I am a bigger fan of bipartisanship than most here in the liberal blogosphere, and after all that's been said about Ted Kennedy's record the past few days, I don't think I need to explain why. However, while bipartisanship should be an important part of any legislative process, the end goal of the legislative process is, as that phrase would imply, legislation. I cheered my former boss, Max Baucus, when he began his Senate Finance Committee negotiations, but my cheering was short-lived. You can only hold out an unshook hand for so long before your arm muscles get tired. Mine got tired when the August recess began and Baucus's Republican counterpart Charles Grassley started shilling for Glenn Beck.

Some folks have stronger arm muscles than mine. Fair enough, but after today's news, no one can continue to hold out that arm without an illegal dose of morphine. Mike Enzi (R-WY), another member of Baucus' working group, jumped ship today in his party's official weekly radio address.

A leading GOP negotiator on health care struck a further blow to fading chances of a bipartisan compromise by saying Democratic proposals would restrict medical choices and make the country's "finances sicker without saving you money." The criticism from Sen. Michael Enzi, R-Wyo., echoed that of many opponents of the Democratic plans under consideration in Congress. But Enzi's judgment was especially noteworthy because he is one of only three Republicans who have been willing to consider a bipartisan bill in the Senate...

"I heard a lot of frustration and anger as I traveled across my home state this last few weeks," said Enzi, who has been targeted by critics for seeking to negotiate on legislation. "People in Wyoming and across the country are anxious about what Washington has in mind. This is big. This is personal. This is one of the most important debates of our lifetime."... Enzi said: "This will result in cutting hundreds of billions of dollars from the elderly to create new government programs."

This very un-bipartisan language comes on the heels of yesterday's comments from Senators John Barrasso (R-WY) and Bob Bennett (R-UT) that "the No. 1 assignment in 2009 is to kill Obamacare." And of course, Republican Whip Jon Kyl (R-AZ) has made it clear that there will be no compromises, and Jim DeMint (R-SC) famously said health care should be the President's "Waterloo." Let's boil that down: the Minority Whip, two of the three Republican Finance negotiators, and several of their conservative allies have gone out of their way to make it clear there will be no bipartisan bill. It's not the Democrats' fault that the bipartisan process American voters say they want has failed - they tried, and the Party Of No lived up to its name. This became clear and it became time to move on several weeks ago, and if Baucus and Emmanuel didn't get it then, they should certainly get it now. The failure of bipartisanship may not be their fault, but if they ignore that failure and keep pressing the deathers, then the failure to pass strong health care reform will be their fault. They wanted to negotiate away the public option? I didn't like it, but like Paul Krugman, I would have lived for the sake of passage. Until now, that is - no point negotiating it away if there's no one to negotiate with.

Let Finance do what Finance will do, but pass the public option in conference. There are almost certainly fifty votes for it in the Senate, and we can almost certainly pressure Snowe, Collins, Nelson (NE), Pryor, Lieberman, and others into voting no on the bill but yes on cloture. We can get sixty votes for cloture and then pass the bill with a Biden tie-breaker.

I was waffely, but Chuck Grassley and Ted Kennedy galvanized me. Mike Enzi's speech is the final jolt liberals needed. No excuses anymore. Like Bob Cesca says, "healthcare reform named after Ted Kennedy must not suck."

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Adapted from Blue Moose Democrat.

Key Republican Senators Charles Grassley, Mike Enzi, and Orrin Hatch have all said that the health care bill needs to have between 75 and 80 Senate votes. Grassley has even gone so far as to make it clear that no matter how much he likes the final bill, he won't bother thinking for himself or for his constituents; he'll only vote for it if a large number of his Senate Republican colleagues do, as well.

75 votes is an absurd threshold. When a president wins election with 60% of the vote, we call it a landslide, and yet when "just" 60% of our elected representatives vote for a bill, we're supposed to consider it partisan? It gets even more absurd when one considers that the original Senators, some of our founding fathers, set up a system where a bare majority rules. The filibuster has since increased that to 60%.

Yet as horrible as they said it was back when they were threatening the "nuclear option," the filibuster just isn't enough for these three Republicans anymore. I think a bill with 75 votes would be a wonderful thing for political unity in this country, but it's just not going to happen. Most Senate Republicans, from Jim DeMint to Jon Kyl, have made it clear that they won't support any sort of reform. Should we give up because our majority is merely a big one rather than a huge one? Of course not! That wasn't the threshold when Republicans were in charge, and it is not the threshold now.

That fact got me thinking: are these three Senators willing to renege on their support for any current laws that received less than 75 votes? Or even more drastically, would they say such laws are invalid? As Howard Dean said on Maddow last night, "I think we probably should have had 80 votes to go to war in Iraq, too." Here, then, is a list of five laws that passed with less than 75% Congressional support:

• The 19th Amendment to the Constitution, which gave women the right to vote passed the Senate 56-25, which today would be the equivalent of 69 Senators, six less than Grassley wants. Does that mean he thinks women shouldn't vote? Is he willing to say so about our efforts to promote democracy in Afghanistan and Iraq?
  
• The 21st Amendment to the Constitution, which repealed Prohibition passed on a vote of 63-21. That means just 71.4% of Senators supported it. Would Mike Enzi like to see prohibition reinstated?
  
• The Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed the Senate on a vote of 73-27, two shy of the new benchmark. Does this mean Orrin Hatch wants to repeal civil rights?
  
• The Iraq War, ie, the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002, did receive 77 votes in the Senate. In the House, however, it only received 297 votes, or 68.3% support, 6.7% less than Republican negotiators now demand. Does this mean they are willing to start opposing the war?
  
• Medicare Part D, ie, 2003's Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act, passed the Senate 54-44. Hatch, Enzi, and Grassley all voted aye - are they willing to admit they were wrong and should have held out for 21-26 more votes?

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Originally posted at The Wayward Episcopalian. This post is called "Dear Opponents of Socialized Medicine." That's clearly not the MyDD crowd, but maybe you can find a new talking point (like "socialized defense") for when Uncle Pete comes over for dinner tomorrow night.

Dear Opponents of Socialized Medicine,

CONGRATULATIONS, YOU'VE WON! This is good news, it means you can stop screaming now! Neither the Senate nor the House is giving serious consideration to government-run health care. What they are doing, with limited leadership from the President of the United States, is trying to reform the private health care system that currently leaves 1/6 of the country in the cold, provides shoddy care to another 1/6, and is on track to consume 31% of the our GDP. What Congress is NOT doing is trying to make it a public system, so please, stop distorting debate over the issue! I would suggest that you pay attention to what is really being considered rather than screaming about a non-issue. Nevertheless, since opposing socialized medicine is all the rage these days, I have three observations that I would like to offer.

1) It seems hypocritical to me to say that the government-run programs are socialist when you don't like them but are democratic when you do. If government-run health care is "socialized medicine," how come the far-right isn't whining about "socialized freeways" or "socialized defense"? My point is this: if the security provided to you and me by the United States Armed Forces is not socialism, then neither is universal access to quality health care.

2) The most common talking point from the status quo crowd is that the government is too incompetent to run something as large as health care. This came up at an Arlen Specter event and has been pushed by organizations like Fox News and the American Spectator. This makes me wonder: does the right-wing also opposes Medicare, or thinks we should take away the government-run health care given to American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan? (On a related note: Weekly Standard founder Bill Kristol said three things on The Daily Show last week: the government cannot provide quality health care, it does provide quality care to soldiers, and normal citizens don't deserve the best health care they can get. Watch the interview here.)

3) Points one and two aren't really that important anyway because no one who matters is proposing government-run health care. President Obama has said that he wants a "public option" but his position carries little weight since he refuses to introduce his own plan to Congress. The House bill's public option was all but dropped following negotiations between Henry Waxman and the Blue Dog Democrats. Finally, the Senate bill will probably be based on the work of a bipartisan Senate Finance Committee working group, a group that will not include a public option in its bill. At least four of the group's six members, Democrats Max Baucus (full disclosure: my former boss) and Kent Conrad and Republicans Chuck Grassley and Mike Enzi, have said so.

Let me be very clear: NEITHER THE HOUSE NOR THE SENATE HEALTH CARE BILLS WILL CONTAIN A PUBLIC OPTION, AND THE PRESIDENT HAS NOT INTRODUCED A BILL OF HIS OWN. So please, PLEASE stop distorting the debate. Stop acting like thugs at respectful town hall meetings. Stop surpressing discourse and squelching voices you don't like. Stop protesting what no one is doing; stop acting like anti-Bush liberals afraid of a draft. For the love of God, stop spreading false information and baseless fear!!! (And while you're at it, stop getting false information in the first place and turn off Glen Beck!)

(Cross-posted to Daily Kos.)

U.S. Citizens can travel to any country in the world except one. It's not the one that the U.S. fought a bloody war with 40 years ago. It's not the one that seized the U.S. embassy 30 years ago. No, we cannot travel to the country which 50 years ago overthrew a military dictator who had taken power in a coup d'état. None of these countries are democracies, but only one is subject to a travel ban.

With the announcement of the "Freedom to Travel to Cuba Act", a bipartisan initiative introduced by Sens. Byron Dorgan (D-ND) and Mike Enzi (R-WY) and Reps. Bill Delahunt (D, MA-10) and Jeff Flake (R, AZ-6) in March, it seems as if we may at last be approaching a sane policy on travel to Cuba. But first, we need to overcome the obstructionism of the gang who thinks that 50 years of failed policy isn't enough.

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When Barack Obama announced plans to nominate Tom Daschle to run the Department of Health and Human Services, I agreed with Ezra Klein that the choice signaled Obama's commitment to get comprehensive health care reform through Congress. I knew that Daschle's wife was a longtime lobbyist, and that Daschle was not nearly as liberal as the right-wingers made him out to be. But we all know that the Senate will be the biggest obstacle to any good health care plan. Daschle knows that body's procedures and the majority of its members extremely well.

The choice isn't looking so good today.

Not paying taxes on the use of someone else's limousine looks bad, but as we saw last week with Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, failure to fully meet one's tax obligations no longer seems to be a barrier to serving in the cabinet. (By the way, Daschle knew about this problem last summer but didn't tell Obama's vetting team.)

Many people might honestly not realize that if they use someone else's car, they need to report the value of that service as taxable income. But what is Daschle's excuse for overstating his tax-deductible charitable gifts and not reporting more than $83,000 in consulting income? If Bill Richardson was asked to step aside because of an investigation that hasn't even proven wrongdoing, then Daschle should not get a pass for not paying his taxes.

As is so often the case in politics, though, what's legal can be even more disturbing. From Politico:

Daschle made nearly $5.3 million in the last two years, records released Friday show, including $220,000 he received for giving speeches, many of them to outfits that stand to gain or lose millions of dollars from the work he would do once confirmed as secretary of Health and Human Services.

For instance, the Health Industry Distributors Association plunked down $14,000 to land the former Senate Democratic leader in March 2008. The association, which represents medical products distributors, boasts on its website that Daschle met with it after he was nominated to discuss "the impact an Obama administration will have on the industry."

This week, the group began openly lobbying him, sending him a letter urging him to rescind a rule requiring competitive bidding of Medicare contracts.

Another organization, America's Health Insurance Plans, paid $20,000 for a Daschle speaking appearance in February 2007. It represents health insurance companies, which under Obama's plan would be barred from denying coverage on the basis of health or age.

There was a $12,000 talk to GE Healthcare in August, a $20,000 lecture in January to Premier, Inc., a health care consulting firm, and a pair of $18,000 speeches this year to different hospital systems, among other paid appearances before health care groups.

The speaking fees were detailed in a financial disclosure statement released Friday, which showed that Daschle pulled down a total of more than $500,000 from the speaking circuit in the last two years, and $5.3 million in overall income.

These speaking engagements are legal, but it is an unacceptable conflict of interest for Daschle to have taken that much money from groups with a major financial stake in health care reform.

At Daily Kos nyceve examines one of those paid speeches and tells you why you should care: As UnitedHealth subsidiary Ingenix defrauded Americans, Daschle was its 2008 keynote speaker.

A lot of liberal bloggers are now calling for Obama to withdraw Daschle's nomination and appoint Howard Dean to run HHS instead. As much as I like Dean, I do not think he's the person to shepherd health care reform through Congress. But I agree that Obama needs to find a replacement for Daschle--the sooner, the better.

If Obama stands by Daschle, I suspect the Senate insiders' club would confirm him, but let's hope it doesn't come to that.

Speaking of stalled confirmations, Senator Mike Enzi of Wyoming appears to be the Republican who is holding up Hilda Solis's nomination for Secretary of Labor. This is purely ideological, based on Solis' support for the Employee Free Choice Act. Solis has not been accused of any wrongdoing.

Will Obama stand behind his choice for this cabinet position? The president expressed support for organized labor on Friday while signing executive orders to boost labor unions.

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