The Founders and Health Care
I always enjoyed those essays in political theory classes which forced you to argue how such-and-so philosopher would have felt about some distinctly contemporary problem. The difficulty with using the Founders as a group in this same light is that they had fairly diverse preferences; it's not hard for us to find internally conflicting views or to look back and find a hero or a villain and often times in the same Founder. With that being said, Here's an argument by way of Ezra Klein that examines the similarities in the processes of the national founding and health care reform.
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I have to agree with Senator Graham. This Bill showed the worst of Washington. If you look at the differences between the House and Senate Bills, the House Bill covered more people, did more to cut costs, was scored better by the CBO and container far fewer sleazy bribes, giveaways, and concessions.
This illustrated how vividly and ugly requiring more than a simple majority perverts the legislative process. The Fillibuster requirement will cost this country dearly. The cost of each additional vote over a simple majority reminds me a lot of the math when considering the economics of unionized labor.
If anyone wants to see the actual math, email me.
Essentially, the cost of each marginal vote (additional worker)increases at an increasing rate for each additional vote (worker).
The additional 10 votes needed to overcome the fillibuster cost us a public option(thank you Senators Lieberman, Bayh, Bauchus, Landrieux, Collins, and Snow), the cornhusker kickbacks (thank you senator Ben Nelson), the slimy medicare deal for seniors in Florida (thank you Senator Bill Nelson)
These are only the most publicly outraged aspects of the bill. Back when the health care bill came out of committees and was merged into one bill before the ammendment process the bill was a hefty 1200 some pages. As it is so wildly reported, the final bill was over 2700 pages. What was the other 1500 pages? And how much of the extra cost was due to "buying" the extra ten votes?
I think that requiring more than a simple majority also helps ensure that when the other side takes power they cannot ram through their interests against the wishes of many people in the country. I think that requiring 60 votes is necessary because in general it essentially shows that the majority of the nation supports the change. I wonder if people would have liked Bush to try to privatize social security or ram through something that the liberals opposed on a simple majority.
The senate bill needed the extra bribes because it simply was not widely supported by enough people. There is a reason this bill had a hard time gaining votes and that is because a lot of people are very unsure about it. The 60 vote requirement is loved by the minority and by hated the majority. The democrats need to remember that one day they will be in the minority again, and they would hate for conservatives to ram something though or change something major with just 51 votes. I think it is always important to see both sides of the issue.
The 60 vote requirement is intended to stabilize change and not have radical shifts in policy based on just over half supporting a bill.
So I was thinking guys. Maybe the problem with getting legislation to stick under a simple majority has something to do with the mechanism by which representatives are elected, at least to a degree. Let me flesh it out a bit here. We've been reading about districting a Gerrymandering and some of the disruptive elements involved in relation to political and other communities. Perhaps majority share sways so much in Congress because these communities aren't really given a chance to take root and establish a stable voting bloc. I'm not really sure how one would solve this, that's why it's speculation, but perhaps a system of proportional representation would gauge congressional districts better. Again, just speculating here considering the hurdles that would have to be jumped to change up the entire electoral system.
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