Independent Caucus

Tea Partiers Wrong To Join Republicans

The Tea Party is making a mistake if they align with the Republicans.

They are the first thing to come along in a while that looks like the beginnings of an alternative party to the Democrats and Republicans, with a genuinely alternative platform, a genuinely alternative set of priorities.

If they decide to run with the Republicans then they deserve the footnote to history they will become.

I don't know why, as author of a blog called Independent Caucus, why the Democrat and Republican parties are so radical. I am not a sufficient historian to comment as to whether they are more polar, more radical, and further from one another than at other times in history, or even what metric one would use to make the case for or against that claim. I only have my perception, nebulus as it is, and the similar perception expressed by various retired legislators, that things are more polar, more radical, more partisan, than they used to be earlier in my lifetime. It's one thing to have the perception, as Einstein did early on, that something was missing from Euclidian geometry and Newtonian physics; and it is something else again, and altogether important to moving beyond something flawed to something better to identify and quantify that missing thing. I wish I had and could share in this post the E=Mc**2 of the radicalism of the American two-party system, a system which used to regularly resemble a Venn Diagram featuring a considerable intersection of opinion, and now, with a strict party-line vote on health care, looks like two completely stand-alone circles.

But overlay the size of those circles on the electorate who strongly agrees with each, and you will see, based on the polls, and how unpopular each party is, that the size of those circles is ever smaller. And what does that tell you? That there is a great, and increasingly great opportunity for the construction of a third party, a third circle, which can cover the broad swath of the American electorate unhappy with both the Democrats and Republicans.

That is the great opportunity of the Tea Parties, to be that, or the vanguard to that, and either way be something revolutionary and historic. But they immediately forfeit that opportunity if they decide to join a party with an overall approval of in the mid to high twenty percent range, and a party which has famously advanced so much of what the Tea Parties oppose, most obviously, the accumulation and carrying of a huge national debt. To join the Republicans is to immediately pour a considerable amount of water into an otherwise very strong cup of tea.

Health Insurance Reform et. al.

Wow, it's been a long time.  I like this stuff - public policy and the like - so much.  I am addicted to it, really.  And so it's remarkable to me that I could go so long and not post, especially since we've just gone through such a historic chapter in public policy with the whole development and passage of the health insurance reform bill.

There were lots of thoughts I had along the way, and I didn't share any of them.  I think I know why.  I had this prevailing feeling of despair throughout the whole thing, and disappointment.

I was happy that Democrats were trying to provide health insurance to 30 million Americans who did not have it.  I was happy that Democrats were trying to eliminate the denial of health insurance if you had a preexisting condition.  I was happy when, as the bill progressed toward its final form, the scoring of the bill by the Congressional Budget Office (a non-partisan agency of the U.S. Congress) indicated that it would extend the life of Medicare and reduce federal expenditures overall by $1.3 trillion over the life of the bill.  Anyone who has read this blog with any regularity in the past knows how opposed I am to federal deficit spending, and the carrying of a large national debt.  On that point, I am right there with the Tea Party members.

But I felt tremendous disappointment throughout the health insurance reform debate, because of how then candidate Obama campaigned, how he said, how he very nearly promised this debate and others would progress with Republicans, in bipartisan fashion.  He told us he knew how to do that.  He did not.  Not on health care.  So, then, are we to believe he knows how to do it on the next issue, when health care was pushed through in the most partisan fashion, with a lot of fixed votes in committee (Democrats always have more members on the committee, so they can vote down every Republican amendment), and a final vote tally which included not a single Republican in the House or Senate.  The House or Senate.  Can you believe?  When is the last time that happened on a piece of legislation of such import and sweep?

So, is Obama the only one at fault for that?  Well, yeah, kinda, if your focus is his campaign message that he knew how to get legislation done in a bipartisan fashion.  Since it didn't happen, clearly he didn't.  So, he failed in that respect, and there are no two ways about it.  But did Republicans dig in and refuse to cooperate on crafting a bipartisan bill?  Was their level of intransigence beyond what Obama had experience with to that point in his career as U.S. Senator?  Did it prove a level above and beyond what Obama could have expected to encounter?  Perhaps he felt like he had built some good relationships on the other side of the aisle while in the Senate.  Perhaps he felt he knew 5 or 10 Republicans with whom he thought he could do business, and would be open to doing business with him.  Maybe he felt that adding Joe Biden, the longstanding Senator from Delaware, as his Vice President, would further increase the cooperation he could count on once President.  In that respect, if things unfolded that way, then health care was a serious wake-up call for Barack Obama.

So, I was disappointed.  What I thought would happen did not happen.  And what did I think would happen?

I thought Republicans would show a little humility from being in the minority, a pretty significant minority in both houses of the Congress.  And I thought Democrats would be not nearly so arrogant.  And I thought that Barack Obama would, at critical times, make a show of Presidential leadership and take on his own party if they began to legislate arrogantly.

Those 3 things.  Absolutely NONE of them happened.  None.

I thought that President Obama, on the issue of health care reform, would approach the Republican leadership and ask, "Ok, guys, what are your top 5 things?"  And, when they told him, he would have said, "Ok, here are our top 5.  Since included in our top 5 is a public option, and in yours is no public option, as a gesture of good faith, for this bill we throw that out.  But, agree to giving us 15-20 Republican Senate votes, and 40 or so House votes, if the final bill incorporates 3 of our remaining 4, and 2 of yours.  So, in other words, give us mandatory coverage (i.e. employer mandate and fines for individuals who refuse to buy insurance), no denial of coverage for preexisting conditions, and health insurance exchanges, and we will give you medical malpractice liability reform, and interstate purchase of insurance.  Done.  And the vote in the Senate is 80-20, and in the House is whatever it is with those 40 Republican "yea" votes.  What do you say?  Do we have a deal?"

That's what I thought would happen.  And there is precedent for legislating that way.  It's how Tip O'Neil and President Reagan addressed the issue of Social Security solvency, putting it on a sound actuarial footing for the next several decades.

So, truly then, and quite rightly, one could say that the President who truly knew how to legislate in bipartisan fashion was Ronald Reagan, not Barack Obama.  To this point in his presidency, that statement is true enough.  He has more chances left.  But he's 0-for-1.