Pelosi and co. on impeachment: Not if, when?

In some ways, the press conference held by Pelosi, Cummings, Nadler and Schiff in the wake of Mueller's testimony today was exquisitely frustrating. Their dual message made no sense on its face: the president manifestly deserves impeachment but we need more evidence. Nadler said the president committed crimes. Pelosi also said that "crimes were committed against our Constitution," albeit in passive voice. Schiff said Trump was disloyal to the country, citing his negotiating the Moscow Trump Tower deal while seeking the presidency without telling the public. So how can they not open an impeachment inquiry?

At the same time, it seemed to me that these committee chairs and Pelosi in particular may have turned a corner. This was the first time I've heard Pelosi speak about impeachment without actively undercutting it. They were stalling, but they were implicitly promising to get there.

This promise -- too strong a word -- was almost explicit at the end. Schiff, all but acknowledging that the Senate would not convict, also declared that that was not the point. My emphasis (and rough transcript) below:

"They saw everything through the prism of healthcare" -- Pelosi at Health Action 2019

I've just started going through my notes from Health Action 2019, Families USA's annual conference, which is always a delight to me, as recounted here (for 2018) and here (2017). I'm reminded that in her 15 minute keynote, Nancy Pelosi actually said something of substance It's here, beginning at about 12:15 (my emphasis):

God truly blessed America with the activism of all of you. It made so much difference..we not only want the grass roots to mobilize, we want them to give us their view of what public policy should be, and how we message that public policy. That was our success in the last two years, because we would say, 'this is what we need to do, how does this translate to the people who are out there?' And they saw everything, the grassroots we were working with  -- including many of you --  through the prism of healthcare. If you want to talk about the tax bill, talk about healthcare...Republicans say about the tax bill, it doesn't really increase the deficit, but if it does, we'll take a trillion dollars out of Medicaid, we'll take a half a trillion dollars out of Medicare. So again, the point being, the effective messaging is what worked at the grassroots level, which encourages people to take advocacy action, to make the calls, to show up at the town halls, to do the sit-ins, all the activism that you know very well. So I'm here to say thank you in all of you. I hope again that you take satisfaction in all you do.

What exactly is the Medicare guarantee?

As Paul Ryan revs up Republican engines for Medicare privatization, Nancy Pelosi vows to Greg Sargent that Democrats will fight it to the death:

Pelosi adamantly stated that Democrats would not give any ground on the core ideological dispute here, which is over whether to maintain a government coverage guarantee. “We are not going to a casino — this is a guarantee,” Pelosi said. “This is a value system for us, and we will fight for it. Is it a guarantee, or not?”

This raises a question: what precisely is the Medicare guarantee?

At present, there's a pretty specific answer: for 95% of seniors, the federal government will pay about 85% of the premiums for insurance that covers a bit more than 80% of the average user's medical costs. That's what traditional Medicare does right now, via Parts A, B and D, for those whose incomes are below $85,000 for a single person or $170,000 for a couple.

Put another way, the federal government pays a bit more than two thirds of the average senior's total medical costs. Low income beneficiaries have all or part of their premiums and out-of-pocket costs paid by Medicaid, though a variety of programs. High income seniors pay higher shares of their premiums, with the percentage stepped up through several income brackets.

Quote of the decade

... that came very early in the decade, 1/28/10*. Remember when Scott Brown won his Senate seat, Democrats were running around like chickens with their heads cut off, Obama's trumpet was still uncertain, and Nancy Pelosi said this?

You go through the gate. If the gate's closed, you go over the fence. If the fence is too high, we'll pole vault in. If that doesn't work, we'll parachute in. But we're going to get health care reform passed for the American people.

 That, ducks, is leadership. Followed through with a whip job for the ages.


* Yeah, yeah, that was the last decade, technically. And?

The GOP is drunk on the proven power of extortion

I am looking past the pending government shutdown to the looming debt ceiling standoff -- the point in late October when Republicans can, worst case, cause a global economic cataclysm, or, second worst, hamper U.S. economic growth for decades to come.

As Republicans keep cramming more fantastic demands into their debt ceiling ransom note, Obama is saying now what he should have said the first time they made fantastic demands ($2.5 trillion in spending cuts over ten years with no tax increases) a condition of raising the debt ceiling in spring/summer 2011. On Friday, he said:

I will not negotiate over Congress’s responsibility to pay the bills that have already been racked up.  Voting for the Treasury to pay America’s bills is not a concession to me.  That’s not doing me a favor.  That’s simply carrying out the solemn responsibilities that come with holding office up there.  I don’t know how I can be more clear about this.  Nobody gets to threaten the full faith and credit of the United States just to extract political concessions.  No one gets to hurt our economy and millions of innocent people just because there are a couple of laws that you do not like.

The continuation, though, rather airbrushed Obama's own history on this question:

Did Nancy Pelosi (and Kerry) read Max Fisher?

Kind of looks like it:

Ms. Pelosi said..that she was hopeful the American people “will be persuaded of” military action. 

“President Obama did not write the red line,” she said. “History wrote the red line decades ago.”

[UPDATE: guess that's the party line: Kerry echoed it in his testimony this afternoon:

Now, some have tried to suggest that the debate we're having today is about President Obama's red line. I could not more forcefully state that is just plain and simply wrong. This debate is about the world's red line. It's about humanity's red line. And it's a red line that anyone with a conscience ought to draw. ][9/5: Obama said the same in Sweden.]

Compare Fisher:

The U.S. decision to move toward possible strikes appears, rightly or wrongly, wisely or unwisely, to be all about reinforcing international norms. It’s not about us; it’s not about “because Obama said so.” It’s about “because international norms say so.”

In which Obama publicly negotiates with himself

It's become a cliche that Obama is a poor negotiator because he "negotiates with himself." In his weekly address, he makes it literal. Here's what he says about the budget he's releasing on Wednesday:

This is the compromise I offered the Speaker of the House at the end of last year.  While it’s not my ideal plan to further reduce the deficit, it’s a compromise I’m willing to accept in order to move beyond a cycle of short-term, crisis-driven decision-making, and focus on growing our economy and our middle class for the long run.  It includes ideas many Republicans have said they could accept as well.  It’s a way we can make progress together.

Of course he's willing to accept this compromise, because he proposed it. The Republicans, however, didn't accept it. Putting it on offer now signals that he's willing to accept a new compromise further to the right.

Taxes or trigger!

Nancy Pelosi was not entirely clear when she said that Democrats negotiating (if such a thing is possible) with the GOP on the bipartisan supercommittee charged with putting forward a deficit reduction plan should be "as forceful as possible and as unified as possible," but that they should not rule out reforms to entitlement programs. She raised a lot of Democratic eyebrows by declaring "you won't see me drawing lines in the sand."  But if I understand her right, she's right. 

There is confusion about the kind of line in the sand Democrats on the supercommittee must draw. They will have to resist Republican intransigence, not mirror it. That is, they have to hold the line on taxes, not entitlements.

Quote of the day

Nancy Pelosi:

"They had to put a stop to me because we were effective in passing health care reform which the health insurance industry wanted to stop, Wall Street reform which Wall Street wanted to stop, (reforms of) students loans for taking the money out of the banks and giving it back to the taxpayer and to families."

We should never forget that the long struggle in American history to rein in the robber barons -- or rather, create and defend rules of the road that prevent corporate interests from becoming robber barons -- is always three steps forward, two steps back.  Now it's time to play defense.

Dionne, give the Dems a break

No one in the reality-based community would object to E.J. Dionne's core point below. But I do have a problem with the final sentence (helpfully boldfaced..):

Can a nation remain a superpower if its internal politics are incorrigibly stupid? 

Start with taxes. In every other serious democracy, conservative political parties feel at least some obligation to match their tax policies with their spending plans. David Cameron, the new Conservative prime minister in Britain, is a leading example.

He recently offered a rather brutal budget that includes severe cutbacks. I have doubts about some of them, but at least Cameron cared enough about reducing his country's deficit that alongside the cuts, he also proposed an increase in the value-added tax from 17.5 percent to 20 percent. Imagine: a fiscal conservative who really is a fiscal conservative.

That could never happen here because the fairy tale of supply-side economics insists that taxes are always too high, especially on the rich.

This is why Democrats will be fools if they don’t try to turn the Republicans’ refusal to raise taxes on families earning more than $250,000 a year into an election issue. If Democrats go into a headlong retreat on this, they will have no standing to govern.

That last sentence triggers in me a feeling I have experienced more than once recently: a vicarious weariness on behalf of Democrats in Congress.

Pelosi prophecies

Under the subject line "my prediction," here's the lede in Nancy Pelosi's fundraising email, sent this morning  (hat tip Marc Ambinder):

Here is what will happen in November. Democrats will keep control of the House. Period.


I realize that advertising is advertising, and fundraising is fundraising, and politics is politics, and politics is fundraising, and fundraising is advertising. Also, per Ambinder, that Pelosi is directly countering Gibbs' admission that the Democrats could lose the House.

Still, as Karen Tumulty pointed out back on Feb. 28 when health care reform was still being pronounced dead by many, "After what she managed to get her caucus to do last year, I would never, ever bet against the Speaker on a vote. And she is looking pretty determined on this one."

Yes, whipping votes in the House is different from corralling a national electorate. But when Nancy Pelosi issues a future-tense declarative, my mood lifts a bit nonetheless. 

The messy evolution of the legislative process, cont.

Bulletin from Pollyannasville:  the health care and financial reform bills disappointed purists of all persuasions.  But both came out stronger than most progressives familiar with the legislative process could have hoped.  In both cases, the widely forecast denuding of key provisions by powerful lobbies was largely forestalled.  In both, the process was more open, more closely tracked by interest and public interest groups and media observers of all stripes, than any prior legislation.

I have more than once referred  to the health care bill  postmortem by Andy Stern, ex of SEIU. His first observation below is tactical. But his second makes an historical argument for what has happened to the legislative process:

First, the longer you wait, the harder it gets and the worse it gets. Time for deliberation is appropriate, but indecision and delay are counterproductive to getting something done. The choices don't get easier over time. They get harder.

Second, people have to decide whether people in the same party will use procedural tricks to trip up their teammates. Or whether parties, particularly the Democratic Party, appreciates that the special deals and earmarks that might traditionally have been part of the process no longer work. Politicians used to bring kickbacks home to their district, but now people think the system is corrupt.

The making of a great President

In his long essay Can America Rise Again? James Fallows sought for a solution to "the American tragedy of the early 21st century: a vital and self-renewing culture that attracts the world’s talent, and a governing system that increasingly looks like a joke."  Our political system has not evolved, Fallows warned, citing the unrepresentative Senate, the distortions in the House wrought by gerrymandering, and the near-impossibility of fundamental Constitutional amendment.  So what to do?  Fallows concluded that we can only "muddle through" -- in effect, trust that our society's civil and economic dynamism will continue to throw up leaders who squeeze far-sighted policies through our creaking political institutions:

America has been strong because, despite its flawed system, people built toward the future in the 1840s, and the 1930s, and the 1950s. During just the time when Frederick Law Olmsted designed Central Park, when Theodore Roosevelt set aside land for the National Parks, when Dwight Eisenhower created the Pentagon research agency that ultimately gave rise to the Internet, the American system seemed broken too. They worked within its flaws and limits, which made all the difference. That is the bravest and best choice for us now.

Tonight is a night to celebrate a muddle-through breakthrough.  One month ago,  Barack Obama framed the struggle to pass comprehensive health care reform this way: "What’s being tested here is not just our ability to solve this one problem, but our ability to solve any problem."

The country passed this test because we have a leader who understands how broken our governmental machinery is and works simultaneously to fix our politics and our policies. We elected a President who appreciates how messy democracy is and understands the manifold constraints as well as the multiple levers of presidential power.  His acknowledged errors notwithstanding, Barack Obama moved this mountain because he knows how to prioritize, strategize, execute and communicate. 

Cool whip

Begging your indulgence, dear reader, an updated reposting from earlier this week:
---
Ever since Scott Brown's election on Jan. 19 seemingly blew the Democratic caucus into pieces, Nancy Pelosi has been a rock. While acknowledging some tactical uncertainty in the immediate aftermath, she never wavered in her assurance that Democrats would find a way to pass comprehensive reform.

On Jan. 21, she caused some anguish by acknowledging that she did not have the votes to pass the Senate bill as is. She did glance at the possibility of piecemeal reform. But the dominant chord even then was that a path to meaningful reform would be found. Note the refusal to panic:

"There's a recognition that there's a foundation in that bill [the Senate bill] that's important. So one way or another those areas of agreement that we have will have to be advanced, whether it's by passing the Senate bill with any changes that can be made, or just taking [pieces of it]," Pelosi said.

"We have to get a bill passed -- we know that. That's a predicate that we all subscribe to."

When will that happen? Who knows!

"We're in no rush," Pelosi said.

On Jan. 28, she took heart from Obama's defense of comprehensive reform in the State of the Union address and responded to his call to Congress to get it passed:

“You go through the gate. If the gate’s closed, you go over the fence. If the fence is too high, we’ll pole-vault in. If that doesn’t work, we’ll parachute in. But we’re going to get health care reform passed for the American people.”

Still Kicking: Nancy Pelosi

Ever since Scott Brown's election on Jan. 19 seemingly blew the Democratic caucus into pieces, Nancy Pelosi has been a rock. While acknowledging some tactical uncertainty in the immediate aftermath, she never wavered in her assurance that Democrats would find a way to pass comprehensive reform.

On Jan. 21, she caused some anguish by acknowledging that she did not have the votes to pass the Senate bill as is. She did glance at the possibility of piecemeal reform. But the dominant chord even then was that a path to meaningful reform would be found. Note the refusal to panic:

"There's a recognition that there's a foundation in that bill [the Senate bill] that's important. So one way or another those areas of agreement that we have will have to be advanced, whether it's by passing the Senate bill with any changes that can be made, or just taking [pieces of it]," Pelosi said.

"We have to get a bill passed -- we know that. That's a predicate that we all subscribe to."

When will that happen? Who knows!

"We're in no rush," Pelosi said.

On Jan. 28, she took heart from Obama's defense of comprehensive reform in the State of the Union address and responded to his call to Congress to get it passed:

“You go through the gate. If the gate’s closed, you go over the fence. If the fence is too high, we’ll pole-vault in. If that doesn’t work, we’ll parachute in. But we’re going to get health care reform passed for the American people.”

I feel very exhilarated...

when Nancy Pelosi is exhilarated:

Again, I feel very exhilarated by a Caucus meeting that we had this morning in terms of the questions that Members have. We spent a good deal of time on the substance, but then some on the process as well. We stand ready to stay as long as it takes to pass the bill. I think Members are eager to pass the bill. And again, it won't be long before we'll be making a real difference in the lives of the American people.

There's been a lot of yearning for Barack Obama to be Lyndon Johnson. Has it occurred to anyone that Nancy Pelosi is Lyndon Johnson?

Obama bends over backwards, and does not yield

Obama's post-summit bid for a comprehensive health care bill, unveiled in a letter to the Congressional leadership, extends his paradoxical  approach to Republican intransigence: bend over backwards/do not yield.  That is, keep suggesting -- and trying to showcase -- the meme that Repubicans can be right at the margins but are missing the big picture.

The White House blog stresses that the President is proposing to include "even more Republican ideas" (!) and the revised plan incorporates several proposals voiced by Republicans at the summit. Yet at the same time, Obama's letter insists "that piecemeal reform is not the best way to effectively reduce premiums, end the exclusion of people with pre-existing conditions or offer Americans the security of knowing that they will never lose coverage, even if they lose or change jobs." In other words, the damn bill -- a blend of the bills passed by House and Senate Democrats -- will pass. 

Pelosi calls for courage -- and demonstrates it

Prior to the Massachusetts election, I can't say I had a very distinct impression of Nancy Pelosi.  Since that bomb dropped, however, scattering Democrats' brains in all directions, I have admired her courage.  She has been the one voice who has consistently said from almost the moment of impact on: we will get it done. We will pass comprehensive health care reform. Most memorably there was this, on Jan. 28:

“You go through the gate. If the gate’s closed, you go over the fence. If the fence is too high, we’ll pole-vault in. If that doesn’t work, we’ll parachute in. But we’re going to get health care reform passed for the American people.”

Today on This Week, Pelosi addressed the hardest question of all for wavering Democrats:

VARGAS...What do you say to your members, when it does come to the House to vote on this, who are in real fear of losing their seats in November if they support you now?

PELOSI: Well first of all our members -- every one of them -- wants health care. I think everybody wants affordable health care for all Americans. They know that this will take courage. It took courage to pass Social Security. It took courage to pass Medicare. And many of the same forces that were at work decades ago are at work again against this bill.

But the American people need it, why are we here? We're not here just to self perpetuate our service in Congress. We're here to do the job for the American people. To get them results that gives them not only health security, but economic security, because the health issue is an economic issue for -- for America's families.

Bipartisan health care reform: the sound of one hand clapping

As Paul Starr demonstrated back in September and as Obama has repeatedly emphasized recently, the Democrats' health care reform plan has a largely Republican pedigree. Plans depending in large part on subsidized private insurance were proposed by Republicans including Richard Nixon and Jacob Javits in the late 1940s, by Bob Dole and John Chafee in the early Clinton years, and again by the trio of Bob Dole, Howard Baker and Democrat Tom Daschl last year.

Ezra Klein recently documented six more contemporary Republican ideas incorporated into the current Democratic bills: an allowance for interstate compacts; the exchanges themselves, which pool risks for individuals and small businesses; a "waiver for state innovation" that allows states to structure their own plans; encouragement of state innovation on malpractice reform; the excise tax, which is a start on reigning in the employer tax deduction for health care; and the absence of a public option. 

All this conceptual bipartisanship has of course won the Democrats zero votes (okay, one House vote, to be retracted in the next round) from the present-day extremists who have taken over the Republican party. Yet the Democrats are still singing the same tune -- whether to win over the more conservative members of their own party,who largely replaced moderate Republicans, or to demonstrate their moderation to the country at large -- or both, as a centrist cast to the bill makes it easier for blue dog Democrats to justify a yea vote to their relatively conservative constituencies.

Here's Nancy Pelosi, contradicting herself in two sentences, defining the new bipartisanship in the second:

“Bipartisanship is a two-way street,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi declares in an interview airing Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union.

“But let me say this,” Pelosi continues, “The bill can be bipartisan, even though the votes might not be bipartisan, because they [Republicans] have made their imprint on this.”

A health care strategy in Obama's pregnant pause?

Two days ago, I started a post in which I was planning to contrast this intrepid declaration by Nancy Pelosi with what I viewed as mixed messages from Obama:

"You go through the gate. If the gate's closed, you go over the fence. If the fence is too high, we'll pole-vault in. If that doesn't work, we'll parachute in. But we're going to get health care reform passed for the American people."

Paraphrasing Steve Benen, I wrote, "Compare Pelosi's strength and determination with the ambiguity emanating from Barack "identify those core elements of this package" Obama" (Benen's comparison was with Mary Landrieu).  The epithet came from Obama's Jan. 20 interview with George Stephanopoulos, in which the President had seemed to me to be pulling in two directions -- first suggesting that a health care bill might have to be stripped down to win some Republican support, and then explaining why the core elements of the bill could not be pulled apart.

But a funny thing happened on the way to "publish post."  I reread the interview, searching for the wording for my epithet, and began to think I had misread it the first time.  That's partly Obama's fault; his language was unclear.  But his thinking at that point was, I think, completely consistent with his presentation of the health care reform task in the State of the Union address a week later. In both cases, he studiously avoiding speaking as a tactical party leader. He gestured toward one more reach-out to Republicans.  He left the door open to picking up a Senate Republican vote or two and therefore going back to negotiating a merged Senate-House bill, rather than trying to navigate the much messier process of the House passing the Senate bill and negotiating fixes to be achieved through reconciliation.

But also in both, he asserted that the HCR bill had been misrepresented, that its key parts were interdependent,  and that a full-scale bill must be passed. In the interview, when he said, " I would advise that we try to move quickly to coalesce around those elements of the package that people agree on," he was not talking about a scaled-down package. "People" may have nominally included Republicans (or not nominally, if he thinks that his own advocacy may pull in a Republican or two). But essentially, Obama meant that Democrats need to recognize that the core elements in both bills cannot be pulled apart, and that they therefore need to find a way to negotiate or live with whatever parts of the bill they find objectionable and get the core elements -- i.e., in all likelihood, the Senate bill -- passed.