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Monday, March 22, 2010

"We Live In A Different Country Today Than We Did Yesterday"

What BooMan Said:
[T]he signature of Barack Obama's rallies was the "Yes, We Can!" chant from his supporters… House Minority Leader John Boehner's floor speech opposing health care reform contained the following… “No, you can’t.... The answer is no.... No, you cannot... No, you cannot... Hell no, you can’t!... Hell no, you haven’t!" Yet, once the key votes had been cast, enacting the most sweeping expansion of the social safety net since the passage of Medicare, the joyous Democratic caucus erupted in the signature "Yes, We Can" chant…

Thus, we close the book on an era of endless onslaught on liberal ideology that began on election night in 1980. For thirty years, liberals were on the defensive. Today, we are back on the offensive. Republicans will have to adjust to an entirely new paradigm… [A] huge percentage of what future congresses will do will be to provide oversight and adjustments to the health care system. The government will be constantly looking for ways to make health care plans more consumer friendly and less costly to the budget…

The longer it takes the Republicans to realize this, the more credit the Democrats will get for having passed these reforms. When Republicans complain about the mandate and score political points, the Democrats will offer to create a public option as the only solution to the problem. They are trapped…

We do live in a different country today than we did yesterday. It's a country that has no use for the old Republican Party.

This could be true, this should be true, but we will have to make it so. We'll see how the politics of the Senate fixes play out, that will be key: the usual Republican obstructionism in the Senate when directed at efforts to junk the very kickbacks they have been demagoguing doesn't make much political sense, but neither would seeming to facilitate healthcare reform by approving the fixes. Watch carefully to see how they wiggle from/in the trap. I think Grayson's Medicare buy-in proposal needs our support so that there is a more progressive alternative waiting in the wings just in case the individual mandate (which liberals abhor quite as much for real as Republicans are pretending to do) challenges have legs (which I suspect they do not -- as if Republicans really will fight the one thing their corporate insurance masters actually like about the bill). We will have to be vigilant as HHS actually delineates the regulatory nitty-gritty in the aftermath of the comments period sure to be suffused with industry voices looking to render reform even more meaningless. It will also be interesting to see whether the experience of pushing through historical legislation against a flabbergasting array of deceptive fearmongering incumbent interests will have given liberals a taste for victory and bolstered Democratic spines... upcoming skirmishes over financial reform will be an early tell.

1 comment:

jollyspaniard said...

It's a very good sign. This move could falter but it could also turn into a rout of the GOP.

Now let's hope they can do something constructive about the environment sometime in the not too distant future.