Will It Float – The Triangles
Two optimistic takes on health care. First, Jonathan Chait points out that despite all the public fights and sensationalist coverage, the real matter here is whether 60 Democrats will be willing to simply not filibuster whatever bill actually ends up on the floor of the Senate. And it appears that this is the case. There’s a lot of time left for things to go wrong, but ultimately if all sixty of those Democrats come to the conclusion that it will be a disaster for them personally and the party overall to actually FILIBUSTER health care reform to death…then it’s going to pass.
And that’s pretty significant. They don’t have to vote for the thing – maybe there’s currency in voting against it while still not filibustering it. They don’t have to LIKE everything that’s in the bill – they almost certainly won’t. They just have to realize how much of a disaster it will be for them if they end up singly responsible for killing the single most important progressive bill in 40 years.
Ezra Klein, meanwhile, points out that all the fretting and backlash has failed to actually turn any votes. Not a single Democrat seems willing to filibuster now, after all the August screaming. Which means there’s not a whole lot of reason to think they’ll balk down the line. The media loves a good story to cover, but Klein sums it up nicely: “They had the votes in the beginning. The question is whether they can keep them together at the end. That is all that has ever mattered, or really been possible. Everything else is just noise, and the players who matter appear to have ignored it entirely.”
I’m not saying it’s a sure thing. But I do think that at this point something pretty fundamental is going to have to change to kill health care reform. The real issue was whether ephemeral polling was going to scare the moderate Dems off the ship. That doesn’t seem to have happened. Which means that if things continue along their current path, the incentives to filibuster aren’t going to get any stronger.
There’s still a lot to worry about, but it’s important to remember that we’re already further into the process than the Clintons ever got. The Finance Committee is going to pass their bill soon (particularly given the pretty strong CBO scoring it got). The other four versions have already passed. It’ll go through the two main chambers, they’ll put together a bill in conference, and then we’ll see if anyone is so angry about the modest pains it’ll impose on insurance companies that they’re willing to annihilate their own party.
Of course, there’s still all kinds of chances for perfectly reasonable parts of the process (the public option, the Kerry amendment to help choose options, etc.) to get cut out. And when some of them don’t end up passing, it will be incredibly frustrating.
But if we get the majority of the bill, I’ll be happy to make those things supplemental efoorts for the coming decade.