Posted: October 27th, 2009 | Author: Maha Rafi Atal | Filed under: Economics, Politics | Tags: Chuck Schumer, Harry Reid, health care, Olympia Snowe, Senate | 1 Comment »
A reader emailed yesterday asking what I made of Harry Reid’s decision to bring the public option back from the dead, and whether I could explain the politics and policy in lay terms. Here’s what I wrote [some day-after edits in parens]:
Basically, the various committees in the Senate and the House have each developed their own bills, which have passed the committee’s own votes. Harry Reid, as Senate leader, gets to take those bills and combine them into a NEW bill, which the whole Senate then votes on. It has to get 60 votes to pass a [procedural] barrier called cloture. Basically, 60 Sens vote for it, and after that, the Senate has 30 hours before it has to pass the bill or not. During those 30 hours, they can consider amendments relevant to the bill but cannot consider any other policy matters. And on those amendments, only 51 votes are needed.
Once the full Senate passes the bill, that version goes back to the House, where they can either pass it as is, OR if they tweak it too, the full Senate has to re-vote on it. That can be dangerous, because the House is further left than the Senate and is likely to add things the Senate won’t pass. So Reid is likely to try and manage the negotiations such that the Senate votes on the bill in a form the House can quickly pass and send straight to the Prez. It seems that the Schumer opt-out version of the pub-op is the one that can potentially get through both House and Senate.
On the policy of this [opt-out] version of the pub-option: I’m not a fan but it’s better than the Snowe trigger compromise. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: September 26th, 2009 | Author: Maha Rafi Atal | Filed under: Economics, Foreign Policy | Tags: China, climate change, Copenhagen, environment, Obama, Senate, UN | 4 Comments »
The madness of Qaddafi aside, there was some value to this weeks UN and G20 meetings: they introduced the world to Barack Obama’s foreign policy.
Readers of this blog will know that I am skeptical of 44, because I see him as representing the rise of the liberal-tarian left at the expense of liberal institutionalists like myself. In foreign policy, however, Obama has endorsed the institutionalist path, memorably promising during the campaign that he would negotiate with any and all world leaders instead of taking unilateral action and would engage international institutions to combat international problems like climate change.
I had struggled to reconcile this with his professed love of diffuse power. Now I understand: Obama thinks of governance as consensus building amongst individuals. As a result, his vision of international institutions is much the same as his vision of Congress, as a place we go to engage in banter until we arrive at broad and general consensus, rather than as a place for realpolitik dealmaking around concrete specifics. Read the rest of this entry »