Sigh.
In the words of Norm Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute:
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/ar ... th/397742/Norm Ornstein wrote:Did Obama Jam Through the Affordable Care Act Without Consulting Republicans or Working With Them to Find Bipartisan Cooperation?
The Obama White House took a number of lessons from the Clinton experience with healthcare policy. First, do not rely on your own, detailed White House plan as the starting point for negotiations in Congress; let Congress work out the structure and details from your goals. Second, try from an early point to get buy-in from the major actors in the health world, including insurers, physicians, pharmaceutical companies, hospitals and other providers, to at least defuse or minimize their opposition. Third, recognize that the House and Senate are very different institutions, and let each work through its own ideas and plan before finding ways to merge the two into a single bill. Obama and his White House executed those lessons brilliantly.
There was a fourth lesson: Try in the Senate to find Republican support at an early stage, instead of waiting until the political dynamic shifts toward implacable opposition. The failure to engage John Chafee, Chuck Grassley, Orrin Hatch, and their colleagues at an early point in 1993, when they crafted their own plan and were willing to negotiate and cut a deal, proved deeply damaging, if not deadly in 1994. As the midterms loomed and Democrats were on the defensive, Chafee and his colleagues were told by then-Republican Leader Bob Dole that there would be no deal, period.
In the House, that lesson was not applicable this time; Eric Cantor and House Republicans had already made it crystal clear that they were not cooperating under any circumstances. There, Democrats debated the issue for several months, but mostly amongst themselves, before introducing a detailed bill that emerged from committees in July 2009 and passing it through the House later in the year with just one Republican vote.
But with Obama’s blessing, the Senate, through its Finance Committee, took a different tack, and became the fulcrum for a potential grand bargain on health reform. Chairman Max Baucus, in the spring of 2009, signaled his desire to find a bipartisan compromise, working especially closely with Grassley, his dear friend and Republican counterpart, who had been deeply involved in crafting the Republican alternative to Clintoncare. Baucus and Grassley convened an informal group of three Democrats and three Republicans on the committee, which became known as the “Gang of Six.” They covered the parties’ ideological bases; the other GOPers were conservative Mike Enzi of Wyoming and moderate Olympia Snowe of Maine, and the Democrats were liberal Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico and moderate Kent Conrad of North Dakota.
Baucus very deliberately started the talks with a template that was the core of the 1993-4 Republican plan, built around an individual mandate and exchanges with private insurers—much to the chagrin of many Democrats and liberals who wanted, if not a single-payer system, at least one with a public insurance option. Through the summer, the Gang of Six engaged in detailed discussions and negotiations to turn a template into a plan. But as the summer wore along, it became clear that something had changed; both Grassley and Enzi began to signal that participation in the talks—and their demands for changes in the evolving plan—would not translate into a bipartisan agreement.
What became clear before September, when the talks fell apart, is that Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell had warned both Grassley and Enzi that their futures in the Senate would be much dimmer if they moved toward a deal with the Democrats that would produce legislation to be signed by Barack Obama. They both listened to their leader. An early embrace by both of the framework turned to shrill anti-reform rhetoric by Grassley—talking, for example, about death panels that would kill grandma—and statements by Enzi that he was not going to sign on to a deal. The talks, nonetheless, continued into September, and the emerging plan was at least accepted in its first major test by the third Republican Gang member, Olympia Snowe (even if she later joined every one of her colleagues to vote against the plan on the floor of the Senate.)
Obama could have moved earlier to blow the whistle on the faux negotiations; he did not, as he held out hope that a plan that was fundamentally built on Republican ideas would still, in the end, garner at least some Republican support....
John McDonough chronicles 161 Republican amendments that made it into Obamacare.
Let me try to understand where you are coming from here. We can't understand the political situation by looking at politics alone. We can't look at it through the lens of sociology, because of all them damn sociologists. So what field can we use to create models that can shed some insight into what's going on?Symmachus wrote: ↑Tue Jun 01, 2021 10:19 pmIf it is a natural tendency, then it will happen no matter what. This also happens in political cultures with multi-party parliamentary systems. I have suspicions about this for the reasons I mentioned: every technocratic proposal of a "rational" solution designed to circumvent this or that thing about human psychology is always politics by other means. I know we see this differently, but I would just summarize my comments here by saying that I don't think the political situation is sufficiently explained by looking at politics alone. These kinds of ostensibly wonk-ish discussions are the most insidious because they pretend to be the opposite of the thing their proponents despise but are in fact merely another instantiation of it. I guarantee you that if we banned cable news and had a constitutional amendment establishing four national parties, complete with a Drutman commission to ensure sufficient numbers of conservative democrats and republicans to match the liberal democrats and republicans, we would just end up with an informal system of liberals vs. conservatives (both of which are a species of liberal anyway). Most likely, the Drutman commission would manipulate things so that its favored side wins.There are multiple problems with two-party systems, the most fundamental of which goes back to psychology. Human beings have a natural tendency to divide the world into “us” vs. “them.” Two political parties reinforces the us-v-them mentality and the simplistic thinking and intolerance that accompany tribalism. “Them” winning becomes an existential threat to our very way of life, which directly leads to things like insurrections at the capital and elected leaders refusing to certify election results.
In any case, I am finding Drutman's insights to be quite interesting, and I'm not willing to dismiss them before I've finished reading his book.