Medicare Loss Proves GOP Ruthless Extremists and Hill Dems Hapless

Senate Approves Medicare Overhaul

el - The one good thing about the Medicare bill is that it establishs that drugs should be covered. How they are covered and how it is paid for are very bad things in this bill.

E. J. Dionne Jr has it right.

The battle over a Medicare prescription drug benefit proves that Republicans are ruthless and determined and that Democrats are divided and hapless. Republicans have changed the rules in Washington, but some Democrats still pretend to be living in the good old days.

"It's a combination of political stupidity and substantive gutlessness," said one influential Democratic congressional aide.

What Democrats failed to understand, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) said in an interview yesterday morning, is that Republicans "are on an ideological march. They have no intention of playing fair. They want what they want when they want it." And they get it.

If anyone doubted the rules had changed, House Republican leaders ended all illusions in the early hours of Saturday morning by holding open a 15-minute roll call vote for an unprecedented two hours and 51 minutes. At the end of the normal time for voting, Republican leaders faced defeat on the drug bill by a two-vote margin. Eventually, two Republicans were hammered into switching their votes.

"I don't mean to be alarmist, but this is the end of parliamentary democracy as we have known it," said Rep. Barney Frank of Massachusetts. The new system amounted to "plebiscitary democracy" in which leaders of the House have imposed such a strong sense of party discipline that they will ultimately pass whatever legislation they bring to the floor. "The Republican Party in the House is the most ideologically cohesive and disciplined party in the democratic world," Frank said. In response, House Democrats were more united in opposition to the bill than Democratic senators, who are operating as if the older system of give-and-take were still in force.

Whatever discontent liberals expressed toward Kennedy [for initially trying to work with the GOP this summer] was mild compared with their irritation toward Sens. John Breaux of Louisiana and Max Baucus of Montana.

Breaux and Baucus were the only two Democrats allowed to negotiate the Medicare bill with the Republicans, House Democrats having been totally excluded. Would Republicans have put up with such an arrangement?

el - This is another demonstration of why Democrats need a fighter like Dean and not one from Washington like Gephardt or Kerry.