Rep Anthony Weiner (D-NY)

This seems unlikely to make a practical difference, but I’m glad to see that House leaders will let a single-payer bill get to the floor:

Seeking to dampen liberal anger about deals cut with centrists, Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) said House leaders have agreed to allow a floor vote on a government-run, single-payer system.

“A lot of members on our committee want a vote on that,” said Waxman said in an interview. “I believe their wishes will be accommodated.”

Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) offered a single-payer amendment in the Energy and Commerce Committee on Friday, but withdrew it after Waxman said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) had promised a floor vote.

To clarify, the idea behind a single-payer system is not to have a “government-run health care system” but to have a health care system similar to the one we currently have, but a health insurance system that’s like Medicare. To avoid confusion, the best thing is probably to press the media to characterize this proposal as a “universal Medicare” or “Medicare for all” plan. Medicare for all is not my favorite vision of health care; if it were totally up to me we’d construct something that’s more like the system they have in Singapore that would have a direct public provision element, a single-payer element, and a forced savings element. But Universal Medicare would be better than the status quo, and better than the “official” bills being pushed by congressional leaders.

My man AD sent me these two links from Haaretz showing Israel’s once-demoralized peace camp is taking heart from the Obama administration’s recent hard line on the settlement issue. Meanwhile, back at home Israel hawks are working to undermine Obama’s effort to simply enforce what’s long been actual American policy. Leading the way are opportunistic Republicans, and some Democratic members of congress from New York:

Rep. Gary L. Ackerman (D-N.Y.), chairman of the House foreign affairs subcommittee on the Middle East and South Asia, said focusing on settlement activity “detracts” from top U.S. goals in the region. However, he added: “I do not support a settlement freeze that calls on Israeli families not to grow, get married, or forces them to throw away their grandparents. Telling people not to have children is unthinkable and inhumane.”

Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) told reporters Wednesday that “we have to be careful not to cross the line where it sounds like we are exerting overwhelming pressure . . . on our rather isolated ally.”

Weiner here is capturing the cognitive dissonance that afflicts a lot of the conventional discourse on this subject. He doesn’t want to say that he supports continued Israeli land grabs or that he stands with the settlers. But heaven forbid anyone actually criticize Israel or exert meaningful pressure on the largest recipient of American foreign aid! Ackerman, meanwhile, is more straightforward. To him, halting settlement expansion means telling people not to have children. And telling people not to have children is unjust. But of course as Ackerman well knows, people are never going to stop having children. Which means that, by Ackerman’s logic, the settlements can never stop expanding. But everyone knows that for peace to be achieved, many settlements would have to be removed. Ackerman’s position is just the position that peace is impossible, and that Israel must fight forever to squeeze the Palestinians out of the West Bank, while the Palestinians must fight forever for the destruction of Israel.

This is a bleak vision, and I think it would be nice if the people who hold to it would come out and say so rather than pretending they’re interested in peace.

I’ve remarked twice before that I’ve been surprised by the level of seriousness with which Barack Obama seems to be pursuing the settlement freeze issue. It’s been official American policy that these settlements are illegal and ought to be stopped for a long time, but the tradition is to offer clear signals that the U.S. is in fact willing to turn a blind eye. Thus far, Obama hasn’t done that, and now the pushback is beginning:

“There’s a line between articulating U.S. policy and seeming to be pressuring a democracy on what are their domestic policies, and the president is tiptoeing right up to that line,” said Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.), who said he’d heard complaints from constituents during the congressional recess. “I would have liked to hear the president talk more about the Palestinian obligation to cut down on terrorism.”

What’s telling right there in Rep. Weiner’s statement and as pointed out by Ben Smith, the author of the piece, is that none of Obama’s critics are willing to say he’s actually wrong. Obama wants a settlement freeze, and as Smith reports “few will defend illegal Jewish outposts on land they hope will be part of a Palestinian state.” But the sense seems to be that it’s somehow unfair for Obama to actually criticize Israel for doing bad stuff, even if we agree that the stuff is bad.

I think the complaint that Obama has somehow failed to mention that Palestinian terrorism is unacceptable is just factually wrong. What’s more, Obama hasn’t just said terrorism is bad, he’s committed to an effort to rebuild the kind of state institutions in the West Bank that can provide provide security. But details aside, there’s a real “two wrongs don’t make a right” issue here. If it’s wrong for Israel to expand settlements—and it is—then it’s wrong for Israel to expand settlements and pressure should be brought to bear to make them stop. Settlement expansion doesn’t make the murder of civilians okay, and terrorism doesn’t make land grabs okay.