Harold Meyerson says immigration and labor law reform, not just health care, needed filibuster-proof majorities to pass as well. The casualty list from last night's Massachusetts disaster is long and sobering, but I don't think in the end that it will include health care reform. Any number of Democrats may fear passing the bill for which they've already voted, but the consequences of not passing it will be far worse: a near-total collapse of turnout from the Democratic base in the November elections. (If Barney Frank truly wants to start over, as he suggested last night, then Barney Frank should be primaried.) Besides, the Democrats don't need 60 Senate votes to complete their job. They need only win a majority in the House for the Senate bill, in conjunction with legislation, passed through the budget reconciliation process that requires just 51 Senate votes, that reflects the compromises on funding and benefits that House and Senate Democrats have already reached. The problem is all the other legislation that has been waiting in the wings while the Senate dithered on health care reform, that does require 60 votes for passage. If the fate of Earth depends on the enactment of climate change legislation, well, so much for the fate of Earth. Lindsay Graham may have been willing to meet John Kerry halfway to deal with global warming before the Massachusetts vote, but it's hard to imagine that either he or a sufficient number of Democrats want to take up the issue now. So, too, with two causes that are not only necessary to restore our economic vitality and political equality but that unequivocally benefit the long-term prospects of the Democratic Party: labor law reform and immigration reform. Since the mid-'70s, the Democrats have known that American business has routinely violated the National Labor Relations Act with impunity, since the penalties for, say, illegally firing the leader of an organizing campaign are negligible. They have known that private-sector unions have lost the ability to grow, and that as unions' numbers have declined, so have certain key sectors of the Democratic electorate. (On average, unionized white men vote Democratic at a rate 20 percent higher than their non-union counterparts.) KEEP READING. . .
