Teabagged

Posted by Robert Zimmer on 03.10.2010

They were for it before they were against it -- GOP flip-flops on health care.

I'm loathe to write anything more about health care because as President Obama mentioned a couple of times this week, pretty much all the arguments have been had, all the ideas put forth, and the complexities contemplated. But the current Republican meme, that the current health care reform legislation isn't bipartisan, just isn't true.

This vital fact has been lost or forgotten by the media in the last year, chock full as it was of staged town hall protests, lies about death panels, and Senate Democrats taking so long to pass health care legislation that they forgot to defend Ted Kennedy's former Senate seat and thus jeopardized the entire reform enchilada. But in June 2009, a set of comprehensive policy recommendations for health care reform was released by a bipartisan health care commission chaired by former Senators Howard Baker (R-Tennessee), Bob Dole (R-Kansas) and Tom Daschle (D-South Dakota) and including former George W. Bush health care advisor Mark McClellan and Chris Jennings, who held a similar post under President Clinton -- hardly a group of Berkeley hippies. Congressional leaders didn't ignore the report; in fact, virtually every recommendation of the Leaders' Project on the State of American Health Care, as the commission was dubbed, made it into the health care reform legislation that passed both the House and the Senate last year. The substance of these recommendations are also consistent with the final legislative fixes to those bills, which Congressional Democrats hope to pass with a majority vote and which President Obama intends to sign into law within the next few weeks.

Also lost and forgotten is the fact that the Senate Finance Committee, including 10 Republican senators like Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), Olympia Snowe (R-ME), and Mike Enzi (R-WY) spent months last year crafting (using the Leaders' Project as a blueprint) what became, in large part, the final Senate health care legislation. So, the reform legislation passed by the House and Senate is already bipartisan, and really has been from the beginning. Furthermore, after the president's recent health care summit, he publicly announced he would include three additional Republican proposals in the final legislative package. So why, if Republican ideas are in the core of the legislation and always have been, are Republicans insisting upon trying to use the filibuster to block the final legislative fixes to health care reform?

Sadly, politics has entirely trumped policy for the Republicans since the inception of the Obama administration. Determined to create a self-fulfilling prophecy that government is broken, the same Republican members of Congress who destroyed the economy during the Bush years have brought all legislative work in the Senate to fix that mess to a complete halt -- with unprecedented abuse of the filibuster. The Associated Press reported last week that the Republicans have set an all-time record for use of the filibuster to stall or block legislation -- over 150 times in the past 15 months, more than tripling the previous record which took an entire two years (1995-1996) to amass. (The Republican freakout over the use of reconciliation to pass the final fixes to the health care legislation is faux; they used it to pass Bush's trillion-dollar tax cuts for the rich in 2001 and 2003.)

Worse, Republicans who actively helped craft the health care legislation now flap their peacock feathers on cable TV and decry health care reform as fiscally reckless, when in fact the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates the reform will reduce the deficit by a $1.3 trillion, while covering over 30 million more Americans, curbing the horrifying practices of the health insurance companies, and lowering premiums and other health care costs for all Americans. Or, Republicans repeat other long-debunked talking points about a "government takeover" of health care, when the public option didn't even make it into the final legislation, or other assorted the-sky-will-fall prevarications. My favorite recent stunt is Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) vowing that the GOP will run this fall on a platform to repeal health care. I'd like to see him take the insurance away from the 30 million who will have it for the first time, or those dying of cancer who can no longer have their coverage rescinded right before they start chemotherapy, or folks whose pre-existing conditions no longer will mean they are uninsurable. The political ads write themselves -- a poor, sick family stares into the camera and their haggard father solemnly vows, "John Cornyn will take our health insurance from my cold, dead hands." It's not quite Charlton Heston at an NRA convention, but it's powerful stuff that will result in a Republican bloodbath if they are foolish enough to try it. The GOP was not simply content to take your civil liberties away from you in a time of (pointless) war; they might just take your darn health insurance away too if you don't shut up and obey Rush Limbaugh. (On his radio show this week, Limbaugh vowed he would move out of the country if health care reform worked. This is the first selfless thing I can recall Limbaugh offering to do for America.)

What's tragic is that most of the Republicans who worked on this health care legislation, and who are serious about health care policy, know that it will work if it passes. (And when it does, Republican talk of repealing health care will vanish faster than cockroaches when you turn on the kitchen light.) What is unforgivable is that none of them will vote for it -- when they could simply take credit for its eventual successes along with their Democratic colleagues. Instead, imprisoned by the ideological extremists who control the GOP, moderate Republicans walk an impossible contradiction, voting for and publicly trashing legislation their own party statesmen helped generate, and which they all privately know will succeed in bettering the life of all Americans, not just a wealthy few.

This worsening disgrace arises from the moderate Republicans' obedience to the Fear Factor that rules the GOP. Republicans are terrified of the Tea Party movement in large part because they have no idea what it all means or what these people really stand for. The GOP has simply attempted to align itself with the most readily available anti-government group; most of the Tea Party movement is poorly organized and ripe for manipulation by sophisticated GOP astroturf operations. But the non-evangelical (and thus endangered) segment of the Republican establishment is in large part privately contemptuous in its feelings about the Tea Party movement. The Tea Partiers, while uncomfortably all-white, less-educated, and rural in demographic makeup, is partially comprised simply of common-sense Americans who are disgusted with the spending and size of the federal government; they had no more love for the economic policies of George W. Bush than they do for Barack Obama's. People who supported Ron Paul in 2008, or Ross Perot in 1992, had to go somewhere with their frustrations, after all, and many of those people became Tea Partiers. But the Tea Party is also heavily populated and controlled -- like the GOP itself -- by a lunatic element drunk on evangelical religion and anti-science drivel.

Where the Tea Party has crossbred with the Republican religious right, a dangerous monster has been created -- the Tea Baggers. The Tea Partiers are nothing to be scared of; in fact, smart Democrats and Republicans alike should embrace them. But the Tea Baggers are something moderates of any political stripe should be genuinely afraid of, not because these Tea Baggers are correct about much, unlike the Ron Paul Tea Partiers, but because they are by and large utterly devoid of actual rational public policy ideas and utterly overflowing with evangelical non-sequiturs popularized by the likes of Sarah Palin, who told a crowd this week that she writes reminders on her hand like she did at the CPAC convention last month because a Bible verse sanctions the idea. (Palin also admitted this week that she used to take her family to Canada to take advantage of the Canucks' free health care. Amazing that a death panel didn't ensnare one of Palin's kids, right?)

For the Tea Baggers and their Pied Palins, Jesus will come back to earth in their lifetimes, universal health insurance is a tool of the Devil, Obama is the Muslim-Socialist- Antichrist, nobody should pay any taxes and Congress should keep its government hands off their Medicare. There's no reasoning with people who suffer from a collective bout of schizophrenia like this; we can only hope to contain them or give them their own country. After all, Texas Governor Rick Perry (R-TX) likes to tease his Tea Bagger base with naughty thoughts of secession from the Union, but a better idea would be to take a state like Alaska and just ship all the Tea Baggers there to live under the rule of Queen Sarah, where they will be entirely free of taxes, health care, and reason; and also free to use as much Aqua Net as they like because cow farts are the real cause of global warming (Amen).

Will health care reform legislation finally pass this month, after sixty years of trying? Too soon to tell. But if the legislation fails, it won't be because it isn't bipartisan, or because it wouldn't work. It will be because a few irrational Republicans -- who know better -- allowed themselves to be tea-bagged into a fearful corner. They should be ashamed of themselves, because the politics of fear should never triumph over policies of hope. And you should never settle for being tea bagged when you can have a tea party instead.

Just in case there are any readers as wonky as me, you can visit the bipartisan health care commission's website here.