I agree with Jonathan Zasloff about this. People saying things about how you “can’t” do certain things through the reconciliation process are being somewhat disingenuous. Joe Biden, Harry Reid, and 49 others Senators can do pretty much whatever they like. Even if there is some problem with the rulings of the parliamentarian, they can appoint a new parliamentarian who’ll offer better rulings. They could appoint me. They could abolish the office of parliamentarian. They could follow Caligula and appoint a favored horse to be parliamentarian.

The issue with this last proposal isn’t that they couldn’t do it, it’s that they shouldn’t do it and you’d never find 50 votes plus the VP to do it. But a majority of Senators “can” do pretty much whatever it likes. The Senate is an independent branch of government that makes, interprets, and enforces its own rules. There’s nothing stopping a determined majority from doing anything. If procedural objections to a reconciliation-track health care bill can’t be surmounted, that’s because the votes aren’t there to do it not because “the rules” are preventing it from happening.

Well, okay, I don’t really think people should sympathize with the Taliban. They’re vicious killers. But via Neil Sinhababu an interesting article tries to take the Pashto agenda seriously on its own terms, rather than merely as a thorn in the side of the United States or Hamid Karzai or the government of Pakistan.

It’s a reminder that it is worth trying to walk a mile in the other guy’s shoes. Suppose you were a member of an ethnic group with a distinctive language and set of cultural practices. This ethnic group lives in a fairly large and yet geographically compact area basically along a mountain range. But instead of there being a state dominated by your people and their values, a line has been drawn straight through the heart of your territory, many decades ago, by imperial powers whose explicit agenda was to undermine the political power of local actors. Consequently, your people find themselves as a large minority in one state on one side of the border, and a rather small minority in the other state on the other side of the border.

Meanwhile, thousands and thousands of miles away on the other side of the planet lies the mightiest empire the world has ever known. Its population dwarfs yours. Its economic might dwarfs yours even more. It heads a military alliance whose members include virtually every other wealthy and powerful country. It accounts for half of global defense spending. And it insists on viewing success of your group’s military organizations as constituting a direct threat to its interests. I wouldn’t be thrilled about the situation.

The people who say a single-payer health care system would be better than the kind of kludgy mishmash that the proposals currently in congress would create are correct. At the same time, the people who say that the political impediments to shifting to a single-payer system are insurmountable are also correct. But that second statement doesn’t, on its own, establish the case for the approach to reform that’s dominated the progressive movement for the past several years. As I’ve been saying for some time, it seems to me that the most reasonable moderate alternative to “Medicare for All” would be “Medicare for More People than Have it Now.”

As Brad DeLong says “There are times when I wonder if the right thing to do on health care reform is simply to raise the Medicare tax rate and drop the Medicare eligibility age to 50.” Or some other variant of that strategy. Maybe you’d only have the votes to do 55. But whatever, you’d take what you could get and then try to get more in the next Congress. But the animating spirit would be steady improvement in, and expansion of, America’s existing national health insurance plan—a plan that whatever its flaws appears to deliver better results at lower cost than the private sector.

The problem with this approach is that it’s harder to fit into the “bend the curve” conceptual framework, but it’s really not clear to me that said framework has accomplished very much.

Anders Fogh Rasmussen

A friend remarked the other day that the solution to most public policy problems seems to be “be more like Denmark.”

Hopefully, then, Anders Fogh Rasmussen who just stepped down as Prime Minister of Denmark in order to become NATO’s top civilian official will be able to do something useful with the mighty-but-listing military alliance. Interestingly, part of the Danish genius seems to be to only let guys named “Rasmussen” run the country. Poul Nyrup Rasmussen led a center-left coalition from 1993 to 2001, and now heads the Party of European Socialists in the European Parliament. Then led several A.F. Rasmussen-led center-right coalitions, and power was handed off to Lars Løkke Rasmussen.