Okay, it's not every day that I link to the so-called-liberal New Republic, but I like Ryan Lizza (he should write for
TAP!) and he pens a great piece on
how to block the GOP's efforts to dismantle social security:
Parliamentary procedure is destiny. "History will show that what undid the Clinton health care plan is the Byrd Rule," says a senior Senate Democratic aide [...] The Byrd Rule was adopted by the Senate in 1985 to combat budget deficits. Anything not germane to the budget and, significantly for Bush's plan, anything that adds to the deficit, cannot be included in reconciliation under the Byrd Rule [...]
Delay equals defeat [...] Ira Magaziner, the plan's author, warned Clinton in a memo, "The more time we allow for the defenders of the status quo to organize, the more they will be able to marshal opposition to your plan and the better their chances of killing it." [...]
Defeat breeds defeat. In Clinton's case, time brought not only a more organized opposition but also a crush of events--a bruising budget battle, political scandals, international crises--that sapped his political capital and distracted him from focusing on health care. The lesson for Democrats is obvious: The harder it is for Bush to pass other parts of his agenda, the harder it will be for him to pass his Social Security plan [...]
Being in the opposition means opposing. If there is one lesson that leaps off the page when rereading the history of Hillarycare, it is that Clinton's foes were ruthless and systematic in their opposition to the president's plan. When Hillary Clinton tried to reach out to Senate Republicans in the spring of 1993, she found she could never schedule any meetings. It turned out that aides to Bob Dole had prohibited any Republican senator from sitting down with the first lady [...]
Many Democrats today argue that their route back to power depends on transforming themselves into a party of reform. Some of these Democrats are scared that mere opposition--and denying Bush's claim that Social Security faces a "crisis"--hampers their efforts. But Republicans faced the same challenge in the early '90s and found that the two goals were not mutually exclusive. They didn't just kill health care reform, they used its corpse as a platform to redefine themselves as a reform movement that swept away the Democratic majority.
It's not just about Social Security. The Republicans knew in 1993 that they were not just engaged in a fight over health care but over the future of their own party [...]
Go read the whole thing.