The Filibuster

The Filibusterhttp://www.good.is/Politics blogger Brian Beutler weighs in on what our government is doing (and what it should be doing).Wed, 15 Feb 2012 05:25:08 -0800CakePHPhourly1en-us <![CDATA[America's Workforce Woes]]> http://www.good.is/post/america-s-workforce-woes/ http://www.good.is/post/america-s-workforce-woes/

America's latest job satisfaction numbers aren't good. To turn them around, workers need to demand more leverage.

You've probably been told, and have likely told others, that some people live to work, while others work to live. Sound familiar? Well in addition to being a tired cliché, it's also a false dichotomy. There are any number of other categories to describe how people relate to their jobs, but for millions of Americans, working simply makes them hate life.

An annual survey by the Conference Board research group finds that, in 2009, only 45 percent of workers were happily employed, down four percent from the year before. According to the study, two factors contributing to the drop were stagnant incomes and general dismay: A lot of jobs are really lame.

There is, of course, no shortage of people who happily accept, or even relish, their professional lots in life. But it doesn't take a rocket scientist (high job satisfaction) to see that a depressing array of structural problems make working in America dreadful for millions.

For instance: The vast majority of Americans with health insurance get their coverage from their employers. That sounds like an important benefit, and in many ways it is, but in others it's an anachronism, and a double-edged sword. For untold hundreds of thousands of unhappily employed Americans, the only thing stopping them from making the leap to entrepreneurship or a more fulfilling job, is the fear of being without insurance. It's a trap. And it gives employers-not all of whom are in the business of pleasing their workers-a ton of leverage.

But wait! There's more! Because U.S. health care is so expensive, and because those costs are rising faster than inflation, employers are spending more and more every year to provide that health insurance. That's money that isn't being put toward paying higher wages and salaries, contributing to the stagnation that makes people feel like their years of work aren't adequately valued.

And it's not just health care. Union density in America is near historic lows, while jobs have become hyper-specialized. Workers with no leverage stuck at tediously repetitive jobs. What could possibly go wrong? Our counterparts in European countries, by contrast, enjoy shorter work hours and more vacation time, without sacrificing productivity.

Add to all this the wrenching uncertainty that comes with the worst economy in almost a century, and it actually seems surprising that even 45 percent of people say things are groovy at work.

Fortunately all of these contributing factors can be mitigated. The health care system in this country will change over time. It has to-eventually, in a way that disarms the booby trapped employer-provided insurance system. Labor laws can also be changed. This is a top priority for unions, which remain a force-though a diminished one-in Democratic politics. Their signature legislative initiative-the Employee Free Choice Act-would go a long way toward giving workers more to show for all their labor.

Somewhat less structurally, the economy is still in the pits, and the nation's infrastructure is crumbling. As a result there will in the future be more of the sort of project-based, nuts and bolts jobs that may not top the job satisfaction charts, but that can't be outsourced.

There's some reason, then, to believe that worker satisfaction is actually at its nadir. Major factors-the economy, the health care crisis, the decline of unions-are aligning to push happiness to a historic low. But even as those trends change it's hard to imagine America becoming a worker-friendly country. That won't happen until workers start to make the connection between the organization of our economy and their role in it-and demand we start to do things differently.

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America's latest job satisfaction numbers aren't good. To turn them around, workers need to demand more leverage.

]]> Brian Beutler Fri, 8 Jan 2010 08:00:50 PST <![CDATA[The Decade in American Politics]]> http://www.good.is/post/the-decade-in-american-politics/ http://www.good.is/post/the-decade-in-american-politics/ designPolitics

Ten years of conflict and economic chicanery (and a fragile promise of change).
The first decade of the third 21st century may not go down as the most consequential, or suckiest decade in the history of the United States. But it was pretty consequential and pretty sucky. Thousands dead on American soil. Two wars. A city demolished. Global economic crisis. The election of the (inspirational) first black president. And the realization that he's not, in fact, all things to all people, or incapable of failure. Here's how it all happened.

2000

Having emerged from a scandalous affair, and a kabuki impeachment, a still-popular President Clinton seeks to help his number two, Al Gore, win a punishing election. Gore wants no part of it.

After a series of snafus and scandals, Florida's vote for president is deemed too close to call. Bush's team-which for all intents and purposes included his brother Jeb, the governor of Florida-fights hard and dirty during the recount. Gore and Lieberman...not so much.

2001

With no mandate to govern and no love from Congress, Bush's first several months in office are a joke. His main achievement: resisting the temptation to touch off an international incident with China, after a Chinese military pilot is killed in a mid-air collision with an American spy plane. And tax cuts.

With the country's intelligence efforts focused away from international terrorism, September 11, 2001 happens.

In October, Congress hurriedly passes the PATRIOT Act. Bush finds his mandate.

Just two months later, America invades Afghanistan.

Osama bin Laden escapes U.S. forces in Tora Bora.

2002

Afghanistan quickly becomes an afterthought as the public rush to war with Iraq begins in earnest.

The ranks of Guantanamo Bay swell.

So do the ranks of Republicans in Congress, in a rare mid-term election victory for the party already in power.

2003

In his State of the Union address, Bush utters the "16 words": "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

Colin Powell makes an error-plagued presentation to the United Nations Security Council.

With the support of the country and the Congress-including most Democrats-Bush invades Iraq.

May: More tax cuts.

By bravely running against the war in a toxic, jingoistic climate, Howard Dean becomes an apparent phenomenon.

American forces capture Saddam Hussein in a hole on a sheep farm in Iraq.

2004

Reports emerge of prisoner abuse of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. soldiers in the prison at Abu Ghraib.

Howard Dean comes in third in Iowa.

Howard Dean screams awkwardly.

The Democratic party nominates John Kerry as its presidential candidate, Kerry picks John Edwards as his running mate. A man named Barack Obama wows the nation with a stemwinder of a speech at the Democratic National Convention in Boston.

John Kerry makes a fool of George Bush at the debates. Karl Rove makes a fool of John Kerry everywhere else.

Bush retains the presidency, with 50.7 percent of the popular vote, bringing greater majorities with him to Congress. That Obama guy wins a Senate seat.

2005

The President launches a fierce, but ultimately failed, push to "partially privatize" Social Security.

August: Hurricane Katrina picks up a head of steam in the Gulf of Mexico. Despite ample warning, the Bush administration remains blithely unconcerned.

Katrina strikes New Orleans. Levees fail. The 9th Ward floods. Nearly 2,000 people die. Heckuva job, Brownie.

The Wall Street Journal breaks the Abramoff story.

The New York Times breaks the warrantless wiretapping story.

2006

It's midterm season. Iraq is a quagmire, the case for the war is debunked, and the Republican party is embroiled in scandal. The Democrats' platform: We're not Republicans.

The Congressional page scandal breaks. Congressman Mark Foley resigns from Congress. Republicans who shielded him are further disgraced.

Democrats maul Republicans at the polls, retaking both the House and, surprisingly, the Senate. Bush calls it a "thumpin'."

Bush fires Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

2007

January: The U.S. Attorney scandal hits a tipping point. Democrats, now with subpoena power, go full throttle.

Barack Obama-the guy from the speech?-launches his presidential campaign. He's widely expected to lose the Democratic nomination to Hillary Clinton.

Within months, after myriad officials leave the administration in disgrace, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales resigns.

2008

Obama shocks the nation, and wins the Iowa caucuses.

John McCain becomes the presumptive nominee to be the GOP's presidential candidate.

Obama and Hillary tussle for the Democratic nod. In June, Obama clinches it.

September: Lehman brothers declares bankruptcy. Congress scrambles to pass a bailout package for the financial sector. The U.S. economy enters a precipitous decline. Unemployment skyrockets and panic ensues.

Barack Obama wins the presidential election in a landslide.

2009

Over one million people descend upon an icy Washington D.C. to witness Obama's historic inauguration.

February: After seizing control of the stimulus package, and trimming it of essential billions of dollars, centrist senators allow a bill to pass and be signed into law.

The (political) tea bagging phenomenon goes viral.

Arlen Specter switches parties, becoming the Democrats' 60th vote in the Senate.

With 60 votes-the number needed to overcome a filibuster-Democrats hope to pass a historic health care bill before August. Complications within their own party prevent it. Tea partiers sense weakness and orchestrated town hall shout downs begin.

In November, the House of Representatives passes major health care legislation. Obama's popularity has slipped notably since January.

On December 1, Obama announces a plan to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan. Osama bin Laden is still on the loose.

Obama will not sign a health care bill before the end of the year. Republicans are energized. Democrats are not.]]> designPolitics

Progressives need to stop mocking buffoons on the far right and focus on passing legislation.

It's no secret that the President and his party have had a hard time making the strides they want to make, particularly on the legislative front. There was, of course, the success of the stimulus, which passed by the skin of its teeth, and only after it had been measurably, and tragically, weakened. But beyond that, the "change" has been scarce: No health care bill, no climate change bill, and we're less than a year from an election, the results of which will likely reduce the Democrats' big majority in Congress, further diminishing their hopes of actually accomplishing anything.

This is a failure with many fathers, some of whom have nothing to do with the progressive majority in the country. We've even addressed some of those problems in this very space.

But, crucially, progressives and Democrats haven't been up to the task. The people and institutions that ushered a progressive majority to power-unions, pressure groups, think tanks, and the Obama campaign-are skilled at many things. Particularly, they're good at making the Republican party seem like a terrible alternative to the public. And that's important-in elections, it helps if your opponent is unpopular. But between elections, these groups should have been focusing significantly more energy on fixing the economy, passing health care reform, and addressing climate change-and less on continuing to expose the GOP for the farce it is.

This was never going to be easy. In the modern, polarized Congress, where most legislation needs 60 out of 100 votes to pass, progress requires more than making asses out of the rump element of flat taxers and climate change deniers. It requires making people in the center feel heat when they don't play nice. And on that score, the White House, and its proxies have failed badly.

The White House itself deserves a great deal of the blame. At every major "change" turning point-when Ben Nelson, Susan Collins, and Arlen Specter tied up and hacked away at the stimulus bill; when banks made a mockery of the taxpayers who bailed them out; when centrists in both the House and the Senate emasculated the public health insurance option-some hardline progressive groups were prepared to pull all of their levers, and the White House said, "hush." In an earlier role as chairman of Democrats' congressional political arm, Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel had helped build this center flank, and he'd be damned if he was going to let fringy activists upset it.

So, for the most part, the well-moneyed groups-the Center for American Progress, SEIU, Obama's reconstituted campaign arm Organizing for America-stayed quiet. Or they did what they've always done. They made Sarah Palin (and Michelle Bachmann, and Rush Limbaugh, and Glenn Beck) look like weirdos. Dangerous weirdos. But mainly just weirdos.

And that's created huge problems. Chiefly, it means that the Democrats were unable to pass a big enough stimulus to keep the country out of double-digit unemployment, even though Michael Steele and Rush Limbaugh looked like buffoons the whole time. They have yet to pass a health care bill, and the one they're working on isn't very popular with progressives, even though Sen. Jim DeMint paid dearly for calling health care Obama's "Waterloo," and Rep. Joe Wilson had to apologize publicly for screaming "you lie!" at the President. And the prospects for a climate change bill passing the Senate before the 2010 elections looks bleaker and bleaker every day, even though everybody knows that Sen. James Inhofe is a nutcase.

Most importantly, that means the country and the world, are worse off. Secondarily, it means that Democratic voters have little to be excited about. So even though all of the left's right-wing bashing has helped keep the GOP extremely unpopular, the GOP's voters are energized, ready to turn out, while the liberal base feels demoralized. You know who wins those elections.

At this point, a solution is elusive. Democrats need to do things-a jobs program, a health care bill people like-that improve peoples' lives, even if it means offending some of their friends. Then they can run on substantive success. To paraphrase Barney Frank, "it's not as terrible as it could have been," isn't an inspiring platform.

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Progressives need to stop mocking buffoons on the far right and focus on passing legislation.

]]> Brian Beutler Thu, 10 Dec 2009 06:07:16 PST <![CDATA[Deficit Chickenhawks]]> http://www.good.is/post/deficit-chickenhawks/ http://www.good.is/post/deficit-chickenhawks/

Politicians love to brag about fiscal discipline, but few have the record to back it up. The media needs to help America figure out who's who.

Agility and power don't often go together. A tank can't turn on a dime; a linebacker isn't usually much of a pole-vaulter; and, in much the same way, the Democratic party isn't as nimble as the smaller, more ideologically limited GOP. That's one major reason why, despite a huge majority in Congress, President Obama is still having an awfully hard time enacting his agenda.

But I'm going to go way out on a limb and suggest that the Democrats can do better than to threaten each other with mass immolation.

Allow me to explain: A statute limits the size America's federal debt. But every year for a long time now Congress has enacted legislation to raise the country's debt ceiling. It's one of only a handful of bills that passes with little wrangling on the Hill, because it simply must pass. America owes trillions of dollars to foreign debt holders and if we default, all hell will break lose both in the United States and abroad.

This year though, a number of Democrats-including Kent Conrad, Dianne Feinstein, and Evan Bayh-are threatening to blow the whole thing up. They say they won't vote to raise the debt ceiling unless party leaders pair the bill with a separate measure to create a powerful and unaccountable "entitlement commission" to radically reshape Medicare, Social Security, and other entitlement programs, likely reducing their benefits.

On the one hand, this threat is so outlandish as to be self-defeating. Not only are these Democrats holding the country and the world hostage to their peculiar complaints about welfare programs for the needy, but they're threatening to lob their own political party into the ensuing chaos.

These Democrats-moderates and conservatives, freshmen and old-timers-identify themselves as fiscal hawks, and for obvious reasons: There's not a single quality more fetishized in the Washington establishment. The title suits some better than others, but few truly deserve it. Of the Democrats in this cohort who were around at the beginning of the decade, most supported the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, every penny of which have been financed by debt.

Senators Evan Bayh and Bill Nelson-who signed a letter pressing for the creation of this debt and entitlement commission-voted earlier this year to slash the estate tax. Republicans call it a "death tax" but you may know it better as the "Paris Hilton tax." If they'd gotten their way, they'd have blown a hole in the budget on the order of hundreds of billions of dollars. That hole could have been filled by new revenue-cuts to government services, or by tax increases on less-wealthy people-or, if that failed, it could have just been patched over by new debt.

Nothing ultimately came of that initiative, but the episode spotlights the hypocrisy-and questionable values-in the ranks of the fiscal hawk brigade. Health care reform must be spare, and paid for, while wars of undetermined length can-no, should!-be waged wastefully. Longstanding welfare programs for vulnerable Americans must be scrutinized heavily to save money, while the government signs over huge checks to the children of dead wealthy people. In fact, the latter is so pressing that it, in part, necessitates the former.

There are genuine fiscal hawks in Washington-Conrad's record isn't so bad-and it's no surprise that they've trained their eyes on entitlement spending. But they have political clout-and can threaten to force America into default-thanks to many more hypocrites in Congress. That is, perhaps, the cruelest farce in all of politics.

In other policy realms, a label is more than just a label. Green-minded legislators have to prove their bona fides to outside score-keepers, as do pro-choicers and pro-lifers, and so on. But pretty much anybody who criticizes federal programs and taxes can call themselves a "fiscal hawk" or "fiscal conservative" without having to answer to everybody-especially the media.

And in the end, the media bears the most responsibility. They're the ones with the power and incentive to upset this dynamic-but first they'll have stop mindlessly echoing tropes about "fiscal discipline" and start examining the well-documented record.

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Politicians love to brag about fiscal discipline, but few have the record to back it up. The media needs to help America figure out who's who.

Endless debate is destroying American democracy

In 1994, a first-term Connecticut Democrat offered slow-moving Washington a bold and prescient diagnosis. "I think the filibuster has become not only in reality an obstacle to accomplishment here," this senator said, "but it is also a symbol of a lot that ails Washington today."

Things change. Looking back, the early 1990s problem of obstruction by filibuster seems trivial. When the Democrats retook Congress after decades out of power, Joe Lieberman had become an independent. Over the next two years, the cancer he identified 15 years earlier would metastasize. The incidence of the filibuster more than tripled. And this year, in one of the most consequential about-faces in the history of politics, Lieberman embraced the tool he once abhorred, threatening to single-handedly derail his old party's health care reform proposal...by joining a filibuster.

The Senate distorts democracy in a number of subtle and creative ways, but the filibuster is perhaps the most obvious and inelegant. The filibuster isn't written into the U.S. Constitution. It's an outgrowth of a Senate tradition holding that the upper chamber has the right to unlimited debate (there's no filibuster in the House). Decades ago, the Senate functioned, to the extent that it did, because, like the gentleman's club it aspires to be, it was governed by a culture of unanimous consent. Most of the time, senators wouldn't object to normal proceedings, and the business of the Senate could continue. But of course, a single objection from a single senator, and things could drag on indefinitely.

When it became clear that unlimited debate had the potential to turn American democracy into a cruel and dangerous farce, the Senate adopted a rule (cloture) to allow a supermajority of members to force an end to debate. This sounds like a nice compromise, but in practice it turned out not to be. Cloture does nothing if a determined minority (like the modern Republican party) decides that obstruction is the way back to political power. They just stick together and, voila, the filibuster holds. At the same time, it takes the onus off the minority to actually debate. All they have to do is promise that a 41-member bloc will oppose an issue and that threat usually does the trick.

So now there's a de facto 60-vote requirement to do pretty much anything of consequence in the Senate. Not just to advance flagship legislation like health care, but completely uncontroversial legislation, as well. Recently a bill to extend unemployment benefits took a month to pass during which it had to overcome three 60-vote hurdles. It ultimately passed 98-0.

As a sign of just how much things have changed since Lieberman's first stand, in 1994 the Clinton health care bill was brought to the floor of the U.S. Senate for debate by unanimous consent. This past weekend, Democrats needed 60 votes to do the same. Even the idea that the majority party should be able to debate a bill can be debated to death.

Ending the filibuster isn't simply a matter of near-term partisan advantage. The current rules of the Senate have created a legitimacy crisis at the heart of our political system. Elected governments, both Republican and Democrat, can't enact their agendas. As a direct result, elections have become perverse circus shows. Candidates and parties aren't rewarded for creating effective policy solutions. Parties are punished by the sickened masses for failing to improve things, and candidates are free to make whatever outlandish promises they wish, knowing they'll never stand a chance of becoming law.

There are excellent ideas for ending a filibuster that aren't remotely partisan. The "cloture number" could be scaled down by a couple votes every Congress for several years until the Senate operated by majority rule (or, as they call it in democracies, "democracy"). Alternatively, debate in the Senate could be designed in such a way that the minority is guaranteed nearly a month to introduce and vote on its amendments, without abusing the rules for the purposes of naked obstruction. On any motion, the threshold for ending debate could start at 60, then drop to 57, then 54, then, finally to 51-a bare majority. If you think that's creative, you can thank its godfather, Joe Lieberman.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of Senators are so in the thrall of their own power that they're blinded to the harm the filibuster causes. Short of a natural disaster-or a charismatic figurehead leading a mass movement-the prospects for reform appear bleak.

Right now Democrats have a 60-member majority, and, with it in theory, enough votes to end all filibusters. That they still struggle to advance their agenda apace is an indictment of the party itself. But in 2011, or 2013, when its majority has dwindled, Democrats will have lost even the power to stumble around with a health care bill for months. All hope for further reforms will dim, and the country will continue to eat itself alive. The right time to address this procedural crisis has long since passed. But better late than never.]]>

Endless debate is destroying American democracy

Why the restriction on abortion in the health care bill is unfair.

Rep. Bart Stupak (D-MI) tussled with his party's leadership in the House of Representatives for months before finally making an actionable threat: give me a floor vote on an abortion-restricting amendment, or I'll kill your health care bill. Under the terms of that health care bill, uninsured Americans will be required to purchase health insurance, and the government will partially subsidize those who can't cover the hefty price. The so-called Stupak amendment, which passed with the support of dozens of Democrats, forbids people who receive that government assistance from buying insurance policies that cover abortion.

The pro-life argument for the dread Stupak amendment is pretty straightforward: If the government helps a woman buy health insurance, and she uses that insurance to finance an abortion, then the government is indirectly spending taxpayer money on abortions. And we can't have that because...a majority in Congress say we can't.

So now, if Stupak and his sympathizers get their way, most, if not all women paying for health insurance will be forbidden from buying plans that cover abortions. What this will mean for the vast majority of women, who will continue to receive health insurance from their employers, isn't known. If over time most people enter the market to buy their own insurance, the impact could be farther-reaching than even Stupak himself foresees. But at least the government won't be "funding" abortions, right?

The problem is that the argument for the Stupak amendment oversimplifies the connection between government money and abortions. Even before Stupak muscled his way into the health care fight, the government was never really going to be funding abortions. The government was going to be funding insurance-private insurance, for the most part-which is really just an intermediary tool for pooling risk and money to finance privately-provided health care services, including, in some cases, abortion.

If you're opposed to abortion, and think the government should stay out of it, this may sound like a direct enough connection to justify the Stupak amendment. But there's a logical flaw at the heart of that position that hasn't been fully explored, and that can only be resolved if the government were to either criminalize abortion or end all welfare services completely.

The problem with the Stupak amendment is that it assumes there's something unique about each individual dollar-that serial numbers are like DNA and government dollars are distinct from private dollars in a meaningful sense. But they're not. The insurance subsidies can't be used directly to finance other spending-a woman couldn't take her insurance tax credit directly to a grocery store to buy canned goods-but, like all welfare, the point of the spending is to ease up the burden for working Americans so that they're free to pay for other goods and services without going broke. This concept-fungibility-leads us uncomfortable places.

Imagine for a moment that Members of Congress had decided that obesity, not abortion, was the nation's most pressing crisis. Americans are too fat, they'd say. Heart disease is a shameful epidemic. They could do a lot of things, in theory, to change peoples' behavior. But, of course, this is America, so taxes and blanket prohibitions are out of the question. Enter hypothetical Rep. Art Stupak, who has a different approach. Instead of battling to ban transfats, Art Stupak demands instead that poor people be forbidden from redeeming food stamps at stores that sell junk food. Government money, he says, shouldn't be used to finance heart disease and its causes.

Let's say he wins. Soon, thousands of poor people will cash in their food stamps for Shredded Wheat, resulting in profits for the same company that makes Oreos. Isn't this also the same as government funding junk food? To really cut the tie, you'd have to ban junk food, or end the food stamp program. Anything in between would be an unfair half-measure targeted at the poor.

Back in the real world, conservatives may not be a huge fans of food stamps in principle, but they would mock Democrats if they described the food stamp program as "government financing of Nabisco." And yet, this is exactly the gambit Bart Stupak and his allies are pulling in their quest to reduce abortions in this country.

That their pet policy will disproportionately effect low- and middle-income women is, for them, an unavoidable side-effect, and an afterthought (if by some curse or miracle, 65 year old, voting women started becoming pregnant, would Stupak be so cavalier about forbidding Medicare from financing abortions?)

Now take the logic one step further. Somewhere in America a poor woman on Medicaid is feeding her family with foodstamps, while saving up for an abortion. Obviously she can't redeem her foodstamps at Planned Parenthood, but the dollars are basically still interchangible, and if it weren't for those welfare programs she'd never put together enough money to pay a doctor to end her pregnancy. So is the government funding her abortion? If Bart Stupak had the courage of his convictions, he'd say yes. Welfare, he'd say, is incompatible with the idea that the government shouldn't finance abortions. But nobody says this, either because they don't believe it, or they realize that resolving the conflict would result in an unthinkable injustisce. So instead the fallback position becomes, "make it as hard as possible for the neediest among us to do things we don't like."

The political opportunism at the heart of the Stupak amendment is precisely what makes it so incoherent. Private doctors and private hospitals provide abortions, and private insurers feel it's within their interests to finance them. Today, anybody who has the money can buy such a policy, or they can buy abortions out of pocket. That includes rich men, and poor women on food stamps and people whose paychecks come from the government. Using Stupak's logic, and the logic of fungibility, the latter two groups of people are guilty of using government money to help fund abortions.

In three years, millions of people will likely be required to buy health insurance. Subsidies are the price the government has to pay to foist that requirement upon them. But the Stupak amendment treats the subsidies as a gift they give to women, conditional on their adherence to pro-life protocols. They've got it backward.]]>

Why the restriction on abortion in the health care bill is unfair.

How climate change legislation and financial reform depend on the health care debate.

For most of 2009, the public option-a hypothetical government-run health insurance plan that, if created, would compete with profit-driven, millionaire-making insurance companies-has defined the health care debate. Other issues pit liberals against conservatives, reformers against skeptics, but none has inspired the sort of passion that the public option has: Republicans and conservative Democrats reject it vehemently. Progressives say public option or bust.

No matter what side of the argument you find yourself on, though, President Obama's position on the issue will leave you disappointed. He says that the public option is a good idea, but it's not, on the merits, a policy that will make or break health care reform on substantive grounds, and he thinks it's surprising and unfortunate that it's become the redline for progressives.

The best you can say about that position is that it's about half right. At this point, the public option is unlikely, in the early years of reform, to be a revolutionary force in the health care system. But, politically, it was critical to keeping activists hopeful about an otherwise-uninspiring policy designed to keep deep-pocketed stakeholders from revolting, and killing reform altogether. That progressives have, to this point, prevented those stakeholders, and conservative politicians, from killing the public option, is an unalloyed good. It's good because, without their support, the reform effort will perish; good because the public option remains a good idea, and one that can be improved upon; and good because they are proving that they won't push over and let a consensus oriented President sell out the change he promised.

As originally conceived, the public option would have been transformational-it would have forced insurance companies to do what they're supposed to do (pool risk, and finance health care) or driven them out of business. That public option was the compromise away from single payer that was still promising enough to keep the large and passionate base of single-payer supporters engaged in debate and willing to go to the mat for a plan otherwise designed to appease, or even strengthen, the for-profit health care industry.

After months of political wrangling and compromise, the public option will more likely be a fail safe-a small program that can be expanded and strengthened if insurance companies continue to do a disservice to the country, and a safe harbor for people who, forced to purchase some kind of insurance, won't want to hand over their money to the same untrustworthy companies that have abused them and their friends and families for generations.

Progressives have sacrificed plenty on this score already. What was once envisioned to be a government program that provided a service to many tens of millions of taxpayers, and used its sheer heft to pummel private insurers, doctors, hospitals, and drug manufacturers into completely overhauling their incentives, will now likely be just another medium-sized insurer, that can compete because it won't have to turn a profit. But though the legislative process has stripped the public option of its greatest promise, liberals will do themselves a disservices if they ease up or fold now that a health care bill seems within reach.

They should continue their fight to keep the public option in the reform package, and, if possible, to strengthen it. If they allow the public option to wither on the vine, and lose its political import, they will make it extremely difficult for the government to ever circle back, and create a government insurance plan for middle-class workers.

But, more crucially, they will send a message-to the administration, to well-heeled interest groups, to "centrist" politicians and Republicans-that they don't, at the end of the day, have the wherewithal to scuttle legislation that isn't good enough. If that happens, the pattern that's already been set in place will continue, and quite possibly worsen. Obama and Democratic leaders will introduce more, ambitious proposals, then do the easy thing and let corporations and their congressional surrogates render them all but useless.

If those same leaders learn that their only hope for success is to twist other people's arms, then perhaps there's hope that the next big projects-climate change, financial reform-won't be long exercises in disenchantment.]]>