LA Philanthropy Watch

Last Friday, nearly four dozen health care experts endorsed a strategy, which some have referred to as ‘Plan B,’ to pass health care reform: the House of Representatives should quickly pass the Senate bill.  Then the House and the Senate should pass  a second bill to work out differences between the two chambers on issues related to taxes and premium subsidies – which could be done through the budget reconciliation process, which is not subject to filibuster and thus only requires a 51 votes in the U.S. Senate (or 50 votes + the Vice President’s tie-breaker).

Their letter to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, Charles Rangel (Chairman of the Ways & Means Committee), Henry Waxman (Chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee), and George Miller (Chairman of the Education and Labor Committee) urged House leaders to take a giant step toward realization of a goal that has eluded Presidents and Congresses for nearly 75 years: making health care accessible to all Americans.

“Both houses of Congress have adopted legislation that would provide health coverage to tens of millions of Americans, begin to control health care costs that seriously threaten our economy, and improve the quality of health care for every American.  These bills are imperfect. Yet they represent a huge step forward in creating a more humane, effective, and sustainable health care system for every American.
We have come further than we have ever come before. Only two steps remain. The House must adopt the Senate bill, and the President must sign it.”

The letter, noting differences between the House and Senate bills, continues:

“The House of Representatives faces a stark choice.  It can enact the Senate bill, and realize the century-old dream of health care reform. . . . Differences between the House and the Senate bill can be negotiated through the reconciliation process.
Alternatively, Congress can abandon the effort at this critical moment, leaving millions more Americans to become uninsured in the coming years as health care becomes ever less affordable.  Abandoning health care reform – the signature political issue of this administration – would send a message that Democrats are incapable of governing … Such a retreat would also abandon the chance to achieve reforms that millions of Americans … desperately need in these difficult times.”

Among the prominent signatories: Jacob Hacker, leading advocate of the public option; Dean Baker, at the Center for Economic and Policy Research; Paul Starr, health care historian at Princeton; and Theda Skocpol, Harvard scholar who has written a great deal on the nonprofit sector.  Three signatories are from Los Angeles: Ronald Anderson at UCLA’s School of Public Health and two professors at UCLA’s School of Public Policy, Mark Kleiman and Arleen Liebowitz.

Today, HCAN – Health Care for America NOW!,  which has been among the most prominent organizations advocating and organizing for health care reform legislation, endorsed Plan B.  HCAN notes the role of the filibuster in the U.S. Senate as a huge obstacle to reform legislation:

“In recent years, the use of the filibuster to block legislation has skyrocketed. While it still only takes 51 votes to pass a bill in the Senate, the minority has ramped up the number of times its blocked legislation with only 41 votes. The Republican party of NO started codifying the use of the filibuster for every piece of legislation proposed by the opposing party under President Clinton. Since then, the use of the filibuster has jumped.”  [Editor's note: click on the thumbnail image for a full-size view of chart].

Last week, SEIU President Andy Stern, writing in the Huffington Post (”A Path Forward: It’s Time to Pass Health Insurance Reform“) also endorsed Plan B, “Let’s not overcomplicate the process, let’s just make it happen. Because we cannot pause or take a step back – we have only one choice: move forward with real reform decisively and right now.”

Will the Democratic Congress go for Plan B?  Or will it dodge responsibility and instead blame the other chamber, or the other party, or someone else for its failure to reform health care?  Will one special election in Massachusetts frighten a majority – which already passed one health care bill in the House and another in the Senate, and is this close to completing the job – into running away from the issue (and from 46 million uninsured Americans) at this stage?  Stay tuned.

(Chart of Cloture voting, U.S. Senate, 1947-2008, courtesy of Wikipedia.)

Yesterday, I posted on advocates of health care reform who are angry about changes in the legislation as it has moved through the U.S. Senate.  Today, I suggest that these critics should take aim at the real culprit: an undemocratic rule that the Senate should change.

Why did it take 60 votes to pass health care legislation in the United States Senate, when a majority is 51?  How could a single Senator, Joe Lieberman, kill both the public option and the Medicare buy-in, though it’s likely that more than 51 Senators would have supported either one or the other?  Why was Senator Ben Nelson able to dictate an abortion provision to a Democratic majority in the Senate?

Because of the filibuster: a profoundly undemocratic procedure that allows a minority of Senators – 41 out of 100 – to block up or down votes on legislation that the minority opposes.

For several decades the filibuster was used for one reason: to block civil rights legislation.  The late Senator Strom Thurmond (pictured) holds the record for the longest filibuster in Senate history (according to the Strom Thurmond Institute for Public Affairs); he stood in the Senate chamber and spoke for 24 hours and 18 minutes against the 1957 civil rights bill.

Things have changed since that era.  In the 1950s the filibuster was invoked an average of once a year and in the 1960s no more than 7 filibusters were staged during any two-year Senate term.  But over time, especially with the realignment of our political parties – Democrats representing the center-left and Republicans the right – the number of filibusters continued to rise.  Mark Schmitt suggests, “In terms of culture and custom, the turning point was almost certainly the previous health-reform debate, in 1993 and 1994. That’s when Bob Dole, then the majority leader, made the phrase ‘You need 60 votes to do anything around here’ his mantra, and when — thanks to Bill Kristol’s famous memo — the idea of blocking major legislation for political reasons, rather than trying to get it revised to reflect your own policy preferences, took hold.”

During the 110^th Congress – 2007-08 – the Republican minority forced a record 112 cloture votes to end debate (nearly double the previous high).

What had been extraordinary has become routine.  Now 60 votes are required for virtually all significant legislation that moves through the Senate.  Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon has suggested, “There’s no question that the Senate has become dysfunctional, and it’s not good for democracy.”

Senator Tom Harkin, who says the filibuster originally served as a way for Senators to delay votes until their colleagues had returned to the chamber (so votes couldn’t be held until all Senators were present), has proposed a change to this rule: essentially, cloture would require 60 votes initially, but the second call for cloture would require only 57 votes, the third vote would require 54, and finally the fourth, 51.  The filibuster would slow things down – but prevent a minority of 41 Senators to bring everything to a dead stop.

Representative Alan Grayson, like many members of the House of Represenatives, is unhappy with the way things get stuck in the Senate.  “Why should launching wars and cutting taxes for the rich require only 50 votes while saving lives requires 60?”  He has setup a website, Stop Senate Stalling, where he has gathered more than 11,500 signatures on a letter to Senator Harry Reid, calling for a rule change in the Senate to require only 55 votes to invoke cloture.

Can we bring a bit more democracy to the United States Senate?  Where does Barbara Boxer stand?  Dianne Feinstein?  Where do progressive Democrats from other states stand on the issue of making the Senate more accountable?

Are you mad about the mangling of health care reform legislation in the Senate?  Don’t blame Senator Joe Lieberman.  Or Senators Ben Nelson or Harry Reid.  Don’t blame President Obama or Rahm Emanuel or the insurance industry.  Blame your Senator – who has voted to approve a Senate rule that allows an obstructionist minority to wield disproportionate power.

(Photo of Senator Strom Thurmond, circa 1961, from Wikimedia Commons.)

Sources:

Robert Schlesinger, “The Staggering Rise and Fall of the Filibuster,” (on his blog at U.S. News and World Report) who cites the research of UCLA political scientist Barbara Sinclair.

Matt Yglesias, “The Silenced Majority,” The Atlantic, December 24, 2008.  He has also posted on his blog at Think Progress.

Mark Schmitt, at the American Prospect’s TAPPED blog – including “When Did the Senate Get So Bad?” (quoted above) – and at his previous blog the Decembrist, has been writing about filibusters for four or five years.  Note: he has been generally supportive of the filibuster.

David Dayen at Firedoglake.

My DD’s desmoinesdem linked to the Burlington, IA Hawk Eye, which quoted Senator Harkin.

James Fallows recently called for discussion of the filibuster on his blog at the Atlantic (which features a nifty chart on the rise of the filibuster).

Ezra Klein, at his Washington Post blog, had references to the filibuster in nine posts during the last week of November.

Paul Krugman, “A Dangerous Dysfunction,” in his December 20 New York Times column.