How the Bike Man Became the Grim Reaper: Meet Representative Earl Blumenauer.

• Author: Middlewood, Erin
• Position: Essay

Until late this summer, Earl Blumenauer, a wonkish U.S. Representative from Portland, Oregon, was best known for promoting bicycling and other forms of alternative transportation.

Then the right wing started its forget-the-facts assault on health care reform, and suddenly the Bike Man became the Grim Reaper. Blumenauer, who serves on the House Ways and Means Committee, helped draft the provision, crafted with bipartisan support, to reimburse doctors for discussing end-of-life care with patients.

Republicans and conservative commentators seized on this. House Minority Leader John Boehner warned that the provision would lead to "government-encouraged euthanasia." Sarah Palin claimed on Facebook that the legislation would create "death panels."

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Blumenauer is proud of the provision, and was surprised by the reaction. "It's the type of sad, inflammatory rhetoric that suggests that people aren't serious about health care reform, not serious about meeting the needs of American families, but rather they're playing political games," Blumenauer said in a floor speech.

"Medicare will pay to hook you up to all sorts of machines and tests and probes, but it currently doesn't pay to have a conversation for a senior citizen and their family to ask about what they're getting into and their choices," he said later in an August telephone town hall. (Like several other Democrats, he used the phone to continue the discussion about health care without opening the door to the near-riots that have occurred at town halls around the country.)

Blumenauer points out that Palin, as governor of Alaska, signed a 2008 proclamation supporting the sort of advance directives his provision encourages.

Such facts aside, the Senate scrapped the provision in mid-August.

B lumenauer comes from the first state to have adopted a Death with Dignity law, which the U.S. Supreme Court upheld in 2006. Oregon has--with minimal controversy--permitted physicians to prescribe a lethal dose to terminally ill patients since 1997. And he represents a city that has a reputation for being both progressive and practical, a sensibility that infuses Blumenauer's approach to health care reform and other issues.

You can spot Blumenauer by his bow ties. He almost always wears one, as well as another accessory--the bicycle lapel pin of the 182-member Congressional Bike Caucus, which he founded. When he arrived in Washington, D.C., after his 1996 election to Congress, Blumenauer...