Matt Yglesias

Grassley Claims Large Deficit Compels Him to Embrace Budget-Busting Status Quo

Senator Chuck Grassley continues to cast about for pretexts to spike health reform and please his party leadership so he’s hit upon an unusually nonsensical reason:

Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa, one of three Senate Republicans negotiating on health care, said the soaring federal budget deficit “puts a stake in the heart” of $1 trillion measures being debated in Congress.

Obviously, the scope of the budget deficit in 2009 and 2010 has nothing to do with how the health care system ought to look in 2013 when the bills under consideration phase in. If the bills are affordable in 2013, then they’re affordable in 2013 regardless of current deficits. And if they’re not affordable, then small current deficits wouldn’t change that either. But more to the point, as the administration was emphasizing before Grassley’s “death panel” demogoguery helped scare them off the point, health care reform is integral to getting the long-run budget deficit under control:

Whatever you think of the current budget predictions, nothing about sticking with the status quo makes things better.

Grassley: Perfection is the Standard

In case you were wondering, here’s yet another indication that Chuck Grassley isn’t serious about doing health reform:

“We need to slow down and do a little less,” Mr. Grassley told another town-hall gathering in Pocahontas, Iowa, Monday afternoon. “We need to fix what’s broken and leave alone what’s working well.”

In an interview, he vowed not to vote for an “imperfect bill” that includes a public option or gives the government too much control over end-of-life issues.

It should be obvious that when you’re talking about doing something like comprehensive health care legislation, you’re talking about passing an imperfect bill. Congress just isn’t going to write and pass a perfect bill. The standard is that you try to pass a bill that makes things better. A Senator talking about the need to avoid imperfection is a Senator looking for excuses to vote no. Delaying health reform, meanwhile, is part of an explicit strategy to kill reform. Max Baucus and Barack Obama need to cut this guy loose and drop the “gang of six” nonsense or else it’s very hard to see how anything is possibly going to get done.

Grassley Says He Would Sabotage A Health Care Bill Whose Provisions He Favors in Order to Advance Partisan Agenda

As you can read here and here Chuck Grassley was on MSNBC earlier today explaining that he might vote “no” on a health care bill even if he thinks it’s a good piece of legislation if that bill doesn’t get support for other Republicans besides Grassley:

In an interview today on MSNBC’s “Morning Meeting with Dylan Ratigan,” Senate Finance Committee ranking member Chuck Grassley (R) said he’d vote against any health-care reform bill coming out of the committee unless it has wide support from Republicans — even if the legislation contains EVERYTHING Grassley wants.

“I am negotiating for Republicans,” he said. “If I can’t negotiate something that gets more than four Republicans, I’m not a good negotiator.”

When NBC’s Chuck Todd, in a follow-up question on the show, asked the Iowa Republican if he’d vote against what Grassley might consider to be a “good deal” — i.e., gets everything he asks for from Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus (D) — Grassley replied, “It isn’t a good deal if I can’t sell my product to more Republicans.”

Grassley’s being a jerk, in other words. But what on earth is Max Baucus doing? He’s chairman of the committee. There are 60 Democratic Senators. He should write a bill and bring it to the floor. In fact, he should have done so a month ago. Instead, he’s given veto power over both the substantive and procedural aspects of reform to a man who’s not even pretending to be negotiating in good faith. If we assume that Baucus actually wants to see reform happen, he’s going about it in a very strange way. If you want to see reform enacted, Baucus needs to just write a bill he likes, talk to Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe about what kind of special lobster subsidies they’d like to see in it, and then you pass the thing. This isn’t brain surgery.

Chuck Grassley Endorses Glenn Beck’s Book

A couple of my colleagues went to see a Chuck Grassley town hall last week and snagged this video of the Senator signing a copy of Glenn Beck nutty book:

TOWN HALL ATTENDEE: I noticed that you have the book “Common Sense” with you today, I hope you share it with a lot more of those 535 people.

GRASSLEY: Well the reason I brought it is you’re supposed to pass it on to other people when you’re not reading it.

Yes, Max Baucus is counting on a Glenn Beck fan to be his reasonable conservative partner in writing health care legislation.

NYT’s Jim Rutenberg Calls Out Death Panel Liars

It’s days late, but this article from Jim Rutenberg at The New York Times on the “death panel” smear is quite good, and even a strong headline “False ‘Death Panel’ Rumor Has Some Familiar Roots.” Beyond the headline, the article is solid. In particular, it stays appealingly first-order and just explains that this business isn’t true, who started it, who’s spread it, and what they’re trying to achieve.

The real test, however, goes beyond any one article or one reporter. What can be devastating to a person’s national reputation is when a consistent narrative develops around them as being dishonest or ignorant or what have you. Is Chuck Grassley going to be able to run around Iowa telling outrageous lies about an issue he’s allegedly an expert in and maintain his reputation as a serious, sober-minded, centrist dealmaker? If he is, then there’s really no deterrent force to lying.

Running Against Chuck Grassley

Chuck Grassley (R-IA)

I think it’s right to say that one of the important dynamics in the health care fight is that even though Chuck Grassley is up for re-election in 2010 he doesn’t seem to have a serious Democratic challenger. Grassley is a popular and powerful incumbent, so it would be very hard for any challenger to beat him. But still, Iowa is a state that voted for Barack Obama in 2008, voted for Al Gore in 2000, voted for Clinton twice, and voted for Michael Dukakis. It has one Democratic Senator, Democrats control a majority in the State Senate, and the Attorney-General and Lieutenant Governor are both Democrats. So you could imagine a serious candidate coming to the fore, and Grassley would have to worry a bit.

Instead, the only thing Grassley has to worry about is a primary challenge from the right. Which means that the only thing Grassley has to do to secure his tenure in office is obstruct health care reform. Which wouldn’t necessarily be so bad, but Max Baucus appears determined to get Grassley’s support for reform. Which, in the presence of pressure from the right and the absence of pressure from the left, is almost certainly impossible.

Chuck Grassley’s Recursive Loops of Bipartisanship

Chuck Grassley (R-IA)

E.J. Dionne’s column urging Barack Obama to get more active in the health care debate contains this interesting nugget:

I’m told that Grassley, under immense pressure from Republican colleagues not to deal at all, has informed Baucus that he cannot sign on to a bill if it is supported by only one other Republican, the sensible Olympia Snowe of Maine. Grassley needs more cover from more conservative colleagues.

We see here some of the oddities of attempts at bipartisanship for its own sake. As I’ve observed previously, under ordinary conditions the Senate’s post-1990 rule that you need a 60 vote supermajority to move legislation (with an exception for tax cuts for the wealthy) just amounts to a rule that only bipartisan bills can pass the Senate. But the Republican Party chose in several instances to run hardline conservative candidates in states like North Carolina, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, New Mexico, etc. that went for Barack Obama. They then chose to mount a primary campaign against an incumbent moderate Senator from Pennsylvania, inspiring him to switch parties. Consequently—and unusually—there will be 60 Democratic Senators when Al Franken is seated.

I think this to some extent changes the game as far as bipartisanship is concerned. By definition any bill that 60 Senators vote for has broad legislative support, which one assumes is the virtue of a bipartisan bill. And yet despite that fact, a new consensus is emerging that for a bill to be “really” bipartisan, it’s not good enough to acquire the vote of the 41st-most-conservative Senator (Ben Nelson) or even the 40th- and 39th-most-conservative Senators (Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe). You also need an additional even more conservative Senator. And now we have Chuck Grassley signaling that his commitment to this weird principle is so strong that he would vote against a bill of which he otherwise approves unless a Senator who even more conservative than Grassley agrees to vote for it.

But what’s the point of this? Who does this help? The way bipartisan bills happen is that you forge a compromise with the moderate members of the other party. As it happens, there are only two moderate Republicans in the Senate. But that should be understood as the GOP’s problem, not the Democrats’ problem. If the GOP ran more moderate nominees, there might be more Republican Senators and then, as a matter of course, bipartisan legislation would require a broader coalition.

Chuck Grassley’s Bizarre Tweets

Chuck Grassley (R-IA)

As you may recall, I’m a Twitter defender. What I’m not trying to figure out is how the bizarre Sunday Twitter outburst from Senator Chuck Grassley fits into the picture. On the one hand, the quality of the prose is low:

On the other hand, this seems like a genuinely revealing moment about a US Senator who tends to get some respect from both sides of the aisle. He’s very upset at the President! But not about any issue of substance. Rather, he thinks it’s sad that Obama wants congress to work expeditiously on a crucial issue. I didn’t even take Obama’s “time to deliver” remarks as especially pointed—the point seemed to be less that congress has been taking two many days thinking about health reform than that congress has spent too many decades talking about the subject. Big change is hard, but the problem of our broken health care system isn’t one that’ll go away if we just choose to ignore it.