have always shown an acknowledgment that runaway health care spending is the problem, which requires a comprehensive health care solution. You can see that thinking here.

Nevertheless, he's playing a dangerous game by flirting with the fiscal responsibility scolds, the same people who voted to appropriate hundreds of billions for endless war, bank bailouts and the Bush tax cuts. They don't have an interest in controlling long-term Medicare spending, they have an interest in self-aggrandizement and pushing an essentially conservative agenda. Chris Hayes' Nation article profiles one the Blue Dogs, and they are not allies:

The Blue Dogs continue to wield influence. Before the stimulus could be brought to the floor, the House had to approve emergency orders to expedite the process. The Blue Dogs balked and threatened to rebel until the White House sent a letter to several House committee chairs reaffirming its commitment to return to pay-go budgeting after the stimulus is passed. In the end, half the caucus voted against the leadership anyway. The week after the stimulus passed the House, Blue Dog co-chair Stephanie Herseth Sandlin sent an open letter to Pelosi and House majority leader Steny Hoyer expressing the caucus's support for efforts by Senate Republicans and conservative Democrats to cut approximately $100 billion from the package--including money for things like school construction, rural broadband and early childhood programs. "We believe that's a highly worthwhile goal," they wrote [...]

This "fraternity" is ostensibly built around a single issue: fiscal discipline. It's a term that is both more and less than it appears.

Everyone understands that Democrats attempting to represent conservative districts have to convince their constituents that despite the D next to their name, they hear them, understand them and share their concerns and worldview. But to do this they've chosen to invest a tremendous amount of political capital in something that, well, no one cares about. In a recent national poll of priorities, the deficit/debt came in a distant sixth, after regulating the financial industry, ending the war in Iraq and healthcare reform. This could be because the national debt as a percentage of GDP is well within post-World War II norms. A Democratic Congressional candidate who unsuccessfully challenged a Republican incumbent in a conservative district in the South put it to me this way: "Nobody brings up the deficit. Ever." [...]

For all their cohesiveness, positive press and legislative leverage, the Blue Dogs haven't produced a ton of legislative accomplishments on their signature issue. On the two most massive expenditures of the last Bush years--the Iraq War and the financial bailout--they've offered little organized resistance. The offsets on the issues on which they've been able to enforce pay-go--like the tax increases to pay for the new GI bill, which the Blue Dogs peg at $63 billion--pale in comparison with the cost of the Iraq/Afghanistan wars and the bailout, which have cost more than $1 trillion over the past two years.

Where Blue Dogs have perhaps been most effective is in helping Republicans pass legislation and blocking or diluting progressive legislation. During the months-long debate in 2006 over the Military Commissions Act, which was crafted explicitly to deny the right of habeas corpus to enemy combatants, many Blue Dogs supported the bill (against the directive of the Democratic House leadership), and ultimately twenty-three of thirty-seven voted for it. And it's not just on national security issues that they've played this role. In 2007 Representative Brad Miller proposed legislation that would have amended bankruptcy law to allow judges to alter home mortgage terms, a reform seen by many Democrats as necessary to reduce the number of foreclosures. But according to National Journal's online Congress Daily, "bankers...knew exactly whom to go to in order to stop the bill in its tracks: the Blue Dog Coalition of moderate-to-conservative Democrats." Sixteen members of the caucus signed a letter objecting to the legislation, prompting it to be pulled from consideration on the floor. As of this writing, it has yet to pass the House.

Positions like this have convinced many progressives that Blue Dogs are little more than bought-and-paid-for agents of big business. One corporate lobbyist explained the Blue Dogs' fundraising prowess this way: companies say to themselves, "Blue Dog Democrats are probably going to be more business-friendly, so let's give them more campaign contributions.... You get elected, you join the Blue Dogs...the money comes flowing." Individual fundraising is then amplified by contributions from the Blue Dog PAC, much of it from large corporations like UBS ($10,000), Citigroup ($10,000) and Coca-Cola ($10,000).

These are corporatists who want to shrink the social safety net. When pushed, Rahm Emanuel will side with them every single time and say "It's the best we can do." This is his way. He sidelined antiwar candidates at the DCCC, he pushed freshman Dems to come out as more anti-immigrant because Hispanics "don't vote." (except they do). He is an accommodationist, perfectly willing to listen to and act on critiques like Dan Boren's, that any bill without bipartisan support is "not American." If fiscal responsibility is seen as the common ground, where the left must sit by while Rahm and the Blue Dogs build a bridge to the Beltway media by cutting off the mass of society to fend for themselves, then we will have a major problem winning elections anywhere in the future.

Obama thinks he can charm the pants off an elephant. This is not the crowd to try that with. They will seal his political fate.

Not One Single Vote, Again

So the House passed the conference report of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

No Republican votes again.

(Seven Dems voted no - Bright, DeFazio, Griffith, Minnick, Peterson, Shuler and Taylor. Dan Lipinski copped out and voted "Present." I'm assuming Peter DeFazio's was a protest vote against what he considered to be insufficient public transit spending in the bill.)

It's not their bill, so they really shouldn't be voting for it. But it's hilarious that Republicans think they're winning. They think that Judd Gregg is a modern-day folk hero for realizing 9 days late that he's a conservative and Obama's a Democrat. They think they're gaining credibility with the American people by peddling lies on the floor of the House (did he really just hold up a toy mouse?) and claiming that spending isn't stimulus. The actually think it's in their interest to sink the global economy.

Andrew Sullivan is succinct:

This much is now clear. Their clear and open intent is to do all they can, however they can, to sabotage the new administration (and the economy to boot). They want failure. Even now. Even after the last eight years. Even in a recession as steeply dangerous as this one. There are legitimate debates to be had; and then there is the cynicism and surrealism of total political war. We now should have even less doubt about what kind of people they are. And the mountain of partisan vitriol Obama will have to climb every day of the next four or eight years.

More here. I'm not surprised by it. They are bereft of ideas, and in a political climate that rewards day-to-day pugilistic nonsense over anything substantive, of course the GOP would measure themselves by news cycle wins and losses. It is beyond perverse, but considering the posturing for the future, the ability to nitpick the economy over and over through united opposition, it's completely expected.

Which is what progressives looking at Obama's efforts at bipartisanship have been saying from the beginning.

• What Obama did: Trusted Judd Gregg when he indicated that, “despite past disagreements about policies, he would support, embrace and move forward with the president’s agenda.”

• What Obama got in return: A “change of heart” from Gregg, who said that he “couldn’t be Judd Gregg” at Commerce.

• What Obama did: Reached out to have dinner with right-wing pundits Bill Kristol, Charles Krauthammer, and David Brooks.

• What Obama got in return: A ripping from his right-wing friends, who called it the worst in “galactic history.”

• What Obama did: Tried to work with the House GOP by preemptively including tax cuts, stripping stimulative spending proposals, and attending their conference meeting.

• What Obama got in return: Zero votes (and a bunch of false myths about his plan)

• What Obama did: Tried to reach out to John McCain to work together on “solving our financial crisis.”

• What Obama got in return: Nothing. McCain voted against the legislation, and even went so far as to call it “generational theft” and hypocritically complained that it contained “corporate giveaways.”

There's no bargaining with the rump faction, and I think the White House is coming around to recognizing that. And perhaps there's some value in making the breaking of the extended olive branch very public and visible. And it's good to hear that future message won't be calibrated to the biorhythms of the Village:

Mr. Emanuel owned up to one mistake: message. What he called the outside game slipped away from the White House last week, when the president and others stressed bipartisanship rather than job creation as they moved toward passing the measure. White House officials allowed an insatiable desire in Washington for bipartisanship to cloud the economic message a point coming clear in a study being conducted on what went wrong and what went right with the package, he said.

This is kind of serious stuff. The global economic meltdown is now the biggest threat to the United States, so says the National Intelligence Director. We can't afford these neo-Hooverists, or the dynamic that empowers the Axis of Centrism. Best of luck to the Obama team to figure out a path forward.

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.

IL-05: The Geoghegan Boomlet

One thing that progressives are going to have to show in the coming months is that their electoral resurgence isn't just a function of President Bush's disaster or Barack Obama's charisma - it's that people are thirsting for progressive ideas on a macro level, and if the current crop of Democratic leaders aren't willing to go there, then these same people are willing to find someone who is. There are going to be a crop of new organizations designed to hold Democrats accountable and elect more bold progressives, but the first chance is going to come fairly quickly, on March 3. Rahm Emanuel's seat in Congress will be up for a special election then, and labor lawyer and writer Thomas Geoghegan is among a crowded field running for the seat. This being Illinois politics, you would expect a machine candidate to be a lock. But it's a crowded field, and with the Blagojevich mess swirling everyone's a little gun-shy to try and influence the race. Not to mention that Emanuel and Blagojevich, the last two holders of this seat, are on tape at least discussing the seat in part.

Geoghegan got a great endorsement from James Fallows the other day.

The basic background on Tom Geoghegan is here, written by his Chicago friend Rick Perlstein. Having been a friend of Geoghegan's for most of my life, I couldn't be more enthusiastic about his deciding to run.

To the extent Tom is known publicly, it's mainly because of his books, like Which Side Are You On?, The Secret Lives of Citizens, and In America's Courts. These really are masterful and original pieces of thinking and writing, which most writers would be content with as their entire contribution to the human endeavor during the period Tom has turned them out. Which Side, which was published in 1991, begins this way:

'Organized labor.' Say those words, and your heart sinks. I am a labor lawyer, and my heart sinks. Dumb, stupid organized labor: this is my cause.

The remarkable thing is that in Geoghegan's case writing has been a sideline. Day by day for several decades he has been a lawyer in a small Chicago law firm representing steel workers, truckers, nurses, and other employees whose travails are the reality covered by abstractions like "the polarization of America" and "the disappearing middle class." Geoghegan's skills as a writer and an intellectual are assets but in themselves might not recommend him for a Congressional job. His consistent and canny record of organizing, representing, and defending people who are the natural Democratic (and American) base is the relevant point.

A labor liberal in Congress? Pinch me.

The fact that so many candidates are vying for the seat may actually work to Geoghegan's benefit. I think progressives should get on board with him. There's a Facebook group here (no website yet, but ActBlue is taking donations).

Emanuel's Power-Grabbing Mistake

I agree with the consensus that the Blagojevich/Obama "scandal" was basically manufactured, and the media ran with it because scandalmongering is really all they know, but I find it hard to continue with the story without acknowledging that Rahm Emanuel is implicated, though on a level wholly separate from Obama's Senate seat. Indeed it is becoming more and more clear that Emanuel wanted help from Blagojevich in making sure Rahm's House seat would be available to him after he finished his stint as White House Chief of Staff.

In addition to talking with Gov. Blagojevich about who would fill President-elect Barack Obama's Senate seat, Obama's newly minted chief of staff had something else on his mind: his own congressional seat.

Just after accepting the top post with Obama, Rahm Emanuel discussed with Blagojevich the possibility of keeping his congressional seat "warm" for him for a couple of years, the Sun-Times has learned.

Emanuel expressed interest in returning one day to his elected position because he was on track to become U.S. House speaker, the Sun-Times previously reported [...]

Days after Emanuel and Blagojevich spoke about Emanuel's seat, the governor is overheard telling aides on secret wiretaps he wanted Emanuel "to get the word today," about raising money for the governor and that when "[Emanuel] asks me for the Fifth CD thing, I want it to be in his head." The "Fifth CD" was a reference to Emanuel's 5th Congressional District seat.

Blagojevich couldn't appoint a successor to Emanuel. But he held the seat before Rahm did, and between the two of them, there is plenty of local power that could be leveraged.

This business with IL-05 wasn't included in the Obama transition report about contacts between their office and Blagojevich's. Marcy Wheeler thinks that was a real mistake because it's bound to come up more and more as this scandal drags on. In fact, Blagojevich's lawyers want Emanuel to testify in the impeachment hearings, where that contact could certainly re-emerge:

In a dramatic development in the ongoing impeachment proceedings, lawyers for Gov. Rod Blagojevich want two key aides to President-elect Barack Obama and U.S. Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. to testify before the House impeachment committee.

Sources tell CBS 2 that a letter sent by Blagojevich's lawyers to committee chairman, State Rep. Barbara Currie, asks that the committee subpoena Obama's chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, senior adviser Valerie Jarrett and Jackson.

Blagojevich is merely riding the scandal wave by pushing focus onto the more enticing aspects of the probe, like Emanuel and Jackson, rather than the repeated and numerous proposed pay-for-play schemes with local hospitals, the Chicago Tribune, etc.

The press clearly wants to extend this story and now they have a vehicle - focusing on Emanuel's conduct and trying to get that to rub off on Obama. I really hope that it was worth it to Emanuel to potentially damage an incoming President just because he was more interested in his personal aggrandizement and hopes for becoming House Speaker.

Fortunately, there's another committed progressive looking at the IL-05 seat, one who would be the polar opposite of Rahm Emanuel if he wins. Labor lawyer and author Thomas Geoghegan is exploring a run, and he has a long record of fighting for working people and exposing Republican hypocrisy. His single piece of proposed legislation, to allow workers to sue management in court for union-busting activities, is enough on which to hang a whole campaign, if you ask me.