Archives for March 2010

I cut my teeth as a blogger covering the recount and legal contest following Washington’s excruciatingly close 2004 gubernatorial election, playing the role of Democratic yin to Stefan Sharkansky’s paranoid, mean-spirited, conspiratorial, Republican yang over at (un)Sound Politics. But for his part, Stefan was already an old hand at this blogging thing, having cut his online canines as a paranoid, mean-spirited, conspiratorial critic of his Bay Area congresswoman, Rep. Nancy Pelosi.

And so it was with some curiosity — and admittedly, more than a little swagger — that I wandered over to u(SP) to read Stefan’s well considered take on last night’s historic passage of health care reform legislation:

AND MAY THEY ALL BE BOILED IN OIL
National News
by Stefan Sharkansky, 08:43 PM

219 Democrats voted tonight to wreck the U.S. health care system.

May their victory be Pyrrhic, short-lived and reversed.

Speaking of which — the RNC has a new website “Fire Nancy Pelosi”, where you can donate to support this year’s Republican House candidates.

So how does it feel Stefan, to know that the congresswoman you hate most, has managed to achieve what other Speakers only dreamed of over the past century? Since you started your personal crusade against Pelosi, she not only rose to become our nation’s first female Speaker, but within a few short years managed to make her indelible mark on history with an extraordinary legislative accomplishment that will shape U.S. policy for generations. How’s that feel?

Does it sting? Does it burn?

I sure hope so.

When Washington State Attorney General Rob McKenna decided to spend our tax dollars joining nine other Republican AGs in a lawsuit that challenges the constitutionality of the recently passed health care reform legislation, who the hell was he representing?

The 58% of Washington voters who cast their ballot for Barack Obama and his promise of health care reform? The 6 of 9 Washington congressional districts who overwhelmingly elected Democrats and their promise of health care reform? The 57% and 55% of voters who last reelected Senators Maria Cantwell and Patty Murray respectively, and their promise of health care reform? The 500,000 Washingtonians who will be added to the state’s health care rolls?

Or, is Rob McKenna merely representing the interests of AWB and BIAW and other monied, special interests?

Washington is a state that supports health care reform and that benefits from it, yet McKenna is spending our tax dollars in the hope that an ultra-conservative U.S. Supreme Court will put aside a century of legal precedent and toss out this historic legislation. So I hope this puts to rest any notion that he is in someway a “moderate” Republican… a political animal that simply no longer exists.

Representatives Dave Reichert and Jay Inslee both spoke briefly on the floor of the House during yesterday’s health care reform debate; not surprisingly, Reichert spoke out in opposition to the bill, while Inslee spoke in its support.

But it was interesting to see both Republican Reichert and Democrat Inslee make freedom of choice a lynchpin of their divergent arguments:

Putting aside the obvious irony of Reichert making a pro-choice appeal, the fact that opposing sides could make the same basic argument in service of competing causes, shows just how muddled, confusing and hopeless this debate really is. If Democrats and Republicans can’t even agree on the meaning of the word “choice,” how can they possibly agree on something as complex as health care reform?

Of course, they can’t, which is why the mythical beast known as bipartisanship was never going to rear its head in this debate.

For the past few years Democrats campaigned vigorously on health care reform, and the American people rewarded them with control of both Congress and the White House. As a result, the American people were going to get a Democratic health care plan if they were going to get anything at all, whether the Republicans chose to constructively participate in the process or not.

The Republicans lost this debate not yesterday, not last week or last month, or even during the long year in which this bill has made its torturous way through Congress. No, the Republicans lost this debate in 2006 and 2008, when voters resoundingly decided to place their confidence in Democrats, not Republicans, to solve our nation’s most pressing problems.

These are the voters to whom Congress fulfilled a promise yesterday, and if voters in 2010 and 2012 aren’t happy about it, they will be free to toss the Democrats out. And that is a definition of “choice” on which I hope both sides can agree.

Writing on the Washington State Insurance Commissioner’s official blog, Rich Roesler explains what yesterday’s passage of federal health care reform means for us here in Washington state:

The health care reform bill passed by the U.S. House Sunday will cut the number of uninsured in Washington state by more than 500,000, provide better coverage to those with insurance, and save $500 million in uncompensated care – health care that’s delivered in Washington state but not directly paid for.

Which makes it hard to explain why Republicans Dave Reichert, Doc Hasting and Cathy McMorris-Rodgers would vote against it. Unless, of course, their votes were purely ideological and/or political.

So we finally find out what Denny Heck thinks about health care. He urged passage the weekend the vote was happening in the House.

Talk about the worst of both worlds. The Tea Party/Republicans will attack him anyway, and by not taking a stand until the 11th hour he’s shown that he’s afraid of the heat. Not exactly what voters are looking for this year, IMHO. Then he complains in his “open letter” about politics? Geebus. How’s he going to handle the right if he can’t handle the left?

UPDATE (Goldy):
Let’s be clear, State Sen. Craig Pridemore came out unequivocally for health care reform well before the vote, at a time when it wasn’t at all clear that Democrats had enough votes to pass it, whereas Heck waited until it was pretty much a done deal. I’ve got nothing against Heck, but I’m personally convinced that politics as usual is a losing ticket for WA-03 Democrats this November, and that’s what he brings to the table, while Pridemore is the kinda populist go-getter who really connects with voters.

Locked in special session, and unable to devote himself full time to campaigning and fundraising, Pridemore sure could use your help.

Bill Clinton couldn’t do it. Richard Nixon couldn’t do it. Neither could Lyndon Johnson, Harry Truman, nor Franklin or Teddy Roosevelt.

But sometime today or tomorrow, President Barack Obama will sign health care reform into law, delivering on one of his top campaign promises.

I’m just sayin’….

The yeas have it, 219-212, without, of course, a single Republican voting for it. More later, but for now, what Josh Marshall said:

If the bill passes, and should the worse befall the Dems and they wake up on November 3rd having lost both houses of Congress, they can look back on all the work in the 2004, 2006 and 2008 cycles and say, it wasn’t wasted and it wasn’t for nothing. This bill will be by far the most significant piece of social legislation in almost 50 years and will achieve, albeit imperfectly, something progressives have been trying to achieve for going on a century. If the Dems lose their majorities in November, they’ll be able to say: we worked this hard, we built these majorities, and this is what we did with it.

Even more though, I come back to the central lesson of the Social Security battle in 2005, which was the realization that the key condition of political success is almost always a genuine willingness to lose well.

[…] A genuine willingness to lose means just that: you might lose. You might lose big. And the dynamics of a mid-term election, amidst crippling unemployment and an energized right, have certain unavoidable implications. But I suspect the effect for the Democrats of actual passing this legislation will be considerably more positive than people realize.

The Dems spent some political capital, and the result was history.

Ezra Klein makes this point magnificently:

When Medicare was being considered, the American Medical Association hired Ronald Reagan to record a record housewives could play for their friends. It was called Operation: Coffee Cup, and you can listen to it in the clip atop this post, or read the text here.

Reagan was a more graceful speaker than Blackburn, but his point was much the same. Kill the bill. “If you don’t do this and if I don’t do it,” he said, “one of these days you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children, what it once was like in America when men were free.”

Well, the bill passed. And moments ago, Rep. Paul Ryan was on the floor of the House, bellowing against Democrats who would dare propose “across-the-board cuts to Medicare.” This is breathless opportunism from Ryan — he has proposed far deeper across-the-board cuts to Medicare, and is making arguments against the Democrats’ bill that would be far more potent and accurate if aimed at his own — but leave that aside for a moment. The GOP’s embrace of the program that Ronald Reagan fought, and that Newt Gingrich sought to let “whither on the vine,” is based on the lived experience seniors have had with the bill: It has made them more, rather than less, free.

Blackburn’s introduction aside, people do not “celebrate” the freedom to not be able to afford lifesaving medical care. They don’t want the freedom to weigh whether to pay rent or take their feverish child to the emergency room. They don’t like the freedom to lose their job and then be told by insurers that they’re ineligible for coverage because they were born with a heart arrhythmia.

When faced with the passage of programs that would deliver people from these awful circumstances, the Republicans adopt a very narrow and cruel definition of the word “freedom.” But when faced with the existence of programs like Medicare, and the recognition that their constituents depend on those programs to live lives free of unnecessary fear and illness, they abandon their earlier beliefs, forget their dire warnings and, when convenient, defend these government protections aggressively. There’s nothing much to be done about that. It is, after all, a free country. But Americans should feel free to ignore these discredited hysterics.

The House now has the votes to pass this thing.

Last week’s contest was won by Liberal Scientist. It was Mt. Vernon, NY.

For those who are new to the contest, click the picture and within the Bing mapping webpage, select Aerial and then select Bird’s Eye if you think you’ve at the location pictured below. Here’s this week’s, good luck!

From KIRO’s Twitter feed:

Rep. Brian Baird just told our DC Bureau that he will be voting yes on the health care bill. He was undecided before.

I’m shocked that the incumbent endorsing Denny Heck has come around, when it’s pretty clear that a vast majority of regular Democrats think we should pass the damn bill. Like Craig Pridemore has said all along. Hmm, maybe having more and better Democrats run in primaries really is a good thing.

At any rate, now we can go back to ignoring what’s his face.

They’ve never been anything more than an angry mob:

Tea partiers and other anti-health care activists are known to get rowdy, but today’s protest on Capitol Hill–the day before the House is set to vote on historic health care legislation–went beyond the usual chanting and controversial signs, and veered into ugly bigotry and intimidation.

Civil rights hero Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) and fellow Congressional Black Caucus member Andre Carson (D-IN) related a particularly jarring encounter with a large crowd of protesters screaming “kill the bill”… and punctuating their chants with the word “nigger.”

[…] And that wasn’t an isolated incident. Early this afternoon, standing outside a Democratic whip meeting in the Longworth House office building, I watched Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) make his way out the door, en route to the neighboring Rayburn building. As he rounded the corner toward the exit, wading through a huge crowd of tea partiers and other health care protesters, an elderly white man screamed “Barney, you faggot”–a line that caused dozens of his confederates to erupt in laughter.

After that incident, Capitol police threatened to expel the protesters from the building, but were outnumbered and quickly overwhelmed.

Makes you proud to be an American, huh?

Of course, bullies are also cowards, and outside of the security of their own mob, I don’t really believe that most tea baggers have the balls to act on their convictions, let alone their threats (The traitor Dave Reichert votes for cap and trade, yet faces no Tea Party challenger… what’s up with that?), but as I’ve written before, there are crazies out there, and violent rhetoric breeds violent actions. So if health care reform does pass, and right-wing violence does break out, I hope responsible political leaders have the guts to brand them as the terrorists they really are.

Leviticus 25:44-45
And as for your male and female slaves whom you may have—from the nations that are around you, from them you may buy male and female slaves. Moreover you may buy the children of the strangers who dwell among you, and their families who are with you, which they beget in your land; and they shall become your property.

Discuss.

Not that that’s news to most of us here, but it appears that even conservatives are starting to figure it out too.