June 17, 2009

Will the Senate kill health care reform? Will it let anything live?

Matt Yglesias thinks that the US Senate will stymie President Obama in any attempt to enact health care reform because -- well, because that's what the US Senate does:

The fact of the matter is that the Senate is what it is—to wit, an
institution with an enormous status quo bias, that’s also biased in
favor of conservative areas. On top of that, the entire structure of
the US Congress with its bicameralism and multiple overlapping
committees is biased toward making it easy for concentrated interests
to block reform. Between them, Dianne Feinstein, Barbara Boxer, Chuck
Schumer, Kristen Gillibrand, Bill Nelson, Dick Durbin, Roland Burris,
Arlen Specter, Bob Casey, Sherrod Brown, Carl Levin, Amy Klobuchar, Kay
Hagan, Bob Menendez, Frank Lautenberg, Mark Warner, Jim Webb, Patty
Murray, Maria Cantwell, Ted Kennedy, John Kerry, and Evan Bayh represent 50 percent of the country’s population. But that only adds up to 22 Senators—you need thirty-eight more to pass a bill.

There's a codfish hanging in the Massachusetts House of Representatives. Maybe there should be a scorpion watching over the US Senate.