Interestingly enough, today’s New York Times front page contains only two mentions of “health care.” One is a letter to the editor, while the other is a link to a Paul Krugman blog post. I mention this, mostly because I discovered this odd fact while looking for yesterday’s piece which did appear on the front page (as well as page A1 of the print version): “Obama Turns Up the Volume in Health Care Bid.” And I mention this because the story, probably the most important story of the day on an issue that is arguably the most important issue of the day, was not about health care reform, or the bill before Congress itself, but about the ongoing process to get something passed.
Process stories are very much more interesting than policy stories, for the very reason that they are stories. They have characters (the president, Democrats, Republicans), settings (Blair House, Pennsylvania), plots (the president “shoving health care through,” Republicans wishing the Democrats fail, filibuster!), and themes (lessons of 1993, lessons of 1994, lessons of 2009-10). Process stories have narratives. When you have to file a column or news piece about an issue everyday, it’s better to have it end with “To be continued.” Policy stories (if you can even call them that), on the other hand, are boring, dry and offer so many details that only wonks and bloggers could even remotely be interested. Better to pepper in these details into something at least a little interesting, like a conflict between the president and Congress, or even a story of the president “firing up” in front of a crowd in Pennsylvania.
Luckily, these process stories are not bad in and of themselves. They can be used, when done well, to teach helpful civics lessons. For example, how many people until this year even knew what budget reconciliation is? Ezra Klein has an almost brilliant column in this week\’s Newsweek about the public\’s new understanding of the senate\’s arcane processes. He begins:
Ask a kid who just took civics how a bill becomes a law and she\’ll explain that Congress takes a vote and if a majority supports the bill, the bill goes to the president. That\’s what we teach in textbooks. In reality, the Senate is a contest to find who\’s better at manipulating the rules for purposes that they were never meant to serve. For the minority, everything depends on its skill with Rule XXII. For the majority, it\’s all about its understanding of the budget reconciliation process. For the country, it\’s a mess.
He goes on to note that the infamous filibuster (Rule XXII), while becoming easier to break in the past century, has been used drastically more often, which has led to budget reconciliation being one of the only tools available for the Senate to pass anything remotely controversial.
As time goes on, it is becoming more and more obvious that the only way the House and the Senate are going to pass the same health care bill (and therefore be able to send it to the president for signing) is through this so-called “arcane” process. And Republicans have seized this moment to decry the reconciliation process as anti-democratic and calling it the “nuclear option” (it’s not, but more on that later).
Well, if this incredible chart from the New York Times is any judge, the Senate has used reconciliation (remember, arcane gaming the system, the nuclear option?) numerous times in the past several decades, for everything from tax cuts to welfare reform.
It’s a shame, but it does seem that reconciliation is the only tool available to a dead-locked Senate for passing such a—or, any—sweeping, and necessary, piece of legislation. Not to mention that a systematic health care reform bill, which resembles very closely what a final bill will look like, has already passed the full Senate the old-fashioned way.
Oh, and what about that so-called “nuclear option?” Otherwise called the “constitutional option,” it very, very basically entails an appeal to the chair (the vice president) in order to rule the filibuster unconstitutional. This procedure was most recently threatened back between 2004-5 when Republican senators (then in a very slim majority) were trying to break Democratic filibusters of President Bush\’s judicial nominees.
See, I told you process stories were way more interesting than policy stories. You\’ll note not one word about what is actually in the health care bill. That would have been boring.
Although, I will point out that after the Sturm und Drang is over, nobody will remember the process story anymore, and there will be no newspapers to sell on the backs of a health care reform package. Yesterday, Ezra Klein (again?) wrote a good piece about the Medicare Prescription Drug benefit vote, and concluded:
Whatever you think of the process that resulted in the Medicare Prescription Drug Benefit, the bill today is settled, and even popular, law. The abuses that ushered it into existence are mostly forgotten. Democrats spoke of its repeal in the months after its passage but are now strengthening it in the health-care reform bill. Republicans, meanwhile, were so confounded by Medicare\’s popularity that they authored and passed a massive expansion of the entitlement state. Democrats, who are currently trying to pass health-care reform in a way that doesn\’t break congressional rules but does upset some Republicans, should take note.
In conclusion, process stories are boring.
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