Tag: senate

Code Brown: PAM

ryking reports that:

the Teabaggers were going apeshit over Brown’s vote for the jobs bill on Twitter and I almost wet myself laughing at the vitriol. I guess these imbeciles thought he’d vote like a typical GOP automaton. News flash, imbeciles: Brown knows he won a protest vote in Massachusetts; he wants to be re-elected after he serves out the last two years of Ted Kennedy’s term so he can’t — and therefore won’t — march in goosestep, er, LOCKSTEP, with the America-hating GOP.

I wish I thought this was an accurate analysis. Unfortunately, I’d say this is an example of the GOP leadership knowing that a lockstep vote here, coming hot on the heels of the Brown mania, would be an all-too-clear and inescapable indictment of their current anti-democratic ways.
Of a piece with that, repeatedly bottling up jobs bills just isn’t going to play for any of them. Thus, Brown is given the go-ahead to vote for cloture, and a few of the moderate GOPers also scurry in to join him. The key vote, though, comes later: when the bill will pass 98-0 or some-such. The GOP Senate knows well that people don’t pay attention to anything, and certainly not the vagaries of cloture votes. No price will be paid for their delaying or otherwise weakening bills; after all, the GOPers can still just run on having voted “for” it in the end. They know that neither will their enablers in the media ever bring up the inconvenient cloture votes nor will the Democrat ever stoop to being so impolite as to mention such a thing in public.

It’s basically stimulus 2.0: take all the glory of anything that works or turns out to be popular, while doing none of the actual policy work needed to bring it about. In fact, you fight all that every step of the way and use the legislative mayhem to further inculcate the sense that DC is fundamentally off the rails. Rest easy that nobody on any side of the aisle or in the media will say or do anything about it. It’s an entirely cost free position that, so far anyway, is working like a charm.

So, no. I don’t feel the need to advance our Code Brown independent vote counter past 0. That happens in the unlikely event of his taking a difficult stand, one clearly against the leadership’s wishes. When FOXnews hollers about a vote, or he’s forced to apologize for some perceived slight, or prostrate himself before Rush: then and only then the 0dometer will advance. And sorry, it’s just not going to happen.

Starve the Beast

Paul Krugman notes that the GOP has collectively been working for around three decades to bring on the catastrophic nexus, “preparing the ground” for the moment at which they can cut wildly popular programs like Medicare and Social Security in the name of “fiscal responsibility.” Unfortunately, with that day all but at hand, the GOP finds itself unwilling to pull the trigger and say these long-held beliefs publicly:

At this point, then, Republicans insist that the deficit must be eliminated, but they’re not willing either to raise taxes or to support cuts in any major government programs. And they’re not willing to participate in serious bipartisan discussions, either, because that might force them to explain their plan — and there isn’t any plan, except to regain power.

Absolutely right. And but Krugman goes on to note in today’s column that the state of the California health insurance system generally and the recent Anthem move to raise rates by ~30% specifically put to lie everything the GOP is saying about national health insurance reforms:

some claim that health costs would fall dramatically if only insurance companies were allowed to sell policies across state lines. But California is already a huge market, with much more insurance competition than in other states; unfortunately, insurers compete mainly by trying to excel in the art of denying coverage to those who need it most. And competition hasn’t averted a death spiral. So why would creating a national market make things better?

More broadly, conservatives would have you believe that health insurance suffers from too much government interference. In fact, the real point of the push to allow interstate sales is that it would set off a race to the bottom, effectively eliminating state regulation. But California’s individual insurance market is already notable for its lack of regulation, certainly as compared with states like New York — yet the market is collapsing anyway.

Finally, there have been calls for minimalist health reform that would ban discrimination on the basis of pre-existing conditions and stop there. It’s a popular idea, but as every health economist knows, it’s also nonsense. For a ban on medical discrimination would lead to higher premiums for the healthy, and would, therefore, cause more and bigger death spirals.

So California’s woes show that conservative prescriptions for health reform just won’t work.

To which we say: yep, even though Krugman starts with a straw-man in there. Some? How about “GOP leaders in the House and Senate say” or any other construction there? Some? That’s Bush league usage.

But, I think the synthesis of these two articles is what actually provides the way forward. We’ve said it before: Democrats can’t bring themselves to move good policy and the GOP categorically can’t resist bad policy, so combine the two. Spend a few years “preparing the ground” just as the GOP did on forcing government into the present fiscal situation in hopes of eviscerating the New Deal once and for all. Make it such that, when the inevitable happens, the end result will require the desired policy solution.
This means that you just pass into law the super-popular and death-spiral inducing community rating and tack on whatever meaningless and ineffective tort and state-lines “reform” the GOP wants to make that poison pill pass. Both sides celebrate. Then wait five years. Even conservatives agree that:

the country will face a choice: allow the numbers of uninsured to continue shooting up, or enroll more and more people directly in taxpayer-funded government insurance plans.

At the collapse of health insurance in this country, the GOP will be forced to roll out Medicare for all; after all, there will be no functional private insurance industry left to protect. Even the very rich will be priced out. Nothing gets the GOP’s attention more quickly than a situation like that.
Just think of the day that Single Payer is finally signed into law by President Palin. Likewise, the new Democratic majority will return to a Senate free from the filibuster as, everyone knows, that will be the first thing to go once the GOP is back in charge over there.

Somewhere, off in the distance, a dog barked.

All during that health care debate, whenever things got impossible you could always say: “What I think they should do is pass the Wyden-Bennett Reform Plan,” and everybody would shut up and slink home to look it up on Google.

It’s a more elegant version of the Bipartisan Study Commission. Which, by the way, the Republicans recently filibustered.

Actually, I think we just need one simple change that will get us back to the good old days when Congress was capable of passing standard legislation and could occasionally summon the will to make large, imperfect fixes of urgent national problems.

Get rid of the Senate filibuster. It wouldn’t make things tidy. It wouldn’t be utopia. The Democrats will miss it next time they’re in the minority. But when people elected a government, it would get to govern again. And probably, it could keep the lights on.

Gail Collins, apparently summoning this material
from some long forgotten font of agreement between us.

America Held Hostage: Day One

The Democrat, at least as currently constituted, simply does not understand what it takes to message. Every Democrat serving at every level should never even approach a microphone without uttering “America Held Hostage, Day X.” It’s as simple as that. Why is Senator Shelby holding America hostage over a couple of earmarks? Does he hate America?

Likewise: Up or down vote. Why won’t the GOP let the Senate vote on jobs creation? Why is the GOP against democracy? Just let the Senate vote; we will abide by the outcome. And etc…

That this is all so hard for them to understand is, perhaps, the single greatest argument in favor of their being dispatched from service come 2010. That they further don’t seem to understand that is, well, remarkable.

America Held Hostage: Day One

Imagine a chamber in which senators were elected by different income brackets – with two senators representing the poorest 2 percent of the electorate, two senators representing the richest 2 percent and so on.
Based on Census Bureau data, five senators would represent Americans earning between $100,000 and $1 million individually per year, with a single senator working on behalf of the millionaires (technically, it would be two-tenths of a senator). Eight senators would represent Americans with no income. Sixteen would represent Americans who make less than $10,000 a year, an amount well below the federal poverty line for families. The bulk of the senators would work on behalf of the middle class, with 34 representing Americans making $30,000 to $80,000 per year.

Annie Lowrey

Code Brown

Boston NPR was predictably atwitter this morning on the news that Scott Brown accelerated his swearing in. What they got through without ever saying, even once, is that he most likely was doing so such that he can be there to vote in lockstep with the GOP to block such critical world-changing policy points as who is going to head the NLRB. Goddamned Liberal Media bias working against us once again.
Brown is genuinely staving off the utter collapse of The Republic by keeping somebody notionally pro-union out of the chairman’s seat over to the labor board. So this “independent” will undoubtedly go 0-4 on the independent thinking front in week one, likely also helping to stop a jobs initiative. And, as Lord Jesus well knows, politically independent Americans have no taste for job creation, no matter how anemic or government sourced those jobs may be. We just don’t want new jobs. Why can’t the fat-cats in Washington understand that? Probably because many of them don’t drive trucks.

Will he be asked about this 0-4 first week, even once? Of course he won’t. Will the Globe add a front-page feature counting days, months, years without a non-GOP lockstep vote on Brown’s part? Of course they won’t. Will enterprising reporters get into his face this week and ask for the deep policy explanations that underlie his supposedly independent stance that just happens to perfectly align with GOP political plays this week, and thus be ready to call him out as either a fool or a fraud? Of course they won’t.

Here’s your Scott Brown “independent” vote counter, brazenly predicted two years in advance and carved into the electronic firmament for all to see: 0.

Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) said Monday that he would oppose any health care reform bill with a national insurance exchange, which he described as a dealbreaker.

“The national exchange is unnecessary and I wouldn’t support something that would start us down the road of federal regulation of insurance and a single-payer plan,” Nelson told reporters Monday.

If Senate Democrats still had 60 votes, this would matter a lot.

Carrie Budoff Brown
Just for the record, it didn’t matter then, either. Just a lot of people convincing themselves it mattered. 59=clarity.

Understanding:Salary::

The Washington Post notes what others have: there’s an absolute shit-ton of money sloshing around in these final days of the MA US Senate special election:

Independent and party groups were set to spend nearly $5 million on television ads in the final weeks leading up to Tuesday’s special election between state Attorney General Martha Coakley (D) and state Sen. Scott Brown ®.
[…]
there are 13 – yes, 13 – groups paying for ads in the race’s final days, with Democratic groups outspending Republican-aligned by more than $1 million.

Remarkable that the very same organizations that have a vested interest in selling these ad slots are the ones that also are the editorial gatekeepers on which polls get play. Thus, it’s far more interesting to run a poll showing it as being close than it is to show one that came out on the same day showing it not-so-close.

So which one is right? As a resident of MA, I can tell you that anyone with caller ID is simply not picking up the phone for any reason; anyone, that is, but rabid tea baggers, Scott Brown partisans, and older-skewing demographics who don’t know or don’t care who is calling. We currently get at least two or three automated polling calls A DAY. That’s before the supporter calls, the robo-calls, and the occasional shout out from the President of these United States. My totally unscientific man-on-the-ground assessment is to say this take is right in saying Brown’s numbers are getting inflated by this. Turnout is what will decide this thing, and even the polls favoring Brown tend to show that many of those very folks (presumably the independents) talking to pollsters aren’t actually sure they’ll a) vote and b) actually vote for Brown.

The media establishment would, of course, disavow that editorial and ad revenue divisions even know what floor the other one is on. But, of course, this phenomenon cuts two ways. It’s much more interesting to write stories if the race appears closer than it is. So, if two of ten polls say it’s close: then, BY GOD, it’s the closest race in the history of close races. Sell more papers, attract more viewers, sell more ads. A lot more ads. Direct collusion is, of course and as usual, utterly unnecessary.