Tyler Bilbo, Staff Writer
Ideology: Yellow Dog Democrat | Writing from: Tulsa, OK

One of the greatest Senators in our nation’s history is gone. After a year-long bout with brain cancer, Ted Kennedy has left us.

I am devastated. Though my life only coincided with a sliver of Kennedy’s long political career, I am privileged to have seen what I saw in this lion’s quest for social justice. Be it an undocumented family from Mexico or a mother of five without health insurance, Senator Kennedy championed the most helpless among us. He had a rare sense of humanity that is all too absent from today’s legislators who heartlessly implore us to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps. Unlike the Tom Coburns and Jim DeMints of today’s Senate, however, Senator Kennedy understood that many Americans don’t even have a pair of boots.

It is impossible to design a more effective Democratic Senator than Ted Kennedy. All too often in the contemporary legislative setting, bipartisan comprise comes at the expense of our core progressive values. Unlike any other Senator since World War II, Senator Kennedy knew how to make concessions that did not amount to a sacrifice of a progressive bill. As we enter the most contentious phase in the ongoing fight for universal health care, this model of bipartisanship is notably absent in the Senate.

Ted Kennedy’s death marks the end of an era in the Democratic Party in which bipartisanship did not mutually exclude the passage of a progressive bill. The warrior in longtime majority leader Mike Mansfield has been replaced by the wimp in Harry Reid as a band of six Senators control the fate of an essential public option in health care. Lyndon Johnson’s proactive White House that ushered in the Great Society is now occupied by an administration whose hands-off approach to Congress has put the public option in jeopardy. I thank God that today’s Senators were not tasked with delivering the great progressive reforms of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations.

Ted Kennedy’s partnership with Utah’s conservative Senator Orin Hatch to pass the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (known as SCHIP) characterized this type of bipartisanship that is sorely missing from the Senate. Intended to cover uninsured families that could not qualify for Medicaid, SCHIP constituted the largest expansion of government’s role in healthcare since President Johnson’s Great Society. Kennedy, however, did not propose to fund this program through a progressive mechanism as the program’s funding would come from a sharp increase in the tobacco tax. Despite relying on one of the most regressive taxes to fund SCHIP, the final proposal maintained Kennedy’s progressive goal of creating a program that assisted uninsured families that could no qualify for Medicaid. This willingness to agree to a regressive means of funding the program to maintain a final progressive product is a classic example of Kennedy’s ability to navigate landmark legislation through the Senate.

In this post-Kennedy era in the United States Senate, the most bipartisan Democratic Senators are largely the most conservative members of the caucus. In the ongoing fight for health care reform, these members are content with diluting the progressive nature of a final bill in a bipartisan fashion that would sicken Senator Kennedy. The government-backed co-operative peddled by North Dakota Senator Kent Conrad is a product of this dominant notion of bipartisanship that threatens to destroy a progressive public option.

Despite watering down the progressive reforms in Obama’s original proposal, the co-operatives are not even guaranteed to pass. Senator Grassley, touted as an essential figure in a successful bipartisan bill, has said that he won’t support health care reform unless he can effectively sell it to his Republican colleagues. When you consider that much of the Republican caucus considers co-ops a Trojan horse for a drastic government takeover, the prospect of winning Grassley’s support on a co-operative looks rather dim.

This is the irony of this post-Kennedy notion of bipartisanship—even when we drastically water down the progressive content of a bill, our conservative opponents in the Republican Party will still stand in opposition. Kennedy’s model of bipartisanship not only preserves the Democratic Party’s progressive identity, it is also a more effective than what we are currently seeing.

Despite their knee-jerk opposition to a public option, many Republicans are floating around merited ideas that have not received much attention. Newt Gingrich has vocally observed that Medicare and Medicaid fraud debilitates much of the system but this discussion gets lost in the larger debate about the public option. In accordance with Ted Kennedy’s model of bipartisanship, we should be enticing Republican support for healthcare reform by discussing these smaller details that get lost in the larger debate. From a crackdown on fraud to an overhaul of our tort system, there are many ways for the Democrats to craft a more attractive health care bill that does not sacrifice the public option. Only a robust public option can adequately honor Senator Kennedy’s legacy in this bill and to listen to men like Kent Conrad is to nearly spit on the late Senator’s grave.