Sens. Al Franken (D-MN) and John Thune (R-SD) had a surprisingly sharp and entertaining exchange yesterday on the Senate floor during debate on health care reform. We’ve whittled the video down to just the highlights. Watch.
To follow up on my earlier post, I should make it emphatically clear that I’m not saying people should sit on their hands or keep their mouths shut and settle for what the sixty senate solons can manage on Health Care Reform. Activism and volume on the outside are hugely important. But reading reader emails at a highly interactive news and opinion site like TPM does give you a front row seat on the political junkie and progressive activist id in real time. Read More
To me, the biggest concern that’s not getting talked about are the delays to implementation contained in most potential versions of the legislation. Great stuff that gets implemented in 2014 may get snuffed out in 2010 or 2012. Here’s where the politics becomes inseparable from the policy. And I do fear there’s too little recognition of that.
From TPM Reader TD …
As fed up as I am with this blundering HCR process, I agree that “burning it down” is not a viable option. That’s the one sure path to electoral punishment. However, I am worried about the equally dangerous idea that “if we just pass something” everything will be okay. The truth is we’re not going to have much to sell to the public in 2010 since whatever we pass is going to be defined by triggers and thresholds and formulas and so forth. This strikes me as politically foolish. I’d rather see a less ambitious bill with more immediate impact than a more ambitious one with delayed impact. It looks like what we’re going to get the worst of both worlds: an unambitious bill with delayed impact. In the end, this is a pocketbook issue with unusual urgency given economic conditions.
At a Capitol Hill tea party rally a short time ago, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) compared the tea partiers to the “charge of the Light Brigade,” although presumably she’s hoping for a better outcome.
The best argument I’ve heard from people who say the emerging bill isn’t just insufficient but just bad law is this: If you’re going to force people to buy coverage (mandates), you need to provide them an alternative to buying private sector health insurance to prevent them from getting gouged by the insurance companies. In the abstract that makes a lot of sense. And it even makes a decent amount of sense in the non-abstract, real world.
Here’s the problem though. The fantasy Public Option would have served this role and put a lot of downward pressure on private sector insurance premiums. And at the beginning of this debate I thought that’s what was being discussed. In fact, though, none of the Public Options that had any support in Congress really accomplished this. They were all designed to keep most people from being able to buy in. That’s why the scoring from the CBO showed very few people actually buying into it (2 million for the senate bill and 6 for House bill, if memory serves) and relatively little downward pressure on premiums. Why they were so feeble-ized is a good question — for which I’ve heard some good and some bad answers.
My point though is that if you are worried about mandates now (and I think that’s a very legitimate worry) you should have been worried about them with a Public Option too.
TPMmuckraker, via a FOIA request, has obtained most of the FBI file of the late black historian John Hope Franklin. His “ties” to communists and the Communist Party were of great interest to the J. Edgar Hoover-era FBI, including a 1965 memo from the FBI director instructing agents on how to conduct a background check on Franklin: “Appropriate informants familiar with CP and communist front activities should be contacted during the investigation.”
Justin Elliott did the digging and posted documents from the file here.
I’ve been leafing through the nominations for the Golden Dukes, and here’s one entrant from the local venue category I had not even heard of, from TPM Reader BB …
This local scandal is the best of the year because it’s both hilarious and heartwarming. It was an open secret mayor of my very conservative town, San Angelo, TX, was gay. Nobody particularly cared, though, because he was the first competent mayor we’d had in several decades.
However, this happy equilibrium was disturbed when he resigned because he wanted to pursue a relationship. With an illegal alien.
Jonathan Cohn warns that Senate negotiations on the health care bill aren’t over yet.