The crucial nature of the individual mandate for health care reform has drawn some helpful attention to the fact that universal coverage isn’t just a charity measure for the uninsured, but a way of creating a risk pool broad enough to lower costs generally, while also avoiding over-utilization of high-cost care options like emergency rooms. In fact, private insurance companies are among the most avid supporters of the individual mandate because it guarantees them new customers.
But as Peter Harbage explains at The New Republic today, a penalty-based coverage mandate isn’t the only way, or even the best way, to get more people insured:

[F]or all of the attention we’re paying to mandates, we’re not giving nearly enough attention to automatic enrollment and other innovations that can get people insured, rather than penalize them if they’re not. Ideally, we’ll get to a “culture of coverage” where everyone assumes they are supposed to have health insurance, much as everybody now assumes they are supposed to get primary education. The situation is quite similar, actually: We have truancy penalties, but most parents send their kids to school because the education system is affordable to families, easy to access, and social pressure says it is the right thing to do.

Automatic enrollment could not only make sure people are insured, but can also help steer them to the plan best designed for their medical and economic circumstances. They would be free to change coverage, but wouldn’t be forced to navigate the current highly complex system to get covered in the first place. It’s worth thinking about as we near the end-game of the health reform debate.

Now that every committee of jurisdiction in both Houses of Congress has reported health care reform legislation, it’s time for reform advocates to focus obsessively on one formidable “choke point” that could kill legislation: a Republican Senate filibuster supported by Democrats. This is true not only for progressives generally, but specifically for hard-core supporters of a “robust” public option. The odds of getting 60 senators to pre-commit to that kind of bill are roughly zero. The odds of getting 60 senators to allow a vote in which 50 senators support that kind of bill are much, much better.
That’s why I applaud blogger Mike Stark’s fairly successful effort to corner Sen. Mark Pryor of Arkansas on the very specific question of Pryor’s willingness to support a filibuster. Pryor allowed as how it would take a “crazy” development on the substance of the legislation to convince him to vote against cloture. That’s not an unconditional commitment, but it’s still pretty important. Other reform advocates should emulate Stark, and focus their questions and please to Democratic senators on the sole question of helping Republicans block a vote on the party’s and the Obama administration’s top domestic prioriity. How they vote on the bill itself is strictly secondary at this point, and completely irrelevant if cloture fails.
This issue is becoming even more critical and time-sensitive given Joe Lieberman’s broad hints that there is not any template for health care reform that he can support. You can get upset about that, or you can say you don’t give a damn how Lieberman votes on final passage of a health reform bill so long as he votes for cloture to allow it to come to the floor. When Lieberman was allowed to keep his committee chairmanship after campaigning for the Republican presidential candidate for president in 2008, it was with the implicit understanding that he’d vote with the caucus on procedural votes. Despite many recent efforts to create a 60-vote threshold for passage of legislation by making cloture votes synonymous with final passage votes, cloture is inherently and exclusively a procedural matter. There should be no excuse for “no” votes on cloture for something this important.
I unuderstand that many progressives remain focused on the public option, and fearful that the final congressional product will be unacceptable from their point of view. But that’s an entirely academic issue until such time as 60 votes are secured for cloture. Get that done, and then we can fight over which version of the public option can secure 218 votes in the House and 50 votes in the Senate, and can initiate meaningful and successful health care reform.

For much of this year, one of the surest bets in political circles has been that embattled New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine would go down to defeat at the hands of Republican former U.S. attorney Chris Christie. Aside from Christie’s (now tarnished) goo-goo rep as a corruption fighter, the thinking was that Corzine had a “ceiling” of somewhere in the low forties, thanks to persistently low approval ratings and the likelihood that most NJ voters had fixed opinions of the incumbents. Thus, for the first time in decades, a GOP candidate would get the late breaks in a NJ campaign, and end the party’s long losing streak in the Garden State.
Now the polls are all showing Corzine and Christie running neck-and-neck, with the big wild card being the double-digit support being attracted by independent candidate Chris Daggett.
At Politico today, Jonathan Martin looks at the race from Christie’s perspective, and focuses on the strategic dilemma faced by the GOP candidate in dealing with Daggett:

Christie, who had been running a traditional anti-incumbent campaign against Corzine, must now reckon with a perennial question faced by candidates who are imperiled by a lesser-known, third-party contender: To attack Daggett is to elevate him, effectively acknowledging that he’s a serious candidate and offering him free publicity. But ignoring him could amount to disregarding the most serious threat to Christie’s campaign, leaving Daggett to siphon away a significant amount of voters who are intent on registering their opposition to Corzine.

But Christie really doesn’t control that decision, since his major funding source, the Republican Governors’ Association, has already started going after Daggett with sledge hammers. It appears their theory is that attacks on Daggett as a “tax-and-spend liberal” will either flip Daggett voters to Christie, or perhaps even drive liberal voters who would otherwise support Corzine to the third-party candidate (who already has significant support from environmentalists). Again, the operative assumption is that Corzine’s vote has hit its “ceiling,” so there’s relatively little risk in drawing further attention to Daggett.
But you have to wonder: does Christie’s vote (now that he’s increasingly campaigning like a conventional conservative Republican) also have a “ceiling,” based on the Republican Party’s legendary handicaps in NJ?
This question shows why the outcome in NJ may have national significance, beyond the silly efforts of pundits to make every state race a referendum on Barack Obama, and the undoubtedly positive impact a Corzine win would have on Democrats who had written off the incumbent many months ago. If the Republican party “brand” is enough to sink a challenger against one of the most vulnerable opponents you’ll ever see, then Democrats aren’t the only party with a lot to worry about going into next year’s 2010 midterms.

With the entire U.S. political world engaged in handicapping the likely outcome of the health care reform debate, while others focus on the Obama administration’s impending decision on strategy and troop levels for Afghanistan, there hasn’t been much attention paid outside advocacy groups to prospects for action on climate change legislation (passed, as you might recall, by the House during the summer).
The general prognosis has been pretty negative, in part because of the extreme difficulty encountered in getting the revised Waxman-Markey legislation through the House (requiring compromises that left a lot of advocates cold or lukewarm), and in part because the Senate was so absorbed with health reform.
But last weekend the leading Senate climate change legislation advocate, John Kerry, threw a change-up that will at the very least require a recalibration of expectations, by signing onto a New York Times op-ed with Republican Sen. Lindsay Graham offering a new “deal”: combining a cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions with provisions liberalizing offshore oil drilling and relaxing regulations on nuclear power development.
The op-ed is worth reading in its entirety, but aside from offering conservatives the carrot of more U.S. oil and nuclear power, it also bluntly threatens the stick of unileratal action on climate change by the Obama administration:

Failure to act comes with another cost. If Congress does not pass legislation dealing with climate change, the administration will use the Environmental Protection Agency to impose new regulations. Imposed regulations are likely to be tougher and they certainly will not include the job protections and investment incentives we are proposing.
The message to those who have stalled for years is clear: killing a Senate bill is not success; indeed, given the threat of agency regulation, those who have been content to make the legislative process grind to a halt would later come running to Congress in a panic to secure the kinds of incentives and investments we can pass today. Industry needs the certainty that comes with Congressional action.

This threat may actually be welcomed by hard-core Republican pols who would lick their chops at the idea of “bureaucrats” end-running Congress to set up a cap-and-trade system, but not by those industries that would actually be affected, particularly since the business community is already divided on the issue.
The op-ed also discusses the national security case for action on climate change, and as Brad Plumer at The Vine notes, this argument polls well, has some appeal to conservatives, and also explains why Foreign Relations Committee chairman Kerry has for the moment displaced Barbara Boxer of CA as the “face” of the climate change initiative in the Senate.
Meanwhile, Nate Silver goes through the Senate membership and tries to assess which specific senators might be moved by a new bipartisan “deal” on climate change:

So what does this get the Democrats? It gets them Linsday Graham’s vote, and possibly Lisa Murkowski’s. It takes Mark Begich from a leaner to a likely yes. It might encourage Mary Landrieu, and possibly George LeMieux of Florida, to look more sympathetically at the bill. Then there are a whole host of more remote possibilities: Isakson of Georgia, and perhaps Cochran and Wicker of Mississippi or Burr of North Carolina; none of those votes are likely, but they become more plausible with offshore drilling in place. Overall, it seems to be worth something like 2-4 votes at the margin.
That would give the Kerry-Graham bill a fighting chance, especially if an additional vote or two — possibly John McCain’s — can also be picked up as a result of the nuclear energy compromise. Of course, that’s assuming that no liberals would rebel against the new provisions, but the opposition to both offshore drilling and nuclear energy seems to be fairly soft in the liberal caucus

On this last point, it’s worth noting that Dave Roberts of Grist, a highly credible warrior for action on climate change, adjudges the concessions on oil and nuclear energy “an affordable price [to pay] for the benefits of passing a bill.”
If nothing else, Kerry’s gambit has shuffled the deck, complicated Republican claims that Democrats are uninterested in genuine bipartisanship, and offered a sign of potential progress in advance of international climate change negotiations in December. All in all, it’s a good example of strategic audacity on an extraordinarily wonky issue, and well worth watching.

There was an interesting blogospheric exchange yesterday between Matt Yglesias and Nate Silver about the differences between the two parties’ Senate Caucuses on disciplinary issues. Matt expressed a very common progressive envy for the willingness of Republicans to threaten serious sanctions for heterodoxy on key issues:

The Senate Republican caucus is organized, like the House caucuses of both parties, like a partisan political organization whose objective is to advance the shared policy objectives of the party. The Senate Democratic caucus, by contrast, is organized like a fun country club trying to recruit members. Join Team Democrat and Vote However You Want Without Consequence!

Nate, however, wonders how effective Republican Senate hardball tactics have been over the years in building a strong and loyal Caucus. Taking the 10 GOP senators deemed (by one credible measurement) most “liberal” in 2001, here’s Nate’s count of what’s happened to them:

[Of the ten, there have been] two defections (Jeffords and Specter), two losses (Chafee and Smith), two retirements (Warner and Fitzgerald), two Senators that the party can pretty much no longer rely upon (Snowe and Collins), and finally, two who have indeed become more conservative and remained loyal to their party (McCain and Cochran). That’s a .200 batting average, which isn’t good in baseball and isn’t any better in the Senate.

Perhaps it’s just a coincidence that the size of the Senate Republican Caucus has also shrunk by 20% since 2001, but Nate makes the excellent point that enforced unity has its limits as a party-building exercise. Probably the best response to that kind of argument is simply that one joins a political party in the first place (particularly if you are a progressive) to get things done in the real world. If the “big tent” keeps thwarting that objective in fundamental ways, then its size is pretty much irrelevant.

As noted in the update to the last staff post, Sen. Olympia Snowe voted for the revised Baucus Bill in the Senate Finance Committee today. To hear Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell, Snowe just wanted to keep the ball rolling, and didn’t necessarily like a thing about the bill itself.
At the same time, the National Republican Senatorial Committee came out with this blast at Sen. Blanche Lincoln for casting the exact same vote:

“It very troubling that Senator Lincoln went back on her word and decided to vote in favor of a bill that will ultimately shift costs to voters in Arkansas who are still struggling to make ends meet,” said NRSC spokeswoman Amber Wilkerson Marchand. “Despite her assertions to the contrary, Blanche Lincoln has effectively opened the door with this vote for a government-run program that will come between her constituents and their doctors and potentially cause over 88 million Americans to lose their coverage.”

You don’t have to be Aristotle to understand the logical contradiction between these two spins from the GOP side of the Senate.

The progressive zeitgeist during the last week has leaned pretty strongly in the direction of a health care reform system that would provide for a strong public option that states could either opt into or opt out of, as opposed to a “triggered” public option where, in theory at least, objective market conditions would determine what happens in particular states.
Interestingly enough, one of the Democratic senators considered shaky on health reform, Bill Nelson of Florida, said today he favored the “trigger” over any state option. When you look at the state Nelson represents, you can perhaps understand it. At present, Florida has a Republican governor and a Republican-controlled legislature, and is facing a highly competitive 2010 election cycle. (For the record, I’ve been raising my own alarms about the impact of a state option on the dynamics of the 2010 elections at the state level).
Why isn’t this point of view held more generally? It could be because the “trigger” idea emerged earlier than the various state option schemes, so that insistence on an “untriggered” public option became part of the general campaign against abandonment of the public option altogether. Or it may be because many progressives, citing polls, think the public option is so popular that resistance in the states can be overcome.
I don’t quite understand why anyone would assume that state legislatures are more resistant than the U.S. Senate to the blandishments and pressure of the forces opposing the public option, but it’s a legitimate argument in a debate that really needs to break out among all advocates of health care reform. Barring a “robust” national system, the public option is in fact going to be “triggered” in parts of the country one way or another. The question is who or what does the “triggering,” under what sorts of circumumstances.

Like a lot of progressive observers, I have obtained an impression of where conservatives and the Republican Party stand today from a variety of sources, including Republican politicians, right-wing journalists and bloggers, friends and family members of the conservative persuasion, and what I’ve learned about the conservative zeitgeist over many years.
Conor Friedersdorf is suppyling a new and fascinating source, via a short questionnaire he has distributed to Republican county chairmen around the country. He is posting responses, verbatim, at a new website called The GOP Speaks. Given the vast number of county chairs, no one response necessarily means a lot, but cumulatively (he’s up to 21 of them by now), they are very interesting, and generally reinforce the impression that grassroots GOPers are driving the pols to the right, not following them. Virtually all of them attribute socialist motives to the Obama administration, and most (while often distancing themselves from Bill O’Reilly) approve of the abrasive messages being dished out by right-wing cable types. There are a few calls for a “big tent party,” but only in the context of avoiding disputes between hard-core conservatives of different hues; quite a few denounce RINOs and explicitly call for a move to the Right.
As Dana Goldstein has pointed out, Friedersdorf’s respondents illustrate the striking extent to which conservatives have internalized the idea–which used to be a real fringe preoccupation–that contemporary liberals aren’t just proposing bad policies for the country, but are consciously and effectively destroying constitutional government. She suggests, plausibly, that some of this mindset may reflect the influence of Ron Paul and his followers, and perhaps also indicates an eclipse in the power of social conservatives. I’m not sure about this latter contention; it’s the right-to-lifers, after all, who have in the past most notably argued that the constitution was being shredded by “liberal activists” who were trying to remake America in the image of secular Europe if not Nazi Germany.
In any event, it’s a good idea to check in now and then on Friedersdorf’s unvarnished responses, particularly if you don’t have occasion to spend much time around grassroots conservatives in your daily life.