Yesterday I suggested that maybe Senate Dems should go ahead and put up a big public fight over repeal of healthcare reform. Sure, they could spend their time trying to pass bills to nationalize the coal mines or set up reeducation centers for tea party members, but they’d just get filibustered anyway, so why bother? Why not spend the next month forcing Republicans to take embarrassing votes on amendments to put the Medicare donut hole back in place, or to let insurers turn down people with preexisting conditions instead?
Well, Ezra Klein had a good question about that: “As a general point, I think ‘making people take semi-embarrassing votes’ is vastly overrated in American politics. Can anyone think of a campaign that even partly turned on one of these gambits?” Jonathan Bernstein agrees. But Barry Pump dives into the literature and says that while it’s hard to tie a specific election result to a specific roll call vote, maybe that doesn’t matter:
Finally, and I think this is the most important factor, both Mayhew and Arnold argue that members of Congress believe that voters are retrospective, so whether they are or not is besides the point. They structure voting situations because they think campaigns and elections may turn on certain roll calls….Now, is that position overrated? Well, some research suggests so. But another response could be, for the reason above, who cares if it’s overrated? When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.
Pump also points to Bart Stupak as a possible example of someone who was undone by a roll call vote, and I suspect you could come up with some other examples in swing districts too. But whether this strategy works or not, Brian Beutler reports that apparently Senate Democrats are looking at it pretty favorably:
A top Democratic aide tells me that leadership staffers are considering ways to make Republicans take tough votes on popular elements of the bill, as Republicans figure out if and how they’ll force a vote on full repeal.
Nothing’s been finalized, including precisely how they’d go about it. But the point would be to turn a global health care repeal push into something more piecemeal — should seniors pay back their $250 doughnut hole check? Should children with pre-existing conditions be stripped of insurance?
“Senior staff are giving serious consideration to the strategy of forcing Republicans to take tough votes on extremely popular elements of the health care law, including the doughnut hole provision, as well as pre-existing conditions,” the aide said.
Well, why not? Maybe it’ll work, maybe it won’t. Probably it won’t, especially so long before an election. But Republicans have made it clear that they don’t plan to do any serious legislating until they’re finished holding timewasting symbolic votes in a desperate effort to assuage their tea party base, so why not give it a try? At the very least, maybe it will send a message to the GOP leadership that two can play at dumb legislative games.
