Dems need to toughen up, stop dithering over reform

I don’t want Sarah Palin to come after me, but when White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel said that some Democrats are retards, I have to say that he may have a good point.

Last week, the House and Senate Democrats were in a childish staring match in order to figure out who should move first to pass the health care bill. House Democrats claim that they don’t want to pass the Senate bill without a set-in-stone commitment that the Senate will pass the changes to fix the bill. They say that they are standing up for what they believe in and their constituents. What they seem to not understand is that if they don’t pass anything, they won’t have any constituents to stand up for at all.

The White House and designated members from the House and Senate, Republican and Democrat, came together in a widely televised meeting to discuss health care reform Feb. 25. It was intended to share ideas from both sides so that they can be able to move forward on reforming the broken health care system.

After they debated for seven hours, the meeting wrapped up, and the Democratic leadership came upon one conclusion. They realized that the only way to get their legislation through was to use a procedure known as reconciliation – a procedure that allows legislation to pass by a simple majority, something that they should have realized months ago.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid took a gamble thinking 60 votes would be easy and he lost last year. If they chose to use reconciliation last year, health care reform would not even be a topic at this point. The longer he delayed in the attempt to get 60 votes, the more the opposition pounced and controlled the narrative, shifting public opinion against Reid and the Democrats. The process to get this done could have been much quicker because he would have only needed 50 votes.

They’ve already made this entire debate so long and grueling so why make it any longer when it doesn’t have to be? Now the deadline to pass reform is by the end of March, before they leave for their recess. It’s possible, but they’ve got to stop being so weak about making tough decisions. They already know that it’s not exactly what they want but doing nothing will hurt them even more.

By not doing anything, Democrats are playing right into the narrative that is gaining much traction across the country – nothing gets done in Washington.

It’s a narrative that is feeding a wave of anti-incumbent anger and because they control Washington, they are going to be the party that will suffer the most if they can’t figure out a way to get problems solved.

Posted by Ian Bridgeforth on Mar 5 2010. Filed under Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry