Taking Social Security Seriously

No link for this, but along with the right-leaning centrist notion that even though every aspect of the Bush privatization plan is bad, Democrats really ought to get on board with it anyway to show that they're serious, there's a competing brand of left-leaning Social Security centrism out there which holds that, in essence, this whole fight is a fake, the Bush plan is dead, and people should stop obsessing over it and move on to other things. I'm not really sure where idea number two comes from, though I could take a guess or two if I were so inclined. More important, though, is the fact that it's terribly wrongheaded. The basic fact is that this is a long-held goal of the Republican Party, the conservative movement, and of George W. Bush personally. It seemed to come a bit out of the blue in January, but it really was a reasonably large element of Bush's 2000 campaign pitch, and had 9/11 not intervened would probably have been the defining policy debate of his first term.

One needs to realize that the Republicans have majorities in both houses of congress. They can push this through, or possibly force the Senate Democrats into a politically difficult filibuster posture. Right now, the prospects for the plan don't look so hot because a lot of GOP Senators and House members don't seem to be on board. And that's right -- if we held the vote tomorrow it failed. But the vote won't be held tomorrow, it will be scheduled for whenever the Republicans think they can win. It would be a huge mistake to underestimate the administration's ability to whip the Republican caucus into shape. All of Bush's major bills provoked this kind of GOP grumbling. On Medicare he was able to get the House Republicans to vote for a bill that approximately zero of them probably thought was a good idea on the merits. Doing so involved violating the rules of the House, violating the laws of the United States, and lying to congress. But that's what needed to be done. Social Security privatization isn't some piddling game, and Bush won't hesitate to play hardball with his people.

The only way for this to fail is for a pretty large block of Senators and Congressmen to be absolutely convinced that if they vote for phase-out they will lose their seats. Almost all of them would prefer not to take the political risk involved in phase-out, but the White House has ways of changing their mind. If they're sure phase-out will end their careers, they won't go for it. Otherwise, the grumbling is just grumbling.