Obama’s price of victory With a Democratic Congress, Obama passed ACA. But it caused all-out political war. By TODD S. PURDUM | 10/2/13 5:02 AM EDT Twenty years ago, when he was trying to persuade Bill and Hillary Clinton that universal health care was a politically unrealistic goal, the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan repeated one insistent warning: Sweeping, historic laws don’t pass barely. “They pass 70-to-30,’’ he said, “or they fail.” Four years ago, when he was trying to persuade Barack Obama that he would pay a terrible price for jamming health care reform through a reluctant Congress on a partisan vote, White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel begged his boss to settle for a vastly scaled-down plan. But the truth is that Moynihan’s point about the only way to make big changes work seems more than vindicated. Obama tried — for far longer than most of his liberal allies wanted — to get a bipartisan health care bill. Its centerpiece — an individual mandate to buy insurance — was a Republican idea, first pushed in Congress 20 years ago by Sen. John Chafee of Rhode Island. That meant nothing to the current Republican congressional leadership, which vowed to block Obama’s bill from the start. “If we’re able to stop Obama on this, it will be his Waterloo,” said then-Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), now president of The Heritage Foundation. “It will break him.” Obama might have shown greater legislative or political finesse at any one of several points along the way. But his basic alternative to passing the bill the way he did would have been to accept his lot as another liberal loser and abandon hope for 20 more years. So the president has fair ground for accusing the House GOP of shutting down the government “over an ideological crusade to deny affordable health insurance to millions of Americans,” as he did on Tuesday. But he could have predicted that his own crusade to bring them coverage would unleash the political whirlwind that is now likely to last for years to come — whatever the merits of his cause. And Republicans are doing their best to make sure no one forgets that he rammed through the health law with Democratic support alone. “You reap what you sow,” said Whit Ayres, the veteran Republican pollster. “When you force through a major and very significant change to our economy, and you do it on a pure party-line vote, and at the very end change the rules to cram it through, you simply set up a long-term political battle that will never end.” Robert Blendon, a health policy expert at the Harvard School of Public Health, offered a less partisan but equally pungent analysis. “The long-term future of bills that have absolutely no minority support and are not popular when passed is not good,” he said. “This law is vulnerable not just for this week, but for the 2014 elections, and if not then, for whenever the minority party does become the majority.” Yes, the Affordable Care Act was duly passed by both houses of Congress and upheld by the Supreme Court. Yet even the Volstead Act — which implemented Prohibition under the 18th Amendment — passed the House 287-100 and the Senate on a voice vote in 1919, but was ignored by many governors and mayors, was never accepted by broad segments of the country and was repealed just 14 years later. The Supreme Court may have ruled 6-3 in Roe v. Wade, but big chunks of the nation’s legislative and political culture were rocked back by the decision’s sweep, and have spent the last 40 years waging a dogged rear-guard action against it. The Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education was unanimous, but not until 10 years later, with the overwhelming bipartisan passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, did that ruling really become the law of the land. No major law of the 20th century — not Medicare, nor the 1957, 1964 and 1965 civil rights and voting rights acts, nor the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act nor Social Security — passed the Congress by anything like the narrow, partisan margin of Obamacare. The Senate approved that 60-39 — a virtual squeaker by that chamber’s modern standards — and the House by just seven votes, 219-212. Perhaps only the progressive income tax, which the Senate approved by a vote of 44-37 in 1913, had such a narrow margin of support. And, not coincidentally, it is the one measure among all those landmark laws that remains the subject of the liveliest debate a century later. For Obama, these historical examples were quaint relics in dealing with a Congress that studies show is more divided than at any time since Reconstruction. His effective response to the realities he faces: What should I do? Give up? He famously told Emanuel, in a dig at Bill Clinton’s small-bore 1990s initiatives, that he had not come to Washington to “do school uniforms.” Read more: politico/story/2013/10/government-shutdown-barack-obama-obamacare-aca-97687.html#ixzz2geJxAd6l politico/story/2013/10/government-shutdown-barack-obama-obamacare-aca-97687.html
Posted on: Thu, 03 Oct 2013 09:28:22 +0000
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