The New Yorker points out that despite bitching and moaning to the contrary the Senate Health Care bill is bipartisan:
…the Democrats’ bill more closely resembles Richard Nixon’s health-care proposal—the one that Ted Kennedy went to his grave regretting he hadn’t embraced—than it does Bill Clinton’s, to say nothing of Harry Truman’s. Nor are all its Republican features archeological. “Our bill contains over a hundred and forty-seven distinct Republican amendments,” Senator Tom Harkin, of Iowa, reminded his summit colleagues. The health-care reform bill—which, despite everything, is still alive—is an ambitious piece of legislation, however modest it may be by the measure of the rest of the developed world. Ideologically and substantively, it is centrist. It has Republicans, and Republicanism, in its family tree.
The GOP caucus simply wants to block reform by any means necessary. It’s not about the relative merits of reform proposals or who came up with them. It’s not about tens of thousands who die annually because they delay care for a lack of coverage. It’s not even about wild shrill, misused accusations of socialism or fascism. It’s about electoral politics, pure and simple. If they can deny Obama a victory, they feel like they’ll do better in the mid-terms. If thousands more die, well they probably didn’t have the money to contribute to their campaigns anyway.
