W.E.B. Du Bois
12-23-2010, 03:45 AM
The Democrats passed the health care reform and financial reform in the spring of this year. The Democrats had the chance to fully fund all this stuff before the midterm election, but it would cost $1.1 trillion, so they decided to wait till after the midterm and then do the funding. The Democrats got slaughtered anyway, Reid tried to pass the "omnibus bill" and was beaten back after a sudden withdrawal in Republican support. He took a temporary extension bill to prevent the government from shutting down, and one of the results was that the funding to implement the health care form and financial reform was dropped.
From the Washington Post's Ezra Klein:
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2010/12/senate_votes_to_defund_health-.html
by extending 2010's funding resolution -- and that resolution didn't include provisions for implementing the bills that were passed as the year went on.
Republicans had been talking about attacking the health-reform law by defunding it, but few thought they'd succeed without a fight. The assumption was that Democrats would shut down the government before they let Republicans take that money. But as it happened, there was no fight at all. The omnibus spending bill collapsed, and the continuing resolution compromise was reached within a few days. Most senators probably don't even know the implications their vote had for the implementation of bills passed over the past year.
This is, of course, a temporary resolution. So we might still see a fight on this early next year, or much more to the point, in March. In the meantime, the various agencies charged with implementing 2010's legislative achievements will have to do more with less -- which probably means they'll have to do less, and what they do get done will get done less well. You might also see them making strategic decisions about what they do and don't get done. To put it another way, if the Republicans are going to force the executive branch to cut back its activities, the executive branch may focus the cutbacks in sectors the Republicans rather like.
Nevertheless, this is bad news for the health-care bill and the financial-regulation bill. There's been a tendency to assume that the universe of options for passed legislation was binary: Either they went forward, or they get repealed. But with an angrily divided government, we may find ourselves in that little-known middle category: The Republicans can't repeal them and the Democrats can't fully fund them, and so rather than simply going forward, they limp forward.
Will the health care and financial reform be killed this way, by constantly not funding them? I'm thinking that for the next two years, the health care reform will be killed like this. Wall Street lobbyists will push the Republicans to kill the financial reform, but I think that is politically dangerous, and I can't see how funding it will be that expensive, so that might actually get the funds to survive.
From the Washington Post's Ezra Klein:
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2010/12/senate_votes_to_defund_health-.html
by extending 2010's funding resolution -- and that resolution didn't include provisions for implementing the bills that were passed as the year went on.
Republicans had been talking about attacking the health-reform law by defunding it, but few thought they'd succeed without a fight. The assumption was that Democrats would shut down the government before they let Republicans take that money. But as it happened, there was no fight at all. The omnibus spending bill collapsed, and the continuing resolution compromise was reached within a few days. Most senators probably don't even know the implications their vote had for the implementation of bills passed over the past year.
This is, of course, a temporary resolution. So we might still see a fight on this early next year, or much more to the point, in March. In the meantime, the various agencies charged with implementing 2010's legislative achievements will have to do more with less -- which probably means they'll have to do less, and what they do get done will get done less well. You might also see them making strategic decisions about what they do and don't get done. To put it another way, if the Republicans are going to force the executive branch to cut back its activities, the executive branch may focus the cutbacks in sectors the Republicans rather like.
Nevertheless, this is bad news for the health-care bill and the financial-regulation bill. There's been a tendency to assume that the universe of options for passed legislation was binary: Either they went forward, or they get repealed. But with an angrily divided government, we may find ourselves in that little-known middle category: The Republicans can't repeal them and the Democrats can't fully fund them, and so rather than simply going forward, they limp forward.
Will the health care and financial reform be killed this way, by constantly not funding them? I'm thinking that for the next two years, the health care reform will be killed like this. Wall Street lobbyists will push the Republicans to kill the financial reform, but I think that is politically dangerous, and I can't see how funding it will be that expensive, so that might actually get the funds to survive.