Given that the positive impact of President Obama’s policies to revive the economy and reform healthcare may not be felt for several years, it hardly seems fair to judge the success or failure of his proposals at this juncture of his first term in office.
But fair or not, Obama has taken on the task of convincing American voters to be more patient by countering the Republicans’ outlandish claims with an intelligent discussion of the matters at hand.
The latest Republican broadside concerns what’s known as ‘reconciliation’. This is a legislative tool created by Congress in 1974 that allows the Senate to pass legislation that affects the federal budget deficit with a simple majority of 51 votes – rather than the 60-vote ‘super majority’ usually required to stop a filibuster. But its use is strictly limited to politically difficult and unpopular bills that reduce the federal deficit.
Republicans claim that if Senate Democrats ‘ram through’ the President’s healthcare bill using reconciliation, the ‘Grand Old Party’ will have another winning issue to use against Democrats in the November midterms.
While they could be right about that, I suspect it won’t be the case for several reasons.
First, if this was such a ‘winning issue’ with voters, then why are Republicans planning to thwart the reconciliation process in the Senate?
The use of parliamentary delay tactics seems very hypocritical if Republicans really believe the Democrats’ use of reconciliation to push through healthcare reform is a winning issue for them.
Of course, being hypocrites is a role that Republicans in Congress are very used to, since they themselves used reconciliation to push through America’s last significant piece of healthcare legislation, the Medicare prescription drug benefit plan.
And that’s not to mention Bush’s budget-busting tax cuts – the main contributors to the multi-billion-dollar deficit President Obama inherited when he took office, and has been forced to increase to deal with the economic crisis.
President Obama recognises that many American voters have short attention spans, so he’s betting that once his healthcare reforms have passed, most will cease to see this as an election issue.
But I also think he would have been much more successful – and provoked much less public opposition – if he had heeded the advice of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel from the start.
A former Congressman, Emanuel is intimately acquainted with the kind of legislative give-and-take required to bridge the often competing interests of the President and Congress. But after Obama’s early success getting his economic stimulus package approved, following Emanuel’s advice, he veered away from the more pragmatic approach to dealing with healthcare reform, unemployment and trials for terror suspects suggested by his Chief of Staff.
Not surprisingly, the current Senate healthcare bill that will go through reconciliation is precisely the kind of smaller and less expensive healthcare proposal that Emanuel originally put forward.
Meanwhile, the Obama administration is also walking back from an idealistic decision by Attorney General Eric Holder to try the 9/11 terror suspects in civilian courts, rather than the military courts that Emanuel suggested. I’ll discuss this issue next time.
Charles Laffiteau is a US Republican from Dallas, Texas who is pursuing a PhD in International Relations and lectures on Contemporary US Business & Society at DCU
