Making the case on Ross

You likely will be hearing more than you’ll want to hear between now and November 2014 about Mike Ross’ votes on Obamacare as a Blue Dog Democratic member of Congress in 2009 and 2010.

Was he for it, even the key vote in foisting it upon a state that didn’t want it?

Republicans say yes, and can make a case.

Was he against it, convinced by marathon town-hall meetings across his 4th Congressional District to oppose it, even after he’d made the good faith effort to make the bill better?

He says yes, and can make a case.

Our next governor’s selection will hinge in large measure on these competing assertions.

So what I’d like to do is offer this column that presumes, or seeks, to tell you everything you’ll need to know to help you decide what to make of all that you’re going to hear on the subject.

Because it was such a massive piece of omnibus legislation originating in the House, the Affordable Care Act was parceled to several committees, one of which was Energy and Commerce.

As it happened, there were seven so-called Blue Dog Democrats sitting on that committee, enough to keep the bill locked if they voted “no” as a bloc.

As it further happened, the Blue Dog Democrats’ previously chosen point man on health-care policy, and a member of Energy and Commerce, was Mike Ross.

For several weeks in the summer of 2009, Ross was a very important man.

He was leader and spokesman for these seven Blue Dogs. He was saying the Blue Dogs wanted amendments before they would vote the bill out. He was getting called down to the White House for high-level confabs. He was getting interviewed by the big boys outside the West Wing.

In the end, the Blue Dogs got credit for a couple of substantive amendments-to change Medicare reimbursement rules to help rural hospitals and to raise the employee threshold for penalties on small businesses for employees not insured by group plans.

So then they acceded and let the bill go the floor.

There was a picture taken that day. It is of Ross fist-bumping a leading traditional Democrat on Energy and Commerce, one Anthony Weiner of New York, newly known as Carlos Danger.

So, in 2010, I wrote something that the Republicans, who don’t typically embrace what I write, have already put into a news release and surely will display in a television commercial in due time.

It went like this: “The truth is that Ross and his pals among Blue Dogs, by having enough votes on Energy and Commerce to hold up the bill and demand changes in the first place, also had enough votes to kill it outright. Instead, in the end, they did House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s bidding, as they always will do at crunch time, and let her have the bill on the floor of the House.”

Ross has given me a sardonic “thanks a lot” for that little sentence.

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In that same August of 2009, Ross came back to his expansive district for the congressional recess and held more than 80 town-hall meetings. He gleaned that his constituents did not want the bill, period, regardless of whether he’d made it better.

So he concluded he would and should oppose the bill.

In the end, what came back to the House in early 2010 was a Senate measure different from what he’d voted out of Energy and Commerce. He voted no-a losing-side no.

Here is his explanation of all that: One’s job in Congress is to be engaged in the process to make law. Thus it was better for him in the early stage to use his leverage to try to make the health-reform bill more palatable to rural areas and small businesses, which he did, than to take himself out of the game altogether.

But, in the end, his responsibility was to represent his constituents. And they didn’t want the bill. So he voted no.

Even then, his early amendments to help rural areas and small business had survived in the final version. He and his Blue Dog allies deserve credit, by that early engagement, for making the law better in those important regards.

Ross’ explanation is solid. It is logical. It reflects a savvy command of the legislative and political processes.

On the other hand, Republicans are based in basic fact when they say that he and his Blue Dog pals could have stopped health-care reform in committee.

I figure Pelosi would have found some way around him and them because she’s resourceful and she was in charge, but that’s forever speculative.

And, yes, there is a photo on Twitter from August 2009 showing Ross in a do-pass celebratory fist bump with Weiner.

This was two years before Weiner resigned in a sexting scandal, which was two years before a second sexting scandal beset Weiner as a New York mayoral candidate, which was the occasion for Republican posting of the photo on social media.

It’s going to be a long governor’s race. But this column ought to shorten it for you, as soon as you can decide for yourself what to make of what it describes.

Oh, all right, I’ll tell you what I think, since this is, after all, an opinion column: Ross made the bill a little better for his constituents even as he cast an expedient vote against its inevitable passage. I side with him.

It is impractical to expect seven House Democrats to stop the major reform initiative of their party’s president and congressional leadership. But they put a mark on it along the way.

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John Brummett’s column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at [email protected]. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.