Rosalea Barker: US Health Care Reform Hoop-La!

For me here on the West Coast, the great national drama unfolding this weekend in DC is nothing short of riveting now that I’ve begun to take an interest in it. It’s not that I was glued to C-Span on my computer all day Saturday, but I did keep looking in on the House Rules Committee hearing on whether the Senate version of the healthcare bill will be “deemed” to have been passed by the House, thus avoiding an up-and-down vote in the House. The Democrats lost that battle, and at 11:24pm PST, which means it was sent from DC after 2am on Sunday, I received the following email from Majority Leader Steny Hoyer’s office:

"The rule issued sets up a straight forward process with three votes. First, a vote on the rule. Second, a vote on the Senate bill itself, which will go to the President for his signature. And third, a vote on improvements to the Senate bill, which will then be sent to the Senate for passage. Tomorrow, I look forward to both a civil and honest debate, as well as passage of health care reform that will reduce the deficit and increase access and affordability for families and small businesses across our nation."

The late hour of Hoyer’s statement reflects the fact that the 10am, Saturday, meeting of the Committee on Rules was reconvened at 9:40pm. If you must punish yourself, you can watch the whole day’s hearing on C-Span here, or just read that website’s abstract, which says: “The House Rules Committee has cleared the way for the full House to take up health care legislation. The committee rejected 80 possible amendments, and passed a rule allowing for separate votes on the Senate health care bill and the reconciliation bill.” If the Rules Committee hadn’t been able to get agreement on a special rule resolution to be sent to the House before midnight, there could have been no vote on Sunday, since such resolutions cannot be voted on in the House on the same day the resolution is reported.

Although its hearing room is by far the smallest in the Capitol, the importance of the House Rules Committee is reflected in the length of the index entries referring to it in the official history of the House of Representatives, The House, by Robert V. Remini. Only the number of entries for the House Ways and Means Committee comes close. In his chapter on the Great Depression, Remini says of the New Deal era that “the real authority in the House emanated from Roosevelt and operated through the Rules Committee. Bills were sent down [from the Executive branch] and the Rules Committee then made certain that nothing got in the way of their enactment. The displacement of party leadership in Congress by the chief executive was possible because of the crisis facing the country…”

When FDR was elected, there were so many Democrats elected along with him that more than a few had to sit on the Republican side of the House, and he was also a very popular president. Obama has neither such a big Democratic majority nor high popularity going for him. And the only crisis surrounding healthcare is the “crisis” of government intervention in the free market, at least in the eyes of the vocal opposition to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, who reportedly spat on White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, and hurled homophobic and racial slurs at several House members as they made their way to the Capitol past the protesters on Saturday.

The House was called into session at 9am, and launched into its usual “One Minutes”, which are an opportunity for Representatives to get a load off their chest, on the record, uninterrupted. Nine of the One Minutes were about health care; the tenth about space exploration. A recess was called, and the House reconvened at 10:30 to consider a couple of bills, one of which creates the equivalent of the New Deal’s Civilian Conservation Corps and incorporates a mandate for green buildings, and (in an amendment introduced and passed on Saturday) allows Secretaries to enter into arrangements with tribal governments in order to provide temporary housing.

The other bill that was voted on amended the tax code to ensure that the types of health insurance given to those in the military are forever considered individual health plans. The bill’s sponsor, a Democrat who will be voting against the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, was at pains to explain that even though those particular plans already qualify as individual health plans in the reform bill, he just wanted to reassure “our brave men and women in uniform” that they wouldn’t be negatively affected by it. By the time the recorded vote on that was completed it was past the 2:45 start time of the Democrat Caucus meeting with President Obama, and there was still a vote to be taken on approval of the Journal of the previous day’s proceedings. Florida Dem, Ron Klein, who is listed as “undecided” on The Hill’s headcount, called for a recorded vote even on that, which used up another 15 minutes, and then the House just HAD to get in a recorded vote on a resolution honoring the life and accomplishments of Donald Harington for his contributions to literature in the United States. Appropriate, I suppose, since Harington wrote often of an Ozark Shangri-La called “Stay More” that was inhabited by Stay Morons.

President Obama’s address to the Democratic Caucus, held in the Capitol Visitor Center’s Auditorium, was closed to the press, but that didn’t stop snippets of it being shown on the evening news out here. He gave a jolly good speech, I thought. You can watch the video and read the transcript on the White House website here. I especially liked one of his opening remarks:

I have the great pleasure of having a really nice library at the White House. And I was tooling through some of the writings of some previous Presidents and I came upon this quote by Abraham Lincoln: “I am not bound to win, but I’m bound to be true. I’m not bound to succeed, but I’m bound to live up to what light I have.”

The image of the African-American son of a solo mum “tooling through” presidential writings as he sits in the White House’s library is, well, choice! Only in 21st Century America! But I like this bit, too:

Now, I can’t guarantee that this is good politics. Every one of you know your districts better than I do. You talk to folks. You’re under enormous pressure. You’re getting robocalls. You’re getting e-mails that are tying up the communications system. I know the pressure you’re under. I get a few comments made about me. I don’t know if you’ve noticed. (Laughter.) I’ve been in your shoes. I know what it’s like to take a tough vote.

But what did Lincoln say? “I am not bound to win, but I am bound to be true.” Two generations ago, folks who were sitting in your position, they made a decision -- we are going to make sure that seniors and the poor have health care coverage that they can count on. And they did the right thing.

And I’m sure at the time they were making that vote, they weren’t sure how the politics were either, any more than the people who made the decision to make sure that Social Security was in place knew how the politics would play out, or folks who passed the civil rights acts knew how the politics were going to play out. They were not bound to win, but they were bound to be true.

Wow! What a day it must have been in DC on Saturday, March 20. With the protestors at the Capitol decrying Obama’s “socialism” and the marchers on the streets on this seventh anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq protesting his escalation of the war in Afghanistan, it’s no wonder the President is beginning to look like the guy in the ad for Touch of Gray. And then, to top it off in the worst possible way, the college basketball team he picked to win the NCAA tournament, Kansas, lost today, and it’s still early in the tournament. Bloggers of the “right” persuasion have been crowing about the “Obama curse” his choice placed on the top-seeded team. But there’s another way of looking at it, as the closing paragraphs in this story about the game show:

This time, he lined up deep in the right corner and, after hesitating briefly, coolly fired away — even though 28 seconds remained on the shot clock. "I was just open on that side, and (the ball) came to me," Farokhmanesh said. "I thought I might as well shoot this one."

"That's what players do, make plays," Collins said. "And (Farokhmanesh) made all the plays for them today."

Whether you’re for or against the healthcare reform legislation, and whether the bill passes or not, you have to admit, Obama is one heckuva Player in Chief.

rosalea.barker@gmail.com

--PEACE--

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