So, I read Pop’s post on bipartisanship with interest, and I just wanted to add a comment or two. I mostly want to say that I think Pops is mostly right, but doesn’t go far enough. It’s true that it’s good to have varying viewpoints in the discussion, and he’s right to say that at least to this point that viewpoint has come from conservative Democrats rather than liberal Republicans, but I don’t think that’s due to some coincidence.
The fact is that in the initial votes in the Senate and House, the controlling vote was owned by a conservative Democrat. In the case of the Senate, when the initial vote took place, there were sixty Ds and forty Rs, so the four or five most conservative democrats set the agenda. If the vote were to happen again today, the alternative viewpoint would come from the three or four most liberal Republicans.
That’s really just a tangent though, the fact is that so long as you have a “yea” or “nay” vote, you’re going to have at least some diversity of opinion even if we did just have a one party system. However, the spectrum of opinions on health care reform is far broader than has been represented in the debate so far, and a political system that resulted in us hearing more of this debate would certainly be superior. If we had a system with four or five separately organized parties, we would presumably see at least some more diversity of opinion. I’d love to see FiveThirtyEight or someone try to game this out to see what our brand spankin’ new parliament would look like and how that might affect specific issues.
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