The case for abolition of the Senate, part 3,743

So the big victory for health care reform is that the Senate voted 60-39 to cut off debate over whether to debate the issue.

The U.S. Senate is an embarrassing anachronism of an institution.

The real propaganda victory

A lot of people remember Bobby Sands, the provisional IRA member who led a hunger strike in a British prison in 1981, was elected to Parliament while he wasted away, and died a martyr to the IRA cause. What most people don't remember is that the specific issue that precipitated Sands' fast was that he didn't want incarcerated IRA members to be treated as ordinary criminals along with convicted thieves, rapists, and murderers; he wanted to be treated as something more akin to a prisoner of war.

So it strikes me as strange that conservatives think that it's some kind of propaganda "victory" for Al Qaeda that Eric Holder is seeking to try 9/11 conspirator Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in civilian criminal court rather than by some kind of military commission (David Brooks gave an example of this argument on Friday's Newshour.) It seems to me that treating Al Qaeda members as warriors unnecessarily elevates them, and trying them as common criminals diminishes their message. Moreover, it's not like the rules of evidence allow Mr. Mohammed to just stand up and declaim the Al Qaeda manifesto during the trial. If he's convicted, he'll get a chance to say anything he wants before sentencing, but I don't see why this is such a big propaganda victory. When Zacharias Moussoui did that in his trial, it only compounded his performance as an embarrassing lunatic.

If you really want to see a propaganda victory for Al Qaeda, check out the opposite of a civilian trial, torture and indefinite detention, which has been uncontroversially reported as a galvanizing factor for Taliban and Al Qaeda recruiting.

Yea, House!

Before I became a home-owning parent in my 40s I wouldn't have had a problem watching C-Span at 11 on a Saturday night. It just would have been prelude to my night out. Now it is the thrill of my Saturday night. That having been said, it was really cool to watch the House vote count exceed 218 last night on the health care bill.

Just to rain on my parade, I turned today to right-wing blogs to see what they had to say about it. Ed Morrissey at Hot Air opined that the narrow margin in the vote showed the weakness of the House Democratic Leadership. The health care blogger at National Review makes the same point, going on to assert that the House bill is now "dead," as "[n]othing like it will ever pass the Senate."

I think that these two are related points, but they don't make me feel half as bad as these conservative writers would like.

There's certainly a health care bill that could have achieved greater support in the House, but it likely would have been substantively a lot worse (in my opinion, at least). Pelosi and company didn't go for such a bill. Instead, they got together the most progressive (and best, in my view) bill that could garner a majority vote. They sensed where the median was in the House (which every legislative body logically will have, after all) and went there.

Sure, the Senate is likely to pass a bill that will look pretty different. But that's why it makes sense to pass the most progressive bill possible in the House. The different bills will be reconciled in a conference committee, and the better the House bill is at the outset, the closer the final result will be to the substantively optimal bill, rather than a more watery House bill that would have had more support.

And as a side benefit, another chamber of Congress passing something just makes the Senate look worse if it can't. Politically, it's a nice pressure point.

Nancy Pelosi's stock went way up in my book last night.

Fort Hood shooting

It's a natural human impulse to want to make sense of the violence and murder at Fort Hood today. I think that accounts for a lot of speculation I've read tonight about the accused gunman, however wrong most of it will likely turn out to be (for what it's worth, the New York Times has the most comprehensive background on the accused that I've seen so far). However natural such an impulse might be, it's also worthwhile to withhold any application of today's shooting spree to the political narrative one lives by (at least until more facts are in), especially with a topic as fraught as this one in post-9/11 America. I doubt that will happen in large part, though.

The real bad news from the elections

From what little I've paid attention to governors-elect Bob McDonnell and Chris Christie, they seem to have budget plans that are light on content, and the people of Virginia and New Jersey will probably be worse off for having them as governors. But at the end of the day, that's really their affair. I'm also not particularly concerned that the election of these two governors portends a tectonic anti-Democratic shift. This is an off- off-year election with a very small data set and bad economic conditions for any incumbent (and the Democrats didn't do too shabbily in the two special congressional races).

No, what I'm really concerned about is the consequences for the health care bill. In particular, I think that a conventional wisdom can easily congeal, that voters are turning against health care reform (tediously articulated on last night's Newshour). This narrative has the advantage of being easy to understand (however wrongheaded it may be) for agenda-averse Democrats. It can also provide rhetorical cover for bad-faith Democrats who oppose reform for the sake of campaign donors.

If there's a political downside to Tuesday's elections results, it's that Democrats will take the wrong lesson from them, self-fulfilling their prophecy by passing watered-down ineffective health care reform that won't address voters' needs. Good policy should come first; when it works, it's good politics in the long run.

Free speech at work

I think most campaign contributions are legal bribery. I therefore support severe restrictions on them. People who disagree with me about that frame campaign contributions as free speech interests.

A couple of recent news items demonstrate freedom of speech at work:

(1) An employee of KBR, a defense contractor, was sexually harassed at her job in Iraq. She complained to KBR and was ignored. Then KBR employees drugged and raped her. She sued KBR, but a clause in her employment contract stymied her lawsuit. Al Franken introduced an amendment in the Senate to forbid the government from doing business with defense contractors that had those kinds of clauses in their employment contracts with regard to assault victims, which passed handily.

Then defense contractors used the money they donated to Democratic Senator Daniel Inouye to influence him to gut the amendment.

(2) Big Pharma gave $2.6 million to members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. The members defied Committee chair Henry Waxman by extending federally-granted monopoly rights to make massive profits off of their products (including those products that the government, rather than the drug companies, developed), at a time when health care reform demands cost savings measures (like generic drugs).

Voltaire would be so proud.

Right-wing narcissism

Maybe epidemic Obama-era levels of right-wing irrationality shouldn't surprise me. After all, this is the same political movement that, in the '90s, accused Bill and Hillary Clinton of rape and murder. You see, it's not enough that someone disagree with you about policy issues. No, there has to be something wrong with them. One's worldview depends on it.

So I guess when focus groups report that conservatives believe that Obama's sincere plan is to destroy the country or that Glenn Beck is popular with conservatives because he claims to have evidence that he's "uncovered something" that validates conspiracy theories or that right-wing fantasies that Obama plans to cancel future election results are gaining credence as a video game, it's all consistent, if depressing.

Such weird sentiments aren't possible without a conviction that a reasonable person can't disagree with you. So much more comforting to avoid arguments on their merits or facts that don't fit one's prefabricated worldview. In other words, it's really narcissism, an unwillingness to comprehend something different than oneself.

Now, I can anticipate every right-winger leaping on every intemperate anti-Bush placard or Democratic Underground comment in the past eight years as evidence that this type of sentiment is all over the political spectrum, not just the right. For me, an important difference is that Republican and conservative institutions enable the most irresponsible right-wing fringe. When the conservative blog the Next Right (that I link to in my blogroll) called upon the RNC to distance itself from World Net Daily, a lunatic operation that regularly peddles "birther" nonsense about Obama, the RNC refused to do so. Conservative but sane writer David Frum, who regularly calls out Glenn Beck for the demagogue that he is, labors in exile from National Review at his site New Majority (which I also link to on the blogroll) while Beck enjoys a highly-rated show on the house organ network for the Right.

If Republican political leadership would adopt the same position as Frum and Next Right, I'd cheerfully concede the debating point. Instead, what I see is Republican elected officials talking about secession, Obama's birth certificate, responding to policies the right doesn't like by arming themselves, and death panels, and that's just what I could come up with off the top of my head. If any comparable Democratic voices embraced analogous left memes, I'd be willing to hear about it, but I sure can't remember any.

Scheming a virtuous liberal cycle

The Senate Finance Committee's passage of a health care bill with Olympia Snowe's vote sets up a possible narrative for the Democrats for 2010 and beyond: they finally did what Democrats couldn't pull off going back to Truman.

Of course, it may not play out that way, and given that Olympia Snowe may now leverage her vote to kill a public option in the Senate, one might very well wonder what the point of winning elections is if you can't enact good policy.

Setting aside the fact that I've mellowed a bit on the public option issue (the Netherlands doesn't have one and they have universal coverage with cost controls and good health outcomes, for example), a bill that would cover millions of people that don't now have coverage and eliminate bad insurance industry practices is worth doing on its own merits.

If the health care saga has taught us nothing else, it's that the Constitution makes change on a scale greater than this (let alone a single-payer plan) really hard. So if this has to be a long-term process, let's get it started: pass something good that creates a political momentum to elect more people who can improve upon it later on -- much like Social Security and Medicaid had to be tweaked over the years, too. Even if Republicans regain control of Congress, I'd guess that efforts to turn the clock back on anything passed now will be as successful as Bush's Social Security privatization. A more likely scenario is that Republicans tolerate the new status quo and move on, like they've done with Medicare.