Let’s Not, and Say We Did
The NY Times’ Ross Douthat wants Democrats to make a deal with Republicans on health care. Here we go again.
You don’t even have to read the article to know that it’s a hopeless clutter of gibberish and magical thinking, but because I love you dammit I tried to get more than a paragraph in…
Even in the unlikely event that the two sides approach the conference in good faith, they’ll still probably end up talking past each other. One difficulty, as Slate’s Chris Beam has pointed out, is that the White House and the Republicans agree on the idea of bipartisanship, but not its definition. For President Obama, being “bipartisan” means incorporating a few right-of-center proposals into an essentially liberal legislative package. For Republicans, it means doing only those things that legislators of both parties can agree on — a far more stringent standard, and one that would produce a very different bill.
OK, that’s enough torture for the day. Look, here’s the “deal”: there won’t BE a deal. And that’s because the Republicans, especially in the Senate, have made clear that they will not help to pass anything bipartisan. They don’t WANT a health care overhaul of any kind, and have said as much repeatedly. For crying out loud, we spent last summer watching Max Baucus toss Charles Grassley’s salad to get a compromise on health care, and what did it get us? NOTHING. Same with Snowe. Same with that other asshole, what’s his name, Enzi.
Here’s how it works: the Republicans say “we can’t vote for a bill that has X, Y, or Z.” So the Democrats remove X, Y, or Z, and then the GOP says “we still can’t vote for the bill.” Lather, rinse, repeat. And this is on a health care bill that resembles the Republican proposal from back in the Clinton days!
So please, Ross, spare me the whining and precious tears over “a deal”. You and the rest of your colleagues on the right are full of shit. If Democrats were smart, they’d do what YOUR party spent the Bush years doing: ramming through their preferred programs and policies without so much as a second thought for what the minority party wanted.
Yeah, it’s smashmouth politics, but that’s what you guys want, so that’s what you should get.
