Current Transportation Secretary and former congressman makes a Republican case for the health care overhaul supported  by the President. He highlights several Republican ideas in the bill:

There are several Republican ideas in the bill. It allows Americans to buy health insurance across state lines. It increases the bargaining power of small businesses by allowing them to pool together — much like large corporations or labor unions — to bargain for a better insurance rate. It gives states the flexibility to come up with an alternate health care plan, and it gives them resources to reform our tort system by developing new ways to deal with medical malpractice.

He’s correct that these are Republican ideas. However from what I’ve gathered, the GOP was never asked for their imput on the bill. The ideas were added in believing that it would attract a few moderate Republicans.

I’ve faulted the GOP for not being serious in the current debate on health care. That said, the Democrats were never that serious about bipartisanship. They added a few bones and hoped a few moderates would take the bait.

While I appreciate LaHood’s willingness to “get things done,” bipartisanship has to be about treating other with respect and not cynicism.

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With a Black Democrat in the White House we are experiencing an unusual upsurge in concern about “government takeovers, “creeping socialism,” and other claims that can only fairly be described “in quotation marks.”  The Republican Party has a very important role to play as the country adjusts to the demands of 21st century global capitalism, but so far we have our guns trained on ghosts.  This hysteria seems to be blooming densely in the South, where it is part of a wider suspicion of any sort of government intrusion into personal life, regardless of the legitimacy, purpose, or merit.

Perhaps a metaphor would be useful.  In the fall of 2004 I moved my family from Houston to the Chicago-area.  Never mind for a moment what this says about my sanity or morals.  It happened.  Let’s all learn from it.  One of my earliest introductions to Yankee life came in the form of a charming orange flier delivered to our door by the town council.  It was printed front and back in small type with a laundry list of laws governing the disposal of our leaves.

This is a topic I had never given much thought.  Growing up in Beaumont we just burned them in the backyard.  The greasy odor of oak and pine smoke clinging to the ground under the cool, humid air is what fall always smelled like.

Living in Houston we piled them into the garden where they seemed to break down into mulch before we could finish raking them up.  If there were any formal ordinances about what we could do with our leaves, or with just about anything else from discarded car batteries to old jugs of Roundup, I never knew what they were.  Viva Houston, viva Libertad

The town’s little orange flier seemed uptight and faintly oppressive.  Until the leaves came down.

I had a great time with the kids making piles under the big maple.  Then we raked them into the beds around the bushes.  Done.  Take that, rule-obsessed Yankees.  When the frost hit them they dried up like parchment.  They seemed to rise and hover in the crisp air like paper embers.  With few fences in any of the yards, we found ourselves a couple of days later apologizing to our new neighbor three doors down, Mrs. Chicago-alski, while we corralled our leaves from her yard and hauled them back.

The town really won’t pick them up in plastic bags.  They were actually serious about that.  Apparently hefty bags don’t mulch well.  They want you to buy these big paper bags which are relatively costly, don’t seem to hold much, are hard to stand up, but are environmentally friendly.  And it turns out that, like the flier warned, if you just dump the leaves in your garbage cans for pickup they are in fact likely to freeze into a wad at the bottom and remain with you after the taillights of the garbage truck have disappeared around the corner.

In my first Yankee year this was just one of a thousand little brushes with what my Southern mind saw as a police state, but now seem like the necessary compromises required to maintain civility in urban life.  My little town consists of 43,000 people crammed into a space considerably smaller than Bush Airport.  In this dense warren its not safe for me to burn my leaves in the backyard and the cloying smoke would not be appreciated by my neighbors with their windows open to capture the cool night air.

But without the rules, I might have done it anyway.

I was raised on the ethic of a Southern man virtually sovereign under God on his own patch of soil.  That model makes perfect sense in Thomas Jefferson’s rural vision of the republic.  It makes no sense under Alexander Hamilton’s vision of an urban, capitalist nation.  To live in an urban environment we have to learn to live together with some rules.

These days Republicans are throwing around words like “collectivist” and “communist” to describe our concerns with Obama, but they sound silly even on our own tongues.  Obama is not a communist and my little orange flier was not oppression.  Southerners are not struggling against socialism.  They are struggling to come to terms with the demands of modern, global capitalism.

Like a lost memory we are feeling the same impulse that animated our Confederate ancestors who mistakenly railed against “wage slavery” and “Yankee Industrialists.”  They feared that capitalism would destroy their values and undermine their rural way of life.  They failed to recognize the tremendous potential of capitalism to not only make us more prosperous, but to open our world to more personal liberty.  They were wrong then with gruesome consequences.  We are wrong now and marching in their footsteps.

There are bright days ahead when we as Republicans put down our pitchforks and give up the search for the village monster.  There are bright days ahead learn to adapt Republican ideas to traditionally Democratic domains, when we learn to apply conservative solutions to problems of environmental protection, urban schools, healthcare, and developing new sources of energy.

And by the way, I found a way to get rid of my leaves without breaking the rules and without buying all those ridiculous bags, but that’s another story.  Junior was right, a country boy can survive, even in the big city.

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Remember all that talk a year ago about how the GOP was in big trouble and could be doomed to a permanent minority?  Well, all of that went away with Scott Brown’s win in January.  Now, everyone thinks 2010 will be a good year for the Republicans.  While that’s all well and good in the short term, things might not be so good in the long term.

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In what seems to be a long running series on the Tea Party movement here at RU, blogger Jazz Shaw of the Moderate Voice shares his latest encounter with the movement. Here’s a sample:

Early on, I was also taken in by a lot of the media hype and found many of my preconceived notions being challenged. I’ve been spending my time this year working on a Congressional campaign which keeps me on the road quite a bit with my candidate, hitting all of the usual stops as well as some ventures into unknown territory. Many of these events are the same old song and dance. I don’t wish to put too cynical of a face on things, but there are plenty of groups out there where you know in advance which points you need to hit. The pro-life groups want to know you’ve checked the right box on your application. Gun owners and sportsmen clubs need to see that you’re up to date on the Heller decision. But when we started receiving invitations to address some tea party meetings I got nervous.

My immediate reaction was to insist that we didn’t send out any invitations to the press. I’d seen all of the provocative video clips from MSNBC and CNN, along with the blaring headlines at Huffington Post. My mind filled with images of pitchfork wielding townsmen carrying around signs with nooses, swastikas and allegations of secret communist plots. “Good Lord!” I thought. “This election is going to be hard enough. The last thing I need is a picture showing up in our local paper of my candidate hanging around with a bunch of Klansmen.”

I’ve now met with more than a dozen groups in both Upstate New York and Pennsylvania, and my suspicions have been almost unanimously confounded rather than confirmed. We’ve been greeted by surprisingly large groups of citizens who were polite and obviously very well informed on the issues of the day which concern them. The tone has been far more energized and excited than hysterical. And any expectations of a friendly, conservative base reception were quickly dismissed. They asked questions – very tough questions in many cases – and listened patiently to the answers.

It’s another reminder that the Tea Party movement is a lot harder to pigeonhole than people think.

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It is not Social Conservatism. It is something that, wherever we are in the economic/governing ideological spectrum, most of us as reform republicans can agree on.  As the health-care bill continues in its congressional struggle and more and more eyes begin to look towards the 2010 elections, we start to see the basic and obvious themes that will more than likely dominate or play important roles in the races.  The Tea Party movement, and its populist conservative theme has already played an important role in the race for governor in my own home state.  Although there was a supposedly absolute “pure” tea party representative republican candidate in the form of Debra Medina who along with Kay Bailey Hutchison challenged the incumbent governor Rick Perry for the spot during the GOP primary, it was Rick Perry’s ability to harness a good deal of the energy that was the Tea Party being especially powerful here in Texas which played a key role in his winning of the primary.  Going a bit further back, it is possible that the Tea Party may have had some sort of impact on Scott Brown’s victory, although how much is not quite certain as national Tea Party support is a different perspective than that of the average Massachusetts voter.

This movement cannot be confused or assumed to represent the discontent of the state voters that put him in power in a traditionally Democratic state as while general discontent with the status quo was evident, most Massachusetts voters nevertheless did not want the healthcare bill because it lacked a public/government run option: a very different view than the anti-government tea baggers.  His voting along with the other New England Republicans for the jobs bill instead of joining a filibuster with the conservative majority of the minority party shows how whether he or the Tea Party movement likes it or not, he will have to represent from the center and be a centrist Republican if not a center-left liberal Republican as Mitt Romney was pre-2008 presidential primary race.  Now whether or not the movement will continue to play a major role in upcoming races for the final 2010 remains to be seen, but the basic message of anti-government which was in response to a potential public option laden healthcare bill may play a huge role.  This potential “vote against government” does not necessarily mean a libertarian-conservative view although that makes up part of it, but as the race in Massachusetts showed, it is a vote against how government is being run.  It therefore becomes a two-sided vote among those of rather different ideologies that has seemingly generated this anti-establishment atmosphere around the races.

At the roots of this is general discontent at the lackluster stimulus which has seemingly overall had only minimal positive impact at the cost of driving the already large debt even higher, which by the way is another concern.  Job growth and the ending of the recession will be a major variable in the whole equation come November which leaves out an interesting part of the ideological makeup that has dominated the conservative movement:  Social Conservatism.  There was no major play on social issues during the Scott Brown campaign, which surely would have sunk it in a state that is overall quite socially liberal, naturally dictating any real candidacy to be as such.  During the previous races of New Jersey and Virginia social issues did not take precedence as they did in the early millennial years and even victory by uber-conservative Rick Perry was done with barely a shout out for some evangelical crusade against…well something that would be seen as not socially conservative.  Let’s not make the mistake of saying that social conservatism is gone from politics as I had noticed that many of the Tea Party members at least in this state’s rallies were the same conservatives that voted for W. Bush for “morality and moral issues” and Tea Party candidates at least here in my state tend to automatically align with socially conservative issues.  Many of them are social conservatives, but in my observation social conservatism as we have known it during its rise in the 90’s to its climax in the ’04 elections to its modern day silence has run its course.

It may be because average Americans, while still having opinions on social issues realize that there is something more important to deal with than with whether or not their state allows gay marriage or whether abortion will determine presidential elections.  They may realize that it’s about jobs, a stable and growing economy; that it’s about our foreign affairs in the continuing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and our nation’s ultimate future that is threatened by debt and an economically insecure future.  Again, social conservatism is not gone, and already some right-wing challengers have attempting to once again create a divide between themselves and opponents who may not share their religious views.  Regardless of how we view of the outcomes of the past few races whether it be from Massachusetts or here in Texas, whether it is about the Tea Party and it’s conservative-libertarian/anti-government hatred or a general discontent with how Democrats have failed to run (which includes those of centrist or even liberal leanings who believed that said party would run government appropriately), the basic message that may have started back in the New Jersey and Virginia races is simple:  It’s the basic ability in governance in order to pass bills from healthcare to creating jobs to a viable and secure economy.  It’s the running of government.  It’s the government…stupid.

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Neoconservatism has been trashed by folks on the left and the right as of late, and for good reason. Many blame neoconservatives for getting us into Iraq.

But Eric Cohen’s essay on Irving Kristol reminds us that neoconservatism had a noble beginning and might have a useful future in the GOP.

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Yeah, this is a good reason to be conservative.  Good grief.

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Per William Golden’s post, Politico reports how the Tea Party isn’t really shaking up the political establishment.

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Richard Ivory takes the GOP to task for avoiding race.

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Per James’ post, Raynard Jackson shares his criticism of the Tea Party movement from a conservative perspsective

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The Honorable Senator from Kentucky has been increasingly irritable, erratic, and downright ornery in recent years.  He has alienated colleagues and nearly lost his seat to a Democrat.  Now he has sealed his “cantankerous old codger” credentials with a stunt that was costing thousands of out of work Americans their unemployment benefits.

Until yesterday, Bunning was using one of those arcane Senatorial prerogatives to halt progress of a funding bill for that includes numerous projects including money for unemployment.  His complaint was that the bill should not move forward until the Senate finds funding to cover its cost.

In and of itself this is not such an unreasonable demand.  What’s strange and pointlessly spiteful about it is that about a quarter of everything Congress spends right now has no revenue behind it and Bunning has played an enthusiastic role in getting us into this mess.  He could have refused to designate any of his earmarks until Congress found funding for them, but that would have severely impacted Bunning’s campaign contributors.  We don’t want to let idealism get out of hand.

Beyond the realization that one guy with a loose grip on reality can hold up Senate business, there is a cold lesson in this experience if we choose to see it.  Bunning is, accidentally I’m sure, playing out for us in microcosm an ambush we have set for ourselves.  We are facing a scenario in the medium-term future, perhaps as few as eight to ten years out, when world financial markets will “pull a Bunning” on us.  When this happens, it won’t affect one government program, but all of them.  We could potentially lose the ability to deliver basic services for brief periods.  This is an opportunity to learn.

These days we aren’t just borrowing “a lot.”  We are borrowing far more money than we can find lenders for.  Our total debt is now almost as high as a full year’s complete economic output for the entire country.  So how have we avoided a collapse in government funding?  We are covering this frightening scenario by having our own Treasury and Federal Reserve purchase the debt that can’t be auctioned in the marketplace.  Under normal conditions this couldn’t be sustained because it would trigger high levels of inflation.  But (again, simplifying), the scale of the recent economic collapse was so vast that even now deflation remains a greater concern than inflation.

So what happens to debt finance when we have finally worked our way through the effects of the housing bubble and the financial industry collapse?  The honest answer is no one really knows.  But you can be pretty certain that we won’t be able to continue to print money to cover our debt.  If we have not found a way to stop running massive annual deficits we face a terrible dilemma -  either run a risk of hyperinflation or run out of money, perhaps rather suddenly.  At that point, the kind of pain Jim Bunning is causing will look like a joke.  Depending on how unprepared we are for the problem, we may not have an opportunity to prioritize whatever available funding there is.  Bills may not be paid based on which day or month they come due, be they military, medical, educational, etc.

This is a scenario other countries, like Argentina and Malaysia have experienced recently with great human suffering.  But if we let it happen to us the pain will reverberate around the planet.  The collapse of Argentina’s currency didn’t destroy the machinery of the global commodities markets and international finance. The collapse of the dollar would have broad global impacts that are difficult to predict.  That makes it likely the world will work to keep it from happening, but ultimately we are in the drivers’ seat.  That’s why you hear so much talk these days about countries and international entities wanting to find an alternative to the dollar as a reserve currency.

Taming our spending problems will be painful and unpopular.  It remains unclear whether we have the will, even within the GOP, to do it.  Over the previous four Administrations, it was Republican Presidents that more than quadrupled our debt to GDP ratio while Clinton actually produced a surplus.  Crazy ‘Ole Uncle Jim is showing us a vision of our future.  It is a future we can avoid if we choose.

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Why must it cost $75-150 for a five-minute consultation with a doctor?

Why can’t I email my doctor and get a reply the way I do with my accountant, attorney, financial planner, pastor, kids’ teachers, etc?

Does it really take a professional who scored a 1350 on her SAT’s, finished top of her class at UT, then completed seven years of expensive post graduate education and residency to determine whether my kid has an ear infection?

Why can’t I know what a test, procedure, or visit will cost and a) compare that cost among providers, and/or b) make some judgment about which care makes sense based on what it will cost and what I need?

If our restaurants and grocery stores had no prices listed and you only got a coded bill weeks later partially covered by someone else, do you think you spending would be efficient?  Would we as a society have serious problems with the cost of food?

Those who complain about a government takeover of healthcare should check their facts.  We already enjoy all the frustration, bureaucracy, and obstacles to innovation of a government-run health system without the benefits.  We live under government-run healthcare, we just pay a fortune for it and don’t cover everyone.

The challenge of making affordable insurance coverage available to all Americans is actually a just one component of our healthcare problems.  Our process for delivering and paying for healthcare was cobbled together about eighty years ago and has been slow to adapt to changes in our society.  It is a system that has become spectacularly rigid, mostly hidden from view, influenced by innumerable separate state, federal, local, corporate, and professional bureaucracies and presided over by none of them.

This doesn’t mean that pure deregulation will work.  Medicine does not and never will function as a truly efficient market.  After falling off a ladder, you are not going to shop ambulance companies for the provider best suited to your particular needs.  Consumer choice is limited by the specialized knowledge required, the vulnerability of the patient, and difficulties in comparing value.  Regulation of the healthcare industry can’t be eliminated, but it needs to be loosened and updated.

Obama’s plan takes the healthcare industry in the wrong direction.  Instead of bringing simplification, it adds layers of new bureaucracy.  It does nothing to strip back the generations of largely irrelevant regulation; building instead a concrete monster on top of the muddle.  It addresses cost by moving toward rationing instead of opening the field for greater efficiencies and better practices.

As Republicans we should understand this one fact – You will never choose healthcare the way you pick which brand of peanut butter to buy.  And some more effective system will have to be put in place to address the needs of the less fortunate.  That system will cost money in the form of taxes.  Have a drink.  Say a prayer. Whatever it takes.  Make peace with it.

However, simply creating the largest government entitlement in history (largest in anyone’s history, not just America’s) on a party line vote with no fundamental restructuring will be a recipe for disaster.

There may not be a more technically complex problem we have ever been asked to solve as a nation.  As Obama’s plan falls apart, Republicans are positioned to propose a conservative process that could bring meaningful improvements and set the stage for wider reforms.  Before we can do that, we have to get over our favorite solution for everything, better than aspirin – “how about a tax cut/credit?”

First step toward a solution?  Empower states to come up with their own solutions.  Give them greater regulatory freedom over existing programs like Medicare/caid.  Offer greater funding from the federal government for state programs that extend coverage significantly.  I’m not saying this for the frequent Republican reason – toss a problem we don’t care about to the states so it can disappear from the agenda.  I say it for these reasons:

- States already have far more experience, breadth of authority, and insight into the healthcare system.  States regulate medical professionals, administer Medicare and Medicaid, along with their own programs.  Any structural changes in the way we administer healthcare would almost have to originate at the state level in order to make sense.  Imagine for example of version of Obama’s plan that was made available for states to adopt or not.

- States have more freedom than the federal government to innovate.  They are smaller, more accountable, and in a worst case, have the larger federal government to fall back on for assistance if their efforts fail.  Who do the feds fall back on…?

- There are fifty states and only one federal government.  Again, more opportunity for ideas to emerge.

Congress could help further by clearing obstacles that limit insurance company competition at the state level.

We are not Canada. We are not France.  We could adopt their healthcare legislation down to the last silent “g” and not see the same results.  The best approach to making quality healthcare available to everyone will take into account our size, our existing systems, our politics, and our values.  There is an opportunity here for the GOP to take a leadership role on an issue we have given little attention.  We need to have the maturity and courage to seize it and act.

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Mitt Romney is currently making the book tour rounds promoting his new tome  No Apology: The Case for American Greatness, while last week at CPAC John Bolton, a Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute  and a member of numerous presidential administrations, said of Obama, “He is the first post-American president.” According to Bolton Obama views America’s superpower status as ending, or ended.  He claims Obama is fine letting America be a nation among the nations, not exceptional, certainly not better.

In light of the recent attention on American Exceptionalism I thought it would be appropriate to repost and article I wrote at The Moderate Republican almost exactly a year ago,:

“The greatness of America lies not in being more enlightened than any other nation, but rather in her ability to repair her faults.”-Alexis de Tocqueville

Alexis de Tocqueville, French political thinker and historian of the 19th century best known for his Democracy in America, felt that the United States held a special place among nations. He said this over 150 years ago when the nation was only 50 years old. This idea gradually took hold and came to be know as American Exceptionalism. This is currently defined as the theory that the United States occupies a special niche among developed nations in terms of its national credo, historical evolution, strong democratic and religious institutions and unique origins. However, recent events have lead me to question whether the concept still resonates in the 21st century. If it does not then perhaps it is time to repair some faults.

“No natural boundary seems to be set to the efforts of man; and what is not yet done is only what he has not yet attempted to do.” – Tocqueville

Are we still a nation of unbridled invention? What exactly is our national credo as we enter this new era in American history? What truths do we hold to be central to who we are as Americans? Once upon a time those truths were of Emersonian self reliance, frontier-style entrepreneurialism , and fierce independence. Do these still hold true in a time when we are conforming to societal norms as presented by banal TV sitcoms, regularly looking to the government for not just a hand-up but a hand-out, and seem to be bowing more and more to pressures from the international community when it comes to our foreign policy?

“Despotism may govern without faith, but liberty cannot. How is it possible that society should escape destruction if the moral tie is not strengthened in proportion as the political tie is relaxed? And what can be done with a people who are their own masters if they are not submissive to the Deity?” – Tocqueville

We are still, of course, the world’s preeminent democracy, however, our religious character, which stood as the foundation of our society, has been called into question. Just last week the American Religious Identification Survey came out with data that showed since 1990, the percentage of Americans claiming no religion has nearly doubled, growing to 15% last year. America was not founded as a country of any particular religion, however, we have always held that basic religious principles were what held our democracy together. If we go the way of most of the European continent and become essentially non religious will our democracy hold?

Over at The America, Charles Murray has a nice piece on how America must decide exactly what it wants to be in the 21st century.

“The advent of the Obama administration brings this question before the nation: Do we want the United States to be like Europe? President Obama and his leading intellectual heroes are the American equivalent of Europe’s social democrats. There’s nothing sinister about that. They share an intellectually respectable view that Europe’s regulatory and social welfare systems are more progressive than America’s and advocate reforms that would make the American system more like the European system. It is the elites who are increasingly separated from the America over which they have so much influence. That is not the America that Tocqueville saw. It is not an America that can remain America.”

What we are faced with today is more than a financial crisis, more than a depressed economy, even more than a bloated federal government. We are faced with a cultural crisis, and if we do not act soon we could see the America of our fathers and grandfathers disappear within our generation.

“When the past no longer illuminates the future, the spirit walks in darkness.”- Tocqueville

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Ross Douthat’s weekly column is about my favorite governor, Mitch Daniels. Here’s a taste:

In a just world, Daniels’s record would make him the Tea Party movement’s favorite politician. During the fat years of the mid-2000s, while most governors went on spending sprees, he was trimming Indiana’s payroll, slowing the state government’s growth, and turning a $800 million deficit into a consistent surplus. Now that times are hard, his fiscal rigor is paying off: the state’s projected budget shortfall for 2011, as a percentage of the budget, is the third-lowest in the country.

But Daniels hasn’t just been a Dr. No on policy. His “Healthy Indiana” plan, which offers catastrophic coverage to low-income residents, aspires to eventually cover 130,000 people, about a third of the state’s long-term uninsured. He’s pushed targeted investments in kindergarten programs, the police force and the child welfare office. And he’s been a pragmatic free-marketeer, rather than a strict ideologue. His controversial decision to lease the Indiana toll road reaped $3.8 billion for the state. But when an attempt to outsource welfare enrollment went awry, Daniels yanked the system back into the public sector.

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