Today for the second day in a row, the President made formal remarks exposing the true agenda of the “don’t rush health care” posse: “I understand that some will try to delay action until the special interests can kill it while others will simply focus on scoring political points. We’ve done that before. And we can choose to follow that playbook again, and then we’ll never get over the goal line and will face an even greater crisis in the years to come.”
Meanwhile, The Weekly Standard’s William Kristol, who infamously devised the strategy to kill health care reform in 1993, tried to frame the President’s call to action as saying “Kristol, Shut Up” and his own obstruction as a plea for open debate: “Congress should assert itself, stand up for the deliberative and democratic process, and defy this presumptuous presidential diktat. The time to debate is now. There’s plenty of time to act later.”
I must have missed it when Kristol spent the last 15 years, after killing health care reform, taking advantage of the opportunity to engage in thoughtful debate to solve the problems of rising medical costs and lack of universal coverage.
Kristol’s Weekly Standard colleague Mary Katherine Ham and I had an impromptu Twitter exchange after she called for “transparency and open debate.” As I (snarkily) noted to her, “did you miss the last six months of open debate on health care? I can catch you up!”
Because in reality, there has been plenty of public deliberation in Congress, on TV news, in opeds and on blogs.
No one saying “we need more debate” has been unable to make their point in the debate.
No one saying “we need more debate” is undecided and seeking more information so they can make a decision.
Everyone saying “we need more debate,” like Kristol and Ham, just wants to see health care reform fail once again.
Because they are ideologically opposed for our government to play a role in covering the uninsured to reduce wasteful health care spending by the private sector.
Furthermore, partisans like Kristol have long feared successful health care reform would put Republicans in the political wilderness. He wrote in 1993: “It will relegitimize middle-class dependence for ‘security’ on government spending and regulation. It will revive the reputation of the party that spends and regulates, the Democrats, as the generous protector of middle-class interests. And it will at the same time strike a punishing blow against Republican claims to defend the middle class by restraining government.”
Ham argues that conservatives want debate to continue because conservatives are winning it, because putting a spotlight on the policy details is legitimately weakening support for the bill.
The problem with that argument is support for the actual policies found in the House and Senate health committee bills remains strong. As the W. Post reported, “Three-quarters of Democrats back the plan, as do nearly six in 10 independents,” with a respectable 54% overall support for all the pillars of the comprehensive package.
What has weakened a bit is Obama’s personal standing. (Yes, his health care policies are more popular than him.) But as I argued earlier, that is more likely because the debate that has played out in the media is woefully distorted and detached from the facts, particularly as it pertains to the fiscal impact of health care reform. Obama is being unfairly associated with adding to the deficit, even though his full package will reduce long-term health care costs, so his approval has taken a small hit.
Calling for endless debate has a name: Filibuster. It’s how legislation dies.
Fine if that’s what you want to do. But if conservatives really believe in “transparency,” they should follow Sen. Jim DeMint’s lead and just admit what their actual agenda is: “If we’re able to stop Obama on this it will be his Waterloo. It will break him.”
UPDATE: Mary Katherine Ham responds at the Weekly Standard blog.
