Oh, you were serious?

About three years ago, the former chair of the Republican Congressional Campaign Committee admitted that Roe v. Wade benefits Republicans: they get to oppose legal abortion to get the self-styled pro-life vote without having to face any electoral consequences from pro-choice voters who figure that Roe takes the issue off the table.

It looks to me like universal health care and labor law reform are turning into the analogous issue for the Democrats that abortion is for the Republicans. Democratic elected officials tend to nominally favor both, especially in the days (not that long ago) when Republican numbers in the Senate made it a very low-stakes matter to support something that had no hope of passage. Now that the Senate Democratic caucus actually has 60 seats, suddenly Democrats are staring down their political equivalent of Roe v. Wade being overturned, and they're balking, reducing Harry Reid to the pathetic spectacle of pleading with Ben Nelson and Mary Landrieu not to vote for universal health care, but just to restrain themselves from filibustering it.

What's so supremely frustrating about this is that the Democratic Party has benefitted from a lot of energy from people at the grass-roots who really worked harder in the last two national elections than ever before, but they're actually motivated by beliefs about things like universal health care and labor law reform. If you send the message that elections don't actually have consequences after all, it will tend to become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Resetting Russia

Almost everyone whose opinion I respect in foreign affairs says that the biggest threat that the world faces today is nuclear proliferation. Addressing that threat poses a political hurdle to overcome when countries that don't have the Bomb question why some countries do have it. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty addresses this by requiring that the extant nuclear powers make efforts to reduce their nuclear arsenals.

With this background, I’m pretty happy about the proposed nuclear arms reductions that Obama and Russian president Medvedev announced in Moscow today (something that definitely wouldn’t have been possible with John “We're All Georgians” McCain as president). The agreement that American troops can use Russian airspace to get to Afghanistan is another achievement.

As much credit as I’m willing to give Obama for this, I’m puzzled that he's yet to give up on missile defense, an obsession of the Bush administration that pointlessly alienated Russia. America’s rationale for missile defense – to protect against a nuclear attack by Iran – is made all the more bizarre by its location in Poland and the Czech Republic. Does Iran have some grievance against the Czech Republic that no one knows about? Iran's normally not exactly shy about expressing that sort of thing.

Not only did Obama fail to extract concessions in return for backing off on missile defense, he indicated a disinclination to do so, although in diplomatic language that Medvedev took be to mean progress from the Bush administration's posture. If Obama is just assuming a negotiating stance, I'm all for it, but if not, then I’m pretty disappointed.

Sarah Palin, the ten-month difference

Sarah Palin, July 3, 2009:

...I won't do it from the Governor's desk.

I've never believed that I, nor anyone else, needs a title to ... make a difference ... to HELP people.

...we know we can effect positive change outside government at this moment in time, on another scale, and actually make a difference for our priorities - and so we will, for Alaskans and for Americans.

Sarah Palin, September 3, 2008:

I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a community organizer, except that you have actual responsibilities.

Some portion of the loaf ...

On Friday the House passed the Waxman-Markey climate change bill by a narrow margin. Achieving a majority to vote for the bill was so difficult that concessions offered to members close to coal or agribusiness interests pushed Greenpeace to actually oppose the bill.

Some people on the left have lodged similar complaints against the Democratic Congress' and Obama's approach to health insurance and financial regulation, that it's too weak and moderate. Substantively, I tend to agree, but when it comes to stuff like this, it's important not to underestimate the huge institutional obstacles liberals face.

To begin with, our hallowed Constitution makes it really difficult for the federal government to legislate progressive change, setting up numerous countermajoritarian roadblocks and veto points, particularly in the Senate, that effectively require super-majorities to get anything done. And that's before even taking into account extra-Constitutional institutions of Congress, like the committee system and the filibuster, which stymie change as well.

Throw into the mix the fact that Obama seeks change that offends big-money interests, like fossil-fuel producers, big finance, big pharma, and health insurance companies, and you start to see why change on this scale probably has only happened a few times in our history, like during Reconstruction, the New Deal, or the '60s.

Be that as it may, I don't think that the situation is hopeless. Ezra Klein shows the way that passage of any bill, even a weak bill, can be leveraged to achieve a better bill through the conference-committee process. But it's also worth remembering that change on this scale usually doesn't happen with one bill. Congress passed about three securities regulation bills in the '30s and at least four civil rights bills in between 1957 and 1968 before making material progress. I don't have a substantive quarrel with Greenpeace's objections to Waxman-Markey, but taking an Obamanian long view seems the better way forward to me.

In defense of the public option

Sometimes there's a trade-off between equity and efficiency. Health insurance is interesting in that the equitable thing -- universal coverage -- is actually more consistent with efficiency. The industrial countries that provide universal coverage also spend a lot less per capita on health care than we do.

Single-payer has always made the most sense to me, and to most of my fellow travelers. Some of us are irritated that Obama's health insurance plan didn't just go that route. Instead, it's sort of universal coverage by bank-shot: give everybody, the already-insured, the underinsured, the uninsured, the "public option," or the opportunity to sign up for something like a Medicare plan or the health insurance plan available to government employees.

I don't have a problem with this approach. After all, if you wanted to go the single-payer route in this country, what would you do about all the private health insurance infrastructure out there? When Dennis Kucinich was running for president, his answer was to put them out of business but compensate them, which seems like a frightful prospect to me (the compensation part, I mean). Single-payer's not the only way to go to provide universal coverage; both France and Germany cover everyone with a hybrid of government insurance and private plans, which seems similar to the public option legislation now under consideration.

The reason why these countries can control costs at the same time that they're covering everybody is that people who aren't necessarily using health care resources are all paying into health insurance (through taxes and/or premiums), thus subsidizing the people who are using health care resources, as opposed to this country, where the uninsured get care in the most expensive point-of-service there is (the emergency room or treatment more expensive than preventive care), shifting the costs to everyone else.

The right-wing critique of the public option plan, articulated here, makes the point that we don't make that application to car insurance of life insurance, so why health insurance? An important difference is the emergency room. Hospitals, by law, have to take care of people needing emergency care (you wouldn't want to live in the Third World public health conditions of a country that didn't have such a requirement), and when people who can't afford it go there and incur thousands of dollars of care they can't pay, a dynamic exists that isn't applicable to other forms of insurance. Not to mention that people will lose insurance or find claims denied in the midst of treatment for diseases, thus also incurring costs that get passed on to others in the same way. That kind of stuff doesn't happen with car or life insurance.

So pass the damn public option already!

What's the end game?

So the protests in Iran seem to have broken out into violent clashes with police and pro-government militias there. Like both conservatives and liberals that I've been reading, I'm rooting for Mousavi's side. Indeed, I've long felt that engagement with Iran (even with distasteful leadership) makes strategic sense for the U.S. for lots of reasons, but I'd much rather do so with a government more liberal than not.

I am worried about the end game for the protests, though. Is the procedural remedy of a recount really going to be satisfactory at this point? And if so, what if Ahmadinejad is the winner? From my limited perspective, I doubt that the protesters have the wherewithal (or even desire) to overthrow an armed government.

Even if the result of all this is Ahmadinejad's re-election and the ultimate suppression of this movement, serious fissures have been revealed in Iran, most strikingly among the clerics in charge of the government. Maybe this would make the government more cautious, although I suppose that it could also make it more defensive and belligerent. If it's the latter, I think it's important to keep in mind that things Iran does that we don't like -- possible nuclear proliferation, its more anti-Zionist-than-thou posturing (to the point of Holocaust denial) -- come from its position of weakness and insecurity rather than strength.

Ah, Albany

Just when we thought that California and Illinois could outdo New York in the embarrassing attributes of their state governments, we come roaring back with this week's "coup" (an appropriate term given New York State government's pre-democratic nature).

Because of some preposterous gerrymandering, the New York State Assembly is about two-to-one Democratic-to-Republican and the New York State Senate just turned Democratic in 2008, with a bare 32-30 Democratic majority. Unfortunately a margin that slim gives inordinate power to any Democratic Senator self-oriented and/or corrupt enough to bail out of the Democratic side when it doesn't give him his slush fund to buy favors with.

Now, you might say, I didn't read you blogging about what a corrupt scoundrel our new Senate president pro tem Pedro Espada is when he was a Democrat. Fair enough, up to a point. I mean, the corruption of the State Senate Republicans reached some impressive levels too, and I never said much about it, as I've never believed that scandals lend some deeper insight into the flaws of a particular ideology, which is what I find more interesting.

No, what's disturbing about the corruption of Pedro Espada and indicted girlfriend-slasher Hiram Montserrate is that by ceding the State Senate back to the Republicans, they're sacrificing substantive policies to their personal agendas. Before the coup, Albany actually passed a reasonable, even progressive budget this year and repealed stupidly harsh sentencing laws for drug crimes. Better protections for tenants and same-sex marriage remain on the state's docket for the dwindling days of the legislative session. These things weren't possible when Senate Republican troglodyte Joe Bruno led the Senate these many years; Espada's and Montserrate's apparent nostalgia for those Dark Ages are what render their corruption particularly reprehensible.

UPDATE - so Hiram Montserrate went back to the Democrats and now the Republicans + Pedro Espada can't get a 32-vote quorum because of that, so neither side can pass legislation, with a few days left in the legislative session. With a 31-31 Senate, and no tie-breaker (the lieutenant governor is normally the tie-breaker, but David Paterson vacated that post when Spitzer resigned, and the law doesn't seem to provide for a replacement), so any Senate business will require some power-sharing between Democrats and Republicans, which the Democrats have offered but the Republicans have rejected.

Oh, and now it seems that legal bribery from the landlord lobby is behind Espada's move, given that the Senate was ready to pass some genuine tenant-friendly laws.