The commentariat is all abuzz with a debate over whether, now that the House has passed the Job-Killing-Repeal-Obamacare bill, the Senate should even allow debate on it.  Harry Reid has said it won’t come to the floor for a vote.  Still, some in the left-leaning blogosphere want to see the senate Democrats drag out the debate, forcing Republicans into embarrassing votes on popular provisions of the law.

This seems to me like an obvious mistake.  The debate on health care is over. End of story. 

True, there are a handful of people still obsessing about the Affordable Care Act – the tea party. Everyone else is tired of this debate.  It passed, the world didn’t come to an end, and Democrats will continue to take deserved credit as popular provisions of the bill continue to become law.  But the president isn’t experiencing a resurgence in the polls because people are spending all of their time thinking about the ACA.  He’s surging in the polls because he signed a bunch of bills in the lame duck session that made it look like he is trying to fix the damned economy and because some good economic numbers posted.  Period.

So let the Senate Republicans spend their time whining that the Democrats won’t let them bring the repeal bill to the floor all they want.  In the meantime, the Democrats in the Senate should be brining a new bill to the floor every week dealing with small business loans, infrastructure projects, higher education access, etc.  And call the bills “The Small Business Growth Act” and “The 21st Century Workforce Investment Act”. If the Republicans shut up and pass the bills, great.  The president will get credit for getting stuff done and for being “bipartisan”.  If they filibuster and demand a vote on health care repeal, great.  The Republicans look like obstructionists who care more about some repeal bill that the president will never sign than they do about creating jobs.  Either way Obama wins.

The point here is this:  the economy is going to continue to slowly recover over the next two years.  The only question is how much credit the president and the Democrats will get for it.  With any luck, they will get a few bills through that actually speed up the recovery, but even if they don’t, FDR was elected and then re-elected twice before the economy ever really started to recover because, irrespective of the economic conditions, he looked like he was doing everything he could to get the economy moving again.

Or the Democrats could let the Republicans set the agenda, make them take a few mildly embarrassing votes.  Like Ezra Klein, I doubt that forcing them to take those votes will hurt the Republicans much, but even if it does, the Democrats will do so at the cost of looking like they don’t understand how badly the economy sucks.

I think that the market in opinions about intelligence failures, al Qaida’s capacity to execute sophisticated attacks, and body scans is pretty well cornered at this point. Still, it’s worth pointing out that this attempted attack really highlights the fact that a 9/11-style attack would be really hard to pull off today.

The 9/11 hijackers were able to hijack the planes by using history against us. Prior to 9/11, it was widely understood that the best thing to do in a hijacking was to just let the terrorist do his thing and you would probably walk away safely. Hijacking and suicide bombing had, up to that point, been separate endeavors. What we saw in the case of the shoe bomber shortly after 9/11 was a radical shift in the average passenger’s cost-benefit analysis. All of a sudden, inaction seemed much more likely to kill you and lots of other people so attacking the would-be hijacker became a much more appealing option.

8 years later, the undie bomber episode tells us that the changed perception of hijacking is probably here to stay. Of course, this doesn’t mean that it is somehow less likely that suicide bombers will be able to blow up individual planes (though query whether pre-9/11 passangers would have been sufficiently suspicious to prevent either the shoe or the underpants bomb). It does mean, however, that it would be incredibly difficult to actually hijack a plane and use it as a missile. That may seem like cold comfort to the victims on the plane that blows up, but it’s a significant security improvement and it has nothing to do with the TSA or the US counterterrorism apparatus. 9/11 was at least an order of magnitude worse in terms of human life, economic cost, and damage to the national psyche than a successful underwear bomb would have been. That’s no reason to stop improving security or intelligence procedures, but it’s still good news.

[R]equire the Federal Communications Commission to prescribe a standard to preclude commercials from being broadcast at louder volumes than the program material they accompany.

And you thought the days of unanimous consent in the Senate were over.  Now if only they could do something about the Sham Wow guy…

h/t Matt Yglesias

Update* – According to at least one study published in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, commericals aren’t actually louder than the television shows they appear on.  Instead, the TV shows have a wider range of decibel levels throughout the program.  The commercials tend to have a much narrower decibel range at the top end of the program volume.  So the volume that the show might use only in a scene with an explosion and lots of gunfire, for example is the volume of the commercial.  Still, the average decibel level of the actual program is probably significantly lower than the average decibel level of its commercials, even if the show sometimes gets as loud as its commercials.

Jonathan Alder asks if the Senate is allowed to bind future Senates in this way and Eric Posner says no.  I’m no expert parliamentarian, but I would like to know one thing: if this Senate cannot constitutionally bind future Senates with a 3/5 requirement to amend a bill sent from the advisory committee, how is it that previous Senates are allowed to bind the current Senate with a 3/5 requirement for cloture?

If that provision of the health care bill doesn’t pass the constitutional smell test, shouldn’t each Senate also have to vote to establish its own filibuster rules? If so, this Senate hasn’t done so, and the Republicans are no more able to filibuster anything than the Democrats are able to restrict the amendment process of future bills. Sounds like a fair trade.

A mummy with a "Cadillac" plan

Beau’s discussion of end-of-life treatment and cost control reminds me that in the health care debate there are two related but distinct problems. The first problem is the rate at which health care costs are growing relative to the rest of the economy such that, if unaddressed, the cost of health care could literally bankrupt the country. This staggering level of cost growth is largely driven by the fact fact that people who have health insurance tend to demand more health care than they need because they don’t directly have to pay the costs of treatment. The second problem is that there are also a whole lot of people who are under-treated because they can’t afford any health insurance or because the policies they can afford are inadequate (think excessive deductables or policies that exclude treatment for pre-existing conditions).

The reason I support the Senate health care bill is because it attempts to do something to address each of these problems. In fact, it uses the benefits of reducing over-treatment (in savings and tax revenues) to pay for the costs of reducing under-treatment.

The Baucus plan to tax generous insurance policies which encourage over-treatment and the plan to try and limit unnecessary Medicare costs through an independent commission are not going to solve the problem of runaway costs, but the will probably make a dent. Similarly, the expansion of Medicaid, the creation of exchanges to enhance consumer information (and thereby competition) in the individual market, the provision of subsidies to buy health insurance, and the fact that states can take those subsidies to essentially create their own “public options” will all serve to noticably reduce the problem of under-treatment.

Again, none of this is to say that the bill will solve either problem. I also recognize that in an ideal world, we would get a bill that did more to reduce both problems if not solve them. Still, we don’t live in an ideal world. A lot of liberals want to start over and push a better bill through using the filibuster-proof reconcilliation process. That may sound good, but the lesson of the past 8 months is that the longer the health care debate goes on, the less popular reform becomes. People don’t like long policy debates in Congress, they like Congresses that do things. Perhaps a little too much (think of the PATRIOT Act). Even if all we needed were 50 votes, it’s not obvious to me that we would have even that if this went on for several more months.

Of course if Harry Reid could get 50 votes a few months from now, holding out for a somewhat better health care bill would still have important costs. Health care is a really important issue, but it isn’t the only really important issue. I don’t even think it’s the most important issue (health care is a big problem for the United States but climate change is a catastrophic problem for the whole world). The longer the Senate is crippled by this health care debate the longer it will be before they start addressing any of the other critical issues on the collective agenda.

The point here is that at some point the marginal benefit of making the health bill a little more perfect is going to be outweighed by the benefits we would see as a country from doing at least something on these other issues. I think we have reached that point.

Fellow liberals, it’s time to pass the damned bill and move on.

Under the Senate version of the bill, part of the uninsured will be covered by an expansion of the Medicaid program to low income families.  Right now, the Medicaid program is funded by a combination of state and federal dollars.  To help ease the transition for cash-strapped states, the bill provides that initially the feds will cover 100% of the cost of the expansion of Medicaid.  Over time the states will start picking up some of the tab until the balance gets back to normal.  Ben Nelson negotiated a longer transition period expected to cost $100M over 10 years.  Vermont and Massachusetts got similar deals, but at higher costs.

Sen. Graham calls this a bribe and says that he wants the South Carolina Attorney General to look into whether it is constitutional.  While he’s at it, I’d recommend that the AG also look into whether Sen. Graham’s $275M in earmark spending directed exclusively toward South Carolina in 2008 is similarly unconstitutional.  Granted, Sen. Graham hasn’t requested any earmark spending in 2009.  Nevermind the fact that he managed to “unconstitutionally” funnel 275% more money to South Carolina in the course of 1 year than Nelson’s deal will send to Nebraska over the course of 10.

It’s heartwarming to see that at least one person in Washington is still able to produce some sincere moral outrage.

The bill in the Senate is the result of at least 8 months of very public debate and the fact that Sen. Snowe is using that as her excuse for voting against it underlines how scared she is of a serious primary challenger in 2012 from a more conservative Republican. She is clearly ready to vote for the bill on idealogical grounds and probably has been for some time. The road block, it seems, is the Republican insistence on a combination of assinine intransigence and ideological purity.

The solution? Keep courting her. Even if the Persident never gets her vote on an important issue, the mere appearance of moderation or cooperation with our Stalinist-Nazi-Muslim-Terrorist president will probably be sufficient to push her to the blue side of the aisle. And don’t forget that Maine is significantly more liberal as a state than Nebraska. If Sen. Snowe were a Democrat, make no mistake that she would be voting for this bill and Harry Reid wouldn’t have needed Ben Nelson’s vote.

Fewer dead kids. If you don’t think that’s both consistent with the “Christmas spirit” and an improvement over the status quo, I suppose we see things differently.

I should also note, though, that this doesn’t change my assessment of the Senate. The fact that a good bill is going to pass doesn’t mean that the House bill wasn’t better than what we’ll get with the Senate. On immigration reform, climate change, and financial regulation, I think that if we see the Senate pass any bills at all, they are going to be significantly less effective than what we would get in a unicameral system.

Andy makes a nice point that 41 Senators only represent 37% of the US population, but part of a democratic society is the protection of the minority (even if you disagree with it). Additional, the federal government is not a democratic system, but instead a republic. Remember, the founding fathers were scared of direct democracy and the power of the common man. Senators have incentives and we hope that the main incentive is to respond to the needs and wants of their citizens in their state through the ultimate confirmation of reelection.

I might not like it, Andy might not like it, but it is a feature, not a bug. If you want to move legislation through the Senate, you need to either shape it so it is more on the side of Republicans or show the Republicans that they will not have jobs after the next election if they stand opposed to the legislation. I believe if the Democrats work hard enough to show the people this is the right cause, unemployment numbers for Republican Senators will see an uptick come November 2010.