I think Markos is getting a little rough with Max Baucus. In my opinion, the biggest part of the problem with the Finance Committee is that there are Dems serving there like Kent Conrad, Tom Carper, and Blanche Lincoln who don’t support the public option. Baucus has said that he supports it. But he can only afford to lose one Democrat and still pass a bill through the committee. Moreover, the Dems would like to get 60 votes and they only have 59 members. Part of Baucus’s charge has been to find one or two Republicans to support the Finance bill. That he has failed in that effort isn’t necessarily his fault.
I don’t like watching Baucus drag his feet and I don’t really trust him to stand up for real health insurance reform. But I don’t think he’s going to become more cooperative in response to verbal abuse from the Left.
The only mitigation for Baucus is that he got on a committee he has no business being on and a position he has no business having. So he gets to shift some blame to the asinine trainwreck that is the US Senate.
I’ll never forgive him for his weaselly dictate that single-payer is “off the table”. It’s beyond my power of imagination to come up with a statement that would be too rough on him.
Sometimes I get frustrated and want to give it to Baucus. But I don’t care about his single-payer comment. What would have been the point of debating a plan that has the support of less than five senators? He should have allowed some pro-single payer testimony, but it would have been a bit of a sideshow under the circumstances. Obama did not run on single-payer and he didn’t want a single-payer bill introduced because it would be dead on arrival.
Right. I forgot that leadership is not an elected official’s job. All he’s supposed to do is assess the odds and go with them.
The point of debating is debating — winnowing and sifting of ideas, remember? If all Congress is for is ratifying the pre-rolled opinions of an alleged majority, why have a legislature at all? I think his arrogant dismissal was quite the opposite of preventing a sideshow: it was fear that it would become the mainstage as far as voters were concerned, and derail his pathetic little “compromise”.
One would hope that a Democratic Senate would be first and foremost interested in helping a Democratic president achieve the agenda he or she laid out in the campaign. There was no reason to be dismissive or two squeeze out important view points in the hearings. You can fault Baucus for that. But he job isn’t to explain why Obama’s health care promises are less than optimal. His job is to write a bill that reflects those promises. He’s failed in that, too, by the way. But I think the blame for that needs to be shared.
He doesn’t need to explain anything. He just needs to operate like one of the alleged leaders in a democratic country, and let all reasonable sides have their say. He certainly had no problem bowing and scraping to the anti-reform nutcases.
I think it’s a little off to excuse him because his job is to carry water for Obama. In the first place, it isn’t. In the second place, do you really think Obama would veto a single-payer bill, or one better than the insipid mess Baucus seems determined to produce? I sure hope not. Bottom line is, he never had any business chairing this committee. But I do agree that the issue is much bigger than him and goes to the whole problem of living under a decrepit House of Lords.
Every day that we go without a modern, accessible health care system, people sicken and die unnecessarily, and many more are impoverished. Given that as the real world consequence of Congress’ action or inaction, it’s hard to imagine how one could be going too far in criticizing Baucus and his cohorts. No one, at least on our side, is threatening violence, after all. We’re just flapping our gums.
People got really excited when a handful of religious fanatics killed a few thousand people on 9/11. The number of people who die of preventable conditions in the United States every year is a couple of orders of magnitude larger than the relative handful who died on that one day. Heart disease and cancer, for example, kill more people than that every single day. Unfortunately, despite having identical outcomes, actively murdering people attracts more concern than allowing a vastly larger number to die from sheer, callous neglect.
We aren’t going overboard, we’re exhibiting absurd self-restraint.
In November of last year, Maxie had a completely different view of things in terms of what a national health plan would be like. He put out a plan that was to the left of everything that’s been passed so far this session and has completely repudiated that plan in favor of the secret stuff he’s working on with Grassley and the other idiots.
That, and his millions in industry contributions, to my mind, make the criticism that much more deserving.
Baucus like many other Senators seems to be in the control of the lobbyists who have found his sweet spot; that is, his need for juicy campaign contributions. One more chapter in the sad story of a national legislature that has sold its soul. Meanwhile, millions of the poor have no health insurance and so suffer the twin agonies of physical and financial ruin.
You do realize he’s just lying to his constituents right?
looks like you opened a can of worms Boo. I gotta tell ya that the only way that a “robust” public option gets passed is if Max gets ripped a new ass hole. Harry decides to exert true leadership. The O man decides that September is gonna be his. Rham decides to use every tool in his toolchest. And us commoners decide that we truly have had enough.
When the goopers run up their true colors and refuse to halt the hate mongers and the tenthers, and the birther and the fucking liars, we little folks must take to the streets of every single city in this country and scream- enough!
Come on Buu- Max is simply a flunky for the coporate insurers and pharma. Even if we lose this time around, just think about what an energised voter base can do in 2010! It is not that far away. Talk about a community organizing bonanza. I gotta say BOO- It is now or never.
The only problem I have with Baucus, Lincoln, Conrad and Carper is that we have representatives of 4% percent of the population deciding whether the other 96% percent will have the public option. (heard this on MSNBC).
I don’t think Kos is harsh enough. It is one thing to not schedule any testimony in favor of single payer; it is quite another to have the doctors who came to speak arrested — more than once. But I think his worst behavior has been shutting the real Finance Committee out of the process. He has self-selected a “gang of six-and-a-half,” including Mike Enzi and Doug Elmendorf, who aren’t even members of the Finance Committee (hell, Elmendorf isn’t even a Senator), while excluding the rest of the real committee. It makes the discussions even less representative of the U.S. than is the whole committee.
It was this gang’s intentional stalling that prevented a bill from passing before August, which gave the industry time to launch and propagate their Town Hall campaign and wall-to-wall advertising blitz. Make no mistake, Max Baucus has done real harm to many, many Americans by his behavior. The fact that he knew better last fall just makes his current behavior harder to justify.