With health care passed, a Supreme Court nomination battle on the horizon, cap and trade inching back towards the front burner, and the eruption over the ratification of the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty insight, where is that leading voice of “Can’t we all just get along”? To paraphrase President Clinton, isn’t the era of big partisanship over with the mid February pronouncements of Senator Evan Bayh and the accompanying hosannas from the media. No! It’s only further evidence that unmitigated hypocrisy is alive and well in Washington DC.
The so called Blue Dog Democrats have perfected their modus operandi to a tee. They preach moderation and it worked to get them elected. Time and again, however, they vote almost unanimously along Party lines when their vote is crucial to the fate of a liberal proposal. When the leadership does not need their vote, they are allowed off the reservation.
Senator Evan Bayh of Indiana took this centrist charade to another level when he decided not to pursue a third term, citing disapproval of partisan politics. The mainstream media and even some conservative pundits were quick to shower him with accolades, but before the Nobel Foundation rushes to bestow upon him the coveted Nobel Peace Prize, it is worth pointing out the absurdity of all this, especially as it applies to ObamaCare. Granted he is not on the left fringes like most of his Democratic colleagues. But Mr. Bipartisan give me a break!
It should be noted that before the special election of Republican Scott Brown, Bayh was one of sixty Senators in Mr. Obama’s camp. Each was as important as the next in maintaining the left’s sixty vote filibuster proof super majority needed to pass ObamaCare. The unique position gave each senator, including Senator Bayh, incredible leverage to hold hostage the president’s agenda. The refusal of any single Senator to play ball with the team would have made ObamaCare DOA. While colleagues sought CornHusker Kickbacks and Louisiana Purchases, had Mr. Bayh genuinely wanted bipartisanship, he had ample opportunity to demand it. He could have insisted the administration reach out to Republicans or at least throw them a bone. He could have refused to support a bill that did not include popular conservative ideas such as real tort reform or insurance competition across state lines or portability. Senator Bayh stood quiet.
After Democrats lost their supermajority, it became obvious they were going to use Reconciliation, the so called nuclear option, the most partisan method imaginable, to ram through an unpopular government takeover of one sixth of the American economy. The silence from this champion of bipartisanship was again deafening.
This Senate Blue Dog equivalent had multiple opportunities to sink his teeth into the administration’s radical health care prescription. Where was that bipartisan voice in the wilderness? In the end Bayh voted for a bill so partisan not even Olympia Snow could support it. Again when it counted, he was no bark and no bite.
One can certainly speculate on Senator Bayh’s motives for dropping out. Either way actions speak louder than words. He indeed said all the right things at his farewell press conference, but when the cameras left and he actually had the opportunity to rebut partisanship in more than its abstract form, he brought plenty of “blue” but left the “dog” at home.
-Jason D. Fodeman, M.D. is an internal-medicine resident at the University of Connecticut. A former health-policy fellow at the Heritage Foundation, he is the author of How to Destroy a Village: What the Clintons Taught a Seventeen Year Old.
