Democrats are scrambling to use obscure and possibly illegal parliamentary procedures to pass health care reform because, they say, “Congress is broken.”
They plan to pass the bill with “reconciliation,” a shady maneuver to avoid the filibuster, or perhaps the “Slaughter Solution,” which, incredibly, would declare a bill passed when it isn’t. Democrats claim they have no choice but to resort to these tactics — gridlock and ossified rules make it impossible to get anything done.
Sen. Evan Bayh, D-Ind., complained about partisanship and congressional rules in a New York Times op-ed when he announced his retirement recently. And the liberal commentariat have been waging an organized campaign to eliminate the filibuster in the Senate and other procedural hurdles.
However, it’s the Democratic party that is broken, and it takes a great deal of hubris to confuse that with the problems of Congress.
People inside the Beltway are so invested in condemning rigid partisanship, they haven’t noticed that the Democrats have the opposite problem — their tent is so big, they cannot effectively govern. The extremes of the party are constantly being played against the middle.
In 2008, Sean Oxendine made this point at the Next Right blog. He cleverly compared American Conservative Union ratings, which rate members of Congress on a scale of one to 100 (with 100 being the most conservative), with data maintained by political scientist Keith Poole. Poole uses a computer algorithm to rank members of congress from conservative to liberal based on their voting record.
Compare the two metrics, and you find that Republicans are grouped much more tightly on the conservative end of the voting spectrum and, as a result, are much more likely to vote as a bloc. Democrats, on the other hand, are much less cohesive. The voting records of the 54 Blue Dog Democrats, for instance, are significantly more conservative than those of liberals representing urban districts.
But you don’t have to be an expert in computer algorithms to grasp how a lack of shared principles results in a governing problem for Democrats. Namely, how do you write a health care bill that will please Gene Taylor — a Mississippi Blue Dog who had an ACU rating of 56 last year, meaning he effectively voted with the GOP more than half the time — and Dennis Kucinich and Barbara Lee, who might as well be Marxists from Neptune?
This problem has also manifested itself in the Senate, where the liberal leadership has suffered a series of major embarrassments for having to bribe party moderates in exchange for their votes on health care legislation, e.g., Nebraska Sen. Ben Nelson (ACU rating of 44) and his infamous Cornhusker Kickback.
All of this points to uncomfortable truths for Democrats.
One, it’s hard to gather needed votes on progressive legislation when significant numbers in your caucus represent conservative districts and aren’t afraid to vote with the GOP. By this measure, health care reform is failing simply because it is unpopular, not because Democrats have yet to find the magic-bullet theory of parliamentary procedure.
Two, party unity is a feature, not a bug. If governing is about enacting an agenda or preventing the opposing one from being enacted, the more party unity, the better. To the extent that governing is about compromise, what incentive do Republicans have to compromise on health care legislation when substantial numbers of the opposition (not to mention the American people) are also against it?
Again, Congress isn’t broken. It works like this: Either you have the votes to pass legislation or you don’t. Rewriting the rules won’t help Democrats so much as undermine democracy.
Mark Hemingway is a editorial page staff writer for The Washington Examiner. He can be reached at [email protected].
