The politics of health care

I generally intend to avoid politics in this blog, but I have gotten so upset at the extreme partisanship surrounding the debate over health care that I can no longer keep it to myself.

As recently as the Clinton administration, when the Republicans took over the House of Representatives for the first time in about 50 years and Newt Gingrich became Speaker of the House, legislation routinely passed with votes from both parties. The political wrangling between Gingrich and Clinton now seems like the good old days.

During much of the Bush II administration, Speaker Denny Hastert chose to introduce major legislation only when he had a "majority of the majority" lined up behind it. I always took that to mean that he preferred to pass legislation without having to seek input from the Democrats. On the Senate side, neither Trent Lott nor Bill Frist had the kind of majorities that would allow them to be so blatantly partisan.

Now, Speaker Nancy Pelosi has chosen to follow the Hastert model of House leadership rather than the functionally less partisan model of previous speakers. Senator Harry Reid has a veto-proof 60 senators that he can usually count on, and will be able to pass anything he wants with no Republican input so long as he can keep all of his people in line. In the current health care debate, that situation has given tremendous power to one senator, Independent and former Democrat Joe Lieberman, and practically none to any of the Republican senators.

I cannot recall anything in particular that President Bush did to abet Hastert-style partisanship. Democrats so stridently opposed his policies that he hardly needed to. President Obama, on the other hand made an excellent speech to Congress about health care and then immediately took steps to negate its potential effect.

After calling out by name in his speech those Republican senators who had advocated and worked for meaningful health care initiatives, he invited wavering Democrats to the White House in order to persuade them to support him. It appears that he did not invite them for the purpose of listening to their concerns. Nor did he invite any Republicans to listen to theirs. All of the Republicans he lauded in his speech soon announced their opposition to his health care plan.

Recently, he summoned all of the Democratic and Independent Senators to the White House to demand action on health care. He has still not had a similar meeting with Republican senators. It appears that the Senate will eventually pass Sen. Lieberman's preference on health care with the grudging support of all the Democrats and the other Independent and without a single Republican vote.

I am sick of the style of super-partisan leadership in the  House of Representatives practiced first by Hastert and now by Pelosi, Reid, and Obama. Some cynic once defined elections as a means of voting some rascals out and other rascals in. That pretty much describes the 2008 election cycle. When will the voting public stand up and demand that the leaders of their own party actually collaborate with members of the other party instead of merely screaming past each other? If that had happened in this Congress, maybe we'd get a health care bill that more than one senator actually likes.