Is There Now An Effective Conservative Coalition Running The House?

Cantor claims he has the votes to kill health care reform

The first thing I read last, night when I got off a 24 hour trip home from Bali, was Paul Krugman's highly sensible piece on Blue Dog perfidy, An Incoherent Truth. Ah... back in America! After explaining the Democratric proposals for health care reform, Krugman points out that the Blue Dogs "talk a lot about fiscal responsibility, which basically boils down to worrying about the cost of those subsidies. And it’s tempting to stop right there, and cry foul. After all, where were those concerns about fiscal responsibility back in 2001, when most conservative Democrats voted enthusiastically for that year’s big Bush tax cut-- a tax cut that added $1.35 trillion to the deficit? But it’s actually much worse than that — because even as they complain about the plan’s cost, the Blue Dogs are making demands that would greatly increase that cost."

There has been a lot of publicity about Blue Dog opposition to the public option, and rightly so: a plan without a public option to hold down insurance premiums would cost taxpayers more than a plan with such an option.

But Blue Dogs have also been complaining about the employer mandate, which is even more at odds with their supposed concern about spending. The Congressional Budget Office has already weighed in on this issue: without an employer mandate, health care reform would be undermined as many companies dropped their existing insurance plans, forcing workers to seek federal aid-- and causing the cost of subsidies to balloon. It makes no sense at all to complain about the cost of subsidies and at the same time oppose an employer mandate.

So what do the Blue Dogs want?

Maybe they’re just being complete hypocrites. It’s worth remembering the history of one of the Blue Dog Coalition’s founders: former Representative Billy Tauzin of Louisiana. Mr. Tauzin switched to the Republicans soon after the group’s creation; eight years later he pushed through the 2003 Medicare Modernization Act, a deeply irresponsible bill that included huge giveaways to drug and insurance companies. And then he left Congress to become, yes, the lavishly paid president of PhRMA, the pharmaceutical industry lobby.

One interpretation, then, is that the Blue Dogs are basically following in Mr. Tauzin’s footsteps: if their position is incoherent, it’s because they’re nothing but corporate tools, defending special interests. And as the Center for Responsive Politics pointed out in a recent report, drug and insurance companies have lately been pouring money into Blue Dog coffers.

But I guess I’m not quite that cynical. After all, today’s Blue Dogs are politicians who didn’t go the Tauzin route-- they didn’t switch parties even when the G.O.P. seemed to hold all the cards and pundits were declaring the Republican majority permanent. So these are Democrats who, despite their relative conservatism, have shown some commitment to their party and its values.

Now, however, they face their moment of truth. For they can’t extract major concessions on the shape of health care reform without dooming the whole project: knock away any of the four main pillars of reform, and the whole thing will collapse-- and probably take the Obama presidency down with it.

This morning's Hill repeats a claim from reactionary Medical-Industrial Complex shill and one of Congress' most determined obstructionists, Eric Cantor (R-VA), who has taken $692,524 in legalized bribes from Big Insurance, more than any other Republican in the House other than his partner in crime, lobbyist John Boehner (R-OH- $871,256), that the two of them control an anti-reform majority in the House when it comes to health care, basically the entire Republican caucus plus most of the reactionary Blue Dogs. Now some Blue Dogs, as we pointed out Thursday, are worse than others. A handful actually support working families, and a handful as as extreme as Dan Boren who opposes President Obama politically, not just on health care-- where he is willing to sacrifice the well-being of his own constituents to stay on the good side of his campaign donor-- but across the board. But most of the Blue Dogs are-- as Krugman hinted-- just a bunch of corporate shills in love with the huge corporate contributions they get from the Medical-Industrial Complex and the Big Insurance CEOs. If it takes selling out their constituents' from the cash, they won't blink-- unless it looks like they may have to pay a price politically. Alas, political history tells us they won't.

John Barrow (GA) is one of the worst of the Blue Dogs, not just because he votes with the Republicans on key matters more consistently than almost any other Blue Dog, but because he's one of only two de facto Republicans in the Democratic caucus representing a strongly Democratic district (the other being Texas reactionary Henry Cuellar). What makes it even uglier is that Barrow was on the verge of face political oblivion in the last primary at the hands of progressive state Senator Regina Thomas, when Obama intervened on his behalf, saving his worthless red neck. Since the new session has begun, the treacherous Barrow has supported the Republican agenda nearly as much as Obama's, one of only two dozen Blue Dogs in that category. He has been distinctly unhelpful in the battle over healthcare reform, even though his Georgia constituents would gain gigantically from the legislation.

According to the new electoral map released by CQPolitics this morning, neither Barrow, Cuellar (nor any other Blue Dog) is in real danger of losing his or her seat in 2010. Now the map doesn't take primary challenges into account and right now it predicts only 3 changes in the composition of Congress-- losses of the 3 GOP seats being held by Mark Kirk (IL-10), who is running for the Senate, Jim Gerlach (PA-6) who is running for governor and Anh Cao (LA-2) an accidental congressman with virtually no chance of re-election. They also point out 3 toss-ups: the seat being given up by Republican John McHugh (NY-23) and the seats of two anti-family Blue Dogs, Walt Minnick (ID-1) and Frank Kratovil (MD-1) who represent very Republican districts and have decided to attempt to keep their seats by voting as Republicans on key issues.

Right now, other than Marcy Winograd's race against Jane Harman, I'm not seeing any credible progressive challenges to reactionary Blue Dogs in the 2010 primaries. Allen Boyd, a loathesome Blue Dog from the Florida Panhandle is being challenged by anotehr right-of-center Democrat, albeit one not as apt to vote in locksetp with the GOP as Boyd has. It's early and there are a few rumblings among progressives in North Carolina, Indiana, and Arizona but, so far nothing worth talking about. That's how we get stuck with conservative policies and how we wind up in a situation with the leaders of corrupt, failed ideologies like Cantor and Boehner claiming to control the health care debate. Cowardly right-wing Democrats like Joe Donnelly (IN), Jason Altmire (PA), Brad Ellsworth (IN), Heath Shuler (NC), Chris Carney (PA), Harry Mitchell (AZ), Dan Boren (OK), Gene Taylor (MS), Bill Foster (IL), Zack Space (OH), Gabby Giffords (AZ), Collin Peterson (MN), Jim Marshall (GA), and, of course Barrow and Cuellar have earned primary challenges by grassroots Democrats who believe in progressive values and principles and take seriously what Bobby Kenendy said about the Democratic Part before he was assassinated.

In this entire century the Democratic Party has never been invested with power on the basis of a program which promised to keep things as they were. We have won when we pledged to meet the new challenges of each succeeding year. We have triumphed not in spite of controversy but because of it; not because we avoided problems but because we faced them. We have won not because we bent and diluted our principles, but because we stood fast to the ideals which represent the most noble and generous portion of the American spirit.