Health Care Reform
Floor Speech
HEALTH CARE REFORM -- (Senate - November 19, 2009)
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I rise in this great Chamber of debate, this greatest deliberative body, to speak about the upcoming debate on health care on which, thanks to the extraordinary work of our leader, Senator Harry Reid, we are about to embark. I am here to urge that we in the Senate lift the tone and direction of our national debate.
Let me start by saying I appreciate and enjoy vigorous debate. Senator Byrd gave an eloquent eulogy for Senator Kennedy, noting that our beloved, late colleague saw politics as a contact sport. There is nothing wrong with a clean hit in the public arena. Nobody here needs to tiptoe around. A well-marshaled argument, buttressed by the facts, is a beautiful thing, even when delivered hot. Dynamic and vigorous debate is how a democracy sorts through the thorny issues we face. What an ideal time now would be for strong, reasoned arguments about health care reform in the Senate in the coming weeks.
Contrast what we have heard for months on the airwaves and in townhall meetings: charged buzzwords such as ``death panels,'' ``socialized medicine,'' ``benefits for illegal immigrants,'' and ``rationing of care''--words that inflame passions and ignite fear rather than making a reasoned case for advancing an alternative.
Worse, these messages have been delivered with a crudeness and a venom; for example, the President portrayed with a Hitler mustache. That is unprecedented in my experience in government. Many of us felt President Bush was less than truthful, but for 8 years, no one yelled out in a State of the Union Address: ``You lie.'' Yet this September, 179 Republicans in the House of Representatives of the Congress of the United States voted to support their heckler comrade.
The media, so often in our history a check on the use of falsehood and distortion by powerful interests, has too often been a part of the problem, not part of the solution. For significant parts of the media, facts do not need to be true to be repeated, conclusions do not need to be logical to be reached, and spin is the order of the day.
FOX News the other day launched an attack on President Obama for having too many so-called czars. Let's set aside that George Bush had more. FOX showed a graphic of 30 officials whom, it said, ``didn't have to be confirmed,'' 9 of whom actually had been confirmed by this Senate. My young niece did a better fact-checking job at her summer job for a literary magazine than that.
Recently, FOX used footage from a different event to make attendance at a Republican rally look bigger. A constituent sent me a letter expressing concern that she heard on the Glenn Beck show that President Obama was planning a national civilian security force that would report only to him, akin to the Nazi SS. What did I think of that, she asked. This was a well-meaning Rhode Islander.
We checked, and it turned out the President had given a speech about expanding the Peace Corps, AmeriCorps, the Foreign Service, and other government service programs. I ask you, Mr. President, in what fevered and distorted imagination does national service to AmeriCorps, to the Peace Corps or in the Foreign Service become an SS-type militia? Yet Mr. Beck actually said that.
Another rightwing piece on President Obama's support for AmeriCorps suggested a parallel with Hitler Youth.
Its author said:
If I need to make my point, I'm going to make it in a provocative manner, because that's how it attracts attention.
The truth should provide terrets through which arguments must run--but not now. As a very well-regarded Philadelphia columnist wrote of the Republican right, ``if they can get some mileage ..... nothing else matters.''
He went on to decry the ``conservative paranoia'' and ``lunacy'' afoot in our national debate.
The editor of the Manchester Journal Inquirer editorial page wrote of the GOP, which he called this ``once great and now mostly shameful party,'' that it ``has gone crazy,'' that it is ``more and more dominated by the lunatic fringe,'' and that it has ``poisoned itself with hate.''
He concluded:
They no longer want to govern. They want to emote.
The respected Maureen Dowd of the New York Times, in her column eulogizing her friend, the late William Safire, lamented the ``vile and vitriol of today's howling pack of conservative pundits.''
Even the staid, old U.S. Chamber of Commerce has descended into such irresponsible advocacy that Apple, PG&E, Levi Strauss & Company, PNM Resources, Nike, and Exelon have distanced themselves from it, PNM citing the Chamber's ``recent theatrics.''
There comes a point when debate unhinges from reality. When that happens, you leave the sunlit fields of argument and deliberation and you enter a shadowy realm of sloganeering, fear mongering, and propaganda. In these dark and twisted Halls, democracy suffers as debate seeks to scare people or deceive them rather than informing or explaining. It is so easy if you want to go there.
Of course, you can get seniors up in arms by telling them their final years will be subject to the whims of death panels. Of course, you can inflame the passions of people without health insurance by telling them their tax dollars will go to provide health insurance to illegal immigrants. Of course, you can provoke people's attention by telling them reform will keep them from
their doctors. But none of these claims is true.
The respected head of the Mayo Clinic recently described the health care antics we have witnessed as ``mud'' and ``scare tactics.''
A well-regarded Washington Post writer with a quarter century of experience, married to a Bush administration official, noted about the House health care bill: ``The appalling amount of misinformation being peddled by its opponents.'' She called it a ``flood of sheer factual misstatements about the health-care bill'' and noted of the House Republicans that ``[t}he falsehood-peddling began at the top. .....''
Her ultimate question was this:
Are the Republican arguments against the bill so weak that they have to resort to these misrepresentations and distortions?
Where does this lead? The ill-informed, the gullible, those already on the razor's edge of anger about the very election of this President may well be tipped by all this poisonous propaganda into actions we would all regret--I hope we would all regret. When do anger and frustration fomented in this debate begin to spill over into dangerous or violent acts? When does some havoc occur, such that we all look back with sorrow and wish we had better leashed our dogs of rhetorical war? Where do we restore civility and reason to the health care debate before it gets too late?
I say history's charge to the Senate is to rise above the poison of our recent public debate. This greatest deliberative body is intended to set an example for public argument, not get swept into its downward spiral. We may find agreement; we may not. At the end of the day, some of us may be happy and others of us not. Some may lose and some may win. But the Senate will go on.
After the health care debate has raged through this great Chamber, other debates will follow, and ultimately what will matter more than the outcome of those debates is whether our proud American democracy has come through them with its head held high.
When debate and our democracy lose its footing in the facts, when things are said for public effect without regard to whether they are true, when the din of strife blots out the voice of reason, something of great and lasting value to America is sacrificed.
Democracy does not prosper on a diet of propaganda and fear. The current tone of much of our debate is, frankly, unworthy of us. Most in America agree something must be done to fix our health care system. If we can agree something must be done, it should not be difficult to debate our differences as to what must be done in a civil, thoughtful, and factual manner. Let the Senate be the place where we take a stand, rejecting the incivility and falsehood that has surrounded us on our public airwaves. Through history, that is what this Chamber, at its best, has always achieved and needs now to achieve again.
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