In the immediate aftermath of Scott Brown’s shocking upset over Martha Coakley in last week’s special election, opinion makers and talking-heads worked themselves into a tizzy that produced more spittle than Chris Matthews at the Democratic National Convention. After allowing a week for heads to cool, we can now better assess the impact of Brown’s election in the near term. The near term is all we can really hope to examine, since any talk of the effect of Brown’s victory on 2012 or beyond is surely premature.
As I see it, there are two basic areas where Brown’s election will have a serious impact. The first and most obvious is the healthcare debate and the future of the Obama agenda on Capitol Hill. Jon Stewart hilariously vented the left’s frustration last week when he pointed out that, despite Brown’s win, the Democrats still have 59 votes in the Senate and an 80-vote margin in the House, a congressional majority rare in our nation’s history. Yet, as Stewart agonizingly noted, headlines and top Democrats working on healthcare (including Barney Frank and Anthony Weiner) have proclaimed Brown’s election the death-knell of healthcare reform. It needn’t be, but the Democrats aren’t facing very pleasant options.
The Democrats have five routes they could go with healthcare reform. The first would be to abandon any hope of getting anything through the Senate and have the House pass the Senate bill as is and deliver it to the President for his signature. Speaker Nancy Pelosi killed that suggestion a few days ago when she pronounced that there are not enough votes in the House to pass the Senate bill without changes. The second alternative would be to supplement House passage of the Senate bill with a separate piece of legislation making changes to the Senate bill. This new bill would be passed by the House and then sent to the Senate, where Democrats—knowing they don’t have the votes to pass such legislation—would try and get the bill through under the budget reconciliation process, which only requires 51 votes for passage.
Sounds easy, right? Well, there are two problems with this method. First, Democrats in the House are loathe to pass the Senate version with only a promise that amendments will later be made. They want an ironclad deal, meaning simultaneous House passage of the amendments bill with the Senate bill and a guarantee from Majority Leader Harry Reid that he has the votes to pass the amendment bill in the Senate. But writing the amendments bill could take months, especially since it will be subject to the complicated rules of budget reconciliation in the Senate, and none of the Democrats want to be talking about healthcare reform in April or May.
The second issue with this approach is that budget reconciliation is an unpredictable process. Under Senate rules, bills passed through budget reconciliation procedures must have something to do with the federal budget, either in the form of spending (appropriations) or income (taxes). Many of the items that Democrats would try to deal with in an amendments bill have little to do with the budget. At this point, you might be saying, “Who cares? The Democrats will ignore those rules and do whatever they want!”
Not so fast. Under Senate rules, the ultimate arbiter (one could say, the decider) of whether something can permissibly be passed under budget reconciliation procedures is the Senate Parliamentarian—and he is not an elected official. Ever heard of Alan Frumin? Didn’t think so. That’s the guy who would decide what elements of a hypothetical amendments bill could be passed using reconciliation. Sure, the Democrats could bring considerable pressure to bear on him, but in the end there has been enough backroom dealing and corrupt bargaining in this process that it stinks to high heaven. If the Democrats try any shenanigans, they’ll pay a heavy political price.
With no guarantee that they can get what they want using reconciliation, the option of passing the Senate bill in conjunction with an amendments bill seems unappealing. The third option, which would involve finishing negotiations between House and Senate leaders on a compromise bill and passing it through the House and Senate under budget reconciliation procedures, is equally unattractive for the same reason. In fact, it is even more unpredictable whether whatever compromise bill emerged would survive Alan Frumin’s parliamentary scalpel given how much larger that bill would be and how many non-budgetary measures (such as the health insurance mandate) would be included in it.
All of that is assuming, of course, that such a compromise could make it through the House in the first place, which is no sure bet considering that it passed with 220 votes. Bart Stupak would vote against any compromise that didn’t preserve his antiabortion language, but Senate leaders have made clear that they cannot pass Stupak’s language in the Senate, so you can assume Stupak is a “no.” Joseph Cao has announced he will vote against final passage of the bill, so the Dems are down to exactly the 218 votes they would need to pass the bill. Ah! Don’t forget that Florida Democrat Robert Wexler, who voted for the original House bill, recently resigned and that his seat won’t be filled until a special election in April. Looks like Nancy’s at 217, and that assumes that 30 or more prolife Democrats in the House don’t bolt on account of the abortion language.
(Sigh) Ok, now that the parliamentary heavy-lifting is done, what is option four? Well, the Democrats could simply scale back their plans and start over. This alternative seems to be the best bet for Democrats to get anything passed, and Obama seemed to be pushing this option in his an interview with ABC news just after Brown’s election. But many Democrats are resisting because they don’t see how their myriad “reforms” can be disentangled from one another. How, for instance, could the government require insurers to stop discriminating against preexisting conditions and to make other changes without also imposing a health insurance mandate to bring new consumers into the market? And how could a mandate be imposed without government subsidies, which, of course, require a new taxation regime? A stripped-down compromise might be possible, but right now it looks like it would take months to put together, something no Democrat wants to see happen.
The final alternative would be to do nothing. The Democrats could simply call it a game, say they gave it their best shot, and walk away with nothing to show for a year’s worth of torturous congressional maneuvering and disastrous political fallout. But passing nothing is probably worse politically than passing a bad bill because at least a bad bill can be spun by candidates as a grand accomplishment to satisfy the Democrats’ base. Passing nothing will only infuriate already dejected and skeptical liberals. If that happens, Nancy Pelosi should start making plans for the transition of the Speaker’s Office to John Boehner.
I could elaborate on how the result of the healthcare fight will, in turn, impact the rest of Obama’s agenda in 2010, but I’ve taken up enough of your time with the thrilling details budget reconciliation (ha, who am I kidding? Anyone who was reading stopped long ago.). So I’ll turn next to the second area in which Brown’s win will have a major impact—the midterm congressional elections.
There is a lot that could be said about how this will impact the midterms, but I’ll confine myself to what a lot of television shows are missing (but what a lot of blogs and other political sites have been paying close attention to). That is the effect this election will have on retirements and recruitment. Brown’s election sent shockwaves through the political world, and many Democrats in tough districts who were once leaning towards reelection might now reconsider their options. This is crucial because open seats are the linchpin of Republicans’ hopes of taking back the House. The more Democrats retire, especially in competitive districts, the more seats Republicans will pick up on election day. In so-called “wave” elections such as this one is shaping up to be, competitive races (both House and Senate) usually break decisively in favor of the party riding the wave. Keep a close watch on Democratic retirement announcements over the next few months, especially if the political climate does not improve for the left.
Just as retirements are a big deal, so are great recruits. Brown’s election sends the message that Republicans can win anywhere, and it will make it much easier for Republicans to recruit star candidates to go up against vulnerable Democrats. This will lead to an expansion of the field of competitive races; more Democrats will face tough reelection battles because Republicans will recruit more high-quality candidates across the country.
We are already seeing this dynamic play out. It is no accident that at the end of last week Mike Pence of Indiana, a rising star in the Republican Party, announced that he is considering challenging Senator Evan Bayh this year. A poll out today showed Pence leading Bayh in a hypothetical matchup. None of the political prognosticators have mentioned Bayh as being vulnerable this year, and no one expected he would draw a serious challenger. But if Pence gets into the race, Indiana suddenly becomes a real pick-up opportunity for the GOP.
It is also no surprise that Beau Biden announced today that he will not seek his dad’s Senate seat in Delaware this year. Sure, he had probably been leaning against making a run against Congressman Mike Castle—the prohibitive Republican nominee—before the Massachusetts election, but Brown’s victory certainly did nothing to persuade Biden to run. He read the political tea leaves and saw that this is a Republican year and that Castle is a strong candidate. But don’t feel too bad for Beau. He’ll be sure to run once Castle (70) or Tom Carper (63) retires.
Brown’s election, then, has already had and will continue to have serious political consequences. Democrats are rightly worried about the effect his win will have on the healthcare bill, the overall Obama agenda, and the midterm elections. Given that Brown will have to run for reelection in 2012 with Obama likely at the head of the Democratic ticket, there is little chance he will keep his seat for more than two years. But boy, what a difference those two years will make.