The Price You Have To Pay

Digby is convinced that the Stupak Amendment was the pound of flesh extracted from the Dirty F'ckin Hippies for the public option being in the House bill.

Just in case anyone doesn't understand or believe me when I said this is all a matter of making sure the liberals pay for pushing through a public option, David Shuster spells it out:

... the thing that Harry Reid has to say to his caucus, he may have to say "look, we may have to follow the House in order to get the centrists on board. We may have to allow this provision that strips federal funding from abortion." That may be the bitter pill that Democrats have to take in order to get the overall bill through. It's part of the whole horse trading that Harry Reid is doing with the centrists.

He is saying, ok look, we know that you don't like the public option, but if we give you, for example, new restrictions on abortions, will you then, at least, follow what the House did and allow a straight up or down vote?"

So restricting women's fundamental rights is a horse trade. But why should it be that instead of something else? Are all of these "centrists" anti-choice? (I don't think so.) They could, after all, give them an airport or an aircraft carrier instead. Maybe offer up a little deregulation on some special interest in their district. Why would an issue like this assuage them en masse?

Unless what you really want to do is show everyone that liberals are not in charge and that they have to feel (even more) pain, real pain, before they get their way. There is no reason other than political domination to demand this particular issue as the bargaining chip: it is an object lesson to liberals, particularly women, for getting too uppity.

I believe Digby is right, but I also believe that Stupak is the vehicle that was always intended to force liberals to scuttle the entire Obamacare package, rather than making the Sensible Village Centrists being the bad guys.

If Joe F'ckin Lieberman or Blanche Lincoln or Evan F'ckin Bayh or Ben Nelson are the bad guy, well, that would affect their Sensible Village Centrist credentials. Make no mistake, all of them want to scuttle the bill, but they don't want the blood on their hands. Better to make the bill so unpalatable and unacceptable to liberals so that they scrap it, and once again liberals are the bad guys and the Sensible Centrists can say "Well, we were going to vote for this compromise, but the liberals killed it. That's a shame. Maybe next time you'll listen to us instead of listening to them. See what happens when liberals are in charge?"

You see, only liberals want this silly health reform crap. (The truth is a majority of Americans do, but this is the Village. Perception is everything.) If you disabuse them of the notion by making the reform so painful and divisive through something like Stupak, then nobody will want health care reform anymore.

And in the end, that's the goal of Washington: to disabuse the people of the notion that the Federal Government is there to help them. It's there to help the Village, not you.