5 Best Sunday Columns

Health care, Wall Street reform, the Census and more

• Jonathan Cohn on the Final Health Care Bill  The New Republic writer gives his closing argument for the health care legislation: "The bill before Congress may be flawed. And the process that produced it may be severely flawed. But it is, nevertheless, an expression of the idea that we--as as society--are not prepared to let people continue to suffer such dire consequences just because they’re unlucky."
  

• Michael Goodwin on the Coming Culture War  The New York Post columnists says President Obama's health care bill will deepen America's culture war: "It's the showdown between Americans who want bigger government and those who want smaller government. And it won't be over anytime soon. Not only does it encompass and include other wedge issues, such as abortion, taxing and spending, but the war over the size of government goes to the heart of the concept of American exceptionalism."
  

• David Ignatius on U.S.-Israeli Relations  The Washington Post columnist urges Obama to push for a broad peace accord between Israel and Palestine: "What's needed now is for Obama to announce that when negotiations begin, the United States will state its views about Jerusalem and other key issues -- sketching the outlines of the deal that most Israelis and Palestinians want. If Netanyahu refuses to play, then we have a real crisis in U.S.-Israeli relations."

• Frank Rich on the Next Democratic Initiative  The New York Times columnist tells Democrats to embrace Wall Street reform: "Once the protracted health care soap opera at last becomes history, the pivot to financial reform could be a great opportunity for the president, a decisive bid for his party to repossess that anti-establishment truck from Scott Brown. The Republicans will once again squeal that it’s political suicide for Obama to try to “ram through” a bill, and once again decry his “socialism.” But while the voters were often genuinely divided about health care, they are not about Wall Street reform: polls have consistently shown for a year that a 60 percent majority favors it."

• Mark Krikorian on the Census  The executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies argues for a color blind Census questionnaire: "The Census forms that have been arriving in mailboxes this week remind us that nearly 50 years after Dr. Martin Luther King's speech, we still have an obnoxious system of mandatory government racial classification. While the motives behind today's race laws are different, and better, than those of the past, the government nevertheless continues to sort us into official racial and ethnic categories... Just as our religious affiliations are none of the government's business (and the Census is rightly barred from asking about them), we also need a wall of separation between race and state."