Hugh Segal (official photo)

Canadians who are interested in politics tend to be fairly well-informed about U.S. political debates, so I’ve sort of been waiting for the day when some right-wing Canadian politicians would step up and defend their fair land’s health care system from the smears of the American right. Now it seems that Conservative Party Senator Hugh Segal is doing just that.

Now as it happens the Canadian Senate is not a very important policymaking body. But irrespective of what lurks deep in the hearts of Canadian Tories, all leading right-of-center politicians in Canada understand that their health care system is far too popular and well-loved to seriously propose replacing it with an American-style system in which whether or not you receive treatment for an illness is determined by the whims of a for-profit insurance company. Indeed, the Conservative Party of Canada lists as one of its founding principles the idea “that all Canadians should have reasonable access to quality health care regardless of their ability to pay.”

All of which is to say that one fun way to shake up the somewhat stale health care debate would be to have a right-wing Canadian politician debate a right-wing American politician. On substance, what does this prove? Well, I think it’s noteworthy that where national health care systems exist, nobody ever seems to want to dismantle them. By contrast, you have lots of examples of countries lacking a national health care system and deciding to build one.

More from the Post poll:

The public also says by a 60-34 margin that it wants Roe upheld.

From the new WaPo/ABC poll:

The ability of the GOP to avoid concern-trolling from the media has been pretty impressive. You might think, ex ante, that offering blind, root-and-branch opposition to the popular agenda of a popular president would be a path to political disaster. And, indeed, the evidence suggests that blind root-and-ranch opposition to the popular agenda of a popular president is making Republicans very unpopular. But they have, at least, succeeded in mostly getting to press to cover their obstructionism as a problem for Obama rather than for them.

(wikimedia photo)

Democrats are taking a look at reforming their presidential nominating process. Steve Benen is particularly excited by Elaine Kamarck’s proposal to do away with the superdelegates. I think I agree with that, but when it comes to this kind of reform it’s important not to expend too much energy on fighting the last war and also think about elements of the current system that could go wrong but didn’t.

On the top of this list I would put the fact that the quasi-proportional manner in which the Democrats award delegates to the national convention raises the very real specter of a totally indecisive primary campaign. As regular readers know, I’m actually a fan of proportional electoral systems. But that’s as a way to produce a legislature in which post-election coalition-building is an integral element of the process. A proportional system helps ensure that everyone is fairly represented at that coalition-building stage.

But when it comes to a party trying to choose a single standard-bearer the considerations are very different. If there’s anything we saw in the 2008 cycle it’s that the mere fact of an ongoing competition can breed enormous ill will even in the absence of huge substantive gaps. At the same time, bringing the contest to a decisive conclusion sets the stage for reconciliation. Under the circumstances, it makes a ton of sense to try to forge an election system that’s likely to produce a clear winner.

Adam Nagourney has a smart piece in the NYT taking a wider-lens look at the issue of gay rights groups’ disappointment with what’s been achieved politically thus far. Nagourney notes that over the past ten years the broader American culture has become wildly more tolerant of gays and lesbians, but even with a new progressive administration in place the policy arena remains fairly unfriendly:

Yet if the culture is moving on, national politics is not, or at least not as rapidly. Mr. Obama has yet to fulfill a campaign promise to repeal the policy barring openly gay people from serving in the military. The prospects that Congress will ever send him a bill overturning the Defense of Marriage Act, which defines marriage as between a man and a woman, appear dim. An effort to extend hate-crime legislation to include gay victims has produced a bitter backlash in some quarters: Senator Jim DeMint, Republican of South Carolina, sent a letter to clerics in his state arguing that it would be destructive to “faith, families and freedom.”

“America is changing more quickly than the government,” said Linda Ketner, a gay Democrat from South Carolina who came within four percentage points of winning a Congressional seat in November. “They are lagging behind the crowd. But if I remember my poli sci from college, isn’t that the way it always works?”

The underlying dynamic here illustrates why it’s always been a mistake to try to draw a contrast between gay rights groups’ efforts to secure equality through the courts and to secure equality through the political process. The fact of the matter is that the political process simply isn’t very friendly to minority rights claims even when the claims themselves are reasonably popular. Repealing Don’t Ask Don’t Tell has become a majoritarian position, but the Obama administration would still prefer to avoid the headaches involved in working to repeal it. At the same time, if a court case were to order the administration to end this policy, it’s abundantly clear that there would be no critical mass of political support for trying to put it back in place.

Either way, the basic fact of the matter is that the political system is biased toward doing nothing. The mere fact that a majority is prepared to support claims of equality doesn’t mean that political leaders want to expend time and energy making our clunky legislative mechanics produce laws reflecting that fact. Under the circumstances, people with just claims to make on their own behalf are wise to pursue those claims through all available avenues including the judiciary.