Federal Judiciary

Not one opposition member voted for his health-care reform. That, along with tawdry buyoffs for fence-sitting members of the Senate and a reconciliation process that avoids another Senate vote, has made a mockery of Obama?s campaign rhetoric of ?healing.?

Will the president react by picking his next fights more carefully, avoiding the sort of shady legislative dealings and us-vs.-them rhetoric that helped ram this bill through?

Or will the methods used to pass Obamacare, which many polls deemed unpopular leading up to this weekend?s vote, become the model formula for a new damn-the-torpedoes, full-speed-ahead progressive agenda?

We will learn soon, on a variety of issues.

Obama may well try again for a comprehensive cap-and-trade bill. The increased taxes resulting from such legislation would trickle down into added fees on power bills for households and businesses. Such European-style state regulation would delight his liberal base and cement his credentials as our first activist-green president.

Yet, given the shaky economy and controversies over the very science of global warming, forcing cap-and-trade through would ensure more months-long acrimony -- identical, in other words, to the health-care fury.

Far easier world be a bipartisan effort aimed at more reliance on nuclear power and radical expansion of drilling for vast deposits of domestic natural gas.

Industry supporters would welcome the boost for employment and greater independence from costly foreign energy. Liberals could applaud lower greenhouse-gas emissions than coal-fired plants currently produce.

President Obama apparently also wants to do comprehensive immigration reform -- he spoke of his plans in a taped video at this past weekend?s immigration march in Washington.

But Obama?s comprehensive solution to illegal immigration -- earned citizenship and amnesty -- can likely only be pushed through Congress by engaging in legislative gymnastics, demonizing the opposition as nativists, and energizing partisan activists by promising to pay them back for their blanket support in the 2008 campaign.

In other words, it will require the same kind of knock-down, drag-out fight we just saw over health care.

Again, far better for the country would be a bipartisan effort to take less dramatic steps toward ending the influx of illegal aliens.

The president could do an about-face and complete the stalled border fence, enforce all existing laws against employers of illegal aliens, and put off the messy fight over amnesty and guest workers until the borders are secure.

Liberals and unions would welcome the rise in wages that would occur once low-income American laborers had fewer illegal competitors. Conservatives could be assured that without an annual addition of a million new illegal aliens, there would be greater chances for the immigrants already here to assimilate and integrate into American society.

It could be a winning situation for everyone -- except the minority that is counting on open borders and serial amnesties for those who break federal laws, as well as a Mexican government that would rather export its population than make the necessary changes that would allow them to stay with their families at home.

Then there are the now-record annual deficits and the spiraling national debt. Even the new revenue from a promised return to Clinton-era tax rates and a radical lifting on the caps on income subject to payroll taxes won?t balance the budget.

So as Obama continues to grow the government, he?ll bring on yet another partisan fight, one over higher taxes.

Or he can acknowledge that new local, state, payroll, health-care, and income taxes will soon take more than 60 percent of the incomes of precisely those who pay the majority of existing taxes -- and decide instead to restrict all federal spending growth to the rate of inflation.

Areas where Obama could find centrist solutions and bridge differences are almost countless -- from abolition of agricultural subsidies to energy independence. But getting things done incrementally and quietly would not bring out the drama, the headlines, and the partisan emotions that the fight over health care produced.

What lessons for the future will the president draw from last week?s health-care brawl?

I doubt it will be that the president and Congress should not ram through unpopular legislation on a strictly partisan and bare majority.

More likely, Obama?s conclusion will be that a win is a win and it?s time to move on for more of the same bare-knuckle brawling.

If the latter is true, Americans may see more change, but they surely will end up with far less hope.

-- Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and editor, most recently, of Makers of Ancient Strategy: From the Persian Wars to the Fall of Rome. © 2010 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

Full post as published by Bench Memos - National Review Online on March 25, 2010 (boomark / email).