Lots of Words! Lots of Pages! Run Away, GOP! [View All]

[babylonsister]

http://www.tnr.com/blog/the-treatment/why-republicans-worry-about-length

Why Republicans Worry About Size
Harold Pollack

Harold Pollack is a professor at the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration and Special Correspondent for The Treatment.


I have before me two tomes. The longer one is a somewhat rushed and tedious product whose guiding ideological vision and fuzzy presentation of crucial details repelled independent voters the last time it was put to an electoral test. The second document is somewhat more succinct and engaging but remains open to criticism for its embarrassingly padded margins and large print that makes it seem so much longer than it actually is. I'll leave you to guess which one is Sarah Palin's memoir and which is the Senate health reform bill.

If you listen to Republicans, they oppose that Senate bill because it is a Rube Goldberg contraption that is just too complicated, too opaque, and fills too many pages. Yesterday, Lamar Alexander gave full voice to this objection speaking with Ezra Klein: "One thing is you can’t be sure what’s in the Senate bill because it's 2,100 pages long. You just know there are surprises in it." He may have good reasons to oppose the Senate bill, but I'm pretty sure that its length and complexity are not his real beef. Congress routinely passes cinder-block-sized tomes that could provide valuable armor plating for tanks headed to Iraq.

Politicians who say that they oppose a bill because it's too long and complicated are generally fibbing. The only mystery becomes: What are they really thinking? In like fashion, a politician who says that she opposes something because it amounts to large-scale social engineering is more likely to believe what she is saying, but she is still telling an untruth. No doubt about it; health reform is ambitious social engineering. So was welfare reform. So were Reagan and Bush (43) tax cuts. So was No Child Left Behind. So was knocking down high-rise public housing here in Chicago. Privatizing Social Security and converting Medicare to vouchers (two favorite Republican ideas) are huge and messy social engineering projects, too.

snip//

Bills rarely fall of their own weight. Most are pushed over the edge by politicians who have their own reasons to see them dead. Republicans oppose health reform because it is an expansion of activist government, and because it is the politically vulnerable signature domestic policy achievement of the Obama administration. It's that simple. If one believes that 30 million people need health insurance now, rather on the model of the original Wyden-Bennett bill, we can't wait.