Yesterday, the House and Senate passed their respective budget bills without the benefit of a single Republican vote in either chamber. Even Rep. Joseph Cao (R-New Orleans) voted against it. This was a strategic blunder for the GOP of potentially lasting import.
As a party, the Republicans are obviously in a bad way, but they haven’t suffered any really structural obstacles to a return to power…yet. That will change if the Democrats succeed in passing a health care plan that includes a public option. Such a plan would be the equivalent of FDR’s Social Security program, which cemented the Democrats in power on Capitol Hill for half a century. The Republicans rightly fear that a public plan will lead over time to something resembling single-payer health care of the…gasp…socialist variety. They also know that the public will love it and will never allow anyone to take it away. The Republicans would be reduced to latter-day Tories, having conceded the endurance and legitimacy of the Welfare State they will be left to bicker about the details.
So, nothing could be more important than preventing a public option within Obama’s health care plan. To do that, the Republicans needed to convince centrist Democrats that they would not filibuster a stand alone health care bill. They needed to give centrist Democrats some kind of argument that they could take to the caucus as a whole. Instead, they voted unanimously against the budget and make vociferous and intemperate attacks upon it. That left the centrists with no plausible case to make. Health Care will be included in the budget reconciliation process because no one can say with a straight face that the Republicans will act in good faith and not filibuster any health care plan regardless of its merits.
But it didn’t have to be this way. If the Republicans had been smart, they would have made all kinds of noises about how they recognized the need to pass health care this year and they would have had ‘moderate’ Republicans saying that they would support an up or down vote and not support obstructionism, etc. Any and all signals that they could send of good faith would have empowered centrist Democrats to stand firm against using the budget reconciliation process for health care, and this could have preserved the option to filibuster health care in the fall.
If they had prevailed on this issue of budget reconciliation, they could have adopted a strategy of helping to pass a health care bill this year, but wielding the threat of a filibuster to kill off a public option. They could take some credit for expanding health care coverage and still protect the HMO’s and other private insurers.
But they didn’t try to lure the Democrats into a trap. They telegraphed their intentions to be rawly partisan and to act in bad faith, and that sealed their fate. The Democrats will simply enact health care through the budget reconciliation process in the fall where they will only need 50 rather than 60 votes to pass it. The Republicans no longer need to be consulted on any aspect of the legislation because there is no need for any of their votes and little incentive to give them any avenue for taking credit. They shut themselves out of the process of creating the most significant legislation in three generations. They didn’t even try to outsmart the Democrats.
We complain about lame-brained leadership from the Democrats all the time, but their boners cannot compare to this airball by the Republicans.