One of the perks of serving in Congress is that members generally get quite a bit of vacation time, and pretty good hours as well. Elected officials aren't normally wild about working into the wee hours, though they'll do it when they have to. And on Monday morning, they did have to -- a procedural vote on healthcare reform was held at about 1 a.m. EST.
If you listen to reform opponents, there was a reason for the hour at which the vote was held, and a reason that the up-or-down vote on the bill is slated to take place on Christmas Eve: The Democrats are trying to pass the legislation under the cover of darkness.
"This Congress, this leadership, is so tone deaf and so hell bent on propping up a policy that the American people doesn’t (sic) want, that they’re willing to basically flip the bird to the American people on this issue and slip it in in the dead of night," Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele said after the vote, expressing a sentiment that's become common on the right. You can bet, too, that Steele and others will have similar things to say if that Christmas Eve vote happens as scheduled -- the farther reaches of the right might add some anti-Christian charges against Senate Democrats, to boot.
What Republicans aren't saying, though, is that they bear as much responsibility for the schedule as Senate Democrats do, maybe more. True, Majority Leader Harry Reid could just decide to blow his self-imposed deadline and not get the bill passed before Christmas. But if Republicans would drop delaying tactics they're currently using, or agree to give up some of the debate time they're allowed under Senate rules, the votes would be conducted at more normal hours and with enough time for everyone to get home for Christmas Eve. At this point, it's clear that the bill will pass -- at least this time around, we'll see what happens after the House and Senate confer -- and that the delaying tactics are only that.
There is a possibility that Senate Republicans will decide to allow the final vote before the evening of the 24th; there were reports that they were discussing that possibility Monday. But now that they've dug in, they'd face an angry base if they did back down.
Clearly, a lot of conservatives want Democrats' healthcare reform legislation to fail, and are dismayed that it looks like there will be a bill passed. But in a post he published Sunday night on his blog Confederate Yankee, Bob Owens took that desire to a whole new level, saying he hoped that Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., would die so that the bill would go down to defeat.
In the post, titled "All I Want Is A Byrd Dropping For Christmas," Owens wrote:
Robert Byrd has been around a very long time, and his many decades of service have made West Virginia a wonderful state in which to manufacture methamphetamine or frame the locals for murder. But it's time for Senator to do the right thing, and expire.
It isn't too much to ask for Byrd to step off for that great klavern in the sky before the Senate vote that may force this nation to accept government-rationed health care. Even a nice coma would do.
Without his frail, Gollum-like body being wheeled into the Senate's chambers to cast the deciding vote, the Senate cannot curse our children and grandchildren with crushing debt and rationed, substandard healthcare.
Noting that some people were bound to be (rightfully) appalled by what he'd written, Owens added that he'd tell those people "that the party wheeling in a near invalid to vote in favor of this unread monstrosity of a bill is the one that should feel shame."
(Hat-tip to Andrew Sullivan.)
A new CNN poll is getting some attention, because it shows a six percentage point bump in approval of the Senate's healthcare reform legislation. That result's probably getting overplayed a bit, though.
For one thing, the percentage of respondents who told CNN they favor the bill is still just 42 percent, compared to 56 percent who oppose it. For another, the poll's margin of error is plus or minus three percentage points, so the bump could really be non-existent -- we'll need to see more polling to know if the numbers really are moving.
There were some notable results in the poll, though. Support for the bill is up 10 percent among Democrats, despite the opposition to the deals the Senate struck that's come from the left recently. And President Obama's approval rating, too, was up among self-identified liberals. That number's now at 81 percent.
Update: Wanted to add a point I meant to include earlier -- it's also fair to expect that Obama's numbers generally will go up after the bill's done and signed. Given the trend among Democrats now, that's likely to be especially true for Democrats' ratings of him. There's been a fair amount of frustration at the administration on the left because of a perception that Obama really hasn't gotten much done, and a major accomplishment like the bill will probably alleviate that.
For most people, the year ending now is 2009. That's apparently not true at the right-wing magazine Human Events; reading it Monday, you could be forgiven for thinking that the Bush administration is still in office.
The magazine has named former Vice President Dick Cheney "Conservative of the Year." The article about the honor praises him for "caus[ing] so much angst at teh White House and in the mainstream news media."
That's not the only throwback aspect to the award, though. The piece that lays out the reason behind Cheney's receiving the honor was written by former UN Ambassador John Bolton, one of the most hawkish members of the previous administration.
There's an interesting perspective to the piece, one that isn't particularly shocking given Bolton's orientation and the magazine's having chosen Cheney in the first place, but is still somewhat hard to square with reality. Bolton repeatedly makes a case that the White House worries about Cheney and his influence on public opinion. That's true, to a certain degree -- but it's also true that the reason the White House has been so quick to publicly engage with the former vice president is that Cheney is remarkably unpopular. The Obama team figures, rightly, that they're better off in any fight in which Cheney is the face of the opposition.
As the man who essentially invented the public option, Jacob Hacker might be expected to side with the progressives he influenced and oppose the healthcare reform bill currently working its way through the Senate. And in a piece he's written for the New Republic, he acknowledges as much -- and then comes out in favor of the legislation. (Update: On the other side of things, Firedoglake's Jane Hamsher sums up the progressive argument with this post, entitled "10 Reasons to Kill the Senate Bill.")
Hacker writes:
I was devastated when [the public option] was killed at the hands of Senator Joe Lieberman, not least because of what it said about our democracy -- that a policy consistently supported by a strong majority of Americans could be brought down by a recalcitrant Senate minority.
It would therefore be tempting for me to side with Howard Dean and other progressive critics who say that health care reform should now be killed.
It would be tempting, but it would be wrong.
Since the first campaign for publicly guaranteed health insurance in the early twentieth century, opportunities for serious health reform have come only rarely and fleetingly. If this opportunity passes, it will be very long before the chance arrives again. Many Americans will be gravely hurt by the delay. The most progressive president of my generation--the generation that came of age in the anti-government shadow of Ronald Reagan--will be handed a crippling loss. The party he leads will be branded as unable to govern.
The public option was always a means to an end: real competition for insurers, an alternative for consumers to existing private plans that does not deny needed care or shift risks onto the vulnerable, the ability to provide affordable coverage over time. I thought it was the best means within our political grasp. It lay just beyond that grasp. Yet its demise--in this round--does not diminish the immediate necessity of those larger aims. And even without the public option, the bill that Congress passes and the President signs could move us substantially toward those goals.
In September, I interviewed Hacker about the public option; you can read that here.
If you just compared it to the sentiments being expressed by other Republicans, the statement that Florida Gov. Charlie Crist released in response to a Senate vote in favor of a Democratic healthcare reform proposal wouldn't seem that unusual.
"I am thoroughly disappointed that votes on an issue affecting 1/6 of the American economy were traded in for sweetheart deals and a rushed vote in the middle of the night," Crist said. "The plan will cripple state economies and add half a trillion dollars in new taxes on top of half a trillion dollars in Medicare cuts. All of this translates to increased health costs on the backs of American taxpayers and decreased benefits for our seniors: That is not reform."
Again, nothing out of the ordinary. But it is an interesting contrast with where Crist was less than a year ago. Back in February, he was supporting the Democrats' stimulus package -- even helping President Obama sell it.
Obviously, the two issues are different. But there's a bigger difference, one probably more responsible for the shift in the governor's thinking. At the moment, he's running for Senate; he was expected to win the seat easily, but has been plagued by his primary opponent, former state House Speaker Marco Rubio, who's been surprisingly successful hitting Crist from the right.
War Room is written and edited by Alex Koppelman, with contributions from Salon reporters around the country.
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