Senate Debate on Health Care Exacerbates Partisanship

David Broder noted in his artice in the previous post:

Matthew Dowd, a former Democrat who served as chief strategist for the younger president Bush, offered congressional Democrats the free advice that they would be better off themselves if the Republicans managed to block Obama's bill.

I do fear he is right. The public is fearful of tax increases and the impact of health care reform on the deficit, regardless of what Party leaders say differently.

The public believes the status quo is preferable to change in this evolving legislation that the details are kept from even Democratic Senators. This is a crazy way to go about passing such important legislation.

From The New York Times:

Nasty charges of bribery. Senators cut off midspeech. Accusations of politics put over patriotism. Talk of double-crosses. A nonagenarian forced to the floor after midnight for multiple procedural votes.

In the heart of the holiday season, Senate Republicans and Democrats are at one another’s throats as the health care overhaul reaches its climactic votes. A year that began with hopes of new post-partisanship has indeed produced change: Things have gotten worse.

Enmity and acrimony are coursing through a debate with tremendous consequences for both sides as well as for the legislative agenda in the months ahead.

Should Democrats prevail, it will put an exclamation point on an eventful first year of their control of Congress and the White House and leave Republicans on the Napoleonic side of what one predicted could be President Obama’s Waterloo. A Republican victory would invigorate an opposition party that was back on its heels at the beginning of 2009 and would strike a crushing blow to Democrats and their claims to governing.

Members of both parties say the dispute over health care has created bad blood, left both Democrats and Republicans suspicious of the opposition’s motives, and shattered some of the institution’s traditional collegiality.

Whatever the cause, things have gotten bad enough that Senator Arlen Specter, Democrat of Pennsylvania, said the Senate should be stripped of one of its illustrious institutional claims.

“This body prides itself on being the world’s greatest deliberative body,” Mr. Specter said. “That designation has been destroyed with what has occurred here the past few days.”