I've been doing a lot of criticizing of Democrats lately, mostly privately, to be sure, since I'm such a flaming lib....
There has been a lot of lunchtime conversation. I've expressed my continuing but now not-at-all unexpected disappointment in the Speaker, and my less unexpected disappointment in the President for his 'D' grade so far, by my assessment, of being the post-partisan president he campaigned he would be.
Just to share one of these, at yesterday's lunch table, I said to our mix of Republican-leaning and Democrat-leaning lunch mates that being post-partisan has ever and can only mean working hard on occasion within your own party for something the other party expressly wants. In a game of pick-up between the Ravens' ownership and the Steelers' ownership, a post-partisan individual presiding over the pick-up of players - and, lets just say, for the sake of argument, from the results of a national vote cognizant that 52% of the country favors the Steelers and 48% the Ravens - allows the pick-up of players to commence back and forth between Ravens and Steelers, but (1) lets the Steelers choose first, and (2) after perhaps 5 picks each have been made, on the 6th pick, lets the Steelers pick two players instead of one, where the Ravens will be able to do the same, but later in the pick-up, when fewer good players are available.
By contrast, the pick-up presider does not allow the Steelers to fully choose their team, then allow the Ravens to choose theirs from whatever is left. Yet, our legislative committee process basically works that way, where all-power resides with committee chairpersons who are 100% from the majority party. That's our system of "democracy", and literally I've maintained for years that that word richly deserves to be placed in quotes when applied to how legislation is made in the Congress. We do well with our regular elections (generally viewed as fair, and if you think that's a given, just look around the world, Iran, Afghanistan; it's not a given at all), with our constitutional system (truly revolutionary at its inception), our checks and balances, our judicial review of laws to make sure they are constitutional, our bill of individual rights which cannot be usurped by any law. These things help to make us a great republic and a great democracy, to be sure, but the tremendous outlier in all of that is the domination of the lawmaking process by the current majority party in the Congress, even if it is the slimmest of majorities, with nearly 50% of Americans (a.k.a. "the represented" in this democracy) whose preferences do not lie with the sitting majority.
Now, just to finish the thought about Obama's failure to be post-partisan, specifically as respects healthcare legislation, the President from the start had to know two things: (1) legislation to emerge from the usual legislative committee process would produce starkly partisan bills, and (2) the only remedy to that reality would be him playing the role of "presider" (not "decider") to enforce that Republicans get some of what they want. That's if he wanted to be post-partisan. He's a smart man, and those are two easy conclusions. That he did not do that says to me, either (1) he lost his will and his courage to be post-partisan, or (2) he never intended to be post-partisan during all of that campaigning. I happen to think it's #1, which is only slightly less reprehensible than #2, since the office of President of the United States should be, if not, expressly reserved for the courageous.
Anyway, if President Obama, once the legislative process had meandered to its predictable result, had said to Republicans, "Write down your top 5 things, the top 5 things you want in a healthcare bill," and to Democrats he had said the same thing, knowing full well by that advanced point in the debate what the 5 things would be on each side, then said to Democrats, "Choose 3 or your 5" and to Republicans, "Choose 2 of your 5, and they may not directly contrast with the 3 the Democrats have already chosen," then you would have a truly bi-partisan, or "post-partisan" healthcare bill.
And the contents of that bill would have included, for Republicans, the much-wanted features of medical malpractice tort liability reform and interstate competition for insurance; and for Democrats it would have included a public option and an employer mandate.
And there's your post-partisan bill. A bill where not just 52% of the electorate had their wishes represented in Washington, but more like 90% of the electorate had their wishes represented in Washington.
That bill - as I described it - is the "unicorn" bill, the one capable of 80 votes in the Senate.
But you will never see that bill.
And you will never see it because (1) such bill is incapable of ever coming out of the legislative committee process as currently structured, and (2) because the man sitting in the Oval Office did not play the role of presider.
And now it's off to work, before I had time to truly talk about what I had intended, and to which this post is titled "Party of No". So, that still to come. It will be titled something like "Party of No..No, Really..."
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