One reason I'm obsessed with the health care debacle--there are many, but this is the one that allows me to feel it's sensible to write about it on a blog devoted to education--is that Obama and the bill's congressional pushers have been handling it in such an outrageously anti-intellectual way. Because they are ideologues and careerists who care more about putting the big Universal Health Care notch on their belts than they do about actual democratic process, they can't be bothered even to read the bill, let alone take the time needed to understand it, to work through its problems, or to remember that their primary duty is to represent the people -- not impose their arrogant entitled god-complexed will on them. Drives me nuts!

And it's just amazing to me to watch the academic blogs that I read look the other way. They couldn't complain enough when the Bush administration let agendas get in the way of good governance. But now you can hear a pin drop--except for those blogs where you can hear this funny, shrill, desperate cheerleading for something the author must know is incredibly wrong, but can't find the spine to question or oppose. So much for rigorous analysis, intellectual integrity, etc.

The good news is that the American people have had enough of Washington's haughty condescension. Here's PowerLine:

Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius and Sen. Arlen Specter held a town hall meeting on health care today in Philadelphia. The audience appears to have been mostly hostile.

In the one exchange I've seen, Specter tried to explain how he goes about learning what's in a 1,000 page piece of legislation. Specter said that, because of time constraints, his practice is to divide responsibility for reading the bill among his staffers. This explanation brought boos from the crowd. [see video above]

The Senate fancies itself "the world's greatest deliberative body." But it's becoming increasingly clear that the Senate is not a deliberative body at all -- not when Senators concede that they would vote on legislation to overhaul one-sixth of our economy, and arguably the most important sixth, without having read the legislation. Specter's defense that there's not enough time for him to read it all himself simply raises the problem in a more acute from: why would the world's greatest deliberative body consider legislation on a timetable that leaves Senators with insufficient to see for themselves exactly what's in the bill?

Americans inevitably will disagree over how our health care system should operate. But nearly every American would agree that Senators should know what's in major health care legislation before they vote on it, and that such legislation should not be enacted in a rush.

The problem is not unique to health care legislation. The same thing happened last year with comprehensive immigration reform and earlier this year with the stimulus bill. Congress is at risk of losing the confidence of the American people based on purely procedural concerns.