I don’t think I will. Flawed, well-meaning legislation with some good parts passed the House last night, and the process to make it a bit better moves to the Senate, along with a transformation of the student loan market which, while less impactful than expected, is in some ways a more sweeping achievement, ending useless subsidies to private banks completely. Them’s the facts.

There will be opportunities – legitimate opportunity – to build on what’s really good about the legislation, insert what’s missing, and fix what’s bad in the coming weeks, months and years. I don’t know that it’ll start with this odd promised vote on a public option by Harry Reid within the next few months. The President also told Stephen Lynch he’d be willing to consider a public option next year. Neither of these claims are entirely plausible, especially if you believe that the President and the hospital industry sealed a deal to kill off the public option last summer.

The energy that went into the movement for a not-for-profit expansion of our health care system will not likely go away. And while it would have been preferable to get a piece of that architecture inside this bill – because if you believe that the whole legislation will improve over time, that would have been just as true for any public option – the movement to add it in after the fact will continue and become part of the progressive platform, part of primary challenges, etc. Alan Grayson’s bill to allow every American to buy into Medicare at cost has over 80 co-sponsors. He does not strike me as someone who will stop.

I associate myself with much of Joan McCarter’s remarks. I never felt the nihilistic impulse that blowing up this process would heighten the contradictions and facilitate the destruction of the insurance industry – that claim was made in 1993, and it didn’t pan out. I’m concerned that this legislation has weak enforcement and does help the for-profit industry survive to an extent. And I’m extremely aware of the other trade-offs made in this bill.

But politics is an ongoing, evolving process without a finish line. If the drug industry won out by shielding their profits, you can target them again. If choice suffers, you now have a very defined target list of the culprits, and you can make them pay. If you agree about the good parts like Medicaid expansion and the revolution in community health centers, you can work to make them even bigger and better. And so on.

I really agree with this, though:

But if the deficiencies–and they are significant–are going to ever be fixed, we can’t make the case for doing so by saying this is a progressive victory along the lines of Medicare or Social Security. It’s just not. If, as progressives have been told and are now repeating, this bill is just the start to reform, we can’t lose sight of exactly where it is we’re starting, and what still needs to be fixed. Congressional progressives are already in a bad negotiating position for future fixes–when as Glenn argues they’ve already shown how easily they can be rolled–by not setting down markers now for what still needs to be fixed.

There will be other fights – in fact, some start today. You either give up or play the game of inches that comes with being on the side of the people against the powerful. I wouldn’t advise giving up.

UPDATE: Robert Reich has an interesting take.