Senate Finance Committee hearings

I'm watching the Senate Finance Committee hearings on the Rockefeller amendment to include a "public option" in the Finance Committee markup. I'm kind of riveted - the level of debate is quite high, excepting Chuck Grassley. I appreciate Orrin Hatch's point of view, which he expressed eloquently, though I believe it is 100 percent wrong. So hurray for representative democracy.

But here's Kent Conrad comparing health insurance systems in the UK, Canada, France, Germany and so on, and he has to have a staffer hold up a big poster board behind him with summary notes. Why is there no computer projection system in the Finance Committee hearing room? Have these people never heard of Powerpoint?

The Senate as social club

In today's New York Times, David Brooks laments the effect that pushing health care reform through by reconciliation will have on the comity of the Senate.

Once partisan reconciliation is used for this bill, it will be used for everything, now and forever. The Senate will be the House. The remnants of person-to-person relationships, with their sympathy and sentiment, will be snuffed out. We will live amid the relationships of group versus group, party versus party, inhumanity versus inhumanity.

It would be nice if the Senate were a friendly club where Jim DeMint and Barbara Boxer could socialize over brandy and cigars. But the purpose of a legislature is to legislate. The Republicans' scorched-earth tactics have made it impossible for the Senate to carry out this essential function. Reconciliation is a solution to a problem, not the problem itself.