If Healthcare Reform Fails Dems Have Themselves to Blame

We're going to hear a lot about how the threat of the filibuster stopped healthcare reform. If true, that's true only in a very roundabout way. The threat of filibuster compelled the Senate to write a more moderate and potentially more acceptable bill, against which the Democratic left rebelled.

Mickey Kaus makes an important point this morning: let the record show it was the left wing of the Democratic party that bailed on healthcare reform first.

Three more points:

1) We're going to hear a lot in the years to come about how the threat of the filibuster stopped healthcare reform. If true, that's true only in a very roundabout way. The threat of filibuster compelled the Senate to write a more moderate and potentially more acceptable bill, against which the Democratic left rebelled. But the proximate cause of healthcare reform's current troubles is the left rebellion, not Republican resistance.

2) There's always one reliable way to over-ride a filibuster: mobilize public opinion. In February 1917, when isolationist senators filibustered legislation to arm merchant ships, President Wilson crushed them by direct appeal to the public: "A little group of willful men, representing no opinion but their own, have rendered the great government of the United States helpless and contemptible," he said in a March 4 address. A month later, the U.S. had gone beyond arming merchant ships - it was at war. But you can only appeal to the public if the public supports the underlying cause. Obamacare's problem is ultimately not the Senate, but the country.

3) Let's never forget that it takes only 51 votes to change the Senate rules and abolish the filibuster altogether.  The Dems have those 51 and then some. If healthcare reform fails, they have nobody to blame but themselves. And the country will have only them to blame too. The argument, "those mean Republicans stopped us," will carry zero weight. Compared to Obama's other adversaries, the Republican senators are not so tough and not so mean. If they are too much for him, maybe he's the wrong man for the job.

4) On the other hand, the Obama team does have some consolation: all those left-wing journalists excoriating his plan's timidity will lament it after it's dead, just as they now lament their failure to accept the plans offered by President George H.W. Bush in 1991 (!) and Richard Nixon in 1974 (!!!). Even better: when President Chelsea Clinton is pushing healthcare reform sometime about 2035, the progressives will be able wistfully to urge Democrats to rally round so as to send a signing pen to ex President Obama at his retirement villa in Hawaii.