POLITICS MARCH 1, 2010
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Washington—The word "partisanship" is typically accompanied by the word "mindless." That's not simply insulting to partisans; it's also untrue.
If we learn nothing else in 2010, can we please finally acknowledge that our partisan divisions are about authentic principles that lead to very different approaches to governing?
Last week's health care summit was a day-long seminar that should make it impossible for anyone to pretend otherwise. But before we get to that, let's examine the Senate debate over whether to extend unemployment insurance coverage. The matter is rather urgent for jobless workers because 1.1 million of them are scheduled to lose their benefits this month, and 2.7 million are slated to lose them by April.
Sen. Jim Bunning, R-Ky., has put a hold on the extension bill, but one of the key reasons the measure is blocked is the effort of Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., to use it as a way of forcing a cut in the estate tax. Kyl is essentially leveraging the unemployed to get a deal on estate tax relief that would cost $138 billion over the next decade, according to estimates by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. The estate tax has already been cut sharply, so the reduction Kyl is pushing along with Sen. Blanche Lincoln, D-Ark., would affect the estates of fewer than three out of every 1,000 people who die, according to the Tax Policy Center.
The proposal helps estates worth more than $7 million in the case of couples. I guess struggling millionaires deserve the same empathy we feel for those without a job.
And notice this: Especially in the Senate, what passes for "bipartisanship" too often involves a Democrat such as Lincoln allying with a Republican on behalf of the wealthiest interests in the country. And we're supposed to cheer this?
At the summit, the most revealing exchange was between President Obama and Sen. John Barrasso, a Wyoming Republican who is also a physician. Barrasso's central concern is that the health care system doesn't operate enough like every other market. He seemed troubled less by the many Americans who lack health insurance than by those who abuse the insurance they already have.
Addressing Obama, Barrasso suggested that we might be better off if people were insured only for catastrophic care. "Mr. President, when you say (people) with catastrophic plans, they don't go for care until later, I say sometimes the people with catastrophic plans are the people that are (the) best consumers of health care in ... the way they use their health care dollars."
"A lot of people" with insurance, he added, "come in and say, my knee hurts, maybe I should get an MRI, they say, and then they say, will my insurance cover it? That's the first question. And if I say yes, then they say, OK, let's do it. If I say no, then they say, well, what will it ... cost? And what's it (going to) cost ought to be the first question. And that's why sometimes people with ... catastrophic health plans ask the best questions, shop around, are the best consumers of health care."
Obama played the old TV character Columbo, who thrived on posing seemingly naive questions: "I just am curious. Would you be satisfied if every member of Congress just had catastrophic care? Do you think we'd be better health care purchasers?"
Barrasso answered in the affirmative, though he didn't propose that senators dump their present coverage. Obama came right back: "Would you feel the same way if you were making $40,000 ... because that's the reality for a lot of folks. ... They don't fly into (the) Mayo (Clinic) and suddenly decide they're going to spend a couple million dollars on the absolute, best health care. They're folks who are left out."
Obama concluded: "We can debate whether or not we can afford to help them, but we shouldn't pretend somehow that they don't need help."
As neatly as anything I have seen, this exchange captured the philosophical and emotional difference between the two parties.
The point is not that Republicans are heartless and Democrats are compassionate. It's that Democrats on the whole believe in using government to correct the inequities and inefficiencies the market creates, while Republicans on the whole think market outcomes are almost always better than anything government can produce.
That's not cheap partisanship. It's a fundamental divide. The paradox is that our understanding of politics would be more realistic if we were less cynical and came to see the battle for what it really is.
E.J. Dionne's e-mail address is ejdionne(at)washpost.com.
E.J. Dionne, Jr. is the author of the recently published Souled Out: Reclaiming Faith and Politics After the Religious Right. He is a Washington Post columnist, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and a professor at Georgetown University.
(c) 2009, Washington Post Writers Group
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12 comments
Sorry, I'm not buying it. The Republicans are perfectly willing to intervene in the market if the purpose is to enhance the wealth and power of those with wealth and power or just to give them money outright. They only object to intervention that would mitigate the extremes of distribution of wealth and power or of market dominance. Their faux principles are as malleable as those of Antonin Scalia in the interests of those whom they serve -- the plutocracy.
- roidubouloi
March 1, 2010 at 7:39am
"The point is not that Republicans are heartless and Democrats are compassionate." Actually, they are heartless. Bunting proved it last week.
- tnmats
March 1, 2010 at 9:17am
" "I just am curious. Would you be satisfied if every member of Congress just had catastrophic care? Do you think we'd be better health care purchasers?" Barrasso answered in the affirmative, though he didn't propose that senators dump their present coverage." And that exchange proves the rank hypocrisy of the GOP, and the Democrats nor the press will call them out on it. They refuse to "eat their own dog food", the surest sign of a liar or hypocrite.
- tnmats
March 1, 2010 at 9:21am
There's another difference: the Republican belief that "market outcomes are...always better than anything government can produce" [yes, I took out the "almost"] has in recent years become a fundamentalist belief. By "fundamentalist", I mean that the belief is considered unquestionable, just as the belief in the inerrancy of the Bible or the Koran is considered unquestionable. That is why Obama had to point out that we could have cheaper food or drugs if we abolished food inspections or drug approvals. Republican rhetoric of recent years elevates "the Market" to a divine role as something to be submitted to unquestioningly - rather than as a force to be appreciated, respected, and at times regulated. Democrats on the whole are more willing to discuss whether regulation makes sense in a particular case. The GOP has become the party of fundamentalisms.
- bjones
March 1, 2010 at 11:31am
that 2nd sentence should have ended, "...just as the belief in the inerrancy of the Bible or the Koran is considered unquestionable by many of their respective believers."
- bjones
March 1, 2010 at 11:34am
"Republicans on the whole think market outcomes are almost always better than anything government can produce." I don't think this is actually correct. Roid is right. Republicans do not hate the government or what it can do for them. I don't see many Republicans clamouring for a reduction in the size of the national security state, or reduction in "government"-provided protection for private property, or any number of other ways in which organized and legitimate force (that is, government) protects privilege. When I was being force fed Critical Legal Studies at law school, (or "Voice of Colour" discussions, or Feminist Theory), I used to argue that every debate about process is really a debate about outcome. That same challenge is true now in respect of the Right's protestations about "government". It is not that they thing the governmetn is more or less efficient than the market - otherwise, national security and legislation and so on would be privatised - but that the Right simply does not like the fact that, on the whole, a democratic polity expects its elected executive arm (the government) to advance the interests of the majority (who, in most countries, are the middle and working classes and the poor). In a truly democratic country, wealth redistribution through a conscious act of political will of the community, happens as a matter of course (the degree being the only real compromise struck between the rich and the rest). And in a truly democratic country, the government, acting as agents of the people (the demos - that quaint idea) harnesses the resources of the state/polity to address ills general and particular. Republicans don't like democratic outcomes; hence their incoherent and incontinent gibberish against the "government" or for the "market". It's absolutely astounding, of course, that we have come to this point, in the 21st Century in the United States; every third-grader in the Middle East and China and Iceland and Mali knows that what we call "civilisation" arose because of the organised effort of communities (the "government") to harness (irrigation canals) the resources of the polity (water), without which there would be no cities and no states. Sad, really.
- icarusr
March 1, 2010 at 1:40pm
Spot on, icarus. I am enlightened by your point that the pretension to prefer market outcomes (in the cases where they do prefer the market outcome) is specifically in order to de-legitimize any democratic alternative as unholy interference with a sanctified market system. I have made the points here many times that (1) markets do some things well and other things poorly or not at all (a pragmatic objection to market fundamentalism) and (2) the market fundamentalists are self-serving hypocrites (a challenge to the good faith of market fundamentalism). But I have never had my attention focused as clearly on the fact that the rhetorical sanctification of markets is principally for the purpose of de-legitimizing democracy as another equally legitimate, and in many cases preferred, means of establishing equitable distribution.
- roidubouloi
March 1, 2010 at 2:04pm
... I used to argue that every debate about process is really a debate about outcome... Nicely phrased, aphoristic-like notion. My law school days ante dated yours by a decade or two--strange for someone 39, actually--so I was spared (missed) Critical Legal studies, Feminist theory and their like. But what's the case for for what I quoted or, easier for you, where is that case well made out by someone that I can read? It's a proposition that seems to be the hinge of your argument in your post and it's interesting, though I am, without seeing that case presented, doubtful.
- basman
March 2, 2010 at 12:38pm
"But what's the case for for what I quoted". When aggressive "states' righters" and "Originalists" such as Scalia and Thomas subvert not only the Constitution but their own stated interpretive mantra, the issue is not the process - "interpretation philosophy" - but outcome. Look at the Republicans and "reconciliation" or "filibuster". And, of course, my own experience in years of diplomatic negotiations. It is a rule, not invariable, that where someone raises a process objection, they are really concerned about outcome.
- icarusr
March 2, 2010 at 5:54pm
"But what's the case for for what I quoted". ...When aggressive "states' righters" and "Originalists" such as Scalia and Thomas subvert not only the Constitution but their own stated interpretive mantra, the issue is not the process - "interpretation philosophy" - but outcome. Look at the Republicans and "reconciliation" or "filibuster". And, of course, my own experience in years of diplomatic negotiations. It is a rule, not invariable, that where someone raises a process objection, they are really concerned about outcome... Okay, and thanks for our post, if that’s what you mean, I don’t disagree with your above. When ideological (and nonesuch) pols argue process they generally want a specific result (except for Harper’s prorogue of course: he was concerned only with the untrammeled purity of that venerable mechanism): the greater the ideology the greater the tendentiousness. And, while not being a student of SCOTUS, it seems to me a particularly outcomes based institution: not so much the SCC, though I’m no student of it either. And no litigator since the Athenian orators ever took a technical or procedural position without something else in mind. The only diplomatic neogotations I’ve ever done have been with my wife, but what is diplomacy as such but the pursuit of interest on the soft ground of minded ps and qs?
- basman
March 2, 2010 at 7:09pm
"what is diplomacy as such but the pursuit of interest on the soft ground of minded ps and qs?" Precisely, but to pretend that the issue always the ps and the qs and forget the interest, that is what I was talking about.
- icarusr
March 3, 2010 at 3:28pm
Understood.
- basman
March 3, 2010 at 5:04pm