Last night, the Democrats were able to garner the 60-votes needed to invoke cloture on the health care bill, clearing a major obstacle and making the possibility that the president will actually sign a health care bill into law that much more likely. Getting the votes of Ben Nelson and Joe Lieberman meant dropping the public option and allowing states to opt-out of allowing abortion coverage -- Ezra Klein says at least one of the national non-profit plans, which will be available in all states, will still offer abortion coverage.
I think Mike Lillis gets the story right when he frames the death of the public option as just another of a set of compromises on issues like credit card or mortgage bankruptcy reform, that have made the first year of Barack Obama's presidency more of a bitter pill to swallow than I think many liberals expected. There are a number of institutional realities -- such as the absurdity of the supermajority requirement in the Senate -- that suggest to me a disproportionate focus on the president as the source of all failure. The Senate supermajority requirement for passing any bill made this frustrating outcome likely, and I'm not sure what could have been done differently to get a better result. (There are areas in which the executive branch has great agency, such as national security, civil liberties, and human rights, where this president has proven to lack the convictions he championed as a candidate.)
Still, like Jacob Hacker, I'm of the opinion that this bill, which will extend health insurance coverage to 94 percent of Americans, is about as good as we could expect given the circumstances, that it should ultimately pass and that it can and should be improved over time. This is true both in the short and the long term; the bill the president signs will be more progressive than the one that just made it through the first procedural vote in the Senate.
This is also pretty much the history of progressive legislation in the United States: The initial product is often an ugly product of the political realities of its time. But if the bill doesn't pass, there's nothing to improve.
-- A. Serwer
