While they appear to be leading the charge in terms of keeping bipartisanship porn alive today, I'm not sure how genuine they really are. It's difficult to believe that they're this blind to what the Republicans are up to. Rahm Emanuel appears to understand the scorpion-ish behavior as evidenced by his comments today. And the president is too smart not to see it. So what's their motivation?
There's no way they'd deliberately allow this legislation to fail altogether. And a crappy, watered-down reform bill would haunt their legacy for decades to come. I mean, if we're not looking at significant relief in how we deal with health insurance by 2012, there's no amount of campaign platitudes that will ameliorate the continued pain and anger. After all, there are experts who are good at math and they'll be able to track whether the reform bill allowed health care prices to continue to skyrocket, further subsidizing the health insurance mafia, or whether the reform bill actually did something, you know, positive.
The only justification I can see for what Gibbs said today and, to a certain extent, what the president and Secretary Sebelius said over the weekend is that with or without the public option, the White House doesn't have 60 votes to break a Republican filibuster.
Unless Senators Kennedy and Byrd are well enough to turn up for two floor votes several months from right now -- one to break the filibuster of the reconciled Senate bill and another to break the filibuster of the conference report -- the White House will need two Republicans to flip and vote against their own party's filibuster. Twice. And this scenario depends on zero Democrats voting with the Republicans (they'd be insane to do that). Ultimately, the only way to get those two Republican votes for cloture is if the White House at least attempts to seem "bipartisan." This possibly explains the continued posturing amid all of the obvious crazy. (Reconciliation is a way around, but, by some accounts, reconciliation would blow giant holes in the bill, perhaps taking the public option with it.)
At this still early stage I'd like to think that the White House's express preference for bipartisanship porn is purely tactical and not reflective of what can only be described as political ignorance and stupidity. If it's the latter, the White House will have ultimately succeeded in its utter self-destruction -- limping across the threshold with a health care reform bill that's been brazenly cut to pieces by marbled-mouthed Glenn Beck disciples like Chuck Grassley.
I sincerely hope this is the last time I write about porn and Chuck Grassley in the same essay.
Reprinted from the Huffington Post: click here.
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