Catch of the Day

So many "scandals," so many silly analogies -- but Steve Benen appears to be exactly correct about Lamar Alexander's ridiculous comparison between Iran-Contra and Obama Administration efforts to raise money for publicizing options under the ACA. Benen:

In order for Alexander's comparison to make sense, here's what would have happened: imagine Obama asked Congress to approve the Affordable Care Act, but instead, Congress did the opposite, approving a measure ordering the president not to change the existing the health care system. Obama, undaunted, sold weapons to North Korea and then used the profits to do the opposite of what Congress instructed.

That sounds about right.

Benen's whole post is good, but I'll expand some of the history, anyway. He notes that there's plenty of precedent for public-private partnerships in these kinds of cases. Alexander's point is that if Congress doesn't fund it, the government can't pay for it. That's correct -- but that's not relevant here, since what HHS is doing is finding funds for a private entity ("Enroll America"), not a government agency. Alexander thinks that doesn't matter because the Contras were also a private agency, but the major difference is that in the 1980s the Boland Amendment and other law specifically prohibited the government from doing anything to help the Contras; the narrower issue of Iran-Contra was whether that prohibition applied to National Security Council staff. In this case, while Congress didn't supply any money for HHS to fund Enroll America, they did not specifically tell HHS that it couldn't implement the law as part of their normal responsibilities.

At any rate, Alexander has forgotten even more: the larger problem of Iran-Contra wasn't that the administration was raising private funds for the Contras; it was that the Reagan Administration retailed weapons to Iran and then used the profits elsewhere. That's not the executive raising money from the private sector for something in the private sector; that's the executive generating new funds that they control and that Congress can't touch. Indeed, the real scary part of Iran-Contra (and here, I'm working from memory) was the idea that this could be self-sustaining; the executive branch could develop permanent funding streams that Congress would have nothing to do with. That would indeed upset the Constitutional balance, and that's probably the core of why Iran-Contra was such a large scandal.

And back to Benen's point: unlike the Contra war, which Congress opposed and was trying to stop, the ACA is actually law; it's the responsibility of HHS to attempt to carry it out as best it can. Certainly, if there's no funding for a specific task, they can't spend money on it. But there's no Congressional prohibition against trying to execute this particular law; indeed, the presumption is exactly the opposite, that HHS has been told by Congress to enact Obamacase as best as it can.

And meanwhile: Nice catch!

"Change in Behavior, Not a Change in Rules"

That's what Lamar Alexander said that the Senate needs.

Truth is, he's right! The best possible solution to the currently dysfunctional Senate would be for the minority party to return to how things were before 1993 -- a Senate in which majorities regularly passed bills, and in which nominations were usually confirmed without a whole lot of trouble and almost always by majority vote.

The problem?

That's not going to happen. And Lamar Alexander isn't going to try to make it happen, as far as I can tell. Republicans, beginning in 1993 under Bob Dole and then in 2009 under Mitch McConnell, decided to exploit the rules to turn the Senate into a body in which everything needed 60 votes. It never had been that before. Is Alexander willing to commit to voting for cloture on all but a handful of top priorities, even if he opposes the underlying bill or nomination? Is he willing to find a half-dozen Republicans to join him? I don't think so.

Now, Alexander says he's open to rules changes but is fully opposed to majority-imposed rules changes; he believes that once that's done, it's only a matter of time before the majority goes the rest of the way and eliminates the filibuster completely. I think that may be correct.

So if that's what he really believes, Alexander shouldn't just be open to rules change; he should be actively pushing changes that would retain what he sees as the Senate's strengths, and rounding up Republicans to get those changes passed.

Indeed: in my view, the real threat of "the Senate becomes just like the House" isn't from one use of majority-imposed rules reform; it's from the status quo. The bottom line, as I've said many times, is that majority party Senators probably don't want a House-like Senate, but they'll prefer it to a Senate that can't get anything done at all. Want to save the Senate, Lamar Alexander? Reform it.