Oh, no, no, Max Baucus wasn’t drunk, leftist bloggers are now saying about a speech he gave on the Senate floor. And maybe not. Maybe this Democrat senator always slurs his words, makes insulting, obnoxious arguments, loses track of what he is saying and seems clumsy when he is sober.
If you believe that, you might like to buy the Capitol dome from me.
The evidence is in the video circulating on the Internet, and that is pretty much where you will have to stop. Major news outlets seem mostly to be avoiding the subject even as the editorial pages of many of them applaud a bigger sin in which Baucus participated. That would be Senate passage of a perilous, potentially evil health bill.
In his speech, the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee blearily accused Senate Republicans of lacking the courage to join in passing the multitrillion-dollar, 2,000-page Senate monstrosity posing as a cure for all that ails our health system. How about we all pause for a moment to assess that conclusion?
It is courageous to add what amounts to a new, hyper-expensive entitlement to the federal budget at a time when mounting debt could lead to economic ruination? It is courageous to vote for legislation so obscure and complicated that very few people if anyone fully understands all the implications of everything in it?
It is courageous to buy votes for this abomination in the Senate with deals of a kind that may fall short of criminality but are most certainly morally rotten?
But wait a second — didn’t Baucus himself once appear reticent to buy into something as fiscally reckless as the Senate bill turned out to be? I recollect as much, and I recollect, too, that Republicans came up with a number of ideas that weren’t getting anywhere, not even something as simple and obviously needed as reforming the system by which lawyers too often exceed the bounds of justice in extracting enormous sums from doctors and hospitals in malpractice suits.
But wait a second — didn’t Baucus himself once appear reticent to buy into something as fiscally reckless as the Senate bill turned out to be? I recollect as much, and I recollect, too, that Republicans came up with a number of ideas that weren’t getting anywhere, not even something as simple and obviously needed as reforming the system by which lawyers too often exceed the bounds of justice in extracting enormous sums from doctors and hospitals in malpractice suits.
The only way in which Republicans could have joined the Democratic revelry was to go along with a sweeping, big-government spend-athon that will inevitably bring disaster our way. I happened across a list of 12 approaches conservatives both in and out of government had come up with to deal with the central faults of our present system, none of which Democrats were about to give serious consideration.
Most struck me as reasonable. My favorite is shifting employer tax breaks to individuals along with outright grants as necessary. The transition would have to be gradual and would entail unpleasant disruption, I suspect, but in the end you would have universal health insurance at no additional federal cost.
If the Republicans did not embrace the Democratic statism, Baucus finally did, but it surely wasn’t courage that took him there.
It was more likely go-along-to-get-along politics. It was the well-taught congressional practice of look the other way. It was loyalty to party and a president over loyalty to principle and the general welfare.
And unless I am wrong and he really came to be a true believer, you have to ask where his conscience was in all of this. In a least one tirade, it at least looks as if he found a way to dull it.
Examiner Columnist Jay Ambrose is a former Washington opinion writer and editor of two dailies. He can be reached at: [email protected].
