American Patrol

The health care reform debate, such as its been, has been dominating the national political attention span all year, a vast bonfire of burning political capital that has essentially sucked the oxygen out of the national atmosphere. For all the ink, band width, and air time the debate has taken up, however, precious little attention has been paid to one of the key elements of this process. Buried under the painstakingly detailed parliamentary analysis, CBO audits, and the mountain of plan old bullshit that has been piled on this particular issue is one sharp and painful fact-- regardless of its outcome, the health care reform effort represents a miscarriage of small-d democracy on a par with the 2000 Presidential election.

Hose away the crap, and you're left with this: a strong majority of the citizens of the United States support health care reform with a robust and accessible public option, and a working majority of their representatives in both the House and Senate are prepared to vote for exactly that. In a functioning representative democracy, that would be the end of the story. In the United States of America circa 2009, it is a seemingly minor consideration. Instead, from the very start, this effort has been marred by the Administration’s attempts at bipartisanship (itself a profoundly anti-democratic notion) and the Congressional leadership’s desire to make sure everyone’s ass has plenty of coverage. Instead of a genuine and effective reform, we are expected to cheer-lead a watered down collection of compromises and hope against hope that even that isn’t blocked by the whims of a Senator or two.

This is ridiculous on its face. Yes, the Senate bill has to survive a filibuster, but for all the energy being expended in the direction of getting a sixty vote supermajority on cloture it may come as something of a shock that no one has actually filibustered the bill yet—in fact, the damn thing hasn’t even been introduced—and that the “assumed filibuster” standard introduced by Harry Reid and company when they regained the Senate majority is in no way a necessary or traditional means of handling the filibuster right, constituting a sort of automatic conservatising machine in Senate deliberations. Reinstitution of the old fashioned filibuster, with participating Senators reading home state telephone books aloud until the wee small hours of the morning, would change the face of this effort immediately and profoundly.

So would a renewed understanding of the whole idea of representation. As much derision as conservative Republicans have earned for their quixotic efforts in the New York 23rd (see, got it right this time) District Congressional race this last Tuesday, the take away for progressives should not be that a further submission to Democratic Party discipline is necessary for the furtherance of the progressive agenda in 2010. Instead, it should be a deeper commitment to the idea that our elected officials are elected to represent the will of the people electing them. Those representatives who fail to live by this standard should rightly be considered fair game for intraparty opposition efforts. The health care fight has given us a ready hit list of Democratic Senators and House members who have ignored the stated will of their constituencies in favor of campaign contributors and bipartisan niceties. We should not be afraid to use it come primary season. Unless and until the current Congressional majority proves to be an effective means of transmitting the will of the people into law, its maintenance needs to be a secondary consideration to the notion of establishing a majority that can.