Dan Calabrese

How bad does a piece of legislation have to be, when you have 60 seats in the Senate and you still can’t get it passed?

Connecticut independent Joe Lieberman, who caucuses with the Democrats even though they turned on him in 2006 for supporting the Iraq War, may be the one guy whose vote sustains a Republican filibuster against it.

Listen, Harry.

But it has taken a lot of Democratic idiocy to make this bill unpassable.

Lieberman makes it clear: No public option, no Medicare buy-in, no abortion funding, no new entitlements. Get rid of all that, and the Democrats could probably not only pass the bill, but pass it with a fair number of Republican votes.

If the goal is to make health insurance accessible to Americans who don’t now have it, that would be a very plausible and reasonable way of accomplishing the goal.

So why don’t they do that? Because that’s not the goal. The goal is to have the government control as much of health care as possible, including the establishment of a government-run insurance company that sets the rules and sets the price structure for the health insurance industry, thus putting private health insurance out of business.

And as you’ll recall from previous columns, I would shed no tears for private health insurers. But if government simply took the existing system, which it essentially created anyway, and took over management of the entire thing, I would shed plenty of tears for the nation.

Far from being an obstructionist, Lieberman is offering Democrats a very reasonable way out of this. The problem is not widespread dissatisfaction with American heatlh care.  The vast majority of Americans are satisfied with their coverage. The problem is the small minority who cannot get access to coverage.

Fixing that problem is a far less ambitious, and far more doable, proposition. But if fixing that problem is all you do, then one-sixth of the nation’s economy does not come under permanent political control at the hands of federal agencies staffed by Democrats.

All that said, one has to wonder if there has ever been a more incompetent Senate Majority Leader than Harry Reid. I realize that Democrats would never pass a health care reform bill that I would like – one that would lessen the influence of insurance entirely and empower consumers. But to pass a reform bill Democrats would like, all he had to do was focus on achievable goals.

He could still do it now. All he would have to do is listen to Joe Lieberman: Get rid of the controversial elements and focus on the solutions on which everyone agrees.

Democrats could boast of having bridged the health insurance gap. President Obama could finally claim a major achievement. And assuming they left the rest of us alone, there would be little in the way of a major uprising.

But when you hold enormous political power for a short period of time, your priority is to grab as much power as you can, as quickly as you can, and to do it in such a way that even when the oppositing party retakes the majority, they can’t repeal what you’ve done.

At least if you think like Harry Reid. And that would have to mean you are so stubborn that you won’t even listen to friendly advice from a would-be ally trying to show you to way back to sanity, and to success.

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