Matt Yglesias

Climate Optimism From Key Democrats

I don’t really think anyone quite knows what to make of this, but Max Baucus is seeming surprisingly bullish on the prospects of climate legislation: “There’s no doubt that this Congress is going to pass climate change legislation. I don’t know if it’s going to be this year. Probably next year.” I would have thought that one major reason to be skeptical about a climate bill’s prospects is that it doesn’t seem like the kind of thing that key senators like Max Baucus would be enthusiastic about. But there you have it.

Meanwhile, here’s Joe Lieberman making a lot of sense on climate. Environmental issues have long been the topic on which Lieberman is most progressive, but it had seemed to me that he’d drifted away from that commitment over the past couple of years.

Joe Lieberman’s Bogus Public Option Reasoning

Joe Lieberman proposes:

“We’re trying to do too much at once,” Lieberman said. “To put this government-created insurance company on top of everything else is just asking for trouble for the taxpayers, for the premium payers and for the national debt. I don’t think we need it now.”

Lieberman added that he’d vote against a public option plan “even with an opt-out because it still creates a whole new government entitlement program for which taxpayers will be on the line.”

Jon Chait disposes:

It literally makes no sense whatsoever. A public plan does not provide a new entitlement. It just doesn’t. It’s a different form of providing an entitlement. Nor is it more expensive. In fact, the stronger versions of the public plan would cost less money. Lieberman is just babbling nonsense here.

It’s also worth emphasizing that while only the House-style public option will save a lot of money, even the relatively weak public option from the Reid draft would save money relative to doing what Lieberman wants. He’s talking about filibustering a deficit-reducing bill in order to try to remove a cost-reducing provision, and doing so on grounds of fiscal probity. It’s ludicrous, and the political reporters covering him need to point this out.

The Trouble With Half-Measures

(cc photo by jitze)

Jon Chait makes an excellent point on the tension between the desire to do bipartisan compromises and the desire to do policy that makes sense:

The fetishization of compromise often overlooks whether such a compromise makes any inherent sense. Not all issues lend themselves to compromise. Joe Lieberman recently piped up that he prefers to take minor steps on health care–such as banning insurance company discrimination against those with preexisting conditions–and forego covering the uninsured.

But, if you forbid insurance companies from discriminating against the sick without bringing healthy people into the risk pool, then healthy people would have no reason to buy insurance. They could just wait until they get sick and take out a policy, and the insurance companies would have to sell them one. Rates would skyrocket, and the whole system would become unaffordable. Some say we should build a bridge across a river. Others say we shouldn’t. Joe Lieberman wants to build a bridge halfway across.

Some issues are really purely quantitative in nature. We could close the deficit by raising taxes, or we could do it by cutting spending, or we could go fifty-fifty. And some issues are susceptible to logrolling—the right could accept higher taxes to subsidize insurance for the poor in exchange for making malpractice law more favorable to defendants. But oftentimes at the core of things you simply have a question of whether or not you agree with a certain approach to policy. And in those cases, there’s no sense in trying to seek a middle ground, what you need to try to seek is a workable version of the overall policy concept.

Taking Yes for an Answer

I appreciate the points that the Great Orange Satan and Glenn Greenwald are making about Jon Chait’s flip-flops on the subject of Joe Lieberman and ideological purges. But this strikes me as a time when it might be a good idea to just take “yes” for an answer. If you make groveling apologies your price for admitting converts, you’re going to find yourself running a small church.

That said, I don’t think it’s been generally acknowledged how much damage the Democratic Party leadership’s failure to aggressively back Ned Lamont in the 2006 general election has wound up doing to the cause of progressive politics. The issue has less to do with the specific malfeasance of Lieberman than with the consequences for party discipline. If you can go so far as to lose a Democratic primary and run against the Democratic Party’s nominee and still not get kneecapped by the leaders of your party, then of course you’ll feel no compunction about joining opposition party procedural obstruction and all the rest. The only way for a party to transform election results into policy outcomes is via some mechanisms of discipline, and the Democratic Senate caucus operates with no such mechanisms. And it does so because even the more liberal Senators—including, in his day, Barack Obama—show no inclination to make the kind of personal sacrifices that building an effective caucus would entail.

The selfishness per se isn’t all that surprising, but the Republicans actually operate under different rules so it’s not impossible for things to change.

Lieberman’s Opposition to Health Reform

Unlike the case with some of his colleagues, you can’t chalk Senator Joe Lieberman’s apparent opposition to universal health care up to political cowardice. Connecticut is a solidly Democratic state at this point, and it’s pretty clear that the main political threat Lieberman faces is from his left. Nevertheless, he’s a man with the courage of his convictions and his convictions just don’t seem to be especially progressive:

LIEBERMAN: Morally, everyone of us would like to cover every American with health insurance but that’s where you spend most of the trillion dollars plus, or a little less that is estimated, the estimate said this health care plan will cost. And I’m afraid we’ve got to think about putting a lot of that off until the economy is out of recession. There’s no reason we have to do it all now.

Since Lieberman is a United States Senator with vast power over the lives of hundreds of millions of Americans it might have been nice for him to familiarize himself to some extent with the legislation he’s talking about. The bills I’ve seen all phase-in in the future precisely in order to meet the goals of deficit neutrality without involving a mid-recession tax increase. Meanwhile, it seems extremely likely that the economy has already returned to growth. But evidently Lieberman’s been too busy talking to TV bookers to learn about the pending legislation.