“You’re not being Bipartisan.” “No, You’re not being Bipartisan.”

The Obama administration and the gang of six’s Republican Senators Charles Grassley and Mike Enzi continue to trade barbs about who is “not being bipartisan.”

The latest response comes from Senator Grassley responding to David Axlerod who had responded to statements Senators Grassley and Enzi had made over the summer recess.

Mr. Axlerod had the temerity on Monday to accuse the Senators of “negotiating in bad faith,” offering that the Senators actions suggested “that they don’t want to participate” in bipartisan talks. Mr. Axlerod further stated:

“If you’re sitting at a table negotiating in good faith, then you probably don’t send out mailers saying, ‘Help me stop Obama-care.’ That’s just common sense.”

According to A.P.,

Enzi, in a radio address Saturday, said Democratic proposals would restrict medical choices and make the country’s “finances sicker without saving you money.”

In an August fundraising letter, Grassley asked for “support in helping me defeat Obama-care.” He said Democratic-drafted bills would be “a pathway to a government takeover of the health care system.”

Far be it from me to define “bipartisan cooperation,” but I must admit “Help me defeat Obama-care” doesn’t really seem to capture the essence of that spirit.

Jill Kozeny, a spokeswoman for Senator Grassley defended the statement saying, according to A.P., that “Grassley was simply restating his well-known opposition to a government-run health insurance plan.”

In addition, Ms. Kozeny in turn responded to Mr. Axlerod’s  accusation as follows:

“Attacks by political operatives in the White House undermine bipartisan efforts and drive senators away from the table,” but added that “the so-called “Group of Six” senators would continue to work for a compromise despite his comments.”

Having been in a schoolyard tussle or two in my time, I can’t help but feel the similarity as each side accuses the other of failing to be “bipartisan.” As a kid growing up in the late sixties and seventies in working class New Jersey, schoolboys everywhere labored under the same admonition from our fathers: “Don’t you start a fight–but if anyone hits you first–or says something about your Mother–you can hit him.” Except for the truly spontaneous outbreaks, most fights (or putative fights) began with ten or twenty minutes of some form of verbal interchange designed to try to get the other guy to throw the first punch, followed by shoving, and then–if no one broke it up–a fight.

And I’m not entirely sure which category “You’re not bipartisan.” “No, you’re not bipartisan” fits (though I suppose there’s no question as to where all that talk about “pulling the plug on grandma” belongs) –but as I’ve said, the similarity to schoolboys trying to engage in a tussle without blame is keen–far too keen. It would be funny–if it weren’t for all those sick people and the fact that we somehow manage to spend considerably more for health care and get considerably less than most everyone in the world.

Obama is said to be scheduled to address Congress about Health Care Reform on prime-time television come the Wednesday after Labor Day. Maybe he can break it up. If not, it might be time to start shoving– or at least twisting some arms– LBJ style.

Obama to Republicans: With or Without You

Justice William J. Brennan (1906-1997)

The Washington Post reports that  President Obama has openly considered health reform legislation without Republican support:

“Sometime in September we’re going to have to make an assessment” about whether to keep trying to negotiate with Republicans, he told MSNBC.

Obama said he “would prefer Republicans working with us” but that getting his main priorities for a health care overhaul are more important. It represents a marked change from the emphasis Obama placed on bipartisanship when he launched his campaign for a health care overhaul at a White House summit in March.

Referring to the gang of six, Wapo reported that Obama

…said he is encouraged that a small group of three Democratic and three Republican senators on the Finance Committee continue to negotiate, but signaled impatience with protracted talks that haven’t yet produced legislation.

As a few have noted on this blog, the gang of six represent less than 3% of this country’s population.

With the addition of Al Franken to the Senate, we’ve done the math here, and the calculus of governance in a previous post:

Which is to say that given a unified Democratic Senate, under Rule XXII,  the threat of a Republican filibuster would now only be the threat of a thirty hour delay.

That, for Democrats, it would seem, is a commanding position.

In Chapter XXII of Niccolo Machiavelli’s “Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livius,” 1531, he has this to say about such positions

And here we may note that he who wishes to be obeyed must know how to command; and those give proof of knowing this who properly estimate their own strength with reference to that of those who have to obey, and who commands only when he finds them to bear a proper proportion to each other, and who abstains from commanding when that proportion is wanting.

Of course, Democratic unity is not a given. But I suppose either is Republican unity. Perhaps either could be had. Supreme Court Justice William Brennan, idealist pragmatic that he was, is said to have asked his new clerks assembled each term the following:

“What is the most important Rule of Law?”

And the clerks, new to Mt. Olympus, would invariably cite to ex post facto, the rule against perpetuities, the First, or one, or any number of the Amendments, until Justice Brennan would just shake his head “no,” and raise one outstretched hand and say “Five.”

“The most important rule of law is the rule of five–that’s how many Justices you need for a majority.”

The rest is just history and dissent. There was, after all, opposition to the New Deal– the benefits of which have long outlived any of the dissent.

Earlier in the day, before a crowd in Indiana, President Obama stated: “I promise you, we will pass reform by the end of this year because the American people need it.” As the summer wears on, and the gang of six plays on, the calculus of both Justice Brennan and Machiavelli seem more and more pertinent.

Early last month, when Senator Chuck Schumer met with Senator Grassley on Face the Nation, we posted the following:

However, faced with strident opposition to the Public Option from Senator Grassley, the realization of Democratic Party power was evident in Senator Schumer’s response.  Schumer cited the “strong public option” contained within the current proposals from both the House and the Senate’s HELP Committee and stated that in “the Finance Committee, we’re trying to come to some form of compromise. But make no mistake about it, the President’s for this strongly and there will be a public option in the final bill.”

Perhaps it is time for Democrats, internally, to make sure that the math works– and then, like Obama and Schumer, to speak in public and at the table as though they have simply done the math.

Bartels’s Unequal Democracy and the Gang of Six

If there’s one thing our elite press corps loves, it’s centrism. They cling to a romantic ideal of bipartisanship–even when they’re discussing necessarily ideological endeavors like health care reform. Thus it comes as no surprise when the NYT’s Herzensohn & Pear can think of no more critical angle on the gang of six “centrist” Senators now at the center of the health reform debate than the fattening snacks that fuel their deliberations.

Those with a more skeptical constitution might note that the Gang of Six represent less than 3% of the US population — a rather slender thread of popular support for whatever solution these striving solons support. Yet they don’t even appear to be acting in their own constituents’ interests. It turns out that a majority of the gang of six–Senators Baucus, Snowe, Conrad, and Grassley–hail from states with extraordinarily concentrated health insurance markets. As Catherine Arnst of Businessweek reports, “such market concentration has become a potent argument for supporters of a public insurer,” which would especially benefit consumers in those states. Yet that’s exactly what the Gang of Six has immediately taken off the table in reform talks:

Already, the group of six has tossed aside the idea of a government-run insurance plan that would compete with private insurers, which the president supports but Republicans said was a deal-breaker. Instead, they are proposing a network of private, nonprofit cooperatives.

Those nonprofit cooperatives are not likely to have much of an effect on spiraling health care costs.

The sudden popularity of this non-solution is one more indication that Larry M. Bartels’s book Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age is essential reading for understanding today’s politics. Bartels predicted a possible “debilitating feedback cycle linking the economic and political realms: increasing economic inequality may produce increasing inequality in political responsiveness, which in turn produces public policies that are increasingly detrimental to the interests of poor citizens, which in turn produces even greater economic inequality, and so on” (286). As the poor uninsured in states like Maine, Montana, and North Dakota see real relief slipping away, they are about as likely to become disaffected and drop out of the political process as they are to hold their senators to account. It’s hard to worry about voting and politics when you’re worried that aches and pains are endangering your job.