President Obama’s campaign for health care reform by this fall, once considered highly likely to succeed, suddenly appears in real jeopardy.
Top White House advisers, especially chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, are still privately predicting massive changes to the health care system in 2009. But for the first time, Democrats on Capitol Hill and in the administration are expressing frank worries about stronger-than-expected opposition from moderate Democrats and worse-than-expected estimates for how much the plan could cost.
Business groups, which had embraced the idea of reform and have been meeting quietly with Democrats for months in an effort to shape the legislation, now talk of spending millions of dollars to oppose the latest proposals out of Capitol Hill. And Democrats themselves are not united, with leading party figures making contradictory declarations about how far they should go to overhaul the system when deficits are soaring and prospects for an economic recovery remain cloudy.
Since I’m not at all qualified to speak with any detail on the chances of a decent health care bill leaving Congress (though it’s worth noting that health care wonks Ezra Klein and Jon Cohn are fairly pessimistic at this point), I’m just going to mention that this whole drama is a little ridiculous. In virtually every other Western democracy, winning electoral coalitions are rewarded with fairly wide leeway in their legislative priorities and governance. To use a familiar example, Margaret Thatcher assumed the premiership in 1979 with a substantial legislative majority and went on to implement a fairly controversial conservative agenda. The British left was none-too-happy with the result, but because they operate in a system which grants legislative initiative to the victor, there wasn’t much they could do.
This is a good thing, and it’s something the United States should emulate, seeing as how Republicans and Democrats operate in a virtually nonsensical institutional environment where legislative initiative lies with the opposition. If the United States had a rational institutional setup, the party which controlled a sizable majority of the legislature as well as the executive branch would have pretty wide leeway to pursue the policies it promised to the voters. George W. Bush partially campaigned on Social Security “reform” in 2005, and while I’m glad that the bill failed, if the majority of the Republican caucus in the House and Senate supported said efforts, then it should have passed. Sure, the current arrangement is fun and makes for interesting political gossip (Evan Byah said whaat now? *whisper whisper*), but it also severely hampers the majority party as it tries to do what it was elected to do – govern.
Unfortunately, decades of institutional worship (The Senate is the “world’s greatest deliberative body!” Many layers of overlapping/conflicting government are a good thing!) have resulted in the widespread belief that we shouldn’t ever tinker with the mechanisms of government, lest we invoke the divine wrath of our (cue Charlton Heston voice) Founding Fathers. Indeed, seeing as how meaningful institutional change is incredibly unlikely, we might as well amend the Senate bylaws to include one of the concluding verses from the Book of Revelation:
For I testify unto every man that heareth the words of the prophecy of this book, If any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book:
You know, for shits and giggles.
check out ezekiel emanuel’s book on health care reform…it’s a radical but sensible approach. as for political viability, it seems too radical to get passed (as rahm has noted).