Here's A Thought, Take The Popular Option

Kevin Drum is as shrill as he gets, which is to say, measured, polite, and miffed.

In case you missed it, Jon Stewart had a good riff on this last night. His question: Why are Democrats so lame? It's a good one! They have a huge majority in the Senate, the public is strongly in favor of a public option, and yet....for some reason they can't round up the votes to pass it. Hell, they can't even round up a normal majority to pass it out of the Finance Committee, let alone a supermajority to overcome an eventual filibuster.

If Democrats really do lose the House next year (about which more later), this will be why. If they don't pass a healthcare bill at all, they'll be viewed as terminally lame. If they pass a bill, but it doesn't contain popular features that people want — like the public option — they'll be viewed as terminally lame. At a wonk level, a bill without a public option can be perfectly good. But wonks aren't a large voting bloc, and among people who do vote, the public option is very popular. So, um, why not pass it?

I will minimally defend Democrats. The Finance Committee has a 13-10 split, which is a bit less of a majority than the 60-40 overall split. Stewart's point was that Democrats had a supermajority and didn't use it in the Finance Committee is inaccurate. Furthermore, there's no such thing as a supermajority in the patently undemocratic confines of the Senate. Because the public option isn't popular among land as well as people, it doesn't have 60 votes in a Senate organized around land. There's also the problem of unanimous opposition from an entire political party, which really does represent a crisis of governance.

That said, yes! Democrats are lame! Especially in this case, where they have a popular policy that also happens to be the policy that best brings down costs and provides competition in the insurance market. As for Drum's point that a bill without a public option can be good at a wonk level, he's talking about something like the Swiss health care system, where private insurers exist without a public alternative, but are strictly regulated. Which is perfectly fine except for a few things:

1) It is the second-worst system in the world in terms of costs, rivaled only by... the United States.
2) We have no history of regulatory strictness, in fact we have the opposite history, so actually pulling off a regulation-based check on the insurance companies is a real long shot.
3) The Swiss have higher co-pays, insurance premiums and out-of-pocket expenses than Americans, which politically would not fly at all. People are already crushed by the burden of high-dollar health care here.

The truth is that the difficulty of Democrats to include a public option - though I don't think it's dead yet - reflects the breakdown of our political system and the influence of corporate money. The Swiss have their health care plan because they put it in place relatively recently, and the large health interests didn't want a public component. It's the same here, and frankly politicians in both parties have been bought off.

As I said, I don't think this is quite over. Labor won't budge on their insistence on a public option, and for a White House obsessed with keeping their majority that's a big deal - lose the support of the AFL-CIO and you lose seats, period. What's more, progressives understand the pressure points now - mainly, the White House and Harry Reid. If he includes a public option in the merged Senate bill it will be very hard to get it out, and then Senators will be faced with the unpleasant choice of filibustering a bill that has the overwhelming support of the Democratic caucus and the White House to protect insurance company profits.

I'd make two calls today - Reid's office and the White House switchboard.

Forget It Roman, It's... Switzerland?

I thought the Swiss were the neutral ones...

After more than 30 years as a fugitive from U.S. justice, Roman Polanski, the director of legendary films including “Chinatown” and “Rosemary’s Baby,” was arrested in Switzerland on an international warrant as he arrived in Zurich for a film festival featuring a retrospective of his work, the Swiss authorities said Sunday.

Mr. Polanski was detained by the police Saturday upon his arrival at the Zurich airport, said Guido Balmer, a spokesman for the Swiss Federal Justice Department. The director was being held in provisional detention in preparation for a possible extradition to the United States based on an arrest warrant dating to 1978.

Mr. Polanski, 76, was convicted that year in a California court of unlawful sex with a 13-year-old girl whom he had lured to the home of Jack Nicholson and drugged. Faced with a prison term, he fled the United States just before his sentencing.

Samantha Geimer, the girl with whom Mr. Polanski had sex, has since publicly forgiven him.

Defense attorneys actually tried to get the Polanski case thrown out of court in Santa Monica this past year, but to no avail. And Polanski could still challenge the arrest warrant and potential extradition, in an appeals process that will last a while.

Laurie Essig has a real interesting story about this. I saw "Wanted and Desired," the movie about the Polanski case which led defense attorneys to try and nullify it, and there are certainly lots of shades of grey in there, including some prosecutors with an agenda and a headline-chasing judge who apparently backed out on a plea deal. Jeralyn Merritt calls the arrest outrageous.

I'm just stunned that the Swiss would involve themselves in this complicated issue, after letting Polanski in their country dozens of times over the past 30 years. They seemed so averse to controversy!

...the LA DA's office set up the arrest warrant. When a judge refused to throw out charges this year, he did so on the grounds that Polanski couldn't have them dropped while he was a fugitive from justice. It could be that Polanski gets extradited to the US, in a process that could take anywhere from a couple days to several months, only to appear before a judge who agrees to drop the charges.

No Numbered Bank Account Information For You

If the IRS simply collected what it was owed, particularly by rich people with tax shelters and secret stashes and corporations with mailboxes in the Cayman Islands that serve as their headquarters, we would actually be much closer to a balanced budget than you could imagine, and by eliminating the kind of loopholes that facilitate this theft, essentially, we could lower overall tax rates while increasing revenue. But this treaty with Switzerland designed to get information on Americans holding Swiss bank accounts in contravention of federal tax law shows how arduous a process this will be.

A new treaty touted as helping U.S. law enforcement crack Swiss bank secrecy may do little to help authorities achieve a prime objective: exposing tax evaders.

In an interview this week, a top Swiss official cited the recently negotiated treaty amendment as evidence that Switzerland is moving toward greater openness. Doris Leuthard, Switzerland's vice president and economic minister, emphasized that in the future the treaty amendment now awaiting ratification would give the United States access to information in cases of tax evasion, which are not covered by an existing treaty between the two countries.

But Leuthard also said that under the treaty amendment, the United States would have to know the names of suspected tax evaders to obtain information about their Swiss accounts [...]

Jack Blum, a lawyer who specializes in international tax and money-laundering matters, said the treaty amendment boils down to this: "If you have the information, we'll give it to you."

The main value of the agreement is that "it gives everybody the ability to say we signed an agreement," Blum said, but "I don't think that qualifies as solving the problem."

The Swiss make lots and lots of money riding on their numbered accounts, and I don't know that you can get them to roll back the kind of secrecy that makes them a leader in global depositing. The US and Switzerland currently are seeking a deal that would get the names of over 52,000 Americans hiding fortunes overseas. But I wouldn't bet the ranch on success.