Given the importance of Rep. Bart Stupak (D-MI) and his allies in the struggle for health care reform in the House, it’s worth thinking a bit about what actually makes him tick. A very revealing moment came yesterday, when Stupak blew off a communication from Catholic religious orders representing 59,000 Catholic nuns urging approval of the health reform bill. According to Fox News’ report of Stupak’s reaction:

The conservative Democrat dismissed the action by the White House saying, “When I’m drafting right to life language, I don’t call up the nuns.” He says he instead confers with other groups including “leading bishops, Focus on the Family, and The National Right to Life Committee.”

Stupak’s meaning couldn’t be clearer: in figuring out his position on health reform, he’s not identifying with fellow Catholics who are struggling to balance various ethical considerations; he’s acting as an agent for the Right-To-Life Movement and its often-machiavellian political game plans. It’s particularly interesting that he mentioned Focus on the Family, the right-wing evangelical Protestant “ministry,” as a greater influence on him than 59,000 nuns.
Why does this matter? Well, aside from the fact that any serious ethical review of the bill has to include the positive impact of reform on maternal and childhood health, it’s also pretty clear that the net effect of the bill will be to reduce federal subsidies for abortion. As Matt Yglesias reminds us today, current law massively subsidizes abortions via the tax exclusion for employer-sponsored private health insurance, which frequently includes abortion coverage. By encouraging (especially over time) people to move from employer-sponsored coverage to the new health exchanges for individual coverage, which under the Senate language will make insurance for abortion exceptionally inconvenient, it’s a sure bet that the overall use of federal money to pay for policies that include abortion services will decline. Indeed, a group of twenty-five prominent pro-life Catholic and Protestant leaders recently penned a letter describing claims that the pending bill would expand abortion subsidies as “misinformation.”
So official right-to-lifer opposition to the health reform bill isn’t really “about” abortion. It’s “about” the desire of the Right-To-Life political movement to score a big symbolic triumph, and it’s “about” the non-abortion political agenda of some of the movement’s constituent members. For a group like Focus on the Family, to which Stupak listens so closely, that agenda includes the Republican takeover of Congress and a wide variety of right-wing policy measures that have zero to do with abortion.

So finally, the Congressional Budget Office is issuing its cost estimate of the final health care package (the Senate-passed bill plus the reconciliation “fix”) today, clearing the way for a crucial House vote. The numbers are very encouraging, showing the package will save more than either House or Senate bills (particularly in the “out years”), and cover more Americans (95%) than the Senate bill.
According to Ezra Klein, this should make it possible for the House to vote on Sunday. There will actually be two votes: one on the “rule” for passage of the reconciliation “fix,” which will in effect be a vote on the Senate bill (since it’s the rule that will “deem” the Senate bill as having passed if the reconciliation bill passes), and a second on reconciliation itself. If both measures pass, then action will move on to the Senate, where Republicans are planning to use amendments to delay passage of the reconciliation bill as long as is possible, but where the final result is pretty much assured.
The teeth-grinding frenzy of the next 72 hours will be a sight to behold.

There’s been a lot of buzz, mostly in the progressive blogosphere, over the news that the proprietor of the notable right-wing RedState blogging site, Erick Erickson, of Macon, Georgia, has been given a perch on a new CNN show hosted by John King.
Most of the talk has featured some of Erick’s more colorful utterances, particularly his description of Supreme Court Justice David Souter as well, a child molester who also enjoys carnal knowledge of certain barnyard animals, and his reference to First Lady Michelle Obama as a “Marxist harpy.” As a fairly regular reader of RedState, if only to get the juices going on slow days, I can say I’m most impressed with the casual cranky extremism of Erick’s stuff on a day-in, day-out, basis, and particularly his bully-boy determination to play a role in Republican primaries around the country. His obsession, for example, with the defeat of Republican Sen. Bob Bennett of Utah, a pretty conventional conservative by most standards, has long since passed Carthago delenda est levels and must be viewed as a matter of sheer ego, if not a clinical disorder. The sheer-ego interpretation finds support in another recent Erickson encyclical, wherein he judiciously gave Mitt Romney a partial indulgence for his endorsement of Bennett upon the news that the Mittster had also endorsed RedState favorite Nikki Haley, a candidate for governor of South Carolina (in the real world, Romney predictably endorsed both for the obvious reason that they both endorsed him in 2008).
Last month I spoke at a municipal association meeting in Georgia, and was asked by a lot of people there how seriously Erick, a city councilman in Macon, was taken by national political types (much as Georgians used to ask me the same question about Newt Gingrich when he first exploded on the national scene). Seems he was already letting it be known that he was entertaining various national media offers, and was about to go big-time. I have a hard time begrudging any blogger a shot at mainstream media exposure. But it’s a sign of the times that CNN filled a mandatory conservative slot with a guy like Erick, who seems to alternate between moods of blind rage and smug triumphalism, and who (like me) also has a face made for radio.
We’ll see how ol’ Erick handles the transition to a national audience composed of people who don’t already agree with him. But he couldn’t have been happy with CNN’s press release, which lauded him as a spokesman for small-town values “who still lives in small-town America.” This will not go over well in Macon, a proud old city whose metropolitan area has a population of close to a quarter million people.

One of the Republicans’ favorite bashing points regarding the Democratic health care reform package is that it does too little too late. Well, Rep. John B. Larson (CT-1), chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, has the antidote for that particular lie in his HuffPo post, “The Top Ten Immediate Benefits You’ll Get When Health Care Reform Passes.” Larson keeps it short and sweet, so HCR supporters can have a one-pager they can tap to win over fence-sitters:

* Prohibit pre-existing condition exclusions for children in all new plans;
* Provide immediate access to insurance for uninsured Americans who are uninsured because of a pre-existing condition through a temporary high-risk pool;
* Prohibit dropping people from coverage when they get sick in all individual plans;
* Lower seniors prescription drug prices by beginning to close the donut hole;
* Offer tax credits to small businesses to purchase coverage;
* Eliminate lifetime limits and restrictive annual limits on benefits in all plans;
* Require plans to cover an enrollee’s dependent children until age 26;
* Require new plans to cover preventive services and immunizations without cost-sharing;
* Ensure consumers have access to an effective internal and external appeals process to appeal new insurance plan decisions;
* Require premium rebates to enrolees from insurers with high administrative expenditures and require public disclosure of the percent of premiums applied to overhead costs.

The immediate benefits Larson cites are so good, so light-years ahead of where we are now. that memorizing just five of them and sharing the information with uncommitted voters should impress many of them enough to win their support. Emphasizing them to uncommitted House members can’t hurt either.

Since the impression persists that Democratic “moderates” are the big problem in the House with passage of health reform legislation, it’s worth noting that a prominent “moderate” (or as he would call himself, a “pragmatic progressive”) has issued a strong call for the party to pull together and get this bill done. Will Marshall, president of the Progressive Policy Institute (with which, as it happens, I have also been affiliated since 1995) has an op-ed up at Politico suggesting that it’s no time to point fingers about which Democrats have made enactment of health reform possible, and certainly no time for any Democrats to beg a pass or take a walk. If reform fails, says Marshall:

Labor unions, Blue Dogs, single-payer stalwarts, favor-extorting moderates, Latinos, anti-abortion Roman Catholics — it’s no use singling out one culprit, because all the party’s tribes will have contributed to the debacle.
By holding firm for comprehensive reform, President Barack Obama has put his party, especially House Democrats, on the spot. He’s asking doubters to put their party’s collective interest above their personal interests and views….

Marshall has a specific message for House Democrats running in hostile political territory:

While party unity isn’t the highest political value, being a member of a party does carry some obligation to its fundamental principles. Tactically, it makes sense for party leaders to give Democrats in tough districts a pass on tough votes — as long as there are votes to spare.
That’s not the case on health care reform. Speaker Nancy Pelosi needs every vote she can get.

In the end, all the political calculations being made about the consequences of this or that House Member voting for health reform fade before the big political reality of the consequences to all Democrats if they flinch before the urgent task just ahead:

Obama was elected on a promise to tackle the nation’s biggest challenges — with health reform as Exhibit A. Independent voters have drifted away from his winning 2008 coalition during the past year, in part because they are losing confidence in the Democrats’ ability to govern.
The party may thus have more to fear from wasting a year to produce nothing than from passing a controversial bill. Failure won’t just make Democrats look bad; it will also vindicate the Republicans’ hyperpartisan campaign to torpedo comprehensive reform.
Sometimes, parties gain even when they lose — especially when they stand on principle. The odds facing Obama and Pelosi and company are daunting.
But the task is doable — as long as enough Democrats recognize that their careers won’t amount to much if their party can’t deliver on its core commitments.

That’s what’s at stake in the House vote on health care reform.

Another day, another angry right-wing challenge to “establishment” Republicans once thought to be very conservative. In Colorado, the two parties held precinct caucuses accompanied, as always, by a straw poll among candidates for statewide office. On the Republican side, prohibitive front-runner for the Senate and former Lt. Gov. Jane Norton ran almost exactly even with self-styled Insurgent from the Right Ken Buck, a district attorney who’s an ally of famed immigrant-baiter Tom Tancredo.
Other than her backing of a controversial ballot measure to relax Colorado’s draconian tax limitation law, Norton’s main sin seems to be her friendship with John McCain, also under attack from the Right.
Meanwhile, on the Democratic side, former state House Speaker Andrew Romanoff actually beat appointed Sen. Michael Bennet in the caucus straw poll. This, however, was no surprise; Bennet is a political newcomer while Romanoff has deep roots among the party activists who attend these events.
Neither straw poll is necessarily predictive of what will happen in the primaries for the Senate that will be held in August. On the Democratic side, it’s noteworthy than the senator whose term is being filled this year, current Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, didn’t win the caucus straw poll in 2006, and still went on to win the primary handily.
But if nothing else, the Colorado results kept underdogs alive, and on the Republican side, confirmed that this will be a difficult year for anyone with the dreaded “E for Establishment” label.

One of the best ways to lose your mind is to track the whip counts measuring the line-up of House member votes on health care reform. Right after you read a convincingly optimistic projection that the Democratic package is a done deal, you will find an equally persuasive case that it is doomed. After going round and round with this game for a few days, I have to conclude that nobody in journalism, msm or otherwise, can make a reliable call.
It would not surprise me, however, if Speaker Pelosi or Rep. Clyburn had the real skinny, such as it is. But I wouldn’t read too much into their confident public pronouncements, which could be true or just an effort to crank up a bandwagon psychology. What seems fairly certain, however, is that it is going to be a very close vote. And what’s important to health care reform supporters is that we have work to do — in generating constituent pressure on House members, specifically those who have been called ‘undecided’ — in the broadest sense of the term.
So where do you go? Reid Wilson’s Hotline post, “Advice To Dems: Sell The Bill,” has a useful insight,

A survey conducted across vulnerable Dem districts shows most voters warm to the proposal once they learn more about it, according to a copy of a memo obtained from Capitol Hill and political sources. Included in the poll were 92 districts held by Frontline Dems and Blue Dogs, districts where Dem incumbents would feel the most heat for supporting the legislation.
Dems will target white middle-aged voters, white women under 65 and white married women. Those groups respond most positively when Dems explain what is in the bill, pollsters found.
The poll, conducted by prominent Dem pollster John Anzalone, who conducted some polling for Pres. Obama during the ’08 campaign, shows a plurality of voters currently oppose the health care bill; just 35% of swing voters favor the bill based on what they know about it. But when they hear more about it, 51% of all voters, and 50% of swing voters support the measure…when they hear more about it, 51% of all voters, and 50% of swing voters support the measure.

We knew that the HCR package polls better after respondents actually understand its key provisions. But it does help to know which white voters are most open to it, and pro-reform activists should take note. In terms of messaging, Wilson explains John Anzalone’s observation about his poll:

Dems should focus on provisions of the bill that require coverage even if someone has a pre-existing condition, and on a provision that requires members of Congress to have the same coverage as other Americans, Anzalone writes in the polling memo.
“Not only are they the most popular components of reform among voters overall, but also among key audiences, including seniors. Based on these results, any messaging in support of reform — to any audience — should prominently highlight these components,” Anzalone and pollster Matt Hogan wrote.
And though Dems have taken heat for the process by which health care legislation has progressed this year, expect the party to argue that their efforts to allow a majority vote on the bill were justified. Those who back reform “should avoid process debates,” the pollsters write, but they say Dems can use the argument that no 60-vote requirement is in the Constitution effectively.

It may be late in the game for mass mobilization of constituents. But calls to leaders and activists of the aforementioned constituencies, urging them to more vigorously lobby uncomitted House members, might do some good.
Apropos of my TDS post yesterday on the influence of African American voters in Blue Dog districts, Peter Wallsten and Jean Spencer note in their Wall St. Journal article “Opinions Harden on Health,” that a new WSJ/NBC survey indicates that “majorities of African-Americans and liberal Democrats, as well as a plurality of Latinos, would be less likely to vote for their representative in Congress if he or she voted against the health-care plan.” In this regard it’s encouraging that Dems are reportedly running pro-reform radio ads on Tom Joyner’s nationally syndicated programs in key cities.
Tomorrow will bring more optimistic and pessimistic prognoses for the fate of Democratic HCR. The important challenge for pro-reform Dems is to shrug off positive and negative predictions and do something to generate phone calls, emails and visits to the offices of uncommitted House members.

One of the important sideshows in the 2010 campaign cycle is the intervention of potential 2012 Republican presidential candidates in current GOP primaries.
Sarah Palin has received considerable attention for endorsing Tea Party favorite and libertarian scion Rand Paul for the Senate in Kentucky over Mitch McConnell’s buddy Trey Grayson, and also for endorsing her old running-mate, John McCain, in his fight with right-wing talk show host and former U.S. Rep. J.D. Hayworth.
Mike Huckabee has been more aggressive in his endorsements, mainly by supporting candidates who endorsed him in 2008. Huck struck gold by getting out early in support of Tea Party/conservative icon Marco Rubio’s challenge to Charlie Crist in Florida–long before Rubio began crushing Crist in the polls. Beyond that, Huck has endorsed controversial gubernatorial candidates in two early 2012 caucus/primary states: Lt. Gov. Andre (Stray Animals) Bauer, and Iowa social conservative Bob Vander Plaats. The latter is an especially interesting endorsement; if Vander Plaats upsets former Gov. Terry Branstad (who is closely affiliated with Mitt Romney supporters in that state) in the Iowa gubernatorial primary in June, Huck will be in good shape to repeat his 2008 victory in the Iowa Caucuses.
Like Huckabee, Mitt Romney has kept his endorsements so far limited to 2008 allies (with the exception of John McCain). Those include front-running California gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman and longshot Alabama gubernatorial candidate Kay Ivy. But two recent Romney endorsements (again, of people who endorsed Mitt in 2008) have drawn national attention: embattled incumbent Sen. Bob Bennett of Utah (a Romney hotbed, for obvious reasons), for whom conservatives have long knives out, and then state Rep. Nikki Haley of South Carolina, a big favorite of the right-wing blogosphere.
Meanwhile, Tim Pawlenty, after doing the Right thing by endorsing conservative Doug Hoffmann in a red-hot New York special election last year, announced he would eschew further interventions in competitive Republican primaries. But he made an exception for John McCain, presumably after ensuring he would receive cover for this step from Palin and Romney.
If Hayworth manages to beat McCain, he won’t owe any 2012 candidates a thing. But there are plenty of other competitive primaries later this year where the presidentials haven’t weighed in, and the chess game of endorsements will be very interesting.

This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galston is cross-posted from The New Republic.
Two analyses released late last week underscore the rising importance of debt, both private and public, to average Americans. On Thursday, the Fed reported that after nearly doubling to $13.7 trillion between 2000 and 2008, household debt fell in 2009 for the first time since record-keeping began in 1945. Because household debt rose so much faster than disposable income during that period, debt soared from 90 percent of disposable income to a stunning 130.6 percent before falling back to 122.5 percent at the end of 2009. Much of the decline results from the forced liquidation of debt through housing foreclosures and credit card terminations; the rest reflects the use of higher household savings to pay down debt.
While this is a good start, households have a long way to go before reaching a sustainable balance between debt and income. With normal interest rates, many economists believe, the average household can afford debt totaling about 100 percent of disposable income. If so, the household sector has worked off only one quarter of the excess debt it accumulated during the past decade, and the economy faces another few years of foreclosures, stringent credit, and higher household savings. While laying the basis for renewed growth down the road, these trends suggest the continuation of a below-average recovery for some time to come.
As citizens begin to recover from their own debt binge, they are becoming increasingly concerned about the government’s. A Gallup survey out Friday showed that 31 percent of Americans think unemployment is “the most important problem facing the country today,” with the economy in general in second place at 24 percent and health care at 20 percent. The federal budget deficit was a distant fifth, at 8 percent. But when Americans were asked what they think will be “the most important problem facing our nation 25 years from now,” more (14 percent) named the federal budget deficit than any other issue. Gallup notes that “[t]his is the first time the federal budget deficit has topped the list of future problems, and indeed the first time it has exceeded 5 percent.”
For decades, the conventional wisdom has been that concern over public-sector budget deficits and debt was confined to a handful of elected officials and policy wonks. Although Ross Perot challenged that belief in the early 1990s, the consequences of his insurgency soon faded. But now, the massive spending and debt accumulation the government has used to save the financial system and stabilize the economy are in the process of effecting a sea-change in public attitudes. While President Obama’s fiscal commission may well deadlock, the problem that called it into being isn’t going away, and neither are the public’s concerns. The party that masters the emerging new politics of deficits and debt will seize the mantle of national leadership.

I know, I know, paying attention to anything Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) says is a bit lazy, since she offers up irrational outrages on a near daily basis. But her remarks suggesting that Americans don’t have to comply with health care legislation if it’s enacted via procedures she doesn’t like really do blaze some new trails for the American Right–or at least trails not pursued since the early 1960s, when segregationists urged noncompliance with Supreme Court decisions and civil rights laws.
Here’s Bachmann flirting with jail-time in defense of the great American principle of unregulated private health insurance, or whatever it is she’s standing for:

If they pass the bill legitimately, then yes, we have to follow the law — until we repeal it. But if they pass it illegitimately, then the bill is illegitimate, and we don’t have to lay down for this. It’s not difficult to figure out. So if for some reason they’re able to get their votes this week and pass this 2,700-page Senate bill — if they get it, trillions of dollars is what it’s gonna cost, when we didn’t vote on it, we need to tell them a message: That if they get away with this, they will be able to get away with anything — with anything. And you can’t say you voted on a bill when you didn’t, because it’s fraud. But we are not helpless here. We are not helpless, there are things that we can do.

What Bachmann is thundering about here specifically are reports that the House may vote on a reconciliation bill to “fix” the Senate bill, and then by a Rules Committee provision “deem” the Senate bill itself as having passed the House via efforts to amend it. Turns out the “deem and pass” strategy was used by Republicans during the Bush administration to enact a debt limit increase–never a popular vote–so there is, ahem, some bipartisan precedent for the procedure. And for all the talk about its sneakiness, it should be remembered that it is being considered not because of some substantive concerns about a “fixed” Senate bill, but because House members fear the Senate will just celebrate House passage of their bill and not bother to get around to the “fix.” In other words, it’s all procedural mumbo jumbo that’s unrelated to real health care reform. Any House member voting for the “fix” is, in fact, going to be held responsible by Republicans for supporting “ObamaCare,” so conservatives are being more than a little disingenous in claiming that “deem and pass” is some sort of devilish trick to avoid accountability.
In any event, the courts are where such matters should be thrashed out, not the streets. And by suggesting that her own view of “deem and pass” as representing “tyranny” should trump the law of the land, Bachmann is taking a fateful step towards the revolutionary posture that her Tea Party allies have been hinting at all along.
I’m reminded of an incident back in Georgia some time ago when Congress had enacted a tax bill that imposed a state-by-state volume limitation on the use of tax-exempt financing for private development projects. I was part of a state government team that designed Georgia’s system for implementing this law, and after a public briefing on the new rules in one locale, a local development official replied: “We appreciate y’all coming down here to explain all this, but we think we’ll just use the old system.” We decided not to humiliate the guy by pointing out that the IRS wouldn’t exactly let him “use the old system,” but instead informed him of that privately.
I hope someone informs Michele Bachmann and her listeners that she doesn’t get to pick and choose which laws are “valid.” And if she’s willing to go to the hoosegow to resist ObamaCare, there are quite a few other Americans who think the supremacy of law is a rather important principle who will be happy to accomodate her.