Ruth Marcus Chats With Chuck Grassley

Ruth Marcus in WaPo:

I caught up with Grassley Tuesday by telephone, when he was at the Des Moines airport, and, without being prompted, he brought up — and disputed — the perception that he had shifted positions during the course of the recess and backed away from comprehensive reform. “I think in my town meetings I haven’t been saying anything that I haven’t been saying for three or four months before,” Grassley said.

Perhaps, but he didn’t sound terribly eager to lead the charge for a far-reaching overhaul. He described the prevailing sentiment at his town hall meetings — he held four on Monday alone — as “slow down, deliberate, do it right, maybe do it incrementally.” Grassley acknowledged that the health system is so intertwined that it is difficult to tweeze out pieces to fix one by one, but said that his goal is “do it comprehensively and still do it in a way that expresses to the people that you aren’t trying to upset the apple cart. That’s the impression people have: that they’re not going to know their health-care system as they now know it.”

Even more, he said, “health care is kind of the straw that broke the camel’s back” on broader public concern over the deficit and government intervention into the private sector. “There is real fear for the future of our country, so we have to assess our activities in light of all that fear,” he said.

Indeed, health reform is an enormous and uncertain undertaking at a moment of economic peril. This is why responsible politicians such as Grassley should be trying to educate voters, not stoke their fears with warnings about pulling the plug on Grandma. And it is why Democrats should be nervous about losing the Grassleys of the congressional world. Shared risk in an enterprise this ambitious is a smart strategy.

As for why Grassley should lead instead of counting Republican noses, my argument is this: If health reform passes, he will be remembered more for his role in making that happen than whether he was elected to a sixth term or what committee he served on as ranking member. If it doesn’t, well, what’s the point of serving in a body so riven by partisan politics that it is unable to function?

Jennifer Rubin in Commentary:

Marcus tries to flatter and egg on Grassley—do it for the legacy, she coos. But Grassley is worried about how “he will be remembered.” He is telling her, because voters are telling him, that the dire issue here is our debt and financial future, not remaking a basically sound health-care system through which the vast majority of voters have insurance that they like. He is also telling her that the “legacy” is whether he will usher in a political and economic system in which the government plays an ever larger role and individual decisions aren’t so individual anymore. (Didn’t liberals use to be all about “choice” and “personal autonomy”?)

Marcus makes the same mistaken assumption that has flummoxed Obama as well as congressional Democrats: she assumes that the current health-care system is unredeemable. The public is saying otherwise—tinker and improve but don’t overhaul, they are pleading. What they do want to overhaul are Obama’s fiscal policies and big-government agenda. Grassley gets that. Marcus should cajole less and listen more. The same goes, come to think of it, for Obama.

Ezra Klein:

Most of the commentary on Chuck Grassley’s truculence and back-pedaling has focused on his potential primary challenge and fear of the Iowa electorate. But that’s not terribly convincing: According to Survey USA, Grassley has a 62 percent approval rating, and that lifts to 69 percent among Republicans. He’s a five-time senator with a serious machine. How scared can he be?

The more plausible argument is that Grassley fears his fellow Republican senators. I’m hearing that Grassley is getting reamed out in meetings with his colleagues. The yelling is loud enough that staffers in adjacent offices have heard snippets. But the real threat isn’t the yelling of his colleagues. It’s their capacity to deny Grassley his next job. Ruth Marcus hints at this in her column on Chuck Grassley today, but it’s worth explaining in a bit more detail.

This is the final year that Grassley is eligible to serve as ranking member — the most powerful minority member, and, if Republicans retake the Senate, the chairman — of the Senate Finance Committee. His hope is to move over as ranking member of the Judiciary Committee, or failing that, the Budget Committee. But for that, he needs the support of his fellow Republicans. And if he undercuts them on health-care reform, they will yank that support. It’s much the same play they ran against Arlen Specter a couple of years back, threatening to deny him his chairmanship of — again — the Judiciary Committee. It worked then, and there’s no reason to think it won’t work now.

Matthew Yglesias:

I’ve emphasized the fact that progressives have very little leverage over key stakeholders like Kent Conrad and Max Baucus. That, however, is because whereas the Senate Republican caucus operates like a political party, complete with rules designed to hold senior members accountable to the rank-and-file and thus to the party’s policy objectives, the Senate Democratic caucus operates like a somewhat boring social club. Committee chairs don’t face term limits and assignments are handed out in blind order of seniority.

I’ve mostly encouraged people to focus their ire on Senate moderates rather than the White House, but this is one of the few areas in which the White House could be making a difference. Surely they can find at least an ally or two up on the Hill to float the notion that Democrats need to adopt Republican-style rules about this. When both parties operated in a discipline-free manner, lack of discipline may have worked. But the current asymmetry in the organization of the parties basically means that progressives do legislative fights with one hand tied behind our backs.

Kevin Drum:

This kind of discipline is normal in a parliamentary system where everyone on both sides is expected to support the party line.  But that discipline is the flip side of a system in which the majority party has the power to turn its campaign platform into law using only its own votes.

You really can’t have one without the other.  If you have an intensely whip-based system, in which the opposition party is expected to oppose unanimously, then the majority party has to have to power to govern using only its own majority.  Conversely, if you have a system in which legislation only passes if party members cross lines, then discipline necessarily needs to be weak.

Not to be tedious about this, but this is yet another example of how Congress has become schizophrenic in the age of the routine filibuster.  We either need a system in which the majority rules, or we need a system in which party members cross lines to form temporary alliances.  Right now we have neither.

Jonathan Chait at The Plank:

So, on the one side you have Grassley’s desire to retain his Senatorial prerogatives and possibly his seat as well. On the other, a fond place in the memories of health care reform proponents. Gee, I can’t figure out which will win out here.

The real value of the column is it shows why Max Baucus is still going through the charade of negotiating with Grassley. Marcus describes how close the two are, and the hundreds of hours they’ve logged discussing the issue. Baucus is probably falling for the fallacy of sunk costs — he’s put so much time into negotiating with Grassley that he can’t come to grips with letting go of the effort. So he soldiers on even though it’s beyond obvious that Grassley is not going to support anything remotely resembling health care reform.

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