Robert Reich: It's Time to Enact Health Care Reform With 51 Senate Votes

Robert Reich: It's Time to Enact Health Care Reform With 51 Senate Votes: "

This week the president is hosting a bipartisan gab-fest at the White House to try to tease out some Republican votes for health care reform. It's a total waste of time. If Obama thinks he's going to get a single Republican vote at this stage of the game, he's fooling himself (or the American people). Many months ago, you may recall, the White House and Democratic party leaders in the Senate threatened to pass health care with 51 votes -- using a process called 'reconciliation' that allows tax and spending bills to be enacted without filibuster -- unless Republicans came on board. It's time to pull the trigger.

Why haven't the President and Senate Democrats pulled the reconciliation trigger before now? I haven't spoken directly with the President or with Harry Reid but I've spent the last several weeks sounding out contacts on the Hill and in the White House to find an answer. Here are the theories. None of them justifies waiting any longer.

1. Reconciliation is too extreme a measure to use on a piece of legislation so important. I hear this a lot but it's bunk. George W. Bush used reconciliation to enact his giant tax cut bill in 2003 (he garnered only 50 votes for it in the Senate, forcing Vice President Cheney to cast the deciding vote). Six years before that, Bill Clinton rounded up 51 votes to enact the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP), the largest expansion of taxpayer-funded health insurance coverage for children in the U.S. since Medicaid began in the 1960s. Through reconciliation, we also got Medicare Advantage. Also through reconciliation came the COBRA act, which gives Americans a bit of healthcare protection after they lose a job ('reconciliaton is the 'R' in the COBRA acronym.) These were all big, important pieces of legislation, and all were enacted by 51 votes in the Senate.



2. Use of reconciliation would infuriate Senate Republicans. It may. So what? They haven't given Obama a single vote on any major issue since he first began wining and dining them at the White House. In fact, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and company have been doing everything in their power to undermine the President. They're using the same playbook Republicans used in the first two years of the Clinton administration, hoping to discredit the President and score large victories in the midterm elections by burying his biggest legislative initiative. Indeed, Obama could credibly argue that Senate Republicans have altered the rules of the Senate by demanding 60 votes on almost every initiative - a far more extensive use of the filibuster than at any time in modern history - so it's only right that he, the President, now resort to reconciliation.



3. Obama needs Republican votes on military policy so he doesn't dare antagonize them on health care. I hear this from some quarters but I don't buy it. While it's true that Dems are skeptical of Obama's escalation of the war in Afghanistan and that Republicans are his major backers, it seems doubtful R's would withdraw their support if the President forced their hand on health care. Foreign policy is the one area where Republicans have offered a halfway consistent (and always bellicose) voice, and Dick Cheney et al would excoriate them if they failed to back a strong military presence in the Middle East. This is truer now than ever.



4. Reid fears he can't even get 51 votes in the Senate now, after Scott Brown's win. Reid counts noses better than I do, but if Senate Democrats can't come up with even 51 votes for the health care reforms they enacted weeks ago they give new definition to the term 'spineless.' Besides, if this is the case, Obama ought to be banging Senate heads together. A president has huge bargaining leverage because he presides over an almost infinite list of future deals. Lyndon Johnson wasn't afraid to use his power to the fullest to get Medicare enacted. If Obama can't get 51 Senate votes out of 58 or 59 Dems and Independents, he definitely won't be able to get 51 Senate votes after November. Inevitably, the Senate will lose some Democrats. Now's his last opportunity.



5. House and Senate Democrats are telling Obama they don't want to take another vote on health care or even enact it before November's midterms because they're afraid it will jeopardize their chances of being reelected and may threaten their control over the House and Senate. I hear this repeatedly but if it's true Republicans have done a far better job scaring Americans about health care reform than any pollster has been able to uncover. Most polls still show a majority of Americans still in favor of the basic tenets of reform - expanded coverage, regulations barring insurers from refusing coverage because of someone's preexisting conditions and preventing insurers from kicking someone off the rolls because they get sick, requirements that employers provide coverage or pay into a common pool, and so on. And now that many private insurers are hiking up premiums, co-pays, and deductibles, the public is even readier to embrace reform.

So what's been stopping Obama from using reconciliation? Even if some of the arguments held water before now, none does any longer.

My free advice to the president: If you want to get health care enacted you must use reconciliation and quickly. Host your bipartisan gab fest at the White House on Thursday. Tell Republicans you've been eagerly awaiting their ideas for over a year, but the American public can't wait any longer. Explain to them how our current economic mess is directly related to the health care mess -- we're paying 16 percent of our GDP for health care while health insurers are hiking rates and Americans are losing their health insurance every day. Then tell the House and Senate to get to work on putting their bills together (or tell the House Democrats to enact the Senate bill and then save their disagreements for reconciliation), and tell Harry Reid you want the Senate bill on a fast track of reconciliation.

Explain to the American people you understand their impatience. The Constitution does not require 60 votes in the Senate to pass legislation. A majority will do. That's called democracy.

Cross-posted from RobertReich.org.

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Gavin Newsom: An Open Challenge on Jobs to the Republican Leadership

Gavin Newsom: An Open Challenge on Jobs to the Republican Leadership: "

Repeating a lie over and over doesn't make it true. But if you listen to Republicans on the subject of job creation and the federal stimulus package, it's obvious they don't understand that or care.

Newly-elected Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown (R) recently declared that the American Recovery & Reinvestment Act (ARRA) - signed into law by President Obama a year ago this week - "didn't create one new job."

Taking dishonesty and hypocrisy a step further, House Minority Whip Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA) has shown the audacity to appear at press conferences celebrating federal stimulus-funded projects, despite vocal opposition to the federal stimulus package itself 'as completing failing to create jobs.'

It's time to stop misleading people and start telling the truth.

The truth in San Francisco is that thousands of people and their families (2,910 and counting to date) now have the dignity of work and a paycheck because of the American Recovery & Reinvestment Act. To Senator Brown and Representative Cantor and to all the other Republican leaders who knowingly mislead the American people, I invite you to come here to San Francisco to meet the families and individuals whose lives have changed because of the leadership of President Obama and the Democratic Congress in passing a much-needed federal stimulus package one year ago.

Top economists agree that the stimulus package has added between 1.6 to 1.8 million jobs to the U.S. economy at a time when we faced our greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression. In California, our unemployment rate remains at 12%, but there's no question it would be far higher without federal stimulus funds.

In San Francisco, we have among the lowest unemployment rates in the State of California at 9.4%, but it is still unacceptably high. But through the leadership of Speaker Pelosi, Senator Feinstein and Senator Boxer, we are investing federal stimulus dollars to rebuild our city and regional infrastructure and put thousands of people back to work. Here are some of the facts about the federal stimulus package, San Francisco and jobs:

• $32.2 million from a stimulus program for needy families with children that in San Francisco we call JobsNow! JobsNow! is a 100% wage subsidy program that allows private, nonprofit and public sector employers to hire unemployed San Franciscans. To date, San Francisco's Jobs Now! program has helped 1,854 residents get back to work - 70% in the private sector - and more are being hired every day.


• $71.8 million in transit capital assistance grants benefitting the San Francisco Metropolitan Transportation Agency. At last report, the agency spent25.8 million and created more than 600 jobs.


• $16.6 million in COPS funding for the San Francisco Police Department to hire and train 50 new police officers. And last year San Francisco had the lowest homicide rate since the 1960's.


• $33.2 million in funding from the Department of Housing and Urban Development to the San Francisco Housing Authority for building repairs, including weatherization, painting, health and safety and general site improvements. At last report, the Housing Authority spent3.2 million and created 192 jobs.

And the list goes on. It's one thing to have an honest disagreement about the best way to create jobs in a recession and whether government should play a role in our economic recovery. It's quite another thing to knowingly lie or mislead the American people to score political points for the next election. Thousands of San Franciscans - and millions of Americans - have the dignity of a job today as a direct result of the American Recovery & Reinvestment Act. Every time Republicans like Scott Brown and Eric Cantor deny this fact they show enormous disrespect to those millions of hardworking Americans. So Senator Brown, Congressman Cantor, come on out to San Francisco anytime. I'd be glad to personally introduce you to some of them.

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Saul Friedman: Gray Matters -- Ronald Reagan: Revisited and Revised

Saul Friedman: Gray Matters -- Ronald Reagan: Revisited and Revised: "

Can anyone guess which modern statesman said the following, which I shall quote at length?

'Facing conditions of absolute inhumanity such as those which now exist in Sudan and Somalia, does not the world have a moral responsibility to act? To choose the right to passage, to impose minimum order and provide sanctuaries of relief? In parts of Africa today, mankind is an endangered species.

'Have we come to the point where we must set up human preserves as we have for rhinos and elephants? If so, then let us do it, and do it now...We must work toward a standing U.N. force-an army of conscience-that is fully equipped and prepared to carve out human sanctuaries if necessary...I can think of no more honorable mission for a soldier or his country..'

I do not think that people like Rush Limbaugh, Glen Beck, Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, Newt Gingrich or the rest of today's so-called right winged Republicans would even come close to agreeing with that or recognizing who said it. But then they didn't really know the man who said it, the man they profess to idolize and emulate; whose name they take in vain attempts to justify their extreme politics.

The speaker was of course Ronald Reagan, and soon, on Feb. 6, it will be his 99th birthday and plans are afoot among the righteous right to celebrate extravagantly his centenary. But I came to know him during more than eight years that I covered his campaigns and his presidency. And we corresponded after that. Those words I cited above was the Reagan who had learned a few things and grew during and after his presidency. This was the Reagan who, plainly put, was not anywhere as near as radical or as nuts as the people who now control Republican politics.

Reagan was popular because he was an inclusive person, with not a trace of wingnut vindictiveness -- even towards a critical reporter. He was close to then Democratic House Speaker Thomas P. (Tip) O'neill; one of his first appointments was that of former Senate Democratic Leader Mike Mansfield as ambassador to Japan.

The speech, to which I'll return, was entitled 'Democracy's Next Battle,' and was delivered on Dec. 4, 1992, at the Oxford Union Society, in England, just a month after Bill Clinton was elected president. The students of the storied debating society had expected to poke fun at Reagan, then 81. But they greeted his unexpected words with a prolonged standing ovation.

I know, this was the same Ronald Reagan who ushered in the era of greed and huge deficits, who approved selling arms to Iran to finance the anti-communist Contras in Nicaragua; who turned the cold war icy with his railing against the Soviets as the 'evil empire'; who sent troops into hapless Grenada, probably to mitigate the killing of 240 Marines in Lebanon; who gave us Star Wars, the myth of a missile defense that's still with us.

I know about these Reagan misadventures, for I covered and wrote critically about all of them, first for Knight Ridder Newspapers, then for Newsday. And I laughed at Reagan's foibles, as when he came back from Central America and exclaimed that 'there are a lot of different countries down there.' Or when he visited a souvenir stand in China and proclaimed that it was a sign that free enterprise had come to Beijing.

Nevertheless, I am a bit of a Reagan revisionist, for it's important to contrast his presidency and his brand of conservatism with that of the former and unlamented occupant of the White House and the right-wing reactionaries who have hijacked conservatism, which my dictionary defines as 'a political orientation advocating the preservation of the best in society and opposing radical changes;' that would include radical changes to the Constitution.

It is true that Reagan came into office with a promise to cut taxes by a third, which he did with the help of Democrats who piled on their own tax breaks. Signed in 1981, it was the largest tax cut in history. But Reagan's chief of staff was Vice President George H.W. Bush's former campaign manager, James A. Baker, a pragmatic conservative hated by White House right-wingers like Pat Buchanan. Fearing that the tax cuts were too deep, that the deficit was growing too quickly, Baker and the Senate Republican Leader Bob Dole, also a pragmatic conservative, combined in 1983 to get Reagan's grudging approval for the largest tax increase in history.

In 1976, when Reagan ran in the Republican primaries against then Vice President Gerald Ford, he suggested Social Security be made voluntary. He also believed that Medicare was a step towards socialized medicine. But in the presidency, he came to understand that Social Security would collapse if it was made voluntary and he made no move to change its nature. Instead, the commission he appointed under Alan Greenspan, made changes that saved Social Security for 75 years. Nor did he make a move to privatize or cut Medicare. Perhaps that's because he admired and voted for Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman before he became a Republican; he didn't allow ideology to get in the way of good sense and politics.

He was late coming to the fight against AIDS, as the epidemic grew in the Reagan years. But he did come at the urging most importantly of Elizabeth Taylor. And despite support from right-wing fundamentalists, Reagan, the first president who had been divorced, did not engage in gay bashing and he did not press his views against abortion, probably because he had too many Hollywood friends who were gay or had abortions.

It is also true that Reagan, against the advice of Baker and most of his generals, sent Marines into Lebanon in 1982, ostensibly to protect the airfield and other installations as the Israelis were pursuing the fleeing Palestinians. Reagan was effusively pro-Israel, but the pragmatists argued that even if the marines were supposed to be neutral they would be seen as on Israel's side and get deeper into the quagmire. Sure enough, after Reagan ordered a battleship to fire on positions that had been attacking the Marines, came the bombing of their barracks. I was there when Reagan took responsibility, then pulled the marines out.

Finally, despite his cold war rhetoric, Reagan was among the first leaders in the west (with then British Prime minister Margaret Thatcher) to recognize that Mikhail Gorbachev was a genuine reformer and, as I reported in these columns earlier, he met with the then Soviet leader in Moscow to declare the era of the evil empire was over. And together they concluded treaties to reduce, for the first time, the number of nuclear weapons. They are still in force

I've always believed that when he called for Gorbachev in 1986 to 'tear down' the Berlin wall, he knew it would happen. And it did, when George H.W. Bush was president and Baker was his secretary of state. Bush, as vice-president, had thought Reagan naive about Gorbachev and as president delayed for a year agreeing to the arms treaties that Reagan made possible.

Indeed, in one meeting with Gorbachev that I covered, in Iceland, Reagan and Gorbachev nearly agreed to banish all nuclear weapons, until their advisers intervened. And after Reagan's death in 2004, Fred Kaplan concluded in Slate that 'the end of the Cold War may be the most oddball chapter in the history of the 20th Century. How fitting that, then, that the two most oddball leaders, Gorbachev and Reagan, made it come to pass.'

Consider, please, what would have happened in those days if Baker or Reagan had listened to the naysayers and cold-warriors in the Reagan administration, like the Buchanans, Rumsfelds, Cheneys, and Richard Perle. What if we were listening to the likes of Limbaugh, Hannity and O'Reilly then?

Reagan was a conservative to the core, but he grew in office. Once, before he became president, he suggested the U.N. should 'sail off into the sunset,' forgetting that the organization is on the east coast.

As he told the Oxford students, 'I did not always value international organizations and for good reason, they were nothing more than debating societies...But with the end of the cold war, the U.N. was also liberated...As long as military power remains a necessary tool of modern existence, then we should use it as a humanitarian tool and rely more on multilateral institutions-such as NATO and the U.N....The noble vision of the U.N.'s founders is now closer to realization.'

I was told Reagan wrote most of the speech, which concluded, 'My young friends, I hope with all my hearts that your days will be great, not on the battlefield, but in science labs, the operating rooms, performing arts halls and wherever empires of the mind can be assembled.'

Perhaps such eloquence is one of the reasons President Barack Obama admired and understood Reagan's legacy better than those who call themselves his heirs.

Saul also writes for Time Goes By (www.timegoesby.net)

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Paul Abrams: Limbaugh Lauds (Socialist) Medical Care in Hawaii

Paul Abrams: Limbaugh Lauds (Socialist) Medical Care in Hawaii: "

'but I think the most likely reason of all was the Grinch had a heart two sizes too small' ('How the Grinch Stole Christmas,' Dr. Seuss).

According to Rush Limbaugh, the health care reform that may be passed by Congress is socialism. Yet, it bears a striking resemblance to the universal healthcare system that just treated him in Hawaii that prompted his remark: 'there is nothing wrong with the American health care system. I received no special treatment.'
Yes, Rush. That's the point! American medicine is superb--for those who can get it. And, in Hawaii, no one gets special treatment, because everyone can get it. [Er, by the way, just to help you out, Rush, a fair percentage of your listeners do not know Hawaii is part of the United States, so clarify that for them...otherwise, they will wonder about you]

By accepting socialist medical treatment in Hawaii, therefore, Rush Limbaugh has shown that, when one is ill, what matters is the availability of quality health care, even if it is socialist.

Rush follows a long litany of conservatives, such as all Members of Congress that have a medical office paid for by taxpayers available in the Capitol, by Dick Cheney who had socialist pacemakers implanted paid for by the government, and George W who had a government-paid socialist colonoscopy while in office. Members of Congress over 65 get single-payer socialist medical care from Medicare. Hawaii has had nearly-universal employer-mandated health insurance since 1974. Although its Pacific Island location makes the costs of everything--from gasoline to milk to ice cream to housing--the highest in the nation, health care premiums in Hawaii, for comprehensive care with small co-pays and deductibles, are nearly the lowest and their costs per medicare beneficiary are the lowest in the nation.

Why? There are a variety of reasons, most traceable to universality. With everyone covered by primary care, emergency room visits tend to be for real emergencies, not the non-emergent care mainland ERs dispense for people without coverage. That reduces the costs of ERs and the costs of non-emergent medicine since patients can be handled less expensively and more effectively by their primary docs. Hospitals have not overbuilt, acquiring expensive machines to compete with their neighbors for patients. Insurance companies have instituted screening and other measures to improve wellness among their covered populations.

We can all be pleased that Rush appears to have survived his encounter with socialist medical care. He seems to be very happy himself, commenting on the results of a socialist angiogram that showed no disease in the arteries that feed his heart muscle. Now, of course, Rush does not live in Hawaii and so his costs are not covered by the Hawaiian insurance system, but having that 'socialist' system for more than 3 decades has not reduced the quality of the care he received. Who would have thunk it!

If Hawaii-style medical care is good enough for Rush Limbaugh, it is good enough for me.

Thanks Rush, and with it my hopes that your medical insurance covers all your costs and that the greatest country in the world can make that same care available to everyone.

Happy New Year!

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Speaking in Tongues - The New York Review of Books

Speaking in Tongues - The New York Review of Books