The only way to save health care reform is to kill health care reform

This Roll Call article from Monday in which Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa defends his approach on health care seems to have passed a lot of people by. But I’m still kind of awe struck at how the old Republican budget hawk frames the debate:

“There’s a feeling that the only way to get a bipartisan agreement is to defeat a Democratic proposal in the first hand and then the Democrats will come to Republican leadership. And then at that point, they’ll know the only way they’re going to get health care reform is bipartisan. But my position has been that if that strategy doesn’t work and the Democrats go ahead and establish a public option, for instance, or a play or pay as a way of putting an 8 percent tax on payrolls for people who don’t offer health insurance — and dozens of other bad things — including leading us to Canadian-style single payer plan, then, if the Democrats are successful in doing that, we’ll be stuck with that plan forever,” Grassley told reporters. “So I’ve been taking to Max Baucus and other Democrats trying to ward off such a role of the dice, and ward off any chance that we’d end up with a government-run, federalized health insurance program like Canada has.”

via Grassley Defends Role in Health Care Debate – Roll Call.

This line also gets repeated in today’s Time story on Grassley by Karen Tumulty, and I have to wonder if this is the new Republican strategy on health care: after we burn your house down, we’ll come back and build another one that we like, and you will live in it. It’s a pretty twisted approach to “bipartisanship” if you ask me – one that confirms the GOP will certainly be in favor of a bill that they as the minority party proposed, and nothing else.

In the Roll Call story, Grassley makes that point even more clear by saying that there is a GOP bill that could be the foundation for health care reform:

“It’s not quite fair for Max to say that everything’s been political, because Republicans have bills in to reform health care,” Grassley said, referring to one bill in particular that was proposed earlier this year by GOP Sens. Richard Burr (N.C.) and Tom Coburn (Okla.).

Grassley of course doesn’t come right out and say it’s “unfair,” just that it’s “not quite fair,” and Rielle Hunter was only a little bit pregnant with John Edwards’s baby. As for the bill in question, Grassley either chose not to become a co-sponsor of that bill, or was not invited to, and note here he’s not even saying he’d endorse this particular approach. An approach, by the way, which if I read the bill’s text correctly would leave intact existing rules about pre-existing conditions, one of the major factors contributing to Americans who are uninsured or only able to get lousy, super-expensive insurance.

But while we’re on the crazy train from Iowa, let’s make one last stop:

“In fact, I told the president I wouldn’t be for a plan that only got 60 [votes],” Grassley said. “Max Baucus and I have been saying since the first of the year that you’re restructuring one-sixth of the economy, it ought to be done with a broad bipartisan consensus. And we’ve been thinking in terms of 75 to 80 votes.”

The only bills in the United States Senate that get that many votes are when they honor dead white men or when they declare war against a foreign country based on made up threats. It’s like South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint said about the health care being Obama’s waterloo: they don’t want a bill, they want a fight club, and they want Obama bloodied and bowed so much by the end of it that he’ll crawl out of the ring and give them whatever he wants.

People keep saying that if Obama can’t be bipartisan, he’s not living up to his campaign rhetoric. But it sounds like the partisans he needs to get bi- with aren’t willing to give an inch on anything of any substance. So there’s no purpose in even thinking about passing a health care bill that brings Republicans on board. Obama and the Democrats had a resounding victory in the 2008 election; time to start governing like it.