Barack Obama is all smiles with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi during the U.S. President's visit to Capitol Hill on Saturday, March 20, 2010.Pablo Martinez Monsivais
There will be forests cut down to print the books on health insurance reform, which passed the U.S. Congress yesterday.
Needless to say, I will leave it to those who followed every twist and turn of the policy debate to provide comprehensive analysis. But throughout the last few weeks, I've been fascinated in following the attempt by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to get to 216 votes, and a majority in the House.
As the bill got altered by side deals and White House Executive Orders, it came closer and closer to the position of the median Congressional Representative. Basically, if you lined up the 431 current members of the House in a great big line from the most progressive to the most conservative, you would find the middle position at 216 or so, and that is the median or middle position of the House.
Therefore, if you are trying to pass a package of legislation that can be arrayed along an ideological line that most of the Congress will follow, you can find a middle point and target your legislation to that particular voter.
Last night, the key vote on the Senate Bill in the House received 219 votes, basically just three votes shy of optimal.
Essentially, economic and political theory holds that public policy outcomes will tend to the centre. The most famous version of this is the Median Voter Theory, first articulated by Duncan Black and then expanded on by Anthony Downs.
This theory is typically applied to elections, rather than legislative votes, but both are derived from public choice, an important school of political theory. In short, for majority elections where there are two parties and the issue menu is arrayed along a single dimension, politicians maximize their number of votes by committing to the policy position of the median voter.
For economists, this is a Nash Equilibrium. For politicians, this is simply driving for the centre.
There is a significant body of work that applies Public Choice theory to legislatures, often examining the roll of Logrolling.
For the health insurance reform vote to have come this close to median after a year of debate (and a hundred years of attempts to get this in place) shows that public choice theory is onto something.
One of the shortcomings of the theory here is its failure to recognize that voters may opt out of the system on the margins if they are disappointed by what is on offer at the centre.
This is what killed Bill Clinton's attempt at reform in 1994. Moderate Democrats and Republicans wouldn't vote for the White House proposal or various compromise bills. Left-wing Democrats wouldn't abandon support for a Canadian-style single payer system. Rather than array in a single line, votes in Congress were in clusters, with no single cluster big enough to pass.
However, the Democrats were smarter this time that in the 1990's. Those on the left saw that defeating "health care reform" would set their cause back. For instance, Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich - who would probably line up as a moderate New Democrat in Canadian politics, and is probably the most left-wing member of Congress - threatened to vote against the bill because it didn't include a public option. He didn't in the end, and his vote was crucial to passage.
In the end, the Democratic Party left held, the leadership was able to drive to the centre, deals were made to appease pro-life Democrats and a bill was passed.
What is fascinating is how the Republicans have allowed themselves to fall back into caricature as a result of the way the voting happened.
Not a single Republican voted for health insurance reform in either House. The debate on passing the bill was strictly within the Democratic Party. As a result, the Republicans were divorced from the pressures of finding the median voter in Congress. They were able to play to their base and use health insurance reform to drive up their fundraising and fire up their troops.
However, because they were divorced from median voter pressure, many of the Republicans lost touch with the median voter in an election.
House Minority Leader John Boehner called the bill "Armageddon" and said it would " ruin the country." Slurs of "socialism" and "totalitarianism" slipped the lips of many GOP members of Congress yesterday. Tea Party protestors hurled racial and sexual orientation epithets at prominent Democrats.
The debate now moves to the fall Congressional elections, and an argument between fear and hope.
The Republicans will offer their hope that this legislation will destroy the country, balloon the debt, bankrupt small business and make it rain cats.
The Democrats have already laid out their course: only we will stand up to the insurance companies and their Republican cronies that deny you coverage.
After a year of searching for the middle voter in Congress, the Democrats may be better positioned to find the middle voter in the election to come.
(Photo: Pablo Martinez Monsivais/Associated Press)