jaiapprovedthis

One of the reasons we were set up as a Republic, instead of a direct democracy, is that it doesn't really make sense for hundreds of millions of people to delve into complex nuances of policy which they'll only have extremely marginal opportunities to effect. It costs a lot of time to sort through public policy, and most people, rationally, don't waste a ton of time on it. I suspect you'd find similar results across the policy spectrum, from foreign to monetary policy. Instead of obsessing over policy details, people elect a handful of people whose sole job it is to be be hyper-aware and immersed in policy details, and voters make a birds-eye-view judgment of their performance every few years in the elections. The idea is that you get the benefits of democracy without requiring everyone in the country to read 200 pages of policy briefings every week.

One of the results of this is that public office holders have some capacity to swing public opinion - lots of people who don't want to waste their time on boring policy details will defer their opinion to a group of trusted representatives. The Republican party, as a whole, figured this out some time ago. If you yell "socialization of medicine" and "death panels", that effects public opinion.

The Democratic Party has, largely, forgotten this lesson, evidenced by the decades-long pursuit of "triangulation" above all else. This is not as bad as it was for much of the 90's and 00's, but the Democratic representatives, on the whole, seem convinced that they are at the mercy of public opinion, rather than active participants in it. If polls show that people are "concerned" that the public option will cost too much money, then they have to be concerned about it too - even when such concerns lack absolutely any merit at all. In the end, many Democrats are so busy chasing polls that they never stop to notice thtat the polls are following them too.

Statements by more than a dozen lawmakers were ghostwritten, in whole or in part, by Washington lobbyists working for Genentech, one of the world’s largest biotechnology companies.

E-mail messages obtained by The New York Times show that the lobbyists drafted one statement for Democrats and another for Republicans.

Rep. Bart Stupak's amendment did not make abortion illegal. And it did not block the federal government from subsidizing abortion. All it did was block it from subsidizing abortion for poorer women.

Stupak's amendment stated that the public option cannot provide abortion coverage, and that no insurer participating on the exchange can provide abortion coverage to anyone receiving subsidies. But as Rep. Jim Cooper points out in the interview below, the biggest federal subsidy for private insurance coverage is untouched by Stupak's amendment. It's the $250 billion the government spends each year making employer-sponsored health-care insurance tax-free.

That money, however, subsidizes the insurance of 157 million Americans, many of them quite affluent. Imagine if Stupak had attempted to expand his amendment to their coverage. It would, after all, have been the same principle: Federal policy should not subsidize insurance that offers abortion coverage. But it would have failed in an instant. That group is too large, and too affluent, and too politically powerful for Congress to dare to touch their access to reproductive services. But the poorer women who will be using subsidies on the exchange proved a much easier target. In substance, this amendment was as much about class as it was about choice.