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.