Is this a complete game-changer? Will the Obama administration now be divided into two eras: BB and AB—Before Brown and After Brown?
There was a lot of trash talk on the part of Democrats and their supporters before yesterday’s election. For example, Speaker Pelosi said, whatever the outcome, ““Let’s remove all doubt. We will have health care one way or another.” And there are simpatico pundits who are still advising passage of that despised and rejected leviathan known as the Senate health care reform bill (see this, for example).
But no less a liberal than Barney Frank is saying “whoa!”—or at least, “whoa for now.” Here’s his statement:
I feel strongly that the Democratic majority in Congress must respect the process and make no effort to bypass the electoral results. If Martha Coakley had won, I believe we could have worked out a reasonable compromise between the House and Senate health care bills. But since Scott Brown has won and the Republicans now have 41 votes in the Senate, that approach is no longer appropriate. I am hopeful that some Republican Senators will be willing to discuss a revised version of health care reform because I do not think that the country would be well-served by the health care status quo. But our respect for democratic procedures must rule out any effort to pass a health care bill as if the Massachusetts election had not happened. Going forward, I hope there will be a serious effort to change the Senate rule which means that 59 votes are not enough to pass major legislation, but those are the rules by which the health care bill was considered, and it would be wrong to change them in the middle of the process.”
Although Frank is from Massachusetts, he is not in a threatened district. His constituents voted overwhelmingly for Coakley and for health care reform. But something is driving him, and if I’m any judge of Barney Frank it’s not a sudden concern for doing what’s right.
My guess is that, despite what Frank says, a Senate/House compromise was already a very iffy proposition before the Brown election, and that many House Democrats were balking. Now, with the Brown victory, Frank is getting word from others in the House that they refuse to go the only route possible to avoid a Brown vote against cloture, which would be for the House to pass the Senate bill as is. The only other option that would remain would be reconciliation in the Senate, which would be almost impossible to effect as well.
So Barney is sounding as though he’s taking the high road and refusing to ram health care reform down America’s throat. But is he? Reread his last sentence, and I think you’ll see that a strategic withdrawal is what is going on here. Frank would very much like to change the rules about the filibuster while Democrats still hold a majority in the Senate. That way, the rights of the minority would no longer be protected, and—as in the House—only a bare majority would be enough to pass legislation. If that had occurred, Brown’s election would have been far less influential in terms of its affect on the health care reform bill.
Is Barney Frank dreaming (not to mention the fact that, if Democrats lose a majority in the Senate, this would come back to bite them)? Perhaps, but if so he’s not alone. Abolishing the filibuster has been a rallying cry for the left for quite some time, and it remains so (see this, this, and this, among others). Just a few days ago, on January 16, Frank went on record as asking for a “crusade” to amend the rules to abolish the filibuster. So his post-election remark was not an idle one; it seems to be part of some sort of plan.
Could it succeed? I think not. But it’s hard to get clarity on how it would have to be done (see this and this). As best I can determine, it would appear that the standard approach would be the one used to amend a Senate rule, requiring a super-majority of 67 votes for the cloture vote rule to change. It is very hard to see how the Democrats could muster that number, if they can’t even gather sixty to call for cloture on health care reform.
But do they have some unknown tricks up their sleeves? To attempt to answer that question, take a look at this document. Written in November of 2003, it outlines a number of proposals under consideration at that time to change the cloture rules.
You may note the somewhat ironic point that, back then, with a Senate equally divided between the two parties, it was the Republicans who were trying to make the cloture rules more liberal (at least for judicial nominations) and the Democrats who were eloquently holding forth on the need to protect minority rights and keep things as is. It all came to naught, because Republicans lacked enough votes for it, and were loath to invoke what is known as the “nuclear option,” a proposal to get around the need for 67 votes, but one that might have destroyed the functioning of the Senate itself.
Do the Democrats have the stomach for a nuclear option now? It doesn’t appear that way, although these things are impossible to predict in the current climate (who would have predicted the events of the last year, for example?) But Senator Evan Bayh of Indiana (and probably some others like him) seems more than willing to pull back from a fight.
Bayh has always positioned himself as a moderate Democrat, but when push came to shove he refused to be the forty-first vote against cloture on the health care bill, and now he knows he may pay the price by forfeiting his lengthy political career. So Bayh is backtracking rather frantically now:
“There’s going to be a tendency on the part of our people to be in denial about all this,” Bayh told ABC News, but “if you lose Massachusetts and that’s not a wake-up call, there’s no hope of waking up.”
Many other Democrats in Congress are afraid that the bell that tolled yesterday for Martha Coakley will be tolling for them soon. But even if enough of them hear the voice of the people and respond by dropping this particular health care reform bill, will that bell be silenced? Will voters forgive them for what they have already done by letting such legislation get this far? My prediction is that a sizable number of the American people have taken their measure during the last traumatic year, and will not forget when voting time comes around.
Problems remain for the Democrats whatever they do. The trouble with retreating from the bill now (and perhaps even proposing some reasonable, bipartisan reforms) is that it would make them—and Obama, Reid, and Pelosi—look like fools for having stuck with the present bill so long. And the trouble with failing to retreat from the bill now is the same thing.
