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The recent Health Care Fiasco demonstrates American Politics at its worst. In this situation when every vote was crucial, lucrative back room deals were made to bribe politicians to support this bill. The people of Nebraska are no doubt happy with their representative Ben Nelson who brought home a sweet $100 million Medicare break for his state. That is the way politics works in this country. The job of each representative is to work for the benefit of his state or his constituents, and voters may condemn pork barrel politics and the corruption of Congress as a whole but they continue voting for their representatives if they keep bringing home the bacon.
This will prove to be a problem for Republicans. They refused to play the game. They had high minded ideological and political reasons to not play the game, and it sounds good that Republicans condemn creeping socialism and pork barrel politics, but the people home would prefer having jobs to having a high minded principled ideologue. People want their Pork. They want the funding to build a bridge to nowhere, because that hires hundreds or thousands of people who support local businesses, and those workers buy houses which gives carpenters jobs, which gives lumber companies money to hire more people. Pork stimulates the economy.
For Republicans there will be no sweet Christmas gifts like Senator Nelson’s constituents will receive. The Red states will be lucky to get a few lumps of coal in their stockings this year.
This is just like Governor Bobby Jindal's refusal to accept $100 million in federal aid for unemployment benefits. Sure he got points for opposing big government and more taxes, but Louisiana’s poor and unemployed needed that money desperately, so Jindel caved in and accepted the money after all. Otherwise the suffering state would have kicked him out.
There is a clear and simple trade off between what is good locally and what is good for the country. The rest of the country will suffer a little bit because they have to pay for that $100 million that Nebraska will get. All of the red states will suffer because in addition to their not getting any pork, they have to help pay for all of the blue state’s pork! Why weren’t the Republicans doing their job and bringing home pork to their districts?
Sure they can say that they opposed a bad bill, and there is much that is bad in this bill, but why didn’t they make the bill better? Why didn’t they work to get some tort reform, or to get cross border competition, or any of a dozen ideas they talked about, that might have saved costs and made the bill better. They didn’t get any of these things in the bill because they refused to play the game. You can’t make a deal with Monty Hall if you are sitting in the audience, you have to get up on stage. If they wanted any of those good ideas to be put in the bill they had to make a deal, to bargain, and be willing to vote for the bill if that amendment was put in the bill. The Democrats adopted nearly 200 Republican amendments to the health care bill because it is just no fun playing without an opponent, but there were no Republicans willing to barter for the big prizes. Olympia Snow had made some big deals and was all set to bring home some sweet deals for her constituents, but the radical ideologues in the party made life so miserable for her, that she decided it was better to harm her constituents than to harm the party.
So that is the way of politics in America. Democrats win and their constituents will be having a Happy Christmas, while Red State Guys, will be sad and dour because their representatives didn’t do their jobs.