Below The Fold

The Washington Post ran two columns this morning coming down somewhere between disdainful and skeptical about costs associated with healthcare reform. Chait already did a good job dealing with Fred Hiatt’s column, but I’d prefer to engage the much worse column from (surprise!) Robert Samuelson. This seems to be the key graf from the column:

On the left, President Obama and Democrats have spent the past year arguing that, despite the government’s massive deficits and overspending, they can responsibly propose even more spending. Future deficits are to be ignored (present deficits, to be sure, partially reflect the economic slump). The proposal is “responsible” because it’s “paid for” through new taxes and spending cuts. Even if these financing sources were completely believable (they aren’t), the logic is that the government can undertake new spending before dealing with the consequences of old spending. Of course, most households and businesses can’t do this.

Politicians can, because it’s all make-believe. They pretend to deal with budget deficits when they aren’t.

First of all, it seems to me that if Samuelson is going to claim that the financing mechanisms for reform aren’t “believeable,” he really ought to go to greater lengths to say why that’s the case. The CBO has scored both bills as deficit reducing, and if Samuelson has some sort of reason to believe those reports aren’t accurate, then it seems to me that his station at a major newspaper obligates him to let us know about it. If nothing else, you’d think the vaunted editors that make newspaper so wicked awesome we keep hearing about might ask their main economics columnist to explain this to their readers. It’s not like it’s trivial, after all. Secondly, there’s the rather obvious point that that last sentence rather blatantly ignores the fact that the CBO says the healthcare reform bill would lower the long-term budget deficit. Passing legislation that reduces the long-term deficit definitely strikes me as “dealing with budget deficits,” and I’d be interested to hear why Samuelson thinks it isn’t. Of course, Samuelson is a big proponent of cutting Medicare and Social Security benefits, as is the Washington Post editorial board, so I suspect it’s mostly a matter of cutting the deficit in general not being as important to Samuelson as cutting social safety net benefits in particular, but that really doesn’t give him a license to lie about the effect reform would have on the deficit. Being a Washington Post columnist, on the other hand…

Technorati Tags: Robert Samuelson, Washington Post

I think this really should have been the focal point of Krugman’s column today, and so the fact that it’s buried at the bottom is a bit disappointing, but I do think that this is the key takeaway from yesterday’s summit:

So what did we learn from the summit? What I took away was the arrogance that the success of things like the death-panel smear has obviously engendered in Republican politicians. At this point they obviously believe that they can blandly make utterly misleading assertions, saying things that can be easily refuted, and pay no price. And they may well be right.

This is basically the fundamental obstacle to getting the public to understand what’s going on with any number of issues at the moment; the Congressional minority is spinning a bunch of outright lies about the proposals, and the media isn’t interested in pointing that out. Consider this Glenn Thrush report, explaining that the summit was “a tie,” and that that means Republicans won because they spoke in complete sentences and didn’t cite Sarah Palin’s Facebook page or something. Thrush was apparently particularly impressed with the Republican decision to let Sen. Alexander take the lead:

The GOP’s smartest move, Democrats say, was picking Tennessee Sen. Lamar Alexander, a folksy, even-keeled conservative with a moderate disposition, to lead off.

Alexander eschewed the usual GOP talking points, instead offering a barbed olive branch, disavowing South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint’s prediction that health care would be Obama’s “Waterloo” — while pressing the moral argument for passing the bill through reconciliation.

 “We want you to succeed,” said Alexander, who urged Obama to heed the lessons the senator learned back in 1979 when he was elected as a 39-year-old governor of the Volunteer State.

 “Some of the media went up to the Democratic leaders of the Legislature and asked, ‘What are you going to do with the new Republican governor?’ They said, ‘I’m going to help him because if he succeeds, our state succeeds,’” said Alexander. “But often they had to persuade me to change my direction to get our state to where it needed to go. I’d like to say the same thing to you: We want you to succeed, because if you succeed, our country succeeds. But we would like, respectfully, to change [your] direction.”

How touching. Thrush thinks (or his sources think, anyway) that it was a smart move to let Alexander lead, and that Alexander took a rhetorically wise track in his remarks. What Thrush never says, not even once, is that Alexander’s “barbed olive branch” included an awful lot of lying of the bill and the process. To the former, Alexander claimed matter of factly that the CBO report on the bill says it will cause premiums to rise. As Krugman notes in his column though, and as many people pointed out in real-time yesterday, this simply isn’t true. The CBO estimates that the bill will lower premiums, and that the lower cost and availability of subsidies will lead to some people buying more coverage. But the same unit of coverage would cost less if the bill was passed. (This, incidentally, is in line with my criticism of another POLITICO article yesterday). Relating to the latter, Alexander claimed that reconcilliation has never been used for something like this, which is an even more egregious falsehood. Reconcilliation has been used to pass TEFRA in 1982, the Balanced Budget Act of 1995 (and 1997), among other Republica priorities. As Krugman notes, both Bush tax cuts were passed using reconcilliation, at a price tag twice that of the current healthcare bill. In the realm of healthcare specifically, COBRA was passed using reconcilliation in 1985. There simply is no way to make Alexander’s statements anything other than egregious falsehoods, but not only do political journalists not point out when polticians are telling egregious lies, they actively praise them based on theater criticism.

It might sound like nit-picking or whining about the refs, but this is a serious problem. If American political journalists are going to make a habit of ignoring when politicians lie about issues, then there’s nothing keeping everyone from wildly making shit up about public debates, which means there’s basically no hope of maintaining an objectively informed populace. And if that happens, democracy itself is threatened.

Technorati Tags: Lamar Alexander, Politico

Yglesias and Greenwald both write on the idea the public option died a curious death, killed off by some unseen Congressional entity, but the more I think about the politics of passing a public option now, the more I think the obvious answer for why there’s little enthusiasm for bringing the public option back is that the House probably can’t pass a bill that includes it. As plenty of people have pointed out, while Pelosi got 220 votes for the bill in the House, 4 of those votes (Murtha, Abercrombie, Cao, and Wexler) are gone. Additionally, they’ll probably lose 5 votes, give or take, over the differences in abortion language in the Senate bill. That means that Pelosi and House leadership are going to have to do some serious lifting getting Blue Dogs who voted against the House bill to vote for the Senate/reconcilliation bill, and that’s probably much easier to do without a public option, leaving the Congresspersons room to say they can support the more moderate Senate bill, even if they couldn’t support the House bill. It’d be a line of bullshit, to be sure, but that seems the only truly plausible answer as to why Democrats are running away from a chance to pass it in the Senate.

Technorati Tags: public option

This blurb from Carrie Burdoff Brown is striking for a number of reasons.

If President Barack Obama at Thursday’s summit, like caps on malpractice awards or allowing insurers to sell across state lines. really wanted to show he’s serious about winning over Republicans on health care reform, he could offer up some key concessions

And if Republicans wanted to reciprocate, they could at least acknowledge the congressional scorekeepers are right – the Democratic plans cut the deficit in the long term and rein in health care costs.

Yglesias does a pretty thorough job pointing out the substantive ridiculousness of this; noting that Republicans agreeing not to lie, or lie less anyway, about Democratic bills isn’t a sufficient trade off for actual, substantive, concessions on policy. If Democrats are going to include Republican priorities everyone can agree to more or less in the bill, then Republicans are going to have to vote for the bill. If Republicans aren’t willing to do that, then there’s no reason Democrats should offer them anything.

For my part, I’d just like to note what this says about POLITICO. For one thing, the second paragraph just makes no sense. For one thing, Republicans aren’t claiming that “Congressional scorekeepers” are “wrong;” Lamar Alexander is not saying, “the CBO estimates that this proposal will lower premium costs, but my Republican colleagues and I don’t believe that, and have evidence to the contrary,” he’s just claiming the the CBO said premiums would go up. In other words, he’s lying. And Brown either won’t say as much, or she really just isn’t listening to what various officials are actually saying. Either way, it’s illustrative of a major problem with American political journalism that’s going to have to be fixed before we stand any real chance of ever addressing a major social problem.

Technorati Tags: Politico

Sen. Jay Rockerfeller (D-WV) is reiterating that he’s opposed to passing the public option through reconcilliation at this time. This remains odd, because to this point Rockefeller has been arguably the biggest champion of the public option in the Senate. This reinforces, I think, the idea that the major players just don’t think they have the votes for the public option, and while much of the attention on that question has been focused on the Senate, the more I think about it, the more I think the House may be the real impediment. Basically, you need to get 217 votes at the moment to pass anything, and while the healthcare bill passed with 220 votes the first time, Robert Wexler has retired, Jack Murtha died, and Jospeh Cao has joined the rest of the GOP in opposition. That leaves you with 217 before you account for Bart Stupak or anyone else who isn’t happy with the Senate’s abortion related language. So basically, any bill that passes the House right now is going to have to get a vote from a handful of Democrats who voted “no” the first time, and they might not be willing to support a public option. That seems like the most likely roadblock at the moment to me.

Technorati Tags: Jay Rockefeller, public option

I don’t usually disagree with Ezra too much on healthcare reform matters, and he seems to have a pretty good handle on the political machinations involved, so seeing this from him surprises me a bit:

One other point on the public option: This has been a complete and utter failure of White House leadership. They need to give this effort their support, or they need to kill it by publicly stating their opposition. But they can’t simply wait for someone else to make the decision for them, which has been their strategy until now.

On the one hand, I think Atrios is basically right to point out that, in releasing their own plan, the White House has staked out their position on reform, although I think the more relevant question is what the Senate will do here. Basically, I very much doubt that the White House is going to try to stomp out an effort to pass a public option in the Senate if 50 votes are actually there for it. But that’s the tricky part, because it isn’t really clear how many votes are there. It seems safe to assume that Lieberman, Nelson, Lincoln, Pryor, Bayh, Landrieu Carper, and Conrad are definite votes against it. Add in Jay Rockefeller, and assume Lautenberg won’t be able to mke the vote, and all you have left are 49 Democrats, assuming that all of them would vote for the public option, something that’s far from guaranteed. But maybe they could! It’s the uncertainty that makes it difficult to take a firm public stance. There’s also the question of whether the House could find the votes to pass a public option without the Stupak language. What I think the White House has managed to do is to find the easiest path through the minefield. If the votes for a public option via reconcilliation do materialize in the Senate, and the House can pass the same package, it will be much easier for the White House to sign off on it than it would be to backpedal away from public support for the public option, again, in the event that the votes for it can’t be found in Congress.

On the other hand, I really don’t see what good the White House can do either way here. Obama might be able to bring a few Senators on board by lobbying them to support the effort but most of that work would need to be done behind the scenes. Public support from the White House at this juncture would only raise the stakes and amplify the cost of failing to get the votes. Conversely, if liberal activists and lawmakers have their hopes up about a public option revival and don’t view this as a quixotic effort, then explicitly stamping out the effort isn’t going to make them feel any better about its failure so much as it guarantees they’ll be pissed off at the White House, probably for the remainder of Obama’s tenure in office. And if they haven’t gotten their hopes up, there’s no reason not to see if the movement can’t pick up more momentum. 50 votes in the Senate and 218 votes in the House is a higher hurdle than most people realize at this point, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible. The White House has been reluctant to gamble on too many moves to this point, and I’ve largely supported that, but in this case, I really do think they ought to put the money down to see another card. They won’t lose that much more than they’re already in for if they don’t see the card they need.

Technorati Tags: public option

That’s Greenwald’s theory:

In other words, [Sen. Jay] Rockefeller was willing to be a righteous champion for the public option as long as it had no chance of passing (sadly, we just can’t do it, because although it has 50 votes in favor, it doesn’t have 60).  But now that Democrats are strongly considering the reconciliation process — which will allow passage with only 50 rather than 60 votes and thus enable them to enact a public option — Rockefeller is suddenly “inclined to oppose it” because he doesn’t “think the timing of it is very good” and it’s “too partisan.”  What strange excuses for someone to make with regard to a provision that he claimed, a mere five months ago (when he knew it couldn’t pass), was such a moral and policy imperative that he “would not relent” in ensuring its enactment.  [...]

This is why, although I basically agree with filibuster reform advocates, I am extremely skeptical that it would change much, because Democrats would then just concoct ways to lack 50 votes rather than 60 votes — just like they did here.  Ezra Klein, who is generally quite supportive of the White House perspective, reported last week on something rather amazing:  Democratic Senators found themselves in a bind, because they pretended all year to vigorously support the public option but had the 60-vote excuse for not enacting it.  But now that Democrats will likely use the 50-vote reconciliation process, how could they (and the White House) possibly justify not including the public option?  So what did they do?  They pretended in public to “demand” that the public option be included via reconciliation with a letter that many of them signed (and thus placate their base: see, we really are for it!), while conspiring in private with the White House (which expressed ”sharp resistance” to the public option) to make sure it wouldn’t really happen. 

There’s a few obvious mistakes Greenwald is making in this post. First of all, he’s overstating what Rockefeller said. As I’ve argued before, when you’re trying to make a point around a politician’s statement, you have to be careful to stick to what they actually said, because politicians carefully select their language. Rockefeller did not say he was completely opposed to using reconcilliation to pass a public option, he said he was “disinclined” to do so. What does that mean? I don’t really know, and neither does Greenwald. It’s certainly a pessimistic non-committal, at best, but it doesn’t give you any indication how committed Rockefeller is to this. Would he actually oppose the public option if there were 49 or 50 votes for it in the Senate? I don’t really think so, given the work his office did in writing the strong public option amendment in the Senate, but it’s possible. 

Secondly, Greenwald is constructing a bit of a strawman when he expresses his skepticism that you could get 50 votes for the public option. I can’t speak for everyone, but I’ve certainly been skeptical of the notion that there were 50 votes for it in the Senate, as have, among others, Ezra Klein and John Cole. Really, the only people I’ve seen who were certain there were enough votes for it were the progressive activists who spent the fall demanding Democrats use reconcilliation to get the bill done.

Lastly, Greenwald takes one person’s comment and spins a conspiracy involving the entire Democratic caucus. We’re to believe that, because Sen. Rockefeller doesn’t think using reconcilliation to pass the public option is a good idea, the entire recent campaign among a minority of the Democratic caucus is all a big sham. Aside from the obviously faulty reasoning here, I’m wondering to what extent Greenwald actually believes this. Bernie Sanders and Sherrod Brown have both signed the letter urging a reconcilliation vote on the public option, does Greenwald think these two Senators are just pulling a fast one on progressives? Does he think Bernie Sanders isn’t actually interested in passing the public option? And if he does (or even if he doesn’t), I’d like to see some actual evidence for his premise, not just more conspiracy theories. One political movement that’s consumed with paranoia and conspiracy theory is quite enough for me.

Technorati Tags: Glenn Greenwald, public option

People have made the point before that, for a couple of reasons, there really aren’t any healthcare experts on the right. Between a combination of conservatives generally believing there aren’t significant problems with America’s healthcare system and people who spend some time investigating and researching it concluding otherwise, pretty much everyone who becomes an expert or something close on healthcare issues winds up developing opinions that fall in line somewhere in the broader left. What I think goes less remarked on is the degree to which a substantial number of people on the right just don’t understand how health insurance works. Timothy Noah hit on this a little bit recently, but consider this declaration from CATO’s Michael Cannon, ironicallycontained in a post asserting that Paul Krugman doesn’t understand how insurance works:

Healthy people dropping coverage would not lead to across-the-board premium increases in California, because California allows markets to set premiums.  Only when the government imposes the kind of price controls that Krugman wants does an “adverse selection death spiral” follow.

To be polite about it, this just doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. The adverse selection problem Krugman is discussing is what happens when younger, healthier people opt not to enter into insurance pools, leaving the pool older, unhealthier, and more costly than they would be with them. Because this is how insurance works; risk is pooled together, and costs are distributed amongst the people in the pool. This makes coverage cheaper for people at higher risk, and more expensive for people with lower risk. But of course, everyone gets older, so while this may be a bad deal at one point, at a later point you’ll be on the other end of the spectrum. As Cohn notes, this is why conservatives love of high-risk pools illustrates that they’re simply not serious about doing real healthcare reform. I’m not really sure why Cannon thinks price controls would exacerbate this problem, if anything they ought to make insurance more attractive to younger customers. But then, I don’t really understand how libertarians think anymore than they understand how health insurance works.

(Via)

Technorati Tags: Dumb Glibertarians, Paul Krugman

I’m pretty sure I’ve said this multiple times before, but it bears repeating that I really think Atrios is overstating the importance of short-term popularity in healthcare reform. For one thing, popularity doesn’t necessarily track good policy. If Democrats wanted to pass a healthcare bill solely around popular opinion, they could craft something that includes popular insurance reforms but no mandate. That would involve including popular things while excluding the most unpopular aspect of the bill, but it would also trigger a death spiral that would end with everyone but the solidly affluent and very healthy, and that probably wouldn’t be very popular. It also probably wouldn’t do politicians a lot of good to make the argument that they were only doing what the public said it wanted at the time. To put it in terms that will strike closer to progressive sensibilities, right now more voters than not are telling pollsters they want the government to do something about the deficit. But actually pursuing deficit reduction would damage the labor market even more, and voters wouldn’t much care for that, and protesting that you were only reducing the deficit like voters said they wanted wouldn’t do elected officials much good in elections amidst 13% unemployment.

Another complicating issue is that reform will itself keep many people from encountering the worst aspects of the insurance industry. People who haven’t had their policy rescinded or been denied insurance for a pre-existing condition may not fully realize what they’re getting out of the deal, but that doesn’t mean they won’t benefit. Atrios’s argument seems to be that the public option gives them something to look at, but even assuming the public option is available to everyone, I’m skeptical that that many people with employer provided insurance would opt to give it up for the public option. But either way, the fundamental point is the same; in the long run, it’s much more important for healthcare reform to represent good policy than to poll well in the near-term.

I’m not sure it’s going to have enough steam to go anywhere, but it’s nice to see that a contingent of Senate Democrats, including Chuck Schumer, are making a push to get a reconcilliation vote on the public option. The people who have done a lot of organizing and pushing on this deserve a lot of credit, even if nothing comes of it. Apparently Digby doesn’t share the sentiment though:

But I would warn them that if they think that building up the base’s hopes on this again only to fail to even get 50 out of 58 Democrats it isn’t going to work. If they are serious about rallying the base they need to deliver, period. No excuses. They have a majority. If they hold a vote that only requires 51, they need to win it.

But if they are running the same game they ran before I can’t imagine how much worse they are making it for themselves. They need to be very, very serious about passing it. This Charlie Brown with the football routine is what’s killing them with the base. They just can’t afford to do it again.

This is, to put it mildly, really, really bizarre. On the one hand, you’d think progressive activists would be happy with getting a vote on their top priority just for the sake of getting a vote. Even if you don’t win it, it’s better than not even getting that far. And it lets you get Democratic Senators on the record as either for or against it. On the other hand, the fact that Michael Bennett and Kristen Gillibrand, two appointed Senators running in special elections looking for progressive support, feel it’s worthwhile to reach out to progressive activists through the issues they care about as we head into election season should embolden said activists, even if they can’t get 40 other Senators on board with them. But if we’re to believe Digby, the progressive base apparently needs to be treated like a 6 year old; don’t broach the possibility of doing something fun with them unless you’re absolutely certain you’re going to be able to do it, because they’re not developed enough to understand that circumstances change, and they’ll be upset if you’re unable to follow through. Most adults are developed enough that when someone says they “might” do something or that they’ll “try” to do something, it’s not the same thing as actually promising to do it. And you would think that if 40 or so Democrats go on record supporting the public option, but can’t hold 50 Democrats in line, progressives would be thankful for the Senators who went to bat on their issue. Indeed, if Digby is right, the people who are going to be hurt most by this will be the progressive activists; if politicians come to conclude there’s no benefit to taking up their causes because the activists won’t support them if they can’t get majority support in either Congress, then they’ll quickly run out of allies in Congress. If you want influence in the insider’s game, then when someone goes to bat for you, you have to go to bat for them.

I guess I should be happy enough that Evan Bayh has decided to take the occassion of his retiring in the face of Congressional dysfunction to call out the filibuster, but like apparently everyone else I can only muster one reaction; if Bayh thinks this is so serious, why isn’t he staying around to change things? Like everything else in Bayh’s political career, it’s a nice sounding quote that makes him look serious about tackling problems, but when push comes to shove he’s just not interested in tangling himself up in the nuts and bolts of doing anything legislatively. You can say similar things about this “defense” of Bayh from Jon Alter:

I’m not sure people realize just how much the failure of health care demoralized Evan Bayh. As I learned in reporting for my upcoming book, The Promise: President Obama, Year One, out in May, White House aides David Axelrod and Jim Messina visited the Senate just before the August recess last year and left feeling much better after hearing from Bayh. He made them feel that the politics of getting reelected demanded passage of the bill, which at the time looked iffy. “We’re all screwed if you don’t get something real on health care,” Bayh told them. This made Axelrod and Messina think that the moderates would be on board.

That’s nice and all, but it leads to an obvious question: if Bayh thought healthcare reform was so important, why didn’t he stand up and fight for it? After all, the process would have been helped immensely by having someone with Bayh’s centrist credentials with the establishment press defending the effort and voicing full support for reform. Especially when the Senate was deliberating over the bill, a strong defense from Bayh actually could have made a big difference. Except, Bayh was basically silent on healthcare reform. So color me less impressed than Alter. And consider most of my impressions of Bayh reinforced; he’s a lazy, disinterested office holder who was only interested in being a legislator to the extent it helped him become President. He was never interested in doing anything with the office. Hell, his name wasn’t even on the vaunted budget commission he’s reportedly pissed didn’t clear a Senate vote. Kent Conrad and Judd Gregg did the lifting on that.

Technorati Tags: Evan Bayh, Filibuster

by Brien Jackson

I don’t really understand what’s so hard to get about this idea:

President Barack Obama is planning to host a televised meeting with Republican and Democratic congressional leaders on health care reform.

The Feb. 25 meeting is an attempt to reach across the aisle but not a signal that the president plans to start over, as Republicans have demanded, a White House official said.

 “I want to come back [after the Presidents Day congressional recess] and have a large meeting — Republicans and Democrats — to go through, systematically, all the best ideas that are out there and move it forward,” Obama said in an interview with Katie Couric during CBS’s Super Bowl pre-game show Sunday.

The idea strikes me as pretty straight-forward; the White House is hoping to re-create the dynamic from the House GOP retreat. That is, the Republicans will throw out a lot of false, insane, claims, and Obama and healthcare experts will be right there to deftly bat them down. The goal being, to make Obama look good, and House Republicans look ridiculous, just like in Baltimore. And by announcing it so publicly, Obama has put the GOP in a bit of a bind; if they don’t show up, the White House will be further able to paint them as the ‘party of no” and point out that they aren’t offering alternative solutions. Not that any of that matters, of course, at the end of the day, it’s just an attempt to get something on C-Span, and create some political theater that generates some momentum for Democrats on the hill to pass the bill. I really don’t understand why we’re pretending not to get this.

So it turns out I was wrong, and Martha Coakley, aka the Worst Candidate Ever, actually did manage to lose an election in Massachusetts to a right-wing Republican. And, apparently, among the many other attributes the new Senator-elect from Massachusetts possesses, he has the ability to make the collective internets lose its fucking mind. Or maybe that’s Washington Democrats, who are apparently suddenly wavy on healthcare reform.

Well far be it from me to be a party pooper, but it does seem worth pointing out that, for all the freakout, very little is actually different today than it was last Monday. The House and the Senate can come to an agreement on how to move forward together? Well the fact that Republicans can filibuster anything they want doesn’t help matters, but they couldn’t really figure much out regarding collective action this time last week either. House progressives don’t like the Senate bill and don’t want to vote for it? That might be a problem, but they didn’t like the Senate bill Tuesday morning either.

I tend to agree with the broad consensus that the House and Senate should pass a reconcilliation bill amending the Senate bill in agreeable ways, and f course ways that are possible through reconcilliation, after which the House should vote to pass the Senate bill. I also agree that if the two chambers can’t work out an agreement that can get enough Democratic votes in the useless upper chamber, that the House ought to go ahead and pass the Senate bill anyway. Yeah they’ll hate it, but it’s still better than the status quo, and if that’s the best that can be done, then that’s what you do. I also sympathize with the House where it comes to negotiating with the Senate; the filibuster gives the Senate a huge upper hand in negotiations, and makes a mockery of the notion of equal chambers. But it is what it is, for now anyway, and the House has to put aside its pride and do what’s best for the people. There will be a time to take on the Senate, but this is not it.

Outside of that, would everyone please calm down? It’s been 4 days since Brown won. That the House hasn’t passed something yet, or that the House and the Senate haven’t quite come to an agreement, isn’t that worrying. The Senate is the hard part, but they’ve already cleared their procedural ball. If 256 House Democrats, including the progressive caucus, put the bullet in healthcare reform, well, we’ve got bigger problems I guess.

Early this morning, the Senate voted to pass healthcare reform by a 60-39 vote. With Jim Bunning (R-KY) not in attendance, 58 Democrats and 2 Independents voted aye, and every Senate Republican voted no. There’s some pretty serious implications of the dynamics at work here moving forward, and obviously more work to be done on the healthcare front, but it’s worth stopping for a moment to appreciate the historic moment.

American progressives have been working for a national healthcare plan since John Dingell Sr. introduced a national health insurance bill to Congress in 1933. He and his son have introduced a similar bill to every Congress since. It has been a 76 year uphill battle, with very few victories along the way. It’s worth keeping that futility in mind as we fight over whether or not the current bill is expansive enough to be worth passing. For whatever the bill’s flaws, for the first time ever, both the House and the Senate have passed universal healthcare bills declaring that the United States government believes equitable access to quality healthcare coverage should be universal. That’s not nothing, it’s arguably the hardest hurdle to clear.

A lot of paens to the moment have declared that this is something  of a hollow win, a legislative victory that doesn’t feel much like a win. Well I’m not having any of that. As someone who’s actually been involved in a fair bit of ground level organizing, it’s worth remembering that big changes rarely come at once. It might be getting cliche now, but these things really are long, hard, slogs. Progressive activism is like a football game, you accomplish your goal by moving the ball down the field, yard by yard, first down by first down. And while the ultimate goal is a touchdown, that’s no reason not to be happy about picking up a first down. So while the legislative process continues to be a mess, while fights over the adaquecy of the bill may cause headaches, and while the endless compromises with nitwits and sociopaths like Ben Nelson and Joe Lieberman may depress, that’s no reason not to feel joy over the accomplishment. For the first time in 76 years, the United States Senate has voted to move towards universal healthcare in America. The fight isn’t over, it never is, but this is a pretty big first down. And for that we can all be joyful this Christmas.

Our country’s Leading Progressive Activist goes on Fox News to argue against taxes.

How about we just rename the bill after Hamsher? Anyone else think that would satisy her need for attention?