Well, they did it. In the face of overwhelming public disapproval and with zero bipartisan support, House Democrats just voted in favor of the Senate health care bill, 219-212, without even the "deem-and-pass" evasion of pretending to vote only for an amended version of the bill.
How did this happen? Kim Strassel has a good overview of the corrupt sausage-making that got the bill passed, but the essence is this.
The "whip counts" that showed Democrats didn't have the votes turned out to be accurate—based on a certain range of normal assumptions, one of which was unexpectedly overthrown. What the whip counts showed was that the vote would be decided by the "Stupak Democrats," a group of about a half-dozen to a dozen anti-abortion Democrats led by Michigan's Bart Stupak. Getting the Stupak Democrats on board seemed impossible: any move to mollify the anti-abortion Democrats by promising to restrict government funding for abortions would cost the votes of an equal number of pro-abortion-rights Democrats.
President Obama found a way to square that circle. He signed an executive order that somewhat vaguely declared that no federal money should be used to fund abortions, which was enough to bring the Stupak democrats on board. But because he did this by executive order, he was not asking the pro-abortion-rights Democrats to approve actual legislation that restricts abortion. He got the votes of the one group without losing the votes of the other. Suddenly, the math worked in his favor.
Of course, this is all a fraud. An executive order can be changed at any time, and it cannot override the language of the underlying law, which Democrats openly admitted. So this was just a surrender, plain and simple, and so it's no surprise that an anti-abortion group that was about to give an award to Stupak promptly rescinded it.
I am actually in favor of the right to an abortion, so I don't particularly care about Stupak selling out the anti-abortion cause. But the Stupak Surrender is symptomatic of a wider pattern, the real reason this bill made its way through. The wider pattern—and the big lesson of this vote—is that it doesn't matter what any Democrat says he's for. When it comes down to the wire, he's only for one thing: collectivism.
Thus, just like Stupak, the "fiscally conservative" Democrats who claim to be concerned about deficits and runaway federal spending also broke for the bill, using the equally unconvincing fig leaf of a rigged Congressional Budget Office report which preposterously claims that a new multi-trillion-dollar entitlement will reduce the deficit.
The same goes for all of the House Democrats who expressed opposition to various awful provisions of the Senate bill—only to vote for the thing in higher numbers than they voted for their own previous House version. Sure, they also voted for a separate package of changes to the bill, but for all they know, those changes are dead on arrival in the Senate. So that's just another fig leaf.
Again, this is the lesson: Democrats stand for collectivism. They stand for resentment of the independent individual, who is to be reined in and cut down to size by a vast network of government taxes and controls. That is their basic ideology, and they will act on it because that is why they went into politics.
That also explains the suicidal politics of the vote. As "centrist" Democratic pollster Pat Caddell put it, this was "political Jonestown": "The opponents of this plan are holding tea parties, and the Democrats are gonna hold a Kool-Aid party."
Remember the old fable about the scorpion and the frog? The scorpion asks to ride on the frog's back so he can cross the stream, but the frog refuses because the scorpion might sting him. The scorpion points out that this is against his own interest, because if he stings the frog, he too will drown in the stream. So the frog agrees, and halfway across the scorpion stings him anyway. As they are both about to drown, he asks the scorpion why. The scorpion replies: because it is in my nature to do so.
It is in the nature of a scorpion to sting, and it is in the nature of a Democrat to vote for collectivism, no matter what the consequences.
Incidentally, this is yet another example of the Broken Culture Fallacy, the "bad news is good" argument about how putting the left into power will provoke a reaction in favor of free markets and we'll all end up better off in the end. In fact, letting Democrats gain power in Congress simply means that we get socialized medicine whether the American people want it or not. Note how close the vote was: only four fewer Democrats in Congress, and the bill would have failed. So anyone who ever advocated voting for Democrats as a protest or as a way of triangulating against the religious right—an argument fashionable in Objectivist circles a few years ago—bears part of the responsibility for this catastrophe. I take no satisfaction in pointing this out, not even a grim one, because we should not have needed a catastrophe to teach us that lesson.
The fact that we lost this round of the battle doesn't mean we have to take it lying down. Pat Caddell is right. Take a look at the "aye" votes on the final roll call: these are all marked men. They must be treated as marked men, or else we—those of us who want to live independent of state control—we will all be marked men.
But we don't have to wait until November to act against Obamacare. Twelve state attorneys general are already filing lawsuits arguing the key provisions of the bill, particularly the individual mandate, are unconstitutional.
For his part, President Obama is under no illusion that he can just declare victory and move on. He knows the bill is massively unpopular among the American people, so he has prepared a plan to sell it to us after the fact.
But the negative consequences of this bill are going to be felt, and soon. (The best advice I've heard about how to personally deal with the consequences is to immediate find a regular primary care physician—because there is likely to be a shortage of them.) And Obama will face resistance on the most basic level. As one commentator responded to Obama's plan to keep selling the bill: "All of that, and we still have to keep talking about ObamaCare?" I think the American people decided what they think about ObamaCare last August. Nothing the president has said since then has moved them, and nothing he says afterward is likely to do so, either. He will just enrage them with its paternalistic condescension. Another commentator—I can't remember where—describes Obama's attitude as being like the advice of a parent to an unwilling bride forced into an arranged marriage: you may resist it now, but you'll grow to love it. I'm willing to bet that we won't.
So our new crusade is a campaign for repeal—a campaign that will take three years. It is mathematically impossible for Republicans to gain a veto-proof majority in the Senate next year; there just aren't enough Democratic senators up for re-election. So overturning this law will have to wait for 2012 and the election of a Republican president pledge to the cause of repeal. So far numerous top Republicans have signed on to the idea: Senator Jim DeMint, House Majority Leader John Boehner, even John McCain. So have prominent commentators on the right, including William Kristol.
This last is interesting, if you know the history of the neoconservatives. It was one of the godfathers of neoconservatism, William Kristol's father Irving, who articulated the neoconservative approach to the welfare state. The big entitlements are too popular and well-established to fight, Kristol argued, so the only thing conservatives can do is to try to reform the welfare state to bring it more in line with conservative values. This was the idea of a "conservative welfare state." If Kristol's son is now refusing to accept a new welfare-state program and talking about repeal instead of reform, that reflects an interesting change in the political atmosphere.
Still, there is no precedent for such a repeal. Congress has never rolled back a significant expansion of the welfare state. Ever. But then again, Congress has never shoved through a major piece of legislation in this way, in such defiance of public opinion. So maybe this is the time for precedents to be broken. And if it is, maybe that will open up discussion of repealing other welfare state programs.
If there is any good to be salvaged from the current disaster, that will be it.—RWT
Robert Tracinski writes daily commentary at TIADaily.com. He is the editor of "The Intellectual Activist (TIA)" and contributor to "The Freedom Fighter's Journal."
How did this happen? Kim Strassel has a good overview of the corrupt sausage-making that got the bill passed, but the essence is this.
The "whip counts" that showed Democrats didn't have the votes turned out to be accurate—based on a certain range of normal assumptions, one of which was unexpectedly overthrown. What the whip counts showed was that the vote would be decided by the "Stupak Democrats," a group of about a half-dozen to a dozen anti-abortion Democrats led by Michigan's Bart Stupak. Getting the Stupak Democrats on board seemed impossible: any move to mollify the anti-abortion Democrats by promising to restrict government funding for abortions would cost the votes of an equal number of pro-abortion-rights Democrats.
President Obama found a way to square that circle. He signed an executive order that somewhat vaguely declared that no federal money should be used to fund abortions, which was enough to bring the Stupak democrats on board. But because he did this by executive order, he was not asking the pro-abortion-rights Democrats to approve actual legislation that restricts abortion. He got the votes of the one group without losing the votes of the other. Suddenly, the math worked in his favor.
Of course, this is all a fraud. An executive order can be changed at any time, and it cannot override the language of the underlying law, which Democrats openly admitted. So this was just a surrender, plain and simple, and so it's no surprise that an anti-abortion group that was about to give an award to Stupak promptly rescinded it.
I am actually in favor of the right to an abortion, so I don't particularly care about Stupak selling out the anti-abortion cause. But the Stupak Surrender is symptomatic of a wider pattern, the real reason this bill made its way through. The wider pattern—and the big lesson of this vote—is that it doesn't matter what any Democrat says he's for. When it comes down to the wire, he's only for one thing: collectivism.
Thus, just like Stupak, the "fiscally conservative" Democrats who claim to be concerned about deficits and runaway federal spending also broke for the bill, using the equally unconvincing fig leaf of a rigged Congressional Budget Office report which preposterously claims that a new multi-trillion-dollar entitlement will reduce the deficit.
The same goes for all of the House Democrats who expressed opposition to various awful provisions of the Senate bill—only to vote for the thing in higher numbers than they voted for their own previous House version. Sure, they also voted for a separate package of changes to the bill, but for all they know, those changes are dead on arrival in the Senate. So that's just another fig leaf.
Again, this is the lesson: Democrats stand for collectivism. They stand for resentment of the independent individual, who is to be reined in and cut down to size by a vast network of government taxes and controls. That is their basic ideology, and they will act on it because that is why they went into politics.
That also explains the suicidal politics of the vote. As "centrist" Democratic pollster Pat Caddell put it, this was "political Jonestown": "The opponents of this plan are holding tea parties, and the Democrats are gonna hold a Kool-Aid party."
Remember the old fable about the scorpion and the frog? The scorpion asks to ride on the frog's back so he can cross the stream, but the frog refuses because the scorpion might sting him. The scorpion points out that this is against his own interest, because if he stings the frog, he too will drown in the stream. So the frog agrees, and halfway across the scorpion stings him anyway. As they are both about to drown, he asks the scorpion why. The scorpion replies: because it is in my nature to do so.
It is in the nature of a scorpion to sting, and it is in the nature of a Democrat to vote for collectivism, no matter what the consequences.
Incidentally, this is yet another example of the Broken Culture Fallacy, the "bad news is good" argument about how putting the left into power will provoke a reaction in favor of free markets and we'll all end up better off in the end. In fact, letting Democrats gain power in Congress simply means that we get socialized medicine whether the American people want it or not. Note how close the vote was: only four fewer Democrats in Congress, and the bill would have failed. So anyone who ever advocated voting for Democrats as a protest or as a way of triangulating against the religious right—an argument fashionable in Objectivist circles a few years ago—bears part of the responsibility for this catastrophe. I take no satisfaction in pointing this out, not even a grim one, because we should not have needed a catastrophe to teach us that lesson.
The fact that we lost this round of the battle doesn't mean we have to take it lying down. Pat Caddell is right. Take a look at the "aye" votes on the final roll call: these are all marked men. They must be treated as marked men, or else we—those of us who want to live independent of state control—we will all be marked men.
But we don't have to wait until November to act against Obamacare. Twelve state attorneys general are already filing lawsuits arguing the key provisions of the bill, particularly the individual mandate, are unconstitutional.
For his part, President Obama is under no illusion that he can just declare victory and move on. He knows the bill is massively unpopular among the American people, so he has prepared a plan to sell it to us after the fact.
But the negative consequences of this bill are going to be felt, and soon. (The best advice I've heard about how to personally deal with the consequences is to immediate find a regular primary care physician—because there is likely to be a shortage of them.) And Obama will face resistance on the most basic level. As one commentator responded to Obama's plan to keep selling the bill: "All of that, and we still have to keep talking about ObamaCare?" I think the American people decided what they think about ObamaCare last August. Nothing the president has said since then has moved them, and nothing he says afterward is likely to do so, either. He will just enrage them with its paternalistic condescension. Another commentator—I can't remember where—describes Obama's attitude as being like the advice of a parent to an unwilling bride forced into an arranged marriage: you may resist it now, but you'll grow to love it. I'm willing to bet that we won't.
So our new crusade is a campaign for repeal—a campaign that will take three years. It is mathematically impossible for Republicans to gain a veto-proof majority in the Senate next year; there just aren't enough Democratic senators up for re-election. So overturning this law will have to wait for 2012 and the election of a Republican president pledge to the cause of repeal. So far numerous top Republicans have signed on to the idea: Senator Jim DeMint, House Majority Leader John Boehner, even John McCain. So have prominent commentators on the right, including William Kristol.
This last is interesting, if you know the history of the neoconservatives. It was one of the godfathers of neoconservatism, William Kristol's father Irving, who articulated the neoconservative approach to the welfare state. The big entitlements are too popular and well-established to fight, Kristol argued, so the only thing conservatives can do is to try to reform the welfare state to bring it more in line with conservative values. This was the idea of a "conservative welfare state." If Kristol's son is now refusing to accept a new welfare-state program and talking about repeal instead of reform, that reflects an interesting change in the political atmosphere.
Still, there is no precedent for such a repeal. Congress has never rolled back a significant expansion of the welfare state. Ever. But then again, Congress has never shoved through a major piece of legislation in this way, in such defiance of public opinion. So maybe this is the time for precedents to be broken. And if it is, maybe that will open up discussion of repealing other welfare state programs.
If there is any good to be salvaged from the current disaster, that will be it.—RWT
Robert Tracinski writes daily commentary at TIADaily.com. He is the editor of "The Intellectual Activist (TIA)" and contributor to "The Freedom Fighter's Journal."
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