If Democrats in the Senate filibuster the House’s health care bill this week, it will be a case study in how polarization is slowly choking American government. This bill is a rare bird: John Boehner, Nancy Pelosi, and a majority of their respective caucuses have all agreed to it. Among other things, this legislation would:
1) make Medicare more solvent by charging higher premiums from wealthier beneficiaries
2) extend a successful children’s health insurance program
3) end the inane annual scramble to prevent massive cuts to doctors giving care under Medicare known as the “doc fix"
The bill contains language known as the “Hyde Amendment” that prohibits community clinics receiving funds from using the money to pay for abortion procedures. Predictably, pro-choice groups are outraged.
But the Hyde language isn’t as big a deal as it seems, because of numerous other restrictions on funding for abortion that exist in federal law (including Barack Obama’s executive order prohibiting funding for abortion under Obamacare, which was key to the compromise underlying the ACA’s passage five years ago).
This hasn’t stopped the pro-choice groups from pressuring Senate Democrats to vote “no” on the whole package. Now Senate Democrats, led by the erstwhile noble Harry Reid, are threatening to filibuster this rarest of compromises out of existence.
Let’s take a second to reflect here. House Democrats have cut a deal with House Republicans — the same people who shut down part or all of the federal government on two separate occasions in the last three years — to make reforms that will have substantive, if not transformative, impact on entitlement spending and health care for children. Democrats in the Senate may kill all of that because they are facing ideological pressure about a tangential amendment that doesn’t have any practical impact anyway. Once again, the culture wars, with their emotional proclamations of ideology, are obstructing progress on core economic issues.
I don’t exactly blame the pro-choice groups for applying the pressure — it’s their job to defend abortion rights. It’s not their job to make sure Medicare is solvent. But it represents a systemic problem when people whose job it is to only care about one or two social issues can successfully block substantive reform on other things.
The New York Times wrote that “the conflict represents a new dynamic in Congress, in which Senate Democrats are assuming the role played for years by House Republicans — waging an ideological fight from a disadvantaged position — and Republicans are eager to prove themselves good stewards of government.”
Will it ever again be possible for both parties to want to prove themselves good stewards of government? Will we ever get voters and interest groups to reward them for that?