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- In the aftermath of passing health-care reform into law, the Republican Meltdown has become manifest, the essence of which is captured in this Bob Herbert column. His key point is an obvious one: Republicans not only tolerate but encourage the vile hatred and ignorance being fomented by the Tea Partiers and their ilk. When Michael Steele calls HCR "Armageddon" he is indicating that his party is incapable of introspection. When Joseph Cao compares (nonexistent) abortion coverage to slavery, he is telling his constituents that he has no interest in being re-elected. And when Republican strategists (but perhaps not the NRSC) are pinning their November hopes on repealing reform instead of focusing on the economy and jobs, they are suffering from delusional overconfidence and gross misunderstanding about the priorities of the electorate.
- I do not know what compels ostensibly neutral news sources to depict the perfectly legitimate manner in which Democrats passed health-care reform as unethical. And I do not understand why the process is depicted as inelegant. Here's Politico describing "the Democrats’ ungainly march toward a victory on health care reform" in an article about the classlessness of Republicans during its passage. Legislation this big is supposed to be a messy affair. Read this account of How Barack Obama revived health-care after Scott Brown's election to get a sense of how many stakeholders in the Democratic Party had to be appeased for a legislative win. This is how unwieldy political coalitions get major legislation passed, one vote and one legislator at a time.
- Chris Cillizza joins the Rich Lowry "Obama needs a Republican Congress" crowd with a post today that argues that because Bill Clinton found a foil in Newt Gingrich, he was able to secure re-election in 1996. He arrives at this conclusion by posing a hypothetical question: "How would the health care fight have played out differently if Republicans were in control of the House?" Obama could have played off of Republican obstruction, Cillizza posits, forcing Republicans to compromise with Democrats on reform legislation. This is what happens when you define success in politics as a function of winning elections. The real answer to Cillizza's "fascinating" (his term) hypothetical is that health-care reform would have died months ago. Portraying Republicans as "a symbol of everything that's wrong with government and why it's not working for the American people" hasn't forced concessions out of Republicans who have nothing to lose, so why would it force concessions out of Republicans who have something to lose?
- What do you do when your beliefs about the interplay between economic growth and environmental regulation are challenged by evidence? If you work at the American Enterprise Institute, you acknowledge the facts and then make up some other causal mechanism out of thin air! Instead of citing the establishment of the EPA, the passage of the Clean Air Act, and other seeds of the destruction of capitalism, AEI "scholar" Mark J. Perry concludes that pollution levels have dropped since 1970 because the United States became wealthier and that all those dire warnings from environmentalists of yore were much ado about nothing. Incidentally, when the world starts regulating carbon emissions in the future, we will all realize that the "global warming" scare of the naughties was just Al Gore hitting the bong and the fabulous wealth created by the Ownership Society was the key to preserving Mother Earth.
- Remainders: Health care deemed a "good thing" by a 49-40 percent margin; it was very responsible of Republicans to spend months and months demonizing Democrats and their legislative proposals; Dana Goldstein on how abortion-rights groups can roll back the restrictions in health-care reform included to appease the Stupak faction; the unintended consequences of Scott Brown's election; Mike Pence is a national treasure; the "challenge" of measuring the right-wing fringe is to use, you know, proven polling methodology; and Megan McArdle is astonishingly uninformed for someone who is paid to write about politics for a prestigious magazine.
--Mori Dinauer
