Spare me the excuses, Pelosi.
Yesterday, Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced that there would be no public option in the health care “reform” legislation that she will send to the House floor for a vote next week.
In the words of Sarah Palin, “How’s that hopey changey thing workin’ out for ya?”
Yes, it’s a sad day when the actions of the Democratic Party prompt me to quote the wordsmith of Wasilla, but this is what it’s come to in light of Pelosi declaring, “I’m quite sad that a public option isn’t in there. But it isn’t a case of it’s not in there because the Senate is whipping against it. It’s not in there because they don’t have the votes to have it in there.”
Pelosi made this statement on Friday, one day after Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin said if the House version included a public option, he’d whip for it. The White House meanwhile, is publicly keeping its distance from the proceedings, and clearly doesn’t mind the lack of a public option.
So this is it, huh? It seems that just about everyone in the Democratic Party is for the public option, but everyone’s against it. Pelosi is blaming the Senate. The Senate’s leadership is saying they’d try to make it happen if the House passes the public option. And Barack Obama doesn’t seem to care what passes at this point, as long as he can call it “reform.” Call me cynical, but I think this has been one big carefully orchestrated charade in which all of the major players have plausible deniability on the question of who really killed the public option.
The more I watch the Democrats exercise their majorities in Congress with Obama in the White House, the more I’m coming to believe that the Democrats are pathetic on purpose. No powerful organization is this inept and unsure of itself. It’s no secret the Democratic Party is a corporatist party, but nonetheless they are more likely than the GOP to enact laws that are beneficial to the average American. But with the GOP out of power, we can clearly see just how bought-and-paid-for the Democrats really are. A huge majority of registered Democrats want a public option, as does a majority of Americans when Independents and even Republicans are included. And yet the Democratic Party is telling me that they don’t have the votes? Why the fuck not? Especially now with things looking as if the senate is going to pass health care using reconciliation, which will require a simple 51-vote majority in the senate. That means that nine Democrats could defect and vote against the bill, and it could still pass, with Vice President Joe Biden voting for passage to break this hypothetical 50-50 tie.
But this isn’t going to happen because the Democratic leadership is basically saying, “We would really love a public option; it’s just that too many people in the party would oppose it. Only 86% of registered Democrats favor a public option, and the support in Congress just isn’t there.”
The “good news” is that the Democrats are going to implement near-universal care by mandating that people buy private insurance or face fines. With a public option, such a mandate is dubious. Without a public option, such a mandate is downright cruel. If the government wants to provide people with a cheaper alternative to private insurance in order to help working class Americans, I’m all for it. But where the fuck does this administration and this Congress get off telling me I have to purchase insurance? I can’t possibly see how that’s constitutional. While the health insurance mandate has been compared to auto insurance mandates, this is an inappropriate comparison. Drivers must buy auto insurance by virtue of having bought cars. Under the health care bill mandate, people would have to buy health insurance by virtue of simply being alive. Not even the broadest interpretation of the Necessary-and-Proper Clause arrives at a justification for mandating business transactions between private parties under such a circumstance. Of course, we’d like to think that if such a law passes, there would be a benefit in having a constructionist majority on the Supreme Court if the mandate were ever challenged and got that far. But the Roberts Court has shown itself to be so rabidly pro-business, I would not put it past the robed reactionaries to rule in favor of the mandate simply because it helps corporations.
In a recent letter to the Democratic Party, I suggested that I might stay home in 2010 if it didn’t clean up its act. Well, the Democrats aren’t going to clean up their act, so you can count me out of the November midterms. And unless Obama starts to push an actual progressive agenda, you can count me out of the 2012 presidential race too. I won’t legitimize this bullshit we call a political system anymore.
- Max
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