Healthcare reform and ping pong

The process of bouncing a bill back and forth between the House and the Senate is commonly referred to as ping pong.  In normal legislation this allows members of both houses to make changes, additions, cuts, and so forth as they fix up a bill for final passage.  Mickey Kaus thinks that they should avoid this for healthcare legislation, and he makes a lot of sense.  The idea is that instead of making any changes to the Senate bill, the House Democrats would simply vote for it as is.

The conventional arguments against ratification are certainly powerful: “It would require House Democrats to shelve all of their ideas about health care and remove themselves from the process …” They couldn’t stick in pet amendments. They’d lose the valuable posturing and Kabuki opportunities that would be presented if they could go on record voting for a House bill that then didn’t actually become law. (Senators would lose some of this flexibility too–they’d be stuck with whatever they voted for the first time, with no chance to pretend to be for something that then got dropped in conference.**)

But this isn’t a conventional circumstance. This is a once in a lifetime chance for Democrats to guarantee health care for every citizen. Do the Dems want to coax a bill out of the Senate and then go through the same wrenching Lieberman/Nelson/Snowe drama again for the cloture vote on the House/Senate conference version? Why would they think there’s any chance of getting it through a second time if the conference moves it to the “left”?

I’m not sure the Democrats possess the resolve to do this – even though Kaus is certainly correct.  Another run through the moderate-Dem/Olympia Snowe gauntlet could turn healthcare reform into … well, into something that looks even less like reform than this bill does.  Can liberals in the House pick the lesser of two evils, or are we bound to keep talking about Joe Lieberman’s war against liberals ad infinitum?

I’d hazard that Democrats will pong the bill right back to the Senate where it will grow even weaker.  Liberals will want to push the bill to the left since it is already a fairly conservative bill.  This will lead to the Senate stripping all those changes and running it back through another compromise meat-grinder, and if it ever leaves the Senate again it will be even more watered down than the first time, making it even less palatable to liberals in the House.

And so on and so forth.