As you probably all know, Senator Max Baucus of Montana, has taken the center stage in the struggle for health care reform. One reason he's focused upon so much is because his Finance Committee seems to finally be coming close to having a bill it's ready to pass out to the Senate as a whole, well after the four other Committees across Congress that have succeeded at doing it.
The Senate Finance Committee is comprised of 13 Democrats and 10 Republicans. Apparently 17 members of this Committee don't matter, as Max Baucus pulled together his "Gang of Six," three Senators from each party, to work towards drafting a piece of legislation, perhaps under the assumption that they could have gotten a handful of Republicans to support its proposal. Well, it's looking like none of the three "moderate" Republicans from the Gang of 3 will support it.
This effectively means that we're focusing on a Bill drafted and supported by just three Democratic Senators.
These three Senators are, of course, Max Baucus, from Montana, Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico, and Kent Conrad of North Dakota. Assuming that the ten other Democrats in the committee give the legislation their rubber stamp, it will make it easily out of committee and be considered the de facto Senate version of the health care bill; though it still would have to go through the merging process from other committees before making it to the Floor.
Getting back to the Gang of 3: Montana's population was most recently measured at 976,450. New Mexico has a more substantial 1.84 million people, and North Dakota clocks in at around 641,000 people. The sum total constituency of the Gang of 3 is, rounding up, about 3.5 million people. Not shabby.
Until you consider the population of the US is something like 304M people, that is.
This means that a major piece of legislation is being drafted by a group of Senators representing about 1.4% of the population.
Just for reference, the city of New York has a population of about 8.3 million people.
Max Baucus decided the already rather non-democratic Senate was not quite non-democratic enough when he decided to form The Max Baucus Gang of Six Plan, by Max Baucus, and featuring Max Baucus, and is a Baucus/Baucus Production. And by deciding to ignore the other 98.6% of Americans as well as the other 17 Senators in the Finance committee, Baucus has proven how easy it is for Congress to ignore the voice and will of the people.
We can't let up. Give the other 98.6% of Americans a voice.