After raising $1.1 million from January to June, the committee raised less than $87,000 between July and September — less than it brought in during any one of the preceding five months. And in just three months, the Blue Dog PAC's monthly fundraising average dropped by more than $50,000 — probably not the sort of fiscal conservatism the 52-member coalition was hoping for.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) is shifting to the center on a government-run public health insurance plan, warming to a version that is being supported by some Blue Dog Democrats.
Pelosi’s recent public statements and private conversations indicate her willingness to move away from the more liberal proposal, which she had been promoting as being more cost-effective. The centrist view was negotiated with Blue Dogs to move the bill out of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
As data piles up that the the public option is good fiscal policy, and the public option still polls well above 60 percent nationally, Blue Dogs have a lot to mull over. Here's more: it's popular in their districts, and their reelection prospects without it are dimmed.
Blocking a public health insurance option is a relatively low priority for conservative Blue Dog Democrats, according to an ongoing survey of its members. The fading House opposition could clear the way for the public option to move through the chamber.
The Blue Dogs have been surveying their membership over the last several days; coalition co-chair Stephanie Herseth Sandlin (D-S.D.) has been collecting the responses. She listed the four top priorities that have emerged: Keeping the cost under $900 billion, not moving at a faster pace than the Senate, getting a 20-year cost estimate from the Congressional Budget Office and addressing regional disparities in Medicare reimbursement rates.
Speaker Pelosi is backing away from a deal she cut with centrists to advance health reform, said a source familiar with talks.
Pelosi’s decision to move away from the agreement that was made with a group of Blue Dogs to get the bill out of committee would steer the healthcare legislation back to the left as she prepares for a floor vote.
Pelosi is planning to include a government-run public option in the House version of the healthcare bill. She wants to model it on Medicare, with providers getting reimbursed on a scale pegged to Medicare rates.
As the health care debate on Capitol Hill reaches its peak, many of the strongest opponents of an overhaul represent districts with the largest percentage of people who don't have health insurance, an NPR analysis shows.
Of the 100 congressional districts with the highest percentage rates of uninsured people, 53 are represented either by Republican lawmakers who are fighting the overhaul, or by conservative Blue Dog Democrats who have slowed down and diluted the overhaul proposals.
One leader of the Blue Dog effort is Rep. Mike Ross of Arkansas, the coalition's chief health care negotiator. His 4th Congressional District covers southern Arkansas, a rural area with a high poverty rate. In his district, more than one out of five residents under age 65 lacks health insurance. That's 30 percent higher than the national average.
"Many of those individuals who would need a public health care option are those who are not likely to be able to take two hours out of their day to go to a public event like that town hall," says Kevin Motl, a history professor at Ouachita Baptist University who attended the meeting. "They were too busy earning hourly wages and trying to keep roofs above their children's heads. Those voices are not going to be present in that discourse."
New data from the U.S. Census Bureau show that 17 percent of Americans under age 65 now go without health insurance. It's a basic truth of political analysis that low-income residents — that is, those most likely to be uninsured — are less likely than middle-class people to attend town meetings and less likely to vote. To state the obvious, the poor are also less likely to make campaign contributions.
The bipartisan "gang of six" senators who helped craft the health care reform bill going before a key Senate committee Tuesday represent less than 3 percent of the U.S. population - but they hold a lot of power at a crucial policy-shaping moment in Congress.
Three Republican and three Democratic senators in the group, all of them members of the Senate Finance Committee, received an average of $74,600 from health industry lobbyists, according to The Chronicle's analysis of records through June.
That is about 25 percent more than the average of $59,632 in such donations that the gang's other Senate colleagues raked in from lobbyists for the pharmaceutical, hospital, insurance and nursing home industries, according to the analysis, which was based on records compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonprofit watchdog group.
"Money buys access," said Henry Brady, a professor of public policy and dean of the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley.
Six Senate Finance Committee members who negotiated a health reform plan that goes before the committee Tuesday represent about 3 percent of the nation's population but received 25 percent more in campaign funds from health care interests than their Senate colleagues through June 30.
When votes start getting cast, those who vote against a public option will generate the kind of ire that Wilson received, and activists will look for ways to punish those corporatist Democrats. Primary challengers are already being recruited in several Blue Dog districts, and votes against reform will generate additional impetus for more primaries. And while ordinary Americans will never be able to outraise the insurance industry and their millions of bribe dollars, they can generate enough money to wage credible campaigns.
Consequently, Blue Dogs should worry about being in the mainstream of their constituents. For example, Rep. Jim Cooper in the Tennessee 5th congressional district has been a longtime foe of real healthcare reform. Yet a Research 2000 poll for Daily Kos found that only 31 percent of respondents would vote to reelect him. Asked if they approved of his actions on healthcare, just 31 percent approved, including just 16 percent of Democrats. All told, 61 percent supported a public option, while just 28 percent opposed it.
Progressive activists are itching for primary challenges to reduce the influence of corporatist Democrats in Congress. Blue Dogs can either solidify their electoral standing by voting on behalf of their constituents, or they can invite primary challenges funded by the party’s well-connected and engaged progressive base.
One would figure that after all this time, the Progressie Caucus would understand that they have to stand for something to have any clout or respect.
We now have a House Dem who's not a member of the progressive caucus signaling he won’t vote for a health care bill without a public option.
Dem Rep. Anthony Weiner, who’s taken on a counterintuitive and increasingly high profile role defending the public plan, just said for the first time in an interview with me that he doesn’t see "any way" he can vote for a bill without the public option in it.
"I don't see how I could," said Weiner, when I asked whether he'd vote for a bill without a robust public plan. "I dont see any way I could." His throwing down of the gauntlet is more striking when you consider that he’s known at home in New York as a moderate who's not known for bucking leadership.
Indeed, Weiner also suggested that liberals should defy the President and Nancy Pelosi and oppose a bill without a public option. If not, they only have only themselves to blame for their lack of clout relative to, say, Blue Dog Dems, he added.
"All of the protest letters in the world don’t add up to much if you don’t finally stand up and vote No on something the President and Nancy want," Weiner said. "There is clearly a sense that progressives in Congress are easily rolled."
"If the Congressional left can’t pass even something as modest as a watered down public option, then frankly I don’t think anyone is going to take the left very seriously later on in this Congress," Weiner continued. "When Blue Dogs talk, there are fewer of them but they have more influence than when progressives talk."
Said Weiner: "You can only shake the saber so often before someone expects you to use it."
If the idea is to have a public option waiting in the wings in case private insurers blow it, why wait for it at all? If it gets lower costs and wider coverage, it should be included right from the start.
What worries me isn't just that the mainstream media are calling Snowe's trigger "centrist," but that the White House might see it as an easy out. "I continue to believe that a public option within that basket of insurance choices would help improve quality and bring down costs," the President said Monday. Fine. But he hasn't yet said the public option is essential. He hasn't threatened to veto a bill lacking it. There's even reason to believe the White House has quietly encouraged Olympia Snowe to pursue her "trigger." The best way to give Blue Dogs cover is for the President to explain clearly and boldly why the public option is essential to health care reform, and why he's ready to veto any bill that doesn't include it. That's also the only way to give the nation a good chance of getting true health care reform. Hopefully, that's what he'll do Wednesday evening.
Obama should also explain why bipartisanship ain't what it used to be. This is a party out to cripple or kill reform, and with it the future success of Obama's Presidency. As the eminent Roosevelt scholar Jean Edward Smith recently argued, "This fixation on securing bipartisan support for healthcare reform suggests that the Democratic party has forgotten how to govern and the White House has forgotten how to lead."
The president should challenge the Blue Dogs. Place the burden on them to get out of the way of the majority in favor of a comprehensive plan. The question isn't whether the progressive majority is unreasonably resisting reform to save the public option. The question is whether a small minority of conservative Democrats will sabotage reform simply to stop the public option. Do the Blue Dogs wish to cripple their own President in his first year in office for seeking an objective that has been the stated goal of their party since the Truman administration?
Obama must lead the charge and rally the people who swept him into the White House. And challenge the Democrats. Make it clear to the Democratic Caucus in general, and to the Blue Dogs in particular, that for the sake of the country they must vote for cloture so that a bill that will accomplish substantive reform can have an up-or-down vote on the floor. Don't heed those who counsel incrementalism or bipartisanship at all cost. The art of the possible is not the same as the art of incrementalism. And healthcare reform enacted by a Democratic majority is still meaningful reform.
The notion that the left or progressives should just chalk it up, meaning drop the public option for the team is disastrous. The whip should have been on the Blue Dogs, why? Because you don't destroy the very BASE, i.e., progressives, your activists in this whole fiasco. It will be REMEMBERED what Rahm Emanuel said to progressives, to the day he LEAVES the White House. The Progressive Caucus HAS THE VOTES, the Blue Dogs don't. It is time for the Obama White House to use their leverage and whip these folks into place. The thinking of something is better than nothing will suppress and demoralize the base. Case and point, Obama is losing across the board, bleeding support from Republicans, Independents and Democrats. If he can not deliver on health care, he will have a very hard 2010. The Republicans are fired up, our side not so much. Not with the continuous blunders of a White House that can not keep on simple message, not with convoluted messages from this White House and not with the continuing for bipartisanship which is a joke, at this point. No public option, hard times in 2010 and it will start with the Blue Dogs going down.
Klein's central premise is that Progressives have no leverage to make Blue Dogs want to vote for good legislation, since opposing Democrats is popular in their districts. However, Blue Dogs have leverage over Progressives, since Progressives don't want Democrats to lose seats.
The reason I disagree with Klein is fairly simple: if no health care legislation passes, and Democrats lose seats as a result, Blue Dogs are the people who will lose the seats, not Progressives. Even if Klein is correct and Democrats lose a bunch of seats because Progressives blocked it, Blue Dogs are actually the ones who will bear the brunt of those losses. As such, Blue Dogs have more to lose if health care fails to pass than Progressives.
So the real story isn't the right-wing rallies. The real story is that it appears that the Obama administration has made back-room deals promising that health reform will protect the profits of the health insurance industry, Big Pharma, and private hospitals, at taxpayer's expense; that a "public option", if any, will be ineffective; and that health care costs will continue to rise.
Obama may get a "Health Reform" signing ceremony on the White House lawn declaring victory. But if the "reform" subsidizes industry profits and mandates that individuals must buy bare-bones policies which they can barely afford and which don't cover many of their health care costs, the raucous town hall meeting could end up being just a precursor to the wrath that American voters will end up aiming at Democrats in a few years when the true effects of this industry-friendly reform become clear.
Republicans have warned that failing to pass a health care bill could be Obama's Waterloo. Passing a bad bill could be an even bigger Waterloo, not just for Obama but for the Democratic Party, and for idea that government intervention is needed to counter-balance the power of free markets and corporate oligarchies.
Liberal organizations who have supported incremental health care reform like Move On, Health Care for America Now, the AFL-CIO, Families USA, and the SEIU need to make clear to Rahm Emanuel and President Obama that they are not an arm of the White House and will mobilize their supporters to oppose a deeply compromised, industry-friendly, health care bill. The House Progressive Caucus needs to make clear to the White House that they have the guts to vote down such a bill. No less than the future of liberalism, as a counter-weight to free market conservatism, may be at stake. If Obama ends up siding with the health insurance industry over ordinary Americans, progressive Democrats in Congress enable him to do so, and liberal and progressive organizations don't speak out, then what's left for millions of Americans whose homes, jobs, and health care are under attack except right-wing populism? The tea parties could end up being, well, just tea parties, compared to the shit-storm to come.
And if you stab us in the back on health care this year don’t you dare ask us for our support next year!
AFL-CIO Secretary Treasurer Richard Trumka traveled to Nevada on Monday to address the Sheet Metal Workers International Association (SMWIA) to talk about the new approach the labor movement will be taking towards conservative "Blue Dog" Democrats and Senate centrists like Senators Max Baucus and Blanche Lincoln.
The SMWIA is the first union to have suspended all campaign donations to ALL Democratic candidates until the Employee Free Choice Act and a bill addressing real Health Care Reform are passed. The SMWIA, along with a coalition of over a dozen unions will be running ads next week targeting several Democratic Senators and a Republican.
Former Democratic National Committee chair Howard Dean fired one of the clearest warning shots at hesitant Democratic lawmakers on Thursday, insisting that if the party was unable to produce a health care bill with a public plan, there would be electoral consequences.
"I do think there will be primaries as the result of all this, if the bill doesn't pass with a public option," Dean said, in a phone interview with the Huffington Post.
What the country needs--what Obama needs, whether he realizes it or not--is an independent, mobilized, progressive citizens' movement that takes on the corporate lobbies, from Big Pharma to Big Oil to Wall Street; challenges the legislators who are in their pockets; and demands affordable national healthcare, renewable energy, empowerment of workers, regulation of Wall Street and more. That movement should go after the conservatives and the compromised in both parties--anyone who stands in the way of reform.
The obstruction by Republicans and the right is real and must be opposed. But so should the back-room guile of the moneyed lobbies and their Democratic allies. If we are going to get the change we need, progressives will have to challenge those in both parties who can't see which way the wind is blowing.
Rahm Emanuel's always been harder on progressives than he is on the Blue Dog Democrats. After all, he was the one who recruited most of these Blue Dogs to run for office, and he's a major part of the reason why the Blue Dogs are working so hard to weaken health care reform in the House. He'd rather deal with the Blue Dogs from a policy standpoint because he erroneously believes that the country is "center-right" rather than "center-left" and that bipartisanship is what Americans want, rather than good policies that was promised by the party Americans voted into office. So giving in to the Blue Dogs makes sense to Rahm Emanuel, and to other aides in the White House from a policy standpoint.
It's that same old Village mentality of where the Democrats must always concede to the Republicans or to so-called "moderate" Democrats in order to pass legislation, regardless of whether they're in the majority or in the minority. Bipartisanship in Washington, D.C., means that Republican ideas must be agreed to in order to pass legislation even though none of these Republicans being courted will vote for the resulting legislation.
Did you know that the Blue Dog Caucus isn't even united on the issue of the public option? We have about 12 members of the Blue Dog Caucus that supports the inclusion of the public option in health care reform, and we only need three more Blue Dog Democrats on our side. It's why Rahm Emanuel should be focused on twisting their arms to support the House Tri-Committee bill without weakening it severely on the false claims of "cost containment."
Now that they're complaining, it's high time to increase the pressure by showing up at their Democratic town hall events and insisting that they take the Pledge to support the public option, and not to weaken the public option, or else they'll face a massive electoral loss in 2010 because the Democratic base will have been demoralized by the grand bailout of the murder-by-spreadsheet industry without a strong, robust public option in the final package.
In a new cover story, BusinessWeek claims that the "health insurers have already won" the battle over health care reform. According to the magazine, their strategy has been to “quietly” focus on “shaping the views” of more conservative Democrats. Central to the health insurers’ strategy is to target the Blue Dog Coalition, which includes Rep. Jim Matheson (D-UT) and Rep. Mike Ross (D-AR):
Impressing fiscally conservative Democrats like Matheson, a leader of the House of Representatives’ Blue Dog Coalition, is at the heart of UnitedHealth’s strategy. It boils down to ensuring that whatever overhaul Congress passes this year will help rather than hurt huge insurance companies. [...]
Matheson, whose Blue Dogs command 52 votes in the House, can’t offer enough praise for UnitedHealth, the largest company of its kind. “The tried and true message of their advocacy,” he says, “is making sure the information they provide is accurate and considered.” [...]
Fifteen years after the insurance industry helped kill then-President Bill Clinton’s health-reform initiative, Ross is frustrating the Obama White House by opposing proposals for a government-run insurance concern that would compete with private-sector companies.
And it is working. . .
Blue Dog Mike Ross Boasts: "We Held Bill Hostage," Killed Single Payer
Rep. Mike Ross of Arkansas boasted about how his Blue Dog coalition "held the [health care] bill hostage in committee for 10 days" and prevented a single player plan" to protect insurance company profits.
We ensured that if there is a government option, it will be just that -- an option -- and it won't be mandated on anybody. If it had been based on Medicare rates, I can assure you that it would have eventually ended up resulting in a single payer-type system, because Medicare has really good rates, because they're negotiating for every senior in America. Private insurance companies could not have competed with that.
Like hell we won't attack them... Selling out citizens for profit really is criminal.
