“Every collectivist revolution rides in on a Trojan horse of "emergency". And "emergency" became the justification of the subsequent steps. This technique of creating emergency is the greatest achievement that demagoguery attains.” -- Herbert Hoover
"Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the Government's purposes are beneficent. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding." -- Justice Louis D. Brandeis
Is it enough to assume that whichever party has the majority in Congress it will have an easier time of implementing its agenda? Not necessarily. Consider the health care bill which took over a year to pass and was extremely divisive even though the democrats had an overwhelming majority in both Houses of Congress at the time.
According to the democrats, the 2008 elections gave them a new mandate from the American people, i.e. that the liberal progressive movement was in ascendancy and was to last for several election cycles. Many commentators thought that the conservative movement that Reagan ushered in a generation earlier, was over. However, as Lincoln reputedly noted: “You can fool all the people some of the time, you can fool some of the people all the time, but you can't fool all the people all the time.” And in November 2010 the House switched to majority republican and the Senate gained more republican seats.
But before that democrat health care reform had a torturous passage through the halls of Congress. Politics is not only about power, but also about capturing the perceptions of the people. So the mainstream media's hostility, its opposition to the Iraq War, and the growing economic crises, made the latter half of Bush’s 2nd term to be about this or that aspect of American institutions being “broken”. Institutions such as the military, healthcare, and immigration. Thus, after the 2008 election Obama and his administration were positioned as saviours responding as if everything was a crisis. TARP was a crisis. TARP II was a crisis. The health care bills were a crisis. The bailouts were a crisis. The stimulus package, a crisis. And of course Obama's advisor Rahm Emanuel reminded us that, "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. What I mean by that is it's an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before". The idea also being that if one governs like everything is a crisis, then one can be perceived as offering the solution. (Thus the quotes from Hoover and Brandeis above)
One of the biggest and far reaching “solutions” of them all was the new health care law. Many commentators and pundits have said it was “rammed” down the American people’s throat. How can one assess this? Was it too partisan? Was it too voluminous to read? Were votes taken at inopportune times?
These and other questions were asked and answered at a Town Hall meeting in San Mateo last week. Tom Vaillancourt and Congressional candidate for the 14th District, Debbie Bacigalupi hosted a very informative presentation on this still very perplexing issue. The presentation was so well received that another Town Hall is scheduled soon. See www.debbieforcongress.org for date and time and a video of the original presentation by Tom. Debbie's opponent Jackie Speier was invited to debate the issue, but declined.
How health care came to be passed is rather indicative of our current state of political divisiveness. The trajectory of the health care legislation clearly shows this. As already mentioned, in the beginning of 2009 the democrats had overwhelming majorities in the House and Senate. They had a 76 vote lead in the House and by July 2009 a filibuster-proof Senate of 60 seats. However, by late 2009 the House was struggling to pass its version of health care, and the Senate had finally passed its bill on Christmas Eve, December 24, 2009.
So what happens when there are two different versions of a bill in the Congress, i.e. one in the House and one in the Senate? The normal process is for the two versions to go to a "Conference Committee" for compromise and reconciliation. But that didn't happen. As Alcee Hastings (D) said at the time, “All this talk about rules. We make them up as we go along.” Or his colleague, James Clyburn (D) who said: "There's nothing in the Constitution that says that the federal government has anything to do with most of the stuff we do." So there was to be no compromise in the Conference Committee.
The House under Pelosi simply passed the Senate version of the bill, but it took them until March 21, 2010 to do so. This way it didn't need to go back to the Conference Committee. The House version, on the other hand, was then sent to the Senate, now with Scott Brown (R) in Kennedy's "seat" in Massachusetts and 41 republicans to enforce a filibuster. But it came under a special emergency "reconciliation" proviso that stated the bill didn't need to be subject to the 3/5 requirement (60 votes) or the filibuster of 41 votes. All that was needed for passage, under this new "reconciliation" proviso, was a simple majority vote in the Senate. And that's what it got. Remember Alcee Hastings, "... rules. We make them up as we go along.”
Moreover, an additional problem with passage of the health care bill was within the democrat party itself. Remember, the bill only passed in the House by 7 votes. But the democrats had a 76 vote majority. So what happened? The “Blue Dog” moderate democrats is what happened. They voted their consciences and for their constituencies. This became a major obstacle for the democrats who only barely got enough votes to finally pass the bill in March 2010.
So now that the Senate version was passed by the House, all that remained was for the House version to be passed by the Senate. The filibuster-proof democrat Senate essentially ended with the election of Scott Brown (R) in Massachusetts in Jan 2010. That created a problem for the democrats and helped create the wrangling that the health care bills went through in early 2010 in order to finally get them passed by March 2010. The House version was passed by the Senate on March 25, 2010 under the new emergency proviso.
The health care legislation was two bills. The Patient Protection and Affirdable Care Act, passed the Senate on December 24, 2009, by a filibuster-proof vote of 60–39 (remember Scott Brown (R) was elected in MA in Jan. 2010) with all Democrats and Independents voting for it, and all Republicans voting against. It passed the House of Representatives (without going to Conference Committee), as already stated, on March 21, 2010, by a vote of 219–212, with 178 Republicans and 34 Democrats voting against the bill.
The other bill, the original House version with amendments called the Healthcare and Education Reconciliation Act passed the House with all 178 Republicans and 33 Democrats voting against it. In the Senate the vote was 56–43, with all Republicans and 3 Democrats voting against it. This passed the House on March 21 and the Senate on March 25,2010.
So clearly no bi-partisanship on either bill.
Thus the health care "reform" was quite a unilateral piece of legislation. But the "due process" tradition in American politics in the last 50 years, is that no major piece of legislation has passed without bi-partisan support. Not welfare reform under Clinton, not Medicare Part D, not the Iraq War authorization, not No Child Left Behind, not the Patriot Act. But in this case, i.e. health care, no bipartisanship at all. No republicans voted for it, many democrats voted against it, and it bypassed the traditional legislative process of having a Conference Committee vote. Thus the saying, it was "rammed down the American people's throat".
