Good Read for the Day

E J Dionne has a thoughtful column today on the Senate Health Care Reform situation. Urging progressives "don't scream, organize", he warns now is not the time to throw up our hands.

Of course what has happened on the health care bill is enraging. It's quite clear that substantial majorities in both houses of Congress favored either a public option or a Medicare buy-in.

In a normal democracy, such majorities would work their will, a law would pass, and champagne corks would pop. But everyone must get it through their heads that thanks to the now bizarre habits of the Senate, we are no longer a normal democracy.

Because of a front of Republican obstruction and the ludicrous idea that all legislation requires a supermajority of 60 votes, power has passed from the majority to tiny minorities, sometimes minorities of one.

Worse, more influence in this system flows to those willing to kill a bill than to those who most devoutly want to pass one. The paradox in this case is that senators who care most passionately about extending health coverage to 31 million Americans have the least power.

He notes how dysfunctional the Senate is, and if you read the comments on this article in the Oregonian, the writers miss the fact that the D's do NOT have 60 votes.

What transpired was thus not the product of some magic show in which more conservative senators are endowed with mysteriously ingenious negotiating abilities while liberals are a bunch of bunglers. The whole system is biased to the right because the Senate itself -- a body in which Wyoming and Utah have as much representation as New York and California -- is tilted in a conservative direction. The 60-vote requirement empowers conservatives even more.

Democrats have no purity pledge when they run as Democrats. Indeed, there are Democrats in some states which shall remain nameless but you know who they are, who would be R's any place else. The presence of only a few 'centrist' R's, like Maine's senators, underscores the vanishing species of 'just right of center' politicians in the GOP.

This whole process is very frustrating. Op Eds bash 'Obama's Health Care Bill' when in fact it's been castrated by the GOP efforts to stop any reform at all. But we progressives need to get over our anger, and resist walking away from this mess. No excuses. We should join the likes of Jay Rockefeller and Sherrod Brown, and ramp it up.

In the meantime, progressives such as Brown and Rockefeller are right to be fighting with all their might to push through this less than perfect but still remarkably decent proposal.

To vote against it, Rockefeller said when I caught up with him recently, "you have to be for not covering 30 million people ... you have to be for denying coverage to people with pre-existing conditions ... you have to be against helping small businesses buy health insurance." His list went on and on and on, making the point that this bill represents rather astonishing progress.

Brown is of the same view, and also points to where progressives now need to direct their energies. Senate passage of this bill is not the final step. The Senate proposal, Brown said in an interview, can still be improved.

Let's urge our Senators and Representatives to get the final bill closer to the House bill than it is to the Senate bill and keep the pressure on to constantly improve it. If we'd had imperfect health care legislation back when the Clintons were working on it, think of how it could have been morphed into something GOOD by now. Inaction is not an option.

It's a lot easier to improve a system premised on the idea that everyone should have health coverage than to create such a system in the first place. Better to take a victory and build on it than to label victory as defeat.