The road forward

19 Jan 2010

Frankly, I can’t claim to be shocked about the outcome of the special election here in MA. I’m appalled, but not terribly surprised. From all evidence, Coakley ran a bad campaign and Brown ran a good one. Even a solidly-Democratic state like this one can’t withstand that sort of treatment, and Brown was enough of a catch-all for people’s non-specific anger towards vague concepts like big government that he harnessed anger from both sides of the aisle. Democrats should have seen this coming.

More importantly, however, I don’t really care about Scott Brown. Yes, he has a truck. Yes, he doesn’t really seem to have any sort of useful policy ideas. In other words, he’s not really that different than any other sitting GOP Senator.

I guess what makes it different (theoretically) is the fact that we no longer have our magical awesome super-great-majority. But let’s face it, we couldn’t even get anything close to meaningful reform even with one. This won’t be that different

If we want to avoid a filibuster, we can try to get the House to vote on the existing Senate health care bill. The House Progressive Caucus is strong enough, however, that I doubt that would go through without a fuss, and right now, we need to just get it done so we can move on and have something to campaign on in 2010.

But after much thought, I’m not sure we want to avoid a filibuster. Just the threat of one so far has been enough to swing the Senate negotiations dramatically in favor of the GOP. What if we, as Obama promised during his campaign, televised every bit of what was going on on the Senate floor, and in factforced the GOP to filibuster? They could no longer claim that we were shoving it down America’s throat. We’d stand up and say “Look, you’re the one who’s denying a straight vote and a real debate. You want to have ‘em, let’s go, and then we’ll vote. If not, we’ll show every single person in America exactly where your interest lies.”

We’ve been playing games to try to avoid a filibuster up until now. We can’t avoid it any more unless we want to woo a Republican over, which is completely implausible. For crying out loud, they’re already promising to repeal the thing when they take power.

Now that we can’t avoid it any more, it’s time to look a GOP filibuster square in the eye. Give us your best shot.

I’m waiting and ready. America’s watching.