GOP’s triumph puts health-care bill in doubt

What happened

President Obama’s health-care reform initiative was left at death’s door this week, after voters in one of the nation’s most Democratic states elected Republican Scott Brown to fill the remainder of the late Ted Kennedy’s U.S. Senate term. The stunning upset denies the Democrats a crucial 60th Senate vote to overcome Republican filibusters, greatly reducing chances that Democrats could get a bill passed by both houses of Congress. In heavy turnout, Brown defeated state Attorney General Martha Coakley, 52 percent to 47 percent, dominating among independent and suburban voters. Brown heavily campaigned on becoming the 41st Republican vote in the Senate. “One thing is very, very clear as I traveled across this state,” Brown said. “People do not want the trillion-dollar heath-care plan that is being forced on the American people.”

Disappointed Democrats blamed Coakley’s campaign, which was marked by verbal and political gaffes, for losing a once-certain seat. But most party strategists acknowledged that following gubernatorial losses in New Jersey and Virginia last November, Tuesday’s vote revealed a groundswell of doubt about the complex health-care packages Congress negotiated in months of infighting. The loss of the 60th Senate seat left Democratic leaders with several undesirable options: Insist that the more liberal House pass the Senate version of the health-care bill without change, making another Senate vote unnecessary; try to pass a heavily stripped-down bill that one or two centrist Republican senators would find acceptable; or give up on existing legislation and start from scratch. Even reform stalwarts Reps. Barney Frank and Anthony Weiner expressed doubts about a way forward. “We’ve got to recognize we are in an entirely different scenario,” Weiner said.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

What the editorials said

Democrats are now “curled on the floor in a fetal position,” said The Wall Street Journal. A Republican victory in “one of America’s most liberal states,” where only 15 percent of voters belong to the GOP, is a devastating repudiation not only of the health-care folly but of the Democrats’ determination to pass “every dead 20th-century liberal dream.”

Brown’s win certainly “reflects voters’ suspicions of Big Government solutions” and their frustration with the party in power, said USA Today. But “with Republicans simply stonewalling,” who will address soaring health-care costs and the plight of 30 million uninsured? It’s ironic that voters in “the one state that already has near-universal health care stymied the Democrats’ plan to give it to everyone else.” Obama won a “resounding mandate” to reform our dysfunctional health-care system last year, said The Boston Globe. Nothing about Brown’s victory negates that. “The House should pass the Senate reform bill.”

What the columnists said

The Democrats are guilty of “political malpractice,” said Yuval Levin in National Review Online. With control of the White House, the House, and—now by a 59-to-41 majority—the Senate, Democrats are hardly “powerless.” Yet they are panicked and filled with self-doubt. Their problem is that they’ve pursued an agenda so extreme that “only a supermajority” could enact it.

The Democrats can’t afford to give up now, said Peter Beinart in TheDailyBeast.com. Yes, enacting reform will “enrage” the Republicans’ “Tea Party base,” but Democrats in both the House and Senate have already voted for Obamacare, so “they’ll be in the cross hairs of those voters no matter what.” And it will hardly help Obama’s claim to competence if “the single biggest item on his legislative agenda collapses.” Democrats did a lousy job of selling a reform bill, but for their own good and the country’s, they have to push through reform—“and fast.”

Passing health-care reform now, in defiance of the Massachusetts vote, would be “political suicide,” said Thomas Edsall in The New Republic Online. Many voters perceive health reform as a “multibillion-dollar transfer of taxpayer money” to “the poor, African-Americans, Latinos, single parents, and the long-term unemployed.” By pursuing reform in the midst of a painful recession, Obama has stoked the anger and anxiety of white middle-class voters, who no longer believe he’ll protect their interests. The loss of the middle class’ support has driven “a large hole through the very center of the president’s agenda.”