Hillarycare 2.0

So here comes Hillary Clinton's health care proposal. It seems like she shrewdly (though not unexpectedly) has written something that exceeds expectations, perhaps after deliberately setting those expectations low. Edwards, who perhaps has the most ground to lose if the leading candidate encroaches upon his populism, is, as Ezra writes, saying that he "will announce today...a bill, to be submitted on his first day in office, ending health care coverage for the president, the Congress, and all political appointees on July 20th, 2009, unless they've passed health reform that accords with four non-negotiable principles Edwards will detail in the speech. If they don't pass comprehensive health reform, they lose their coverage until they do."

This is an extremely charged political move, and one that will, I think, have instant, though probably short-lived, appeal with the electorate. If the Iraq debate has proven anything it's that voters don't really know or care about the nitty-gritty of congressional procedure but that they want to see the people they elect do what they were elected to do. Rules be damned. Edwards knows better than anybody how to make this point. When his critics charge that this will be unfair to the families of relatively wealthy politicians, Edwards can rightly say that this is exactly the point. It's wealthy politicians themselves who are standing between the poor and health care, and if they believe that it's OK to do this, then they'll have little grounds on which to object when the president welcomes them into the ranks of the hoi polloi.

That said, I'm not sure Edwards should expect this honeymoon to last very long. It won't take much of a sustained effort by Obama and Clinton to make the case to the campaign reporters--who are already seemingly unfavorably disposed to Edwards--to point out exactly how unfeasible this is.

For the sake of simplicity, let's pretend he wins the presidency and goes about this a different way. On day one he introduces a bill designed to accomplish every item in the health care proposal he'd campaigned on. It goes to the floor and gets filibustered. So he pulls it and introduces a bill to remove all elected officials and appointees in the Executive and Legislative Branches from the government health rolls until Congress passes the bill he'd just pulled. It gets filibustered. So he pulls that and introduces a bill declaring that all filibustering Congresscritters are very, very mean people. It gets filibustered.

And so on.

Without line-item veto power, I don't see how he could do this even if he wanted to. It's as implausible a bill as is a universal health care bill to begin with, and I think he may be underestimating his rivals' ability to successfully make the point that this gambit might accomplish little other than running his mandate into the ground. That said, it's a bold move, and I think it's worth pointing out that the problem is not the move itself, but that almost nobody in politics makes moves like this.