Intellectual dishonesty

Max Baucus yesterday offered one of the more bizarre rationales for voting against including a public option — publicly administered health insurance plan — in healthcare reform:

Finance committee members rejected two amendments that would have created a public option. The votes were 15 to 8 and 13 to 10. Baucus, who has emerged as the central player in shaping the bill, was one of three Democrats who voted ‘no’ on both proposals. Baucus said he supports the principle of a public option as an alternative to private insurance. But he warned that including it could doom the bill to a Republican filibuster.

“No one has been able to show me how we can count up to 60 votes with a public option,” Baucus said. “I want a bill that can become law.”

So, to be clear: Baucus supports the public option but can’t vote for it unless everyone else does. So much for intellectual consistency.

The Baucus contradiction, of course, is one that most progressives have been criticizing (Rachel Maddow last night, in a comment laden with derision and snarky sarcasm, described the Baucus position as “leadership”).

Another intellectually suspect argument has been making the rounds, however, and it comes from the left, from the people seeking to get a public option into the bill. As anyone knows who has read this blog or my columns with the Packet Group or The Progressive Populist, I view the public option as a stop-gap but necessary measure. What I find disturbing is this argument, made last night by both Sen. Charles Schumer and Howard Dean on Maddow — and made by other progressives at other times regarding this bill: That Democrats should vote with the leadership on cloture and with their conscience on the bill.

MADDOW: You just heard my interview with Senator Schumer. And he said something that I haven‘t heard him articulate before, which is that Democratic leadership should be able to expect that even Democrats who are going to vote against health reform should vote for cloture, should vote to end the Republican filibuster, thereby making the threshold 51 votes instead of 60. What‘s your reaction?

DEAN: That‘s true. Core procedure in almost every legislature I have ever had anything to do with, including the national legislature, is, you can vote however you want on a bill, that‘s a conscience matter, but you owe it to your leadership who gives you your chairmanship and to vote with the leadership on procedural votes. And a filibuster is a procedural vote.

So, I would expect all of the people caucusing with the Democrats to allow a vote to go forward.

MADDOW: And.

DEAN: And so, you know, the chairman‘s argument is auspicious. You don‘t need 60 votes for a public option, you need 51 — under any circumstance, if the people who caucus with the Democratic Party and owe their chairs to the Democratic leadership are willing to do the right thing.

It’s a specious argument that unfortunately echoes the ones made by Republicans when Democrats threatened (they always threatened but rarely followed through) to filibuster hard-right judicial nominees. Let the nominee get an up-or-down vote.

That’s what Dean is arguing here, that whatever you believe you should allow a floor vote to occur. Sounds good in theory, but what if you know that allowing the floor vote will allow legislation you disagree with vehemently to pass. The cloture vote is the only power you have to stop the bill.

I’m not defending folks like Ben Nelson or Blanche Lincoln. Their stance on healthcare is indefensible. But they have a responsibility to use every tool they have in their arsenals to ensure that legislation they oppose does not become law.

The issue here is not that all good Democrats should fall in line. Rather, the issue is the filibuster itself and whether it really is anything more than an opportunity for a minority of senators to hold the rest of the Senate hostage.

I’ve written about this before (there was a point in time when I defended it, but shifted my view about four years ago$, when the Republicans threatened to jettison the filibuster to get their court nominees through. My reasoning was simple: It was an archaic technicality generally used to stop progress and thwart the democratic process. Rather than a simple majority of Senators (an unrepresentative body in and of itself), you potentially needed a supermajority of 60 — something that can be difficult when controversial legislation is on the table (think about the civil rights filibusters of the ’60s).

So, here we are, with a public healthcare option being incredibly popular (65 percent according to a recent CBS/NY Times poll) and offering the only real chance we’ll get to keep the health insurance companies honest, but failing to get through a committee because a handful of small-state Senators with power disproportionate to the size of their constituency are unwilling to get behind it.

All of this is possible because we continue to hang on to an archaic procedural “safeguard.”

Author: hankkalet

Hank Kalet is a poet and freelance journalist. He is the economic needs reporter for NJ Spotlight, teaches journalism at Rutgers University and writing at Middlesex County College and Brookdale Community College. He writes a semi-monthly column for the Progressive Populist. He is a lifelong fan of the New York Mets and New York Knicks, drinks too much coffee and attends as many Bruce Springsteen concerts as his meager finances will allow. He lives in South Brunswick with his wife Annie. View all posts by hankkalet