Correcting a conservative red herring, on health-care reform

Last night, on the "PBS Newshour," in his weekly set piece with Times-columnist David Brooks, syndicated-columnist Mark Shields offered with slight but still visible discomfort these extenuating arguments in defense of Congress' feckless delay in passing health-care reform:

First, Congress is always feckless, no matter what the issue, and what we're witnessing now is just par for the sausage-making course, so not to panic; and second, it should be remembered that four out of five Americans do, after all, already have some sort of health-care plan, and three-fourths of those four-fifths are reasonably satisfied with it, so a sense of Congressional urgency is not unreasonably absent.

Doubtless, Shields was not the first to advance those arguments -- they've been swimming around Washington's sewers with increasing velocity since Congress decided to proceed with its scheduled summer vacation, icing not only health-care reform, but financial reregulation as well as energy legislation -- yet there was something, I guess, about the way he phrased them, especially the one of a fractional note, that uniquely smacked me the wrong way.

I mean, if for whatever reason only four out of five Americans had First Amendment, or Sixth, or maybe Fourteenth Amendment rights, would columnists and politicians be celebrating that percentage, arguing its mitigation against urgent, comprehensive correction?

Or, heaven forbid, if one out of five Americans somehow, but suddenly nevertheless, lost their sacred, God-given Second Amendment rights, would there not take place a thunderous legislative stampede which would outdo in instant theatrics even the Schiavo case, summer recess or no?

Or, more along the lines of generally recognized human rather than Constitutional rights, if 60 million Americans -- 20 percent; one out of five -- had no job, no food, and no home, would the Beltway-employed admit to that human calamity, while mugging for the camera: Hey, the prodigious upside is that four out of five Americans are doing pretty well by comparison, so why on the floors of the House and Senate should there be any bloody panic?

Well, that's one thing -- panicky overreaction, a rush to right human-rights wrongs -- we'll never see in relation to health-care reform by Congress, where five out of five, it should be tediously renoted in every discussion of this needlessly tedious issue, are fully insured through a government guarantee.

No, they require a little break, you see; a little downtime, they say, to "consult" with their constituents -- puzzlingly, on a matter that was already decided by a crushing democratic proportion, last November.

Such consultation will of course entail a swarm of privileged visitors, suffocating anti-reform media campaigns, and organized right-wing protests -- all designed to overturn the intended results of yet another democratic election.

As the NY Times observed, "The delay will [also] give Republican opponents ample time to highlight what they say are the bill's flaws, and will subject moderate [read conservative Dem] lawmakers ... to a barrage of questions."

The silliest -- pardon my stridency -- of which is, How are we going to pay for this? Time after time, in interview after interview, we've listened to conservative Senate and House members assert that that's the most prominent sticking point; where oh where, and just how, will they ever find the necessary money.

Humbug, hogwash, and unforgivable flummery. Fiscal resources aren't the problem -- there's been no shortage of creative suggestions there -- or the real sticking point, or the fundamental cause of delay. The public option is. And killing it -- that which the electorate overwhelmingly voted for -- is merely taking some time, that being the most efficient instrument of its undemocratic demise.

Republican Senator Chuck Grassley, swooned and fussed over daily by finance-committee Chairman Max Baucus, has admitted as much. He's willing to entertain, he has said, nearly any suggestion of health-care reform -- except a public option. That's the deal-breaker, the ideological poison pill.

And Grassley has Max to gleefully go along with him, arm in arm with a filibuster-protecting number of other conservative Senate Democrats, as well as dozens of foot-dragging, negotiations-complicating Blue Dogs in the House.

But strip the public option from any given bill and you'll see these conservatives suddenly warm to virtually any proposed funding plan. The money is a red herring. It's the humanity of a public option they hate, and intend to delay to death.