I think one good way to think about the misguided question of whether health reform is a step forward for the American people or just a giveaway to the insurance industry is with reference to SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as “food stamps.” The way this works is that eligible people get vouchers (subsidies) that they can use to buy food at stores. This generates profits for food retailers and also for food producers. For greedy for profit food retailers and food producers. Indeed, one of the biggest supporters of SNAP are truly evil agribusiness concerns that are sort of destroying the world.

That said, SNAP is good policy and it’s clearly progressive policy. Nobody would say that the real left-wing position is that we need to repeal the program until it can be made into something that only feeds people through organic co-ops or something. At the same time, it’s also true that the program doesn’t work as well as it could if it were less geared to corporate interests. And it’s good that the program has been modified lately to be more friendly to things like farmer’s markets. Ideally, I’d like to see the focus on actual nutrition enhanced and corporate interests (among other things) make this difficult.

The main point is just that in a market society any effort to give any benefits to anyone is going to create some profit opportunities. This fact doesn’t discredit the enterprise.

Nancy Scola tells us about the latest socialist plot from the United States Congress:

I think I may be in the minority in being untroubled by this particular lifestyle issue, though. The House has passed — on a voice vote — Anna Eshoo’s (D-CA) Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation Act. The CALM Act, would direct the FCC to regulate TV commercial volume to be pegged to the volume of regular programming, so as not to be “excessively noisy or strident.” Seems to be a real crowd pleaser.

Sounds good to me.

As we all recall, it was just a short time ago that Joe Lieberman held the health reform process hostage to some idiosyncratic demands. Expanding coverage and curbing the deficit were important, said Lieberman, but not so important that he would vote to do those things. Unless, that is, some popular ideas like a public option or Medicare expansion were completely killed. He got his way, and now the health care train is moving. But you can see why these kind of actions would make you less popular. Unless, that is, you write for The Hill in which case you see them as puzzling:

It is difficult to pinpoint when or why Lieberman has taken a hit: In the past two weeks, he not only crucial in helping remove the healthcare bill’s public option and Medicare buy-in provisions, but also subsequently announced that he would join with Democrats to support the bill after those provisions were removed.

These seems like a nice encapsulation of the weird fetishization of “centrist” politics that we have in DC. In some trivial sense it’s politically savvy to be “in the center” in the sense of having most people agree with you. But not every instance of “centrist” dealmaking is going to hit that sweet spot. And the polling on this was pretty clear—people had a lot of doubts about health reform, but definitely liked the public programs idea.

Like Kevin Drum I don’t really understand why Barack Obama feels the need to pretend that legislation that’s clearly the result of a compromise process in congress is the greatest thing since sliced bread:

[Presidents] never concede a mixed bag on anything they’re associated with. The Iraq war was always going swimmingly. Welfare reform was an unqualified boon. Reagan never raised taxes. Etc. Likewise, Obama seems unwilling to admit that the healthcare reform that finally got spit out of Congress is anything other than exactly what he wanted all along.

This reached the height of absurdity with the stimulus bill. ARRA was such a fundamentally quantitative debate that there was no way for anyone paying attention to miss the fact that the administration proposed one number and congress came back with a different, substantially lower number. And I think the administration did itself a lot of totally unnecessary by not saying something like “I’m signing this bill because I think it will do enormous good for the American economy, but as you know my economic team thought a larger package was warranted so we might need to do more later. More good things about the bill here. Happy happy happy.”

David Parker wrote a defense of the filibuster for Newsweek the other day that was both utterly typical and utterly weird in that it doesn’t actually defend the filibuster. It doesn’t argue that a 60-vote supermajority requirement is better than a 67-vote requirement, or better than a 55-vote supermajority requirement. It doesn’t say that Minnesota’s State Senate ought to start operating on a supermajority principle, or that we erred by creating a constitution for Japan that allows a majority in the parliament to prevail.

Instead he says things like filibuster opponents’ “arguments are often based on the assumption that simple majority rule is always desirable.” That’s silly. Obviously when the majority is inclined to vote for bad legislation, majority rule is not desirable. But our arguments are based on the fact that a legislature needs to operate according to some rule and that majority rule is, as a principle, preferable to the available alternatives.

He then goes on to discuss some points that are only loosely related, like the idea that strong party discipline is undesirable (I disagree, but this is a different issue from whether a supermajority rule is desirable). Then he seems to mount a contradictory argument that (a) one of the good things about the filibuster is that it promotes parochialism (I agree, but this is bad), and (b) that liberals shouldn’t complain about parochialism because it’s inevitable (I agree, but see [a] the filibuster promotes parochialism). Then he rolls off some nonsense about because individual senators tend to be hypocritical about process arguments, that we shouldn’t take seriously any proposition about the desirability of changing the political process.

I think what you’re seeing here is just psychological anchoring and status quo bias at work. If the United States Senate operated by majority rule, I promise you that nobody would be saying “what with bicameralism, the committee system, and the presidential veto the problem with this country is that it doesn’t have enough legislative choke points—we should implement a supermajority voting requirement in the less-representative legislative body.” It’s too silly.