It Seems Most Who Are Disappointed Have No Clue How The Senate Works.

WeDidIt

(1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore

Wed Dec-23-09 09:43 AM
Original message

It Seems Most Who Are Disappointed Have No Clue How The Senate Works.

Edited on Wed Dec-23-09 09:50 AM by WeDidIt

You might want to google the phrase "The Great Compromise" or even "Connecticut Compromise".

The Senate was created with a single purpose in mind, a CONSERVATIVE approach to legislation. By this I do not mean a rightwing approach, but a slow, methodical approach.

See, all the big states with the large populations were in favor of the Virginia plan which would have had a single body for legislation where representation was based solely upon population. This was too much for the smaller states to swallow, thus the Senate came into being.

That single creation meant it would take more than 80 years before the single most odious legal action enshrined by our constitution would be altered, the existence of slavery. And even that required a war to change.

And since the Congress as we know it came into being, the House has always been the Reactive body while the Senate has always been the Deliberative body. The Senate becomes a check on the more aggressive legislation by the House, to slow things down. In other words, a more conservative approach.

And when it has served the aims of the Left, it has been decried by the Right and lauded by the Left. Examples of this are found in many of the moves over the past eight years by the Bush Administration which have simply failed. Social Security privatization would have been a slam dunk without this more conservative approach by the Senate. since it was a non-starter in the Senate, it became a non-starter overall.

This is why incrementalism is the ONLY WAY to advance any ideas in our form of government. That's how Social Security began and it's how Medicare began. Neither were what they are now when first enacted.

And that's how HCR will go, too. This approach also guarantees one thing, if the health insurance companies are to survive, they must make the system better, else incrementalism works to their disadvantage and they are pushed out in favor of a public plan. If they behave themselves, they can continue to exist and will become more like the Dutch example of healthcare delivery. Either way, they are never going to be what they once were.

Am I pissed off we didn't get more out of HCR? HELL YES! What that means to me, however, is we need to move the political leanings of the Senate further to the Left as that will be the way to build upon this foundation to form a more perfect version of health care reform.

If, on the other hand, the LEft just gives up and sits at home all disappointed, the right wins and this foundation will be wiped away, never to be visited again in any of our life times because to do so would be far too risky politically.

So the choice of how this proceeds is up to the left. Be whiny poutraged babies, and the Republicans get what they want. Fight even harder to move the ideological bent of the Senate to the left, and you'll see this legislation change quickly in legislative terms.