I’ve been remiss in updating the blog since just before Thanksgiving, except for a short “quote of the day” post back towards the end of December.  Rather than ease my way back into the swing of things, though, I thought I’d take a stab at discussing the implications of the special election in Massachusetts three days ago, to fill the U.S. Senate seat formerly held by the late Ted Kennedy, and won decisively by Scott Brown.

Others have tried their hand at analyzing, with varying degrees of objectivity and persuasiveness, why this occurred.  As a Bay State expat I suspect there are a number of factors: Martha Coakley had some difficult-to-shed baggage (the Amirault case, the Geoghan case, the Winfield case) from her career as a prosecutor; Coakley ran a weak, gaffe-prone campaign that veered from entitled indolence in the early days to frenzied negativity once Brown surged; Brown was an affable candidate who excelled at retail politics, and managed to tap into across-the-political-spectrum anxieties about what’s going on in Washington, particularly with the healthcare bill; Kennedy fatigue; increasing disgust with the corruption in the state-level Democratic Party; and so forth.  Naturally national Republicans are claiming this is a wholesale repudiation of the Obama agenda, while national Democrats are spinning it as the result of a poor candidate and an electorate focused exclusively on local issues.  Given that Brown ran explicitly as the “41st vote” that would enable a GOP filibuster against ObamaCare, I suspect reality, while undoubtedly short of Republicans’ “wholesale repudiation” scenario, is somewhat closer to that spin than the Democrats’.

What I think is telling, though, is the sackcloth-and-ashes angst from Democrats about the loss of the seat, and with it their filibuster-proof majority in the Senate.  One friend of mine characterized it as the triumph of witless populism, and the death of nuance.  Andrew Sullivan and his readers have gone off the deep end, as ably chronicled by Megan McArdle.  And we’re being told by the Very Smart People that this could mean the death of health care reform or even the entirity of President Obama’s domestic agenda.

Some perspective, here, is worthwhile.  Notwithstanding Mr. Brown’s victory, Democrats haven’t enjoyed Congressional majorities this large since the 1920s.  The hated George W. Bush, who managed to push several signature initiatives through Congress, never, at any point during his presidency, had a 59-seat majority in the Senate (Jon Stewart, while mocking Democrats for their incompetence, made a similar point the other night).

So here’s a thought: to the extent that the loss of a filibuster-proof majority operates as a repudiation of the Democrats’ governing agenda and renders them politically powerless, it’s evidence not of the death of thoughtful politics or that the United States is ungovernable, but rather that the Democrats’ governing agenda is so unpopular that only a supermajority could pass it.  Moreover, rather than moderate that agenda in the face of public opposition, they have instead doubled down, deluding themselves on the basis of cherrypicking polls and their own three-generations-long dream of socializing healthcare that the proles would eventually come around.  The result has been predictable: they’ve alienated independents and thus energized an opposition party that, a mere year ago, looked like a regional rump.

It’s unclear to me that Democrats possess the humility and capacity for self-reflection necessary for them to pull back from the precipice.  In light of their having spent the last year pursuing a maximalist liberal agenda, it’s going to cost them a great deal of embarassment and political capital to tack back to the center (and to implicitly concede that George W. Bush wasn’t, and the Tea Partiers aren’t, the radical far-right extremists of MSNBC spin).  The alternative, though — to continue pursuing maximalist liberalism after this — is likely to prove even more costly.

“The rushed, secretive way that a bill this destructive and unpopular is being forced on the country shows that ‘reform’ has devolved into the raw exercise of political power for the single purpose of permanently expanding the American entitlement state.”

I am pointed by a wonderful friend of mine to this column at the Huffington Post, penned by a colleague of his who is a chaplain for Planned Parenthood.  It is a thoughtful, interesting read.

As I told him, though, I find myself nonplussed that “reproductive justice for women” has come to encompass not merely the right to end a pregnancy, but taxpayer subsidies for elective abortion (or, for that matter, taxpayer subsidies for the care and feeding of not-aborted anklebiters).

I am largely indifferent to what a woman does with her own uterus on her own dime.  While I am frequently discomfitted by the antiseptic denialism in the pro-choice ranks (you are destroying nascent human life, folks, not simply “terminating a fetus”), there are two hard realities, here:

1. The ultimate question — when, if ever, does a woman’s right to sexual and reproductive self-determination give way to her unborn child’s right to exist? — is freighted with moral ambiguity, such that reasonable people of goodwill can and will reach wildly different conclusions.
2. Even assuming a moral consensus that prohibiting or sharply limiting the practice is appropriate, every legal prohibition comes at an intolerable cost to our other civil liberties (see also, the War On Some Drugs).

Accordingly, my view is that the government ought to butt the hell out.  Individuals, not the state, are the best arbiters of whether, if ever, abortion is right or wrong, proper or improper.

But when you begin demanding that public dollars be used to subsidize your healthcare needs, my indifference fades, and I recite the subject line of this post: he who pays the piper calls the tune.  American taxpayers are not required to supinely accept indentured servitude to the functioning of your uterus, and the fact that some of them are motivated by a religious conviction that abortion is a moral horror is entirely irrelevant.  Either pay your own way, or accept the strings that your benefactor attaches to his largesse.

UPDATE: Reason #1 I hate discussing abortion — it’s perfectly obvious and uncontroversial that in much of the country women have ample access to accurate and fairly comprehensive reproductive health and family planning information.  For goodness sake, one can find safe-sex PSAs on the Big Three networks in prime time.  And yet, dare to point this out, and someone is sure to start in about the tragically-ignorant girls in the rural wastelands of Insert Bible Belt State Here, who still think storks bring babies and live 30 miles from the nearest drugstore, never mind a Planned Parenthood clinic.

It is not to deny the existence of these women to observe that many, many others don’t have tragic ignorance as an excuse, and yet make poor family planning decisions resulting in unwanted pregnancies anyway.  Many, many others, in other words, end up pregnant as the result of their own sexual irresponsibility.

That sounds a good deal more judgmental than I mean it to be, and so I want to make clear: I am not unsympathetic to any woman faced with an unwanted pregnancy, under any circumstances, and considering her options.  It’s an awful situation, and there but for the grace of God, and my gender, go I.  But even if a woman ends up hostage to her own body as the result of some sort of systemic injustice, one does not right that wrong by doubling down, as by forcibly confiscating private wealth to pay for her ob/gyn care.

On the heels of her risible claim that the House healthcare reform bill is a Christmas gift for the country, Madame Speaker says that her legislation is “very fair” insofar as it contemplates criminal penalties for people who refuse to comply with its individual mandate:

Stone: Do you think it’s fair to send people to jail who don’t buy health insurance?

Pelosi: … The legislation is very fair in this respect.

Socialism always comes with handcuffs.  Always.

UPDATE: Ace has a fantastic post on this same subject, that it’s probably unfair to quote so extensively:

The left says: You are crazy to claim your so-called freedoms are being taken away, and you are a lunatic to scream about an overly powerful state which will use violent coercion (no one goes to jail without the threat of violence if he doesn’t, after all) to enforce its notions of the “economic good.”

And with the next breath the left says: By the way, you shall either buy health care insurance or we will throw you in prison for two or three years.

I’m paranoid? Really? I am not fretting here about some remote and unlikely possibility. We are not speaking here of “slippery slopes” or in terms of “what comes next?”

We are instead objecting to a black-letter law spelled out for all to see in the very first piece of legislation you’re proposing.

Right out of the box. The state here — Pelosi, Reid, Obama — are claiming that they can imprison people for behavior that has never before even been hinted as being a crime, on the theory that such behavior constitutes unpatriotic economic behavior which is detrimental to the state’s balance sheets.

Think about what a broad, all-encompassing term “economics” is. 80% of our waking hours are spent in economic activity of one sort or another. The state here is asserting the right to imprison people for behavior they consider not actually morally reprehensible or harmful as other crimes are, but instead merely detrimental to the Great Push Forward, the state’s master plan of economic health and well-being.

Right out of the box they propose sending people to jail for acting as economic subversives and economic traitors and yet I am, somehow, paranoid if I point out that the first step here is to reduce human freedom and increase state power.

And this is just a down-payment, remember. This is merely the first of many freedoms you previously believed sacrosanct to be lost. This is merely the first freedom they’ve realized, in advance, will have to be taken away. When their Rube Goldberg system of cross-subsidizations and stealth-rationing produces a slew of irrationalities and evasions they did not anticipate, we will have a welter of new crimes to correct all that human behavior they now find constitutes bad economic hygiene and must be outlawed.

But we’re paranoid. We’re lunatics. We’re “extreme.”

Read the whole thing.

My visceral reaction to this loathsome woman’s untrammelled hubris was pure rage — nearly enough to make me put my fist through a convenient wall.  Upon reflection I realized that, like Hillary Clinton’s execrable ad during the primaries last year, it’s a wonderful illustration of the leftist habit of mind: forcibly confiscate money out of the pockets of the unwilling, buy them something they don’t really want, and then give yourself a repetitive motion injury patting yourself on the pack for your good intentions and magnaminity despite the certainty that the program will turn out to be (yet another) horrendous boondoggle.

My wife (peace be upon her) added this: “You can’t return it and you have to wear it — like the bunny pajamas in A Christmas Story.”

I liked this, from Mike Cannon: “President Obama wants to put people in jail if they don’t buy health insurance. Give that man a peace prize.”

Yesterday the Congressional Budget Office finally gave ObamaCare some good news, “scoring” the Senate Finance Committee proposals as reducing the deficit by about $81 billion over 10 years.  But as the Cato Institute helpfully reminds us:

The CBO report that said the health care bill won’t raise deficits makes it clear that the Baucus bill’s reduction in future budget deficits comes not from controlling government spending or reducing health care costs, but because of a rapid escalation in tax revenues.

The bill imposes a 40 percent excise tax on health-insurance plans that offer benefits in excess of $8,000 for an individual plan and $21,000 for a family plan. Insurers would almost certainly pass this tax on to consumers via higher premiums. As inflation pushes insurance premiums higher in coming years, more and more middle-class families would find themselves caught up in the tax.

In fact, overall, the tax increases in the bill are more than double the amount of deficit reduction. This isn’t a health care efficiency bill or a cost containment bill. It is a tax and spend bill, pure and simple.

Emphasis mine.  Also:

The CBO score of the Baucus bill is like a mystery novel with the last 50 pages missing. It fails to reveal both the full cost of the bill and the budget gimmicks that Mr. Baucus uses to hide that cost.

The Baucus bill will not reduce the deficit, and it would ultimately cost taxpayers more than $2 trillion—just like every other bill Congress has produced so far.

The biggest gimmick employed by the bill is that its individual mandate pushes more than half of the legislation’s cost off-budget, and onto businesses and individuals who will have to shoulder that burden. A real-world parallel already exists in the Massachusetts health care plan, where private-sector mandates account for 60 percent of the cost. In 1994, CBO counted those mandated private payments in the federal budget, and it helped kill the Clinton health plan. This time around, Democrats were very careful to craft their mandates so that they just barely avoided having the CBO include those payments in the federal budget. But the CBO’s decision does not change the fact that those private-sector mandates are part of the cost of this bill.

The second-biggest gimmick is assuming that Congress will let the “Sustainable Growth Rate” cuts in Medicare physician payments to occur. Starting in 2003, Congress has repeatedly blocked those cuts, and there is no reason to think that Congress will behave any differently in the future. So yes, provided that the sun rises in the West, the Baucus bill would reduce the federal deficit.

In other words, this entire thing is an exercise in smoke and mirrors.  Simply put, it is impossible to reduce the costs of health insurance while increasing insurers’ exposure to risk (through community rating and guaranteed issue mandates).  The increased risk costs money, and somebody has to pony up.

Two things about Mr. Obama’s speech last night that I want to touch on:

1.  The Heckling

For those unaware, at one point during the speech a Republican congresscritter from South Carolina who nobody had ever heard of before yesterday stood up and shouted, “You lie!” at the president (video and context here).  The media and much of the port side of the political spectrum came down with a collective case of the vapors and dragged itself over to the fainting couch to bemoan the lack of civility and the coursening of the discourse, et cetera et cetera.

Well, screw that.

For one thing (and I say this fully appreciating that it’s a rhetorical two-by-four to the backs of the heads of Mr. Obama’s many, many personality cultists), the United States has a president, not a king.  Calling a politician — any politician — on his weapons-grade BS isn’t “classless”; it’s the absolute birthright of every American.  We owe public servants the raucous skepticism of a free people, not the polite fealty of cowed subjects.

For another, let us note that the folks currently soiling themselves over this supposed breach of Congressional decorum — you know, the same deep thinkers who spent the entire month of August calling opponents of ObamaCare “teabaggers”, “evil-mongers”, an angry mob, and so forth — are, shall we say, poorly positioned to be casting stones.  If you want respect, try giving it occasionally.

For a third, and perhaps most importantly, truth is a higher-order value than civility.  The mendacity of politicians corrupts the public discourse far more gravely than mere incivility ever could.  When a president brazenly lies his ass off, as Mr. Obama did last night vís-a-vís coverage for illegal aliens (among other things), he deserves to be called on it, ideally while dodging the rotten fruit and dead wombats being hurled in his direction by an outraged citizenry.

And that brings me to my second point:

2.  The Lies

Matt Welch at Reason does yoeman’s work cataloguing the president’s fusillade of whoppers.  A taste:

The lies last night began in Obama’s opening paragraph. “When I spoke here last winter,” he began, “credit was frozen. And our financial system was on the verge of collapse.” In fact, Obama spoke on Feb. 24, at least six weeks after credit markets began to thaw, and one week after he proclaimed that the passage of his $787 billion stimulus marked “the beginning of the end, the beginning of what we need to do to create jobs for Americans.” Obama’s speech that day wasn’t about staving off a collapse, it was about cleaning up the mess and tackling long-ignored issues. Such as health care.

It’s never encouraging when a politician who desperately needs to convince skeptical Americans of his fiscal sobriety starts off by slurring his words. As you might then infer, Obama was just warming up. “Insurance companies,” the president announced, “will be required to cover, with no extra charge, routine checkups and preventive care, like mammograms and colonoscopies,” in part because such prevention “saves money.” Looks like someone forgot to tell the Congressional Budget Office, or other non-White House sources that have analyzed the cost-benefit of prevention.

Welch, hunting in a target-rich environment, manages to miss the illegal alien lie.  But he does capture the latest episode of what Rich Lowry described, a while back, as President Above-It-All.  Lowry (writing about Obama’s vicious murder of straw men in the war on terror/enhanced interrogation debate):

Put Barack Obama in front of a teleprompter and one thing is certain — he’ll make himself appear the most reasonable person in the room.

Rhetorically, he is in the middle of any debate, perpetually surrounded by finger-pointing extremists who can’t get over their reflexive combativeness and ideological fixations to acknowledge his surpassing thoughtfulness and grace…

Obama bracingly politicized these very issues on the stump, staking out unsustainably purist positions because they suited his momentary political interest. Now that’s he’s president, he wants the debate to end. He’s above the grubbily disputatious culture of partisans and journalists. And he’s above contradiction because, as ever, he occupies the middle ground, one “obscured by two opposite and absolutist” sides: those who recognize no terrorist threat and those who recognize no limits to executive power.

And there Obama stands, bravely holding his flanks against straw men on all sides.

Welch:

Again last night, Obama invoked the boogeyman of “special interests” who “lie” in order “to keep things exactly the way they are,” despite the fact that the special interests in this case are lining up to support the president, and that the critics of his plan tend to bemoan, not defend, the status quo. Opponents of his plan, he said, were “ideological”; Ted Kennedy’s support for health care reform, meanwhile, “was born not of some rigid ideology, but of his own experience.” Obama said his door was “always open” to those bringing “a serious set of proposals,” and he slammed that door shut on any attempts to break the almost universally unloved link between employment and insurance. He yearned to “replace acrimony with civility,” then got Democrats stomping on their feet with attacks against the Iraq War and “tax breaks for the wealthy.” The center of the debate, as always, was wherever he chose to stand.

By far the most offensive bit is that which I’ve bolded — as if the Democratic healthcare reform proposals are not themselves ideological in nature, insofar as they evidence an unshakeable faith in the munificence and competence of government, “the leavening hand of wise policy” without which we’d be in as much peril as if government were too big.

What a load of unmitigated crap.  Anybody who looks upon the federal Leviathan and comes away thinking that we’re confronted by a crisis of too little government is hopelessly blinkered by ideology.  Anybody who looks at the American healthcare system and comes away thinking that the principal problem is the sliver of market freedom remaining rather than the hash that previous government interventions have made of things is similarly not dealing with reality.

Jay Cost, at RealClearPolitics, has Mr. Obama’s speech tonight pretty much nailed:

What exactly is this speech supposed to do? Let’s ditch the metaphors – “game changer,” “ninth inning” – and use words that point to actual things: health care reform is in trouble because of differences among factions of the Democratic Party. The compromises that moderates like Ben Nelson require are apparently too much for liberals like Anthony Weiner to accept. How is a speech supposed to overcome this? It would either have to: (a) propose a third-way solution that both sides can agree to, or (b) convince one side or the other that it needs to adjust its stance.

Should we really expect a speech to do that, considering all the other things the President intends to do in it?

I’d say no. I think this will be little more than a change in tone – perhaps from cool/slightly mocking Obama to angry/forceful Obama. From the looks of it, the President is still planning to make all the same points he’s been hammering for months. He’ll ask for bipartisan cooperation while remaining cagey on the public option (a deal breaker for 99% of the Republican caucus). He will again insist the time for debate is over and the time for action is now. He’ll make a not-terribly-compelling case about how this somehow relates to the current economic morass, even though the benefits do not kick in for years. He’ll fearlessly stand up to Republican straw men, who never offer anything except disingenuous attacks.

I have a post percolating about Mr. Obama’s rhetorical tics, but suffice it to say that we’re also likely to hear his signature “let me be clear” and “as I have always consistently said” and “the time for debate is over” lines quite a lot.

My cousin worries that he’s becoming the uncredited guest star of this blog.  This post will reinforce that perception.  He writes:

The most amusing point of all is that Corporations are making those decisions and letting people die each and every day in the name of profit and people feel thats ok, but omg don’t let the government step in to regulate a heartless industry.

Let’s stipulate here, now, that there’s nothing particularly noble about the profit motive.  Its advantage, however, is its predictability.  For-profit concerns can be relied upon to do whatever is in their economic best interests — and as we’ve discussed here before, many of the problems with healthcare in the United States are the result of economic distortions created by existing government intervention.  Seventy-year-old tax laws have produced the insurance portability and continuity problems by creating economic incentives for employer-based health insurance.  Government regulations favoring managed care (pushed, it should be noted, by liberals like Ted Kennedy) create economic incentives for low-deductible policies, which in turn reduces consumer price sensitivity to healthcare, which in turn diminishes the benefits we’d see in a healthy market.  “Community rating” regulations prohibit insurers from pricing actuarial risk, which increases the cost of premiums for everybody.

In other words, much of the perceived “heartlessness” of the insurance industry is exactly because of existing government interference in the healthcare market.  One government policy after another has forced insurers to do business this way, and now the votaries of government have the temerity to not only complain about it, but try to use it as an excuse for the next round of market-distorting regulations.  If only we could repeal that pesky Law of Unintended Consequences!

Equally pernicious, though, is this absurd notion that politics, of all things, is the elixir vitae to the toxin of for-profit “heartlessness”.  Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, permit me to reveal to you a nugget of transcendental Truth: love does not scale.  Your mother loves you.  Your father loves you.  Your children, if any, love you.  Your friends love you.  These people may provide you with food, shelter, and healthcare out of the goodness of their hearts.  Governmant and politicians do not love you.  Any benefits they provide, they provide out of political expediency and nothing more.

So now comes the $20,000 question: as between one entity doing something for you out of political expediency, and another entity doing something for you because it’s profitable, which do you want to bet your life on?