The Tea Party is Nothing New

Much is being made of Rand Paul's victory in the Kentucky Republican Senate primary. Paul loudly credits the Tea Party for his success

I'm sorry to say that I really don't see what's so "new" or "different" about the Tea Party. Sure, the Tea Party may power Rand Paul - a political newcomer - to the Senate. But grassroots insurgencies have landed plenty of unlikely people in high political office for decades. There's nothing that unique about the Tea Party. It's just the latest hysterical, right-wing counter-reaction to center-left government in D.C. Plenty of political newcomers wound up in high office in 1994 and 1966, for example, both years that were characterized by a right-wing backlash to liberal governance.

Rick Perlstein's Nixonland illustrated how the same kind of trends powered the Republican resurgence in the late 1960s, which was far stronger both electorally and culturally, than the present Tea Party. Perlstein himself made the comparison explicit when he commented on a NYTimes forum a month ago:

Watching the rise of the Tea Party movement has been a frustration to me, and not just because it is ugly and seeks to traduce so many of the values I hold dear.

Even worse has been the overwhelming historical myopia. As the Times’s new poll numbers amply confirm — especially the ones establishing that the Tea Partiers are overwhelming Republican or right-of-Republican — they are the same angry, ill-informed, overwhelmingly white, crypto-corporate paranoiacs that accompany every ascendancy of liberalism within U.S. government.

“When was the last time you saw such a spontaneous eruption of conservative grass-roots anger, coast to coast?” asked the professional conservative L. Brent Bozell III recently. The answer, of course, is: in 1993. And 1977. And 1961. And so on.

For a movement that the U.S. has seen time and time again, it's odd that people seem to treat it like something new.

Has the Deepwater Spill Killed Climate Change Legislation?

Where does the Deepwater spill leave climate change legislation?

Before 210,000 gallons of oil a day were engulfing the Gulf Coast, recall that just a month ago, President Obama announced support for a dramatic expansion of offshore drilling. Though it was derided by environmentalists as a premature concession to Republicans, the president's defenders argued it was necessary to win climate legislation the support of wavering conservative Democrats in the Senate.

In the wake of the spill, birds and turtles may not be the only things dead in the water. At a press conference yesterday, Sens. Bill Nelson (D-FL), Robert Menendez (D-NJ), and Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) all pledged to oppose any expansion of offshore drilling, with Nelson threatening to filibuster if it were to be included. The Senate climate bill, is now unlikely to include any offshore drilling.

If anything, the tragedy in the Gulf argues strongly for a serious focus on renewable energy, as well as carbon caps, which would not only reduce carbon emissions but would increase energy efficiency. And yet, the irony is that by killing support for expanded drilling, the Deepwater spill, may well be dooming the overall climate bill. Without the support of Republicans and conservative Democrats, no climate bill is going to pass.

Can the Senate get 60 votes for a climate bill without offshore drilling? Perhaps if the Senate were a sane institution. I'm not holding my breath.

More on this from Brad Plumer and Ezra Klein.

No, Megan McArdle. Health Care Reform Wasn't "Tyranny of the Majority"

Sunday night, shortly before the House of Representatives passed the health care bills, Megan McArdle ranted that a grave injustice was about to be inflicted upon the American people.

Parties have passed legislation before that wasn't broadly publicly supported. But the only substantial instances I can think of in America are budget bills and TARP--bills that the congressmen were basically forced to by emergencies in the markets.

One cannot help but admire Nancy Pelosi's skill as a legislator. But it's also pretty worrying. Are we now in a world where there is absolutely no recourse to the tyranny of the majority? Republicans and other opponents of the bill did their job on this; they persuaded the country that they didn't want this bill. And that mattered basically not at all. If you don't find that terrifying, let me suggest that you are a Democrat who has not yet contemplated what Republicans might do under similar circumstances. Farewell, Social Security! Au revoir, Medicare! The reason entitlements are hard to repeal is that the Republicans care about getting re-elected. If they didn't--if they were willing to undertake this sort of suicide mission--then the legislative lock-in you're counting on wouldn't exist.

Contra Megan, we woke up Monday morning in an America where the minority still has numerous recourses to the "tyranny of the majority." For a bill to pass into law, it needs majority support in all relevant committees, majority support in both chambers of Congress, 60-vote supermajority support in the less-representative chamber and a presidential signature. Democrats passed health care reform not because of any procedural trickery but because they - barely - passed these hurdles. Somehow, according to Megan, this still represents a "tyranny" because the bills didn't overcome a new and arbitrary hurdle of polling data.

Why, though, should polls constitute another veto point? We aren't a direct democracy but a representative one. We elect others to make laws so that they aren't bound by the shifting winds of public opinion or parochial interests. And if voters dislike the results, they can have their say at the next election. If legislators are to just do what the polls say, then why not simply dissolve Congress and run the country via referenda? (Worked out great for California!) Unless we're prepared to take that step, then elections are what matter most and opinion polls from the winter of '09/'10 do not invalidate the 2006 and 2008 election results.

That isn't to say that polls don't serve any purpose. At their best, polls should work as a check, not a veto. If members of Congress encounter bad polls while pursuing a major initiative, that should compel them to evaluate whether that policy is important enough to implement even without substantial public support. For Democrats to pass health care reform wasn't a denial of public opinion, but an honest assessment that reform was necessary for the country's future well-being. And if voters ultimately don't agree, they can vote them out at the next election.

Beyond complaining about health care reform's unfavorable polls, Megan - and many other conservatives - insist that Democrats resorted to some kind of underhanded trickery in order to pass health care.

If the GOP takes the legislative innovations of the Democrats and decides to use them, please don't complain that it's not fair. Someone could get seriously hurt, laughing that hard.

What "legislative innovations" is she talking about? Democrats passed preliminary bills in five relevant committees: three in the House, two in the Senate. They passed a bill through the House. They passed a similar bill through the Senate by defeating a filibuster with 60 votes. The only "innovation" was that rather than negotiate a merged bill to then pass both chambers, Democrats had the House simply pass the Senate bill since Brown's seating left the Senate without 60 votes willing to invoke cloture on the health care measure.

If Megan is referring to the separate "budget reconciliation" bill being pushed through the Senate with a simple majority vote, the only innovative aspect is that reconciliation is being used to augment and amend a bill that was just passed. But the procedure on its own is routine and the measures being pushed through are thoroughly germaine. And besides, even if Democrats were to use a rare procedure, if it's in the rule book, how is it an "abuse" of the rules?

In any event, Democrats shouldn't complain - and I certainly won't - if Republicans use - gasp! - procedures like budget reconciliation. And I certainly won't complain if Republicans pass a bill through the normal order. I'll reserve my complaints for the policy, not the process.

Still, the thing I found most bizarre in her rant was this last paragraph:

We're not a parliamentary democracy, and we don't have the mechanisms, like votes of no confidence, that parliamentary democracies use to provide a check on their politicians. The check that we have is that politicians care what the voters think. If that slips away, America's already quite toxic politics will become poisonous.

So the United States has a less-unchecked legislative process than parliamentary countries? Hardly. In a parliamentary system, party caucuses rubber-stamp the agenda of the governing party or coalition. If Barack Obama were Prime Minister, health care reform would have been swept into law - in a much more liberal form - months ago.

So no, passage of health care reform didn't indicate an unchecked, power-mad tyranny of the majority. All that happened was that a party won two landslide elections, sought to enact the centerpiece of their domestic agenda through the normal legislative process, and succeeded. That's it.

"Repeal HCR!... Except all the good stuff."

Nobody could have seen this coming.

Rep. Phil Gringrey (R-GA) told CNN’s Rick Sanchez yesterday afternoon that he “does not want” to repeal everything in the bill, noting there are many things — including the exchanges, electronic medical records, expanded coverage for dependents, expanded Medicaid, and expanded consumer protections — that he supports.

...

"All hail the People's Front of Judea!"

The Incredibly Moderate and Incrementalist "Government Takeover of Health Care"

As health care reform - finally - reaches its conclusion, I continue to be struck by the number of people who argue that the current bills are "too ambitious" and that Democrats should have scaled back their ambitions to enact something more "moderate," "modest," and "incremental."

So how would one go about constructing such a "modest," "moderate" health care bill? First, we'll set a condition that nobody will lose the health care insurance they currently have. Second, we'll identify two main goals: providing health insurance to everyone and enacting some common-sense regulations of the insurance industry. That should be simple, right? We'll just expand Medicaid, the existing federal-state program for low-income citizens, and pass legislation that will prevent insurance companies from denying or rescinding coverage or charging people more because they have "pre-existing conditions."

Yet the flaws in this limited program quickly become clear. Medicaid expansion alone won't solve the long-term problem of the uninsured. Unless Medicaid is expanded to cover everyone, there will remain a group of people in the middle who don't get insurance through work and aren't eligible for Medicaid. Since skyrocketing health care costs are forcing companies to dump health coverage, this group will only grow. And because insurance on the individual market is even more expensive than employer-based insurance, most people won't be able to afford insurance.

The new regulations won't work either if people can opt out. If insurance companies are now required to cover people with expensive health conditions and healthy people choose not to buy coverage, adverse selection occurs. Because the pool being insured is now sicker and more expensive to cover, premiums will shoot up, making coverage in the individual market unaffordable. So we'll need an individual mandate, both to ensure that everybody is covered and to make sure that the new insurance regulations will work without making care even more expensive.

Now, though, we're forcing people to buy coverage which is still unaffordable to many. Therefore we need to provide subsidies. And to make the rates comparable to the rates enjoyed by large employers, we'll need to pool everybody in the individual market. Thus, we need to create what policymakers call an "insurance exchange": a very large large in which insurers can offer coverage at low rates comparable to what major corporations can negotiate.

This, however, creates a new problem: since the federal government is now helping provide individuals with health insurance, employers may decide that it's cheaper to drop their health benefits. This violates our first condition that states nobody will lose the health insurance they currently have. And it shifts costs to the federal government, which is now on the tab for even more subsidies, sending the price tag for health care reform soaring. So we need to impose an employer mandate, both to prevent people from losing their present coverage and to reduce costs to taxpayers.

Even with all of this, however, we have done little to address skyrocketing health care costs, which will threaten the whole effort. So we'll need to include at least some pilot programs and demonstration projects that starts to move the medical system - especially Medicare - away from fee-for-service and towards "bundled" payments that pay doctors for overall care, not just each procedure. We'll need to include constraints on the future growth of Medicare, preferably putting that politically-explosive question out of the hands of elected officials. And we may need to start taxing or capping employer-based coverage in order to put a cap on the growth of premiums and in order to encourage employers to shift their workers to the exchanges or buy cheaper plans.

So having originally set out to simply (1) expand coverage and (2) end insurance company abuses, while preserving the insurance most people already have, we've now had to (3) provide subsidies and create (4) an individual mandate, (5) an employer mandate, (6) insurance exchanges, and (7) some moderate cost-controls just to meet our original objectives. Ditching any one of these elements likely prevents us from achieving either of our original goals.

Stepping back, we find that our moderate, incremental health reform plan has morphed into... the bills currently before Congress. And that ought to make clear how modest this framework really is. It doesn't impose a Canadian-style single-payer system. It doesn't force everyone to change their coverage, as the Clintons' failed 1993 plan did. It doesn't radically change cost incentives for the insurance companies or for doctors and hospitals. At its core, the plan does two things: it expands coverage to the uninsured and prevents insurance company abuses. If you already have health insurance through your employer, nothing will change, except you will now be able to get affordable health insurance if you leave or lose your job. These are hardly the makings of a socialist dystopia.

In fact, many health policy analysts would argue the plan isn't radical enough. A Canadian-style single-payer system would provide cheaper, more integrated care, to everyone. Alternatively, you could expand coverage and far more aggressively lower costs by ending the employer-based system and sending everybody into a regulated private market as Switzerland and The Netherlands do. (A bipartisan Senate bill authored by Oregon Democrat Ron Wyden and Utah Republican Bob Bennett would do just that.) Yet both ideas run into a wall of opposition in Congress and collide with most Americans' desire to keep the health insurance they currently have. The congressional health care bills attempt to fix some of the biggest problems in American health care while recognizing these constraints.

So when you hear people argue that the President should ditch these proposals for a more modest and incremental "compromise," be aware: these proposals are about as modest as can be while still providing reform that is remotely meaningful.

Welcome

It is with some ambivalence that I join the blogosphere. But as someone who reads and comments on numerous political blogs on a daily basis, I figure that maybe something good can come out of this. I don't presume to think that my random musings will have much effect on anyone, but if I can start a conversation with someone, it won't, I think, be in vain.

So cheers. And welcome.