The landmark bill that no one can see

For PJTV, I tried to pin down where the secret Democratic Senate meetings were being held on health care. They turned out to be a movable feast. Some were announced; many never were. No one knows who sat in what meetings and on what topics.

We don’t know how AARP fared in influencing details of the bill. Or how SEIU shaped the bill. Or what Big Pharma was promised for its endorsement of an early Obama plan…

A penchant for secrecy is a style of governing that is well known in many authoritarian countries. We don’t have to stretch our imagination to see these governing styles on display in Iran, China, Venezuela, Cuba, and North Korea.

Thankfully America isn’t Venezuela. And Obama has not become Hugo Chavez.

I suspect the face of authoritarianism here may arrive with more benign faces. It may emerge with subtle velvet hands like those used by regulators out of the European Union’s faceless bureaucracy. There, regulations are hatched in private among elites, then paternalistically dispensed to their citizens. The EU model is driven by an impenetrable bureaucracy that has little accountability, protects special groups, and informs the public in a genteel way about what it is they can and cannot do.