By John Brummett
All four of our state’s delegates to the U.S. House of Representatives found the health care bill passed Saturday night to be not what they’d want in an actual new law.
So two of them, Vic Snyder and Marion Berry, voted for it. They said it was to move the process along.
That is mildly euphemistic for being pressured.
What it means is that the Democratic hierarchy decided it was important that Nancy Pelosi’s Democratic House pass something to provide momentum and install the liberal boundary for what, in a couple of months, will be a privately negotiated settlement of this issue in a conference committee.
We’ll not get anything in the way of new health care policy unless the liberal base is allowed to put a few herbs and spices into the stew.
The Democratic House leadership, searching hard for the vital 218 votes, squeezed Snyder and Berry into acquiescence. This isn’t the law we’ll get; this is simply a step along the way we can’t afford not to take — that’s what they were told.
Snyder is our most reliable left-leaner, anyway, and Berry owes his Appropriations Committee seat to Pelosi. He once told me Pelosi was the smartest political operator he’d ever worked with.
Snyder had spent the August recess eschewing the idea of a public option government insurer, which is in this bill. But he voted for the measure anyway.
Everyone figured that would happen, which is why the liberal base wasn’t nearly as aggravated with Snyder as with Mike Ross, the Blue Dog Democratic leader from southern Arkansas making similar comments.
Ross was permitted to play to the conservatives back home. He hates this ever-recurring stratagem by which the House gets strung out to the left while the Senate waits to scale everything back. His “no” vote was a luxury provided by finding 220 votes without him, including one Louisiana Republican.
But it would have been no fun for Ross if Pelosi had been stuck at 217 and White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel had been screaming at him colorfully about standing alone on the wrong side of history.
Republican John Boozman wasn’t for any of this, of course, and, alas, he’s irrelevant. All Republicans are irrelevant in this debate. This is entirely an intra-party Democratic fight, liberals versus centrists. Republicans are left to go on Fox and to run against whatever emerges.
The Senate will pass something less to the left of center, costing less and probably only triggering a public option in certain noncompetitive circumstances. The eventual stew probably will be defined more by Senate than House flavors.
Most likely, the House’s successful covering of the left flank frees the Senate to let centrists like Blanche Lincoln dictate a few incremental and moderate terms.
P.S. — The real issue to emerge over the weekend was the complication over abortion.
It’s up to private insurers whether and how to cover it now.
Federal policy is to expend no public dollars on abortion.
But if the government puts all private insurance into a health care exchange through which publicly funded subsidies would be provided all the way up to middle class families, then the government essentially would be subsidizing abortions through the subsidizing of customers of the private plans that cover abortions.
Pelosi had to go along most grudgingly with expressly forbidding that in an essential last-minute concession late Friday night. But that’s hardly the last we’ll hear of this, or of anything about this debate.
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John Brummett is a columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock. His e-mail address is jbrummett@arkansasnews.com; his telephone number is (501) 374-0699.
