Reconciliation

Some things are hard to reconcile...

I'm big on individual liberties. As a necessary caveat to that, I believe in limited government. When government expands with unnecessary laws and by doing unnecessary things, it leaves a little less liberty for the rest of us. My favorite example is the trans fat war waged by my former home city, and a number of other cities as well. I don't know exactly what trans fats are, but I know they're delicious. I don't have a problem with the government forcing foods to be honest about how bad they are for us, but once they've done that, if people still want to eat crap, get fat and die young, that's their right (it's honestly hard for me to believe anyone would disagree with me on this, but I know people do).

The difficult thing for me is, I've got a bit of dictator in me too. Specifically, if I were the President, I would feel strongly that my administration and I should be allowed to do whatever we want and everyone should shut up and let us. I wouldn't actually act that way if I was the President (well probably not, maybe not) but that's what I'd be thinking. Usually, these two somewhat conflicting impulses are easy to reconcile, because I'm not going to be the President, so limited government it is. But it gets harder when we have a President like Barack Obama, who I like and who I think is a smart guy and who I think probably knows what he's doing. Luckily, I don't actually agree with the President and his party on a lot of things, so even though I like him, I'm still pretty firmly in favor of limiting his power.

I'm thinking about reconciliation now because there's suddenly a lot of talk about Senate Democrats using the reconciliation process to pass health care reform. The President is meeting with Republicans again Thursday, this time Senate Republicans and this time specifically to talk about health care. I expect it to be mildly entertaining, but not as great as the smackdown the President laid on House Republicans last month. I also expect it to get us nowhere in terms of getting closer to passing a bill.

Sidenote: I wish the President would do this kind of thing on the really stupid Republican talking points, like how lots of Republicans say they don't believe in evolution (I'm sure lots of Democrats say this too, but I'm picking on Republicans for now). Recently, Olbermann threw out a statistic that said 38% of people in Texas think that humans were created in our present form about 10,000 years ago. 51% of people in Texas (and yes, I'm accepting Texas as a reasonable proxy for "Republicans") don't believe in evolution (what do the 13% of people who don't believe in evolution but also don't think people were created 10,000 years ago believe?). 30% of people in Texas believe humans and dinosaurs lived at the same time. That last one always gets me. 3 out of 10 people think the Flintstones was a documentary (I may have stolen that joke from Bill Maher, I don't care, it's funny) Do you think if I stop believing in Texas I can just make it go away?

Anyway, health care is something I'm a little conflicted about too. I'm so tired of hearing about it, but it's just as important as it was six months ago and we're not really any closer to a solution than we were six months ago, or six decades ago for that matter.

On one hand, I know we need a change. It's ridiculous that so many people in this country don't have health insurance. And I'm not so quick to call health care reform an unnecessary expansion of government because, as I've argued before, the private sector sucks at providing health insurance. I think that's an argument the Democrats are missing out on. We don't really need health care reform. Health care in this country is awesome. Hospitals are great, we have the best doctors, we have great technology. We need health insurance reform. It's not the care that needs fixing, it's the access. I think people (some people anyway) who already have good access would be more reasonable about this issue if they understood that this isn't really about them. No wait, that's a terrible strategy, it's damn near impossible to get most people to care about anything that isn't about them. I retract that suggestion.

On the other hand, everything I know about the current Senate health care bill tells me we're getting a crappy bill at the end of this process. I don't want to get into a whole thing here about everything that might appear in a hypothetical health care bill, so just one example. I hate the individual mandate, I really do. The idea that the government can force people to by a product is insane. And don't come back at me with auto insurance, the government can only force you to by auto insurance if you make the free choice to own a car. I know it's hard to make insurance affordable if healthy people don't have to buy it, and I don't necessarily have an answer for that, but I still don't like it. If I were a Senator, I'd probably vote against the next health care bill that comes up if it's as compromised as I think it will be. Why? Because individual mandate+no public option=big fat multi-billion dollar gift to insurance companies and I don't care what else is in the bill, I wouldn't put my name on that.

Having said that, as someone who probably won't like the final bill, do I think Senate Democrats should use reconciliation to pass a bill? Of course they should. Why? Because I want the people in charge to either believe in what they're doing or go away. This is where the dictator in me comes out again. Democrats, if you think you've got an idea that's best for the country, than just do it and live with the consequences. All this nonsense of looking for compromise and political cover, that just tells me Democrats really have no confidence in their own ideas and they'd very much like to not be held accountable if something doesn't work out. If that's how you approach decisions, get a job which doesn't require you to make any.

People ask me why I don't change my party affiliation considering how often I disagree with and mock Republicans. This is why. Everything Democrats do strikes me as cowardly. When Republicans get power, they tend to do things (and sure, starting with Reagan, a lot of those things have been pretty stupid, but they still did them, and most of those guys would do those same things again if we let them). When Democrats get power, they spend a year searching for political cover and nothing gets done. You could have the best idea in the world, it doesn't help anyone if you're not willing to act. Democrats don't act, they cower and beg us not to vote against them.

Is Barack Obama a political coward? We're about to find out. I hope not. He's a smart guy, but that doesn't help us if he spends the next three years not doing anything because he's terrified of not getting re-elected. One of the best things about George W. Bush was his constant sense of certainty. He wasn't always right (OK, he was hardly ever right, that's not my point right now), but HE was always sure HE was right. If we could only get that sense of certainty into a guy like Barack Obama, who might actually be right sometimes, we might just get somewhere.

And yes, I understand that Barack Obama and the Democrats just doing whatever the hell they wanted to do would also stick me with a government doing a lot of things I wouldn't really like. Yes, that happens sometimes. I don't know where people got the idea that we're entitled to a government that only does things we like. The government doesn't work for us, they work on our behalf, there's a big difference. They don't always have to do what we say and we don't always have to like what they're doing.

But here's the problem, Barack Obama's willingness to listen to other ideas and compromise is, at least tangentially, related to his high level of intelligence and, simultaneously, one of the main reasons people are so frustrated with him. In contrast, George W. Bush's ability to block out dissenting opinions and inconvenient facts and do whatever he wanted allowed him to get a lot done, but was also a key part of his, um...unremarkability(I just made up a word, I do that quite often, I could be the next Republican President). I feel like I want a President who can do both. Because then, even if I wouldn't like what was happening, at least something would be happening, and that's often better than nothing. See? Some things really are hard to reconcile.