Max Baucus as Committee Chair: Coincidence?

There's a good article at The Daily Beast which demonstrates the frustration of the left with the current health care bill, Max Baucus, and small state senatos. However, Michelle Goldberg wonders "Somehow, the most important progressive legislation in a generation has ended up in the hands of a conservative, unimaginative man whose coffers are stuffed with health care industry dollars, and who represents a state with less than half the population of Brooklyn," the following portion of her article demonstrates that it was no coincidence that it did. It is not "somehow" that it came to be.

Indeed, Baucus exemplifies much of what’s wrong with the Senate—both its fealty to corporate donors and the inordinate amount of power it accords to people from small, conservative-leaning states.

The combined populations of Montana, Wyoming, Nevada, North and South Dakota, Colorado, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Arizona and Alaska are about equal to those of New York and Massachusetts. The former states have 22 senators; the latter, at the moment, have three. That creates a tremendously high bar for progressive legislation, even if that legislation is supported by a majority of Americans. Worse, campaign funding compounds the rightward tendencies of small-state senators. As Nate Silver pointed out last month, senators from small states, having a smaller fundraising base among their constituents, are more reliant on donations from corporate political action committees. “Senators from the ten smallest states have received, on average, 28.4 percent of their campaign funds from corporate PACs, versus 13.7 for those in the ten largest,” wrote Silver, who concluded that small state senators have even more incentive than their colleagues to “placate special interests.”

The nature of the Senate is that any bill costing money must go through the finance committee, in addition to any other committees which have oversight. It will cost money to insure people, so it is under the jurisdicion of the Senate Finance committee, and public health bills are also under the jurisdiction of the Senate HELP committee (Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions). Healthcare has been a Democratic priority since 1992. Democrats use a system of seniority and interest when choosing committee chairs, and small state senators are more reliant on corporate PAC money than large state Senators.

So is it really a random occurance that a conservative, small state senator would end up being the committee chair of one of the two committees through which health care legislation must pass? Or is it more likely that a small state senator knew that this would be a priority in the future, knew he would have to raise corporate money to be elected, so he showed an interest and therefore would be chairman of one of the two committees when the time came for creating a bill?

I don't think it was "somehow" at all - Baucus has raised more than $1,000,000 in the past five years from the health care industry.