Letters from Inside the Tent
Over at MLN, tparty has been ably documenting the public statements of Connecticut’s Congressional delegation regarding the public option in health reform.
On Friday, one of my perennially-unhappy fellow DTC members mentioned a letter from Jim Himes opposing tax increases to pay for health reform, and after some gossip investigation, the letter turned up and is available here. It’s from 22 members of the “New Democrats” caucus in the House to Speaker Pelosi, and while it doesn’t actually oppose all tax increases to pay for health reform, it does oppose the consensus funding stream in House Ways and Means (a surtax on the top 1.2 percent of income earners), characterizing it as being anti-small business. It also calls for the House leadership to “reduce the overall need for revenue generation, and to propose a more equitable way of distributing the burden of any remaining needs.”
This is in stark contrast to the other letter issued by 22 different members of the New Democrats caucus a week prior, one sent to both Pelosi and Steny Hoyer, describing “a robust public health insurance option” as “essential if we are going to provide more choice for individuals and businesses, and if we are serious about lowering costs for both.” That letter was signed by Chris Murphy and Joe Courtney.
As someone who has made fun of the “sternly worded letter” as a tool for effecting change, my first inclination is to blow both of these letters off as just a bit of posturing. But as efforts to get our members to commit to opposing reform without a public option haven’t been successful, I think we should admit these letters into the debate as part of a “preponderance of evidence” about their negotiating positions, and what they seek to accomplish in the healthcare debate.
I’d love to do a primer on J.L. Austin and his thinking regarding speech-acts, but I’ll skip the drama and just import a description from Wikipedia:
Austin is widely associated with the concept of the speech act and the idea that speech is itself a form of action. Consequently, in his understanding language is not just a passive practice of describing a given reality, but a particular practice to invent and affect those realities.[...]
How to Do Things With Words is perhaps Austin’s most influential work. In it he attacks what was at his time a predominant account in philosophy, namely, the view that the chief business of sentences is to state facts, and thus to be true or false based on the truth or falsity of those facts. In contrast to this common view, he argues, truth-evaluable sentences form only a small part of the range of utterances. After introducing several kinds of sentences which he asserts are indeed not truth-evaluable, he turns in particular to one of these kinds of sentences, which he deems performative utterances. These he characterises by two features:
- First, these sentences are not true or false.
- Second, to utter one of these sentences is not just to “say” something, but rather to perform a certain kind of action.
These letters do things in Austin’s sense of being performative: there’s no point to quarreling with way that Himes’ letter characterizes a 1% surtax on $250,000 earners as being harmful to small business, just like there’s no point to challenging Joe Lieberman’s assertion that the Senate needs to slow down health reform in order to better understand the consequences of the bill. You could quibble over details, and I’m tempted to do so here. But their are assertions are not about communicating the most accurate set of facts, but are meant to change the debate around the policy, make their concerns appear more important than other peoples’ concerns, and restrict the actions of the institutions to which they belong.
The Himes-New Dems letter, in particular, links a group of potentially-vulnerable Freshman Members of Congress to a particular economic philosophy. If health reform comes to the floor with the surtax in place, it becomes very difficult for them to support, as they’ve put themselves on the record saying both that the surtax hurts small business and that small business interests supersede other interests. The letter-signers go so far as to suggest that failing to serve the interests (as they define them) of small businesses (as they define them) jeopardizes the economic recovery!
To have these words quoted back to a candidate in a campaign or debate setting about a bill that they actually supported would severely wound their prospects for re-election. So while the signers don’t say that they’ll oppose a bill with a surtax as the funding mechanism, this letter only just stops short of such a position, and forces the leadership into a difficult position very late in the process.
By contrast, the advocates for a public option don’t make any statement “tantamount to opposition” to a bill without a public option: they don’t claim that anyone will die or suffer if their preferred option doesn’t go through, nor do they claim that the economic well-being of the nation will be endangered without their policies. Their letter doesn’t generate any costs for them should they vote for a bill without a public option.
Insofar as the “no surtax” letter is a conservative response to the progressive “public option” letter,* it goes much further in its attempt to compel the caucus to move in their direction.
Caucus politics. In a way, it’s a small thing: the New Dems and the Blue Dogs are the right edge of the Democratic coalition, and a few lawmakers inside those tents are pulling them in different directions. Bloggers care about that stuff, and a lot of us are skeptical of those caucuses, so Murphy and Courtney deserve thanks for the effort… and recognition that one can effect progressive change from the inside of a conservative organization. Keeping track of these things are so detail- and process-oriented that there aren’t many mass-media outlets that would explore these issues in an article or series.
At the same time, it’s a huge thing: change is made possible or impossible by these machinations. And people are pretty sophisticated about these things — primary voters in 2006 were able to assemble the “preponderance of evidence” about Joe Lieberman, so even while there were very few specific bad acts you could pin on him, you could tell that he was making the country a more conservative place.
The longer I’ve been involved in politics, the less interested I’ve been in a candidate’s or elected’s positions – where they stand – and the more interested I’ve become in observing what they’re pushing towards.
* Word is that this is actually Steny Hoyer’s response to the “public option” letter, hence his not being one of its recipients. Can we call its signers “Steny’s Angels?”
July 20th, 2009 at 9:55 pm
That Himes signed both these letters smacks of having his cake and eating it too. He can point those in favor of a public option to his signature in support, and he can point those who use a tax increase as an excuse to oppose a public option to this letter.
While you are taking a rather blase view of the inherent dishonesty of the misleading wording of this letter, I find this playing fast and loose with the “facts” pretty sickening.
As for “Steny’s Angels” — someone should point out to Congressman Himes that when one lies down with dogs, one is apt to get fleas. I’d hoped for a lot better from Jim Himes, but it seems he’s just business as usual.