The Democrats are now claiming that Obamacare is all the Republicans’ fault. If they’d had their druthers they’d have gone all the way for single payer instead of the abortion of the individual mandate.
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Harvard Professor Jane Mansbridge:
Democrats have already compromised on healthcare reform by adopting Obama/RomneyCare in the first place.
There’s only one problem with this latest messaging: political science says it’s baloney, Dr. Mansbridge.
Remember back when Obamacare was getting off the ground in the House and the Senate in 2009-10? Recall how the voting went?
There was not a single Republican vote for Obamacare. Not in the House of Representatives. Not in the United States Senate.
What does that tell us? Well, let’s not muddy the waters with mere talking points and messaging. Let’s go to the science.
The science in this case is the seminal “Calculus of Consent“ by James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock.
In their Calculus, Buchanan and Tullock go through endless voting situations to figure out how voting in a legislature works.
A typical scenario: landowners get to vote over a proposed country road. Not surprisingly the landowners that won’t benefit from the new road don’t want to pay for it. So the pro-road folk have to buy the votes of one or two landowners to get to a majority.
Regardless of how the voting works, whether it takes a simple majority or a supra-majority, you end up bribing the one or two fence sitters to get their vote.
Let’s apply this logic to the climactic moments of Obamacare in Congress. Not a single Republican voted for the bill in either house, which means that not one Republican got to bargain with Harry Reid (D-Nev.) or Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) for their vote. On the contrary, Harry Reid was forced to bargain for the votes of red-state Democrat senators. That’s what the Cornhusker Kickback and the Louisiana Purchase were all about.
In the House, of course, things were different. Moderate Democrats didn’t want to vote for Obamacare at all. These were the moderate candidates cunningly recruited in the 2006 and 2008 election to show middle America how moderate the Democratic Party was. These representatives knew Obamacare was electoral poison for them. So the question in the House was, which of those moderate Democrats would be allowed by Speaker Pelosi to vote against the bill.
Again, no Republicans voted for the bill in the House. But not all Democrats voted for it, either. Democrat leaders needed just a simple majority; they could afford to let representatives in the more conservative districts off the hook and vote against Obamacare and 13 of them did.
In 2009 and 2010, Democrats’ concern was how liberal could they make Obamacare and still get enough Democratic votes to pass it. Meaning, the thing that stopped Obamacare from going full single-payer was not hard-liner Republicans, but red-state Democrats whose constituents would hate single-payer.
Obamacare was a compromise, not with Republicans, but with moderate Democrats. Without them, there wouldn’t have been any Obamacare at all.
Perhaps NPR could do a segment on Science Friday about voting systems? Just to get the base up to speed.
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- How to defund Obamacare with 51 votes (rare.go-vip.net)
- Pelosi: Obamacare didn’t cost Democrats the House (rare.go-vip.net)
- Exit Polls Analysis Contradict Nancy Pelosi Obamacare Claim (freebeacon.com)