Ungovernable?

Update: Another voice--Paul Krugman-- supporting the compromised health care bill. What the bill does, its supporter say, is insure the uninsured, while admittedly not doing much else. Krugman on the disillusion and the bill: "But don’t take it out on the tens of millions of Americans who will have health insurance if this bill passes, but will be out of luck — and, in some cases, dead — if it doesn’t."

Original post:
Sometimes I hear a commentator say something I hadn't thought of. Sometimes I hear something I had thought of, but days or weeks after it occurred to me. But it's particularly startling to hear a major if tentative conclusion come out of someone else's mouth on the same day it came to me.

As the Copenhagen meetings reach their climax, so does the health care reform legislation in the U.S. At the moment, everything is pretty much up in the air on both. The latest Senate health care proposal is creating new divisions, notably within the mostly Democratic "progressives." Howard Dean and Senator Bernie Sanders are among those against the bill. Kos makes his statement against it. John Podesta makes his for it, as does Ezra Klein.

It was Ezra Klein on Charlie Rose who read my thoughts. Not about health care specifically, but about Congress. Klein suggests that this debate demonstrates that under current conditions, Congress is unable to deal constructively with big issues, to make big changes no matter how necessary they are to the country, its economy, its identity, its future. He noted exactly the prior example I was thinking of: California. In combination with the kind of extreme politics prevalent now, a few rules in the legislature and in state government make this state ungovernable. The same is becoming true in Washington, where the misuse of the "filibuster" rule in the Senate now requires 60 votes out of 100 to pass anything of significance. It is that rule which has turned the health care reform effort into a shameful farce.

Klein also said something else I believe: that the media concentrates on the President, but the President's actual power is limited. Not everything that goes wrong is the President's fault. Congress is where the buck stops now. So it's too simplistic to assume that Hillary Clinton or anyone else could simply have kicked some ass and gotten this done. There's too much power accruing to too few very flawed Senators.

I'd go beyond Klein's naming of the media: it's also our focus on the President as our substitute king, our symbol, the president of projection. It's true however that the Bush presidency tended to mask the congressional black hole, partly because he had a rubber stamp Republican Congress doing his destructive bidding.

Now Democrat Obama has a large Democratic majority in the House and a tenuous 60 votes in the Senate, but there are two differences: the Democrats aren't a rubber stamp monolith, and the Republicans are shameless in opposing everything the Democrats propose or the President supports. That shamelessness extends to the criminal misuse of the filibuster, which has become just another way to vote no, and thwart the majority.

As Klein pointed out, even FDR didn't have to have 60 votes in the Senate to pass the New Deal. But President Obama must have 60 votes, and that has not only turned health care into a tragic farce, it is feeding an increasingly ugly mood and divisions within the country. At least one poll indicates that growing opposition to health care reform is coming principally from liberals who wanted the public option, but probably more broadly it is coming from people who are just disgusted with the process. It looks like Wiemar to too many.

What's the remedy? The Democrats are unlikely to be in a stronger position after the 2010 congressional elections. Their mythical 60 vote majority in the Senate is likely to be a memory. Only reform of the filibuster rule can save this country from sinking far and fast for the foreseeable future.

I don't know if this health care bill should be passed or not. I do know that it is far, far less than it should be, and it will do far, far less than it could have. Whether it would do more good than harm is debatable, and maybe even unknowable. It's just all pretty disgusting. And it suggests that both in terms of ugly, destructive politics and intractable structural deficiencies in the states as well as the federal government, this country is verging on the ungovernable.