Josh Kalven of Progress Illinois went to Rep. Jan Schakowsky’s (D-IL) town hall meeting last night, “where over 2,000 people showed up, packing a high school auditorium and spilling onto the sidewalk outside.” One of the most disturbing moments of the event came right after the opening of Schakowsky’s introductory speech, when she said, “You know, Ted Kennedy had said that this was the great issue of his life.” Some audience members applauded her, but there were also a loud amount of booing…just days after Kennedy passed away. Watch it:
At a recent event in upstate New York, Rep. Eric Massa (D-NY) asked for a moment of silence to remember Kennedy. Many attendees shouted throughout the 10-second memorial.
It was President Obama himself who suggested that seniors who don’t have as long to live might want to just consider taking a pain pill instead of getting an expensive operation to cure them. Yet when Sen. Kennedy was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer at 77, did he give up on life and go home to take pain pills and die? Of course not. He freely did what most of us would do. He choose an expensive operation and painful follow up treatments. He saw his work as vitally important and so he fought for every minute he could stay on this earth doing it. He would be a very fortunate man if his heroic last few months were what future generations remember him most for.”
Listen:
Piggy-backing off of Sarah Palin’s claim that health care reform would establish “death panels,” Republicans have launched a coordinated campaign to scare seniors. This week, the effort found Republicans in the rather awkward stance of defending Medicare while simultaneously arguing that the program is “a very good example of what we should not have happen with all of our health care.” Huckabee’s contention is even more baffling. Following Huckabee’s argument to its logical conclusion would suggest that Kennedy fought cancer in order to strip other older Americans of the ability to vigorously fight the disease.
Today, in an attempt to criticize Democrats for using Ted Kennedy legacy to pass health care reform, Gov. Mike Huckabee (R-AK) argued during a radio segment for ABC Radio Networks that Kennedy would have died sooner under health care reform:
It was President Obama himself who suggested that seniors who don’t have as long to live might want to just consider taking a pain pill instead of getting an expensive operation to cure them. Yet when Sen. Kennedy was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer at 77, did he give up on life and go home to take pain pills and die? Of course not. He freely did what most of us would do. He choose an expensive operation and painful follow up treatments. He saw his work as vitally important and so he fought for every minute he could stay on this earth doing it. He would be a very fortunate man if his heroic last few months were what future generations remember him most for.”
Listen:
Piggy backing off of Sarah Palin’s claim that health care reform would establish “death panels,” Republicans have launched a coordinated campaign to scare seniors. This week, the effort found Republicans in the rather awkward stance of defending Medicare while simultaneously arguing that the program is “a very good example of what we should not have happen with all of our health care.” Huckabee’s contention is even more baffling. Following Huckabee’s argument to its logical conclusion would suggest that Kennedy fought cancer in order to strip other older Americans of the ability to vigorously fight the disease.
I was talking earlier with some friends and I asked, who might emerge as the new Ted Kennedy in the United States Senate? You know who a lot of people think it might be? … That would be Senator McCain.
Ted Kennedy endorsing Barack Obama at American University (cc photo by diggersf)
Mark Schmitt has an excellent small anecdote about Ted Kennedy, illustrating the difference between a Senator who’s there on the Hill to get things done, and a Senator who’s just there to kill time and feather his bed:
As an example, early on in the period when I was working for Sen. Bill Bradley, Bradley decided to get involved in reform of the student-loan system. He wasn’t on the appropriate committee (Kennedy’s Education and Labor Committee, now known as HELP), and he had never been involved before. But as a member of the Finance Committee, he saw a way to sneak student-loan funding into a tax bill, and pay for it. While other Democrats on Education and Labor brushed us off as if we were encroaching on their domain (we were, shamelessly!), Kennedy saw it as just another opportunity to get some good accomplished.
Before we knew it, Kennedy had pulled everyone involved into his maritime-themed hideaway office (perhaps the most awe-inspiring physical space in the entire Capitol) to figure out how to get it done, and he threw himself into it — at one point calling me from the Senate floor to dictate the precise flattering language of a letter we would need to send to Sen. Robert C. Byrd to persuade him to give his permission to the unorthodox move. In the end it didn’t happen (the first President Bush vetoed the bill), and it’s not even a footnote to his legacy. It was one of hundreds, thousands of tiny moments of opportunity to make some progress, and if 99 out of 100 of those opportunities failed, he knew that the one that didn’t would at least make a difference in someone’s life.
The Senate is a strange place full of weird rules and impediments to action. The people who make it work are the people who, like Kennedy, understand what they want to do and then try to figure out ways to get it done. Congressional procedure is a real impediment to doing a lot of things, but the effective legislators are the ones who see those obstacles and start finding ways to remove them or work around them. Most folks, however, seem to just shrug and in many ways be happy to have a reason why they “can’t” do the hard work involved in changing things.
This morning, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) honored Ted Kennedy’s legacy by disingenuously arguing that Kennedy’s absence from the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee (HELP) mark-up hearings allowed Democrats to reject Republican amendments “of any significance”:
You’d have to change the way things have been done and that is the fact that there have been no real negotiations. There has been a bill before committee, on which I sit, the HELP committee and it was done by Democrats and no amendments were agreed to of any significance and so that’s not the kind of negotiations I did with Senator Kennedy.
As Slate’s Christopher Beam pointed out, “many of the GOP amendments on this incomplete list do seem pretty substantive.” (The committee even accepted several of McCain’s more substantive amendments):
- McCain 205: To establish certain policies for small group health plans
- McCain 2: Determines whether existing Federal Government sponsored health and wellness initiatives are effective in achieving their stated goals.
- Enzi 25: To impose an earning requirement with respect to enrollees.
- Hatch: Adds programs based on pain care, environment, antimicrobial resistance, oral health, wellness programs for at risk populations.
Since Kennedy’s death, a long line of Republicans have argued that “Kennedy’s absence from the health care debate prevented lawmakers from reaching a bipartisan compromise and that had Kennedy been present, agreement on health care reform would have been more likely.” But as Ezra Klein argues, “this stuff just isn’t plausible. Kennedy was around in 1994 and there was no deal. More to the point, Kennedy’s committee, the HELP Committee, has passed health-care reform. Kennedy’s staff, as you might expect, led their effort. But neither Kennedy nor his staff can make the deals for another committee. If Kennedy were in the Senate now, health care would be exactly where it is: Through Ted Kennedy’s Committee and stuck in the morass of Max Baucus’s Gang of Six. ”
One essentially irreplaceable role that Ted Kennedy played in the United States Senate was that he was such an iconic figure of American liberalism that he had the credibility necessary to stare down Democratic-leaning interest groups when their narrow interests subverted broader progressive goals. The most recent case of this was in Kennedy’s work on the No Child Left Behind Act that substantially increased school funding and focus on the educational needs of poor and minority students, but tended to antagonize teacher’s unions.
A related story, however, comes from the now-unknown story of trucking deregulation. For decades, it was extremely burdensome for anyone to get into the business of shipping anything, because incumbent stakeholders could use the regulatory apparatus to block you from entry. The result was severely limited competition and, consequently, higher prices for just about everything. But eventually things changed:
Both the Teamsters Union and the American Trucking Associations strongly opposed deregulation and successfully headed off efforts to eliminate all economic controls. Supporting deregulation was a coalition of shippers, consumer advocates including Ralph Nader, and liberals such as Senator Edward Kennedy. Probably the most significant factor in forcing Congress to act was that the ICC commissioners appointed by Ford and Carter were bent on deregulating the industry anyway. Either Congress had to act or the ICC would. Congress acted in order to codify some of the commission changes and to limit others.
The Motor Carrier Act (MCA) of 1980 only partially decontrolled trucking. But together with a liberal ICC, it substantially freed the industry. The MCA made it significantly easier for a trucker to secure a certificate of public convenience and necessity. The MCA also required the commission to eliminate most restrictions on commodities that could be carried, on the routes that motor carriers could use, and on the geographical region they could serve. The law authorized truckers to price freely within a “zone of reasonableness,” meaning that truckers could increase or decrease rates from current levels by 15 percent without challenge, and encouraged them to make independent rate filings with even larger price changes.
A similar tale can be told about airline deregulation.
The moral of the story isn’t that “regulation is bad” but that progressive politics at its best isn’t about bigger government but about attacking privilege and power. At times that requires more government and more regulation (right now we badly need more regulation of polluters whose carbon dioxide emissions are threatening the viability of the planet) but at times the forces of privilege and power are using existing regulatory structures to re-enforce their own position. Kennedy, rightly, saw no contradiction between his record as a deregulator and his record as a champion of the little guy.
In a USA Today article today crediting Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-MA) for having “fashioned the modern day” immigration system, immigration advocate Frank Sharry pointed out that Kennedy “laid the groundwork” for the sort of humane immigration reform that he had spent much of his political career fighting for, but never achieved. It’s hard to imagine an immigration bill hitting the Senate floor without Kennedy’s binding support, but the truth is he’s already paved the legislative road for its debut and equipped progressives with the guts and principles to see it through.
Sen. Kennedy kicked off his political career in 1965 with a major overhaul of immigration laws that eradicated ethnically-biased immigration quotas that made it nearly impossible for anyone other than Western Europeans to emigrate to the US. “He created Americans,” says Dana Houle of the Daily Kos. After changing the face of immigration, Kennedy spent the next 40 years fighting to change how the nation treated its newcomers. Kennedy helped pass the Refugee Act of 1980 that brought “U.S. law into compliance with the requirements of international law.” He fought with all his might against the harshest provisions proposed in the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, described in the Cornell Law Review as the most “the most diverse, divisive and draconian immigration law enacted since the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.” In the more recent past, Kennedy cosponsored the DREAM Act to legalize hardworking undocumented students who have lived in the US most of their lives at no fault of their own and the Agricultural Job Opportunity, Benefits, and Security (AgJOBS) Act of 2005 to improve the lives of immigrant farmworkers.
Many aspects of Kennedy’s original Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act — which died in the Senate in 2007 — “continue to be the model” for comprehensive immigration reform today. With that said, there are some tough lessons to be learned from what went wrong that year. The final negotiated bill was attacked by both the left and the right, as both sides could point to major aspects of it that they were unwilling to swallow. Mary Giovagnoli says the immigration bill was “met with lukewarm support from many immigration advocates and was pilloried by those on the far right, who turned the Senate’s efforts to find a way out of our immigration mess into a personal vendetta against immigrants.” A small, but vocal minority of restrictionist constituents lit up the phones of Senate staffers who cowered and retreated in electoral fear. Labor was also adamantly opposed to the inclusion of a guest-worker program — something they perceived as a threat to wages, jobs, and immigrant worker rights. Kennedy will be remembered by many as the “master negotiater” and the “stalwart of the Senate.” But in 2007, it wasn’t enough.
Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) is committed to giving immigration reform another shot, and he thinks he stands a good chance at passing it. Much like Kennedy partnered with Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) on immigration, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) will probably be Schumer’s Republican ally. But bipartisanship can’t just be symbolic. They’ll both have to reach out to conservative Democrats and other moderate Republicans — many who even Kennedy was unable to convince — in order to negotiate the votes needed to pass reform. Most importantly, Schumer will have to balance the delicate interests of business, labor, and immigration advocates, along with conservatives’ demands for harsh enforcement, without losing sight of the compassionate solutions that must be brought to immigrant communities across the country. It helps that the climate is a bit different this time around: immigration advocates are better organized, labor is on-board, the president is more engaged, and Latino voters have made clear that anti-immigrant rhetoric coming from Congress will render vulnerable nativist candidates obsolete. But if Kennedy were still around, he’d probably advise Schumer not to take any of that for granted.
When the 2007 immigration reform bill didn’t pass, Kennedy announced:
We will endure today’s loss and begin anew to build the kinds of tough, fair, and practical reform worthy of our shared history as immigrants and as Americans. Immigration reforms are always controversial. But Congress was created to muster political will to answer such challenges. Today we didn’t, but tomorrow we will.
While some argue that Kennedy’s death has left a “leadership gap,” the truth is his passing has yielded the floor to new voices who are versed in his political skills and progressive agenda. His notable absence doesn’t mean that his legislative triumphs and moral agenda won’t continue to guide the immigration debate closer to a fair and just solution. It would’ve been easier to reach with him, but it must be achieved without him.
Sen. Ted Kennedy considered health care reform “the cause” of his life. Throughout his 47 years in the U.S. senate, Kennedy fought for universal comprehensive coverage some 15 different times, working closely with the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) committee to pass health care reform bill this year, even while undergoing cancer treatments in Massachusetts.
Looking over today’s health care battle field, one wonders if reform would be in a different place under Kennedy’s leadership. As Ezra Klein correctly points out, “what was important about Kennedy’s career, though, was that he managed to marry compromise and principle. He was not a believer in lonely stands that underscored his purity. Nor was he a believer in compromising simply for the sake of compromise.”
Indeed, in 1971, Kennedy proposed an alternative to President Richard Nixon’s plan to expand private health insurance coverage. Kennedy offered a single-payer like plan that would have expanded coverage to every American, covered 70% of medical expenses, eliminated cost sharing and capped medical expenses. By 1974, the Kennedy proposal morphed into a plan that built on the existing employer system. Employer health benefit plans were unaffected, but Americans without coverage would have been eligible for the national plan administered by the Social Security administration.
Kennedy never allowed the perfect to become the enemy of the good; his passion for health care reform grew out of personal experiences and a deep commitment to justice and equality. He weaved his personal experiences and years of public service into a powerful and compelling narrative for health care reform. As a public servant, Kennedy received government sponsored health insurance coverage through the Federal Employees Health Benefits (FEHB) Program. But for Kennedy, that privilege only highlighted the inequality of America’s health care system. In this speech before the Montgomery County Democratic Committee, Kennedy recalls the time he spent in a children’s hospital in Boston where his son lost his leg to cancer. While his government-sponsored health insurance covered the treatments, the other families — either uninsured or underinsured — paid some $3000 every single week:
And I listened to these families whose children had the same kind of infliction as my child had. And they said, “Look, we’ve sold our house. We have the $30,000. We have $20,000. We are able to afford it for 3 months, for 4 months, for 5 months. What kind of chance does my child have to be able to survive?” I knew that my child was going to have the best because I had the health insurance of the United States Senate. And I knew that no one, no parent, no parent in that hospital had the kind of coverage that I had. That kind of choice, for any parent in this country is absolutely unacceptable and wrong, my friends.
Watch it:
Kennedy explained that “for the 15 times that I have fought on the floor of the United States Senate that we ought to have universal, comprehensive coverage, listen to the voices on the other side who have universal and comprehensive coverage say ‘No, it’s not time. We can’t afford it. It is the wrong bill at the wrong time.’”
Today, opponents of reform are making the same argument. But as Kennedy reminded us in his 1980 concession speech, “for all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.” Kennedy spent his life fighting for health care reform, now it’s up for progressives to deliver on that promise.
Early this morning, news broke that Sen. Ted Kennedy had passed away after serving in the U.S. Senate for nearly 50 years. Soon after, conservative commentator Andrew Breitbart began a sustained assault on Kennedy’s memory, tweeting “Rest in Chappaquiddick.”
When a fellow conservative tweeted to Breitbart asking him not to treat Kennedy like they believe some on the left treated the passing of Tony Snow and Ronald Reagan, Breitbart responded “How dare you compare Snow & Reagan to Kennedy! Why do you grant a BULLY special status upon his death? This isnt lib v con.” Despite his claim that his attacks weren’t about “lib v. con,” Breitbart repeatedly justified them in ideological terms.
“Look, this man was granted absolution for nothing. Class, life station played a part but PARTY was everything. GOP couldnt get away with it,” complained Breitbart in one tweet. “IF a GOP possesses 1/100 of human failings of T. Kennedy he/she is TOAST,” he claimed in another. “In this moment I cant but recognize absolute backwardness of media & society. Bush=EVIL. Ted Kennedy=SAINT. Im gonna keep fighin’, folks,” Breitbart said in another tweet.
Update
Megan Carpentier has rounded up other conservative Twitter attacks on Kennedy.
In a USA Today article today crediting Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-MA) for having 
