The Public Option Lives – For Now
For weeks now, nearly every political pundit on TV has at one time or another declared the public option dead. They just couldn’t see a way for Harry Reid and the rest of the Senate Democrats to gather enough votes to include it in the final bill. However, somewhere between the bluff and bluster of the angry right and a seemingly unsupportive White House, the Senate Majority Leader found enough political courage to take a stand and throw his support behind the plan.
Now that it is in the bill, the Democrats must hold the line with all 60 of their votes against a Republican filibuster. Not all the Democrats need to vote for the bill on the floor but they do need to stand with their fellow caucus members and vote to end debate. The ultimate disaster for the Democrats would be for one of their own to break with the party and tradition to give the Republicans a victory. However, that is exactly what Senator Joe Lieberman has threatened to do.
Lieberman has a long and sordid history of betraying the Democratic Party and his constituents. His two most memorable defections have been his active and public campaign against Barack Obama in the last election and his continuing support for the decision to go to war in Iraq. Despite his contrarian policy decisions, he was allowed to retain his prestigious chairmanship of the Homeland Security Committee. This was presumably done to insure that he would be there when the Democrats needed him on critical party votes. Trusting Lieberman, however, has always been a risky proposition and his lack of loyalty to the Democratic Party has always been in plain view. If you if you go back to the previous November, he told Glenn Beck that he “feared” a 60 vote Democratic majority and proclaimed the filibuster as “key”.
“And I think the filibuster is the key. You know, it gets a bad name, but it was really put there, a 60-vote requirement, to, as somebody said to me when I first came to the Senate, stop the passions of a moment among the people of America from sweeping across the Congress, the House, through the Senate, to a like-minded President and having us do things that will change America for a long time. So the filibuster is one of the important protections we have.”
The worst part about Lieberman’s stated intentions is that it gives other Senate Democrats “permission” to go against Harry Reid and the majority. No Democrat wants to be the only person voting against health care reform, but one no vote can turn in to three or four very quickly and sink the idea of the public option for the next 20 years.
I do applaud Harry Reid for having the courage to move this bill forward with a public option but I wish he would have locked up the votes of notoriously unruly Senators like Joe Lieberman first.
