President Obama has finally laid out a vision for the last mile on health care. In short, big public debate then vote. I was initially quite worried about the alternate strategy after reading about it in the Washington Post. However, I think the Post story actually does get it wrong, I don’t see any indication that this is an alternate strategy, it does seem to be consistent with passing the bill via reconciliation in the likely event that there’s no more Republican support. Jon Chait takes a stab at decoding the strategy:
I think Obama sees the perception that the process is broken -- that it's backroom deals and "ignoring the will of the people" -- to be the biggest impediment to passage of the bill. So he's proposing a remedy to that perception.
The most important part is what Obama says should happen first: Democrats should settle their differences and work out a final bill. That's crucial. Then he wants to sit down with both parties, and health care experts, and walk through the details in a methodical way. I'd guess he's imagining a process that might look a little like his back-and-forth with House Republicans -- they present him with wild claims about a government takeover, and he calmly responds…
He's [also] saying that Congress can't just ignore the issue and let it die in quiet. It needs to have a vote, relatively soon, and make a decision, rather than decide by default to keep the status quo.
Jon Cohn thinks that this manages to put the ball in the Republican’s courts, although he also notes that Obama will still need to help getting to a final bill. A friend, [Matt Lewis]m talking me down after the Post article similarly thought it [might] mean they’d have to defend the status quo. I think the inclusion of experts here is key, if the Republicans don’t show up the Democrats can discuss this with experts, that is to say that outright boycott is not as rewarding of a strategy.
An interesting feature of this strategy is that it in some ways riskier if the Republicans do participate. As Krugman has pointed out, the bill is a three legged stool and thus not especially agile. This is especially true because the reconciliation mechanism can only be used for budgetary matters thus any major regulatory style changes would make the bill again vulnerable to a filibuster. However, I think that gets to the feature of a public debate that wasn’t present in the Baucus gang of six affair, participating in the negotiations is high visibility and requires either effectively defending your ideas or being willing to make concessions.
On the whole, I’m fairly displeased with where we are and do feel on the whole let down by the leadership over the past year. This sort of approach might be a great idea for starting to go after the filibuster if used in conjunction with a popular set of proposals that weren’t complex and interlinked, like banking reforms. However, as Kevin Drum discusses, the Republicans are demonstrating a fair amount of hubris and are more likely to repeat their government shutdown mistakes than to actually participate in governing. I think Obama may just have managed to devise an approach where pure obstruction is an inferior tactical choice versus participation. It’s actually quite clever, hopefully not too clever.
On the whole, I’ve also been a bit moody over the past month as a result of this fight. I don’t like it. Maybe I should pick up meditation or something. Might be a downside of not blogging as much, Twitter really doesn’t cut it in terms of letting ideas air out.
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