David Brooks, Sarah Palin and the vacuous meta-debate about reconciliation

Washington has been consumed for months not just by the endless health care sausage-making process, but also by the tedious meta-debate about the process itself. And the process is indeed, debatable. Nancy Pelosi’s latest wrinkle, called “deem and pass” is a faintly ridiculous maneuver in which House members could avoid actually voting for the Senate health care reform bill that so many of them fear and despise, yet pass it anyway.

This institutionalizes what you might call the John Kerry approach to legislation – you can be for something before you’re against it, and then be sort-of for it anyway! As Kevin Drum notes:

Any Democrat who thinks that Republican attacks this fall are going to be blunted even a smidge because, technically, they voted for the package of fixes, not the main bill, is living in fantasy land.

In fact, it will probably just make things worse. They still will have voted for the Senate bill, but it’ll look like they’re trying to hide the fact. That’s the worst possible tack they can take. For the fence sitters, their best hope is to pass the bill — through gritted teeth if they must — and then come out of the House chamber smiling broadly and proclaiming it a historic advance for ordinary Americans of all incomes etc. etc.

But does any of this matter (except in some marginal congressional races where it might become an campaign issue)? Put another way: does anybody outside of Washington care about congressional process? Most of the nation’s frustration and anger over Congress and health care is not due to arcane procedural maneuvering, but to the fact that, after more than year, the maneuvering has accomplished nothing. What matters is results. Once health care reform passes – or fails – Americans (with the exception of the parliamentarians) will instantly forget about reconciliation.

There’s only one thing more craven than tricky insidery rules, and that’s yammering about their alleged outrageousness. Is there any more vacuous debate? It’s not even a debate but a debate about the terms of the real debate, and its content is almost all opportunistic and hypocritical. Sarah Palin can fulminate about the alleged extra-constitutionality of Democratic tactics, but who doesn’t think she and her followers wouldn’t applaud such maneuvering if it were used to pass something they liked?

Moreover, it’s mostly just cable chat show noise. There’s nothing politically at stake. There’s no downside to attacking congressional process, because nobody outside of Washington understands or cares about it. There’s also very little upside (aside from firing up your own followers) because the politicians using those rules know that.

Here’s David Brooks attacking reconciliation:

Once partisan reconciliation is used for this bill, it will be used for everything, now and forever. The Senate will be the House. The remnants of person-to-person relationships, with their sympathy and sentiment, will be snuffed out. We will live amid the relationships of group versus group, party versus party, inhumanity versus inhumanity.

We have a political culture in which the word “reconciliation” has come to mean “bitter division.” With increasing effectiveness, the system bleaches out normal behavior and the normal instincts of human sympathy.

Brooks, it turns out, gets his reconciliation facts wrong. And this in the service of his own twisty maneuver, this time in the rules of rhetoric, couching a blunt partisan argument into a supposedly high-minded elegy for a non-existent time when comity trumped politics.