Who Are These People Anyway? The Gang of Six

This may be a dupe, and I'm sorry if it is but this is driving me nuts. Baucus picked these other 5 and he knew they wouldn't play ball. It makes me sick.


Who Are These People Anyway? The Gang of Six and the Politics of Health Care Reform

Jerome Karabel Posted: August 12, 2009 12:22 PM

The fate of health care reform may well now rest in the hands of a small group of Senators, three Republicans and three Democrats, who have come to be called the Gang of Six. Hand-picked by Senate Committee Finance Chair Max Baucus (D-MT), they have been assigned the elusive task of brokering a bipartisan deal -- a grand bargain -- that can attract broad support from both Republicans and Democrats. With the outcome of perhaps the most significant domestic legislation since Social Security hanging in the balance, the question arises: who are these six Senators and whom do they represent?

In terms of the states from which they come -- Iowa (Grassley-R), Maine (Snowe-R), Montana, New Mexico (Bingaman-D), North Dakota (Conrad-D), and Wyoming (Enzi-R) -- one can hardly imagine a group of Senators less representative of the entire country. Comprising well under 3 percent of the nation's population, these six states do not include a single large or even mid-sized state; in fact, 11 states have larger populations than all of them combined, with California alone having over four times the total number of inhabitants. Of the nation's 60 most populous metropolitan areas, these six states contain not a single one. But the unrepresentative character of the six states goes far beyond their sparse populations; they are strikingly racially homogeneous, with none of them more than 2.4 percent black (Iowa), and three of them less than 1 percent black (Montana, Wyoming, and North Dakota); in contrast, for the United States as a whole, blacks constitute 12.4 percent of the population. Surely in a nation that prides itself as having a government "of the people, by the people, and for the people," the stunning unrepresentativeness of the six Senators poses grave problems for democratic legitimacy.

<snip> How to reform America's deeply troubled health care system is a task that would challenge even the strongest and most representative of our democratic institutions. Entrusting it to a hand-picked group of six Senators so deeply unrepresentative of the country as a whole is a decision that neither the American people nor its elected representatives in the House and Senate should tolerate.

..... http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jerome-karabel/who-are-these-people-anyw_b_257570.html