Senate Majority leader has scrapped a deal forged by the Senate finance committee on the jobs bill, due to complaints from Democrats:
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) is rewriting a jobs bill after Democrats complained of too many concessions to Republicans.
Reid announced Thursday that he would cut back on the jobs bill Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) introduced only hours earlier, essentially overruling the powerful chairman.
It is enough to make one ask--why didn't he just do this with health care? The 74 days the Senate lost while waiting for Baucus and Grassley on health care was enough to push the process past the Massachusetts special election. If Reid had just overridden Baucus back then, the health care bill would currently be law.
I guess even if Reid did not override Baucus then, at least overriding Baucus now shows that he valuing bipartisanship at lot less these days. Progress!
Debate, amendments and voting on this bill will take place next week. As I discussed on Tuesday, this bill is pretty weak tea compared to the House jobs bill. It is especially light on direct public infrastructure spending, and direct grants to state and local governments.
The deal between Baucus and Grassley that caused Democrats to balk included many other measures:
[A] short-term extension of the USA PATRIOT Act, flood insurance provisions, Small Business Administration loan provisions, and a $1.5 billion package of agriculture disaster relief provisions.
The Baucus version of the bill also included a tax extenders component very similar to the $31 billion Tax Extenders Act passed by the House, and a deal on unemployment and COBRA extensions.
While these measures will not be in the bill the Senate votes on next week, it is important to note that the Senate isn't scrapping any of these ideas. Rather, they will take up these ideas the week after next in separate legislation.
One of the toughest decisions to make in politics is figuring out the right time to compromise and the right time to pick a fight and see the fight through. As that great verse from Ecclesiastes says so well, there is a time for every season under heaven. Being willing to make modest compromises has resulted in some of the greatest legislation in American history, but it has also been a fiasco at times. Knowing the right time to pick a fight (think Bill Clinton during the 1995 government shutdown fight with Gingrich) can be absolutely transformative for a politician.
The whole legacy thing sometimes clouds the judgment of even the best politicians on when to compromise and when to stand tall. My all-time favorite Senator, the best and most effective in history in my opinion, was Teddy Kennedy, but toward the end of his career he got snookered by the Republicans twice, in part because I think he was thinking a little too much about his legacy: on No Child Left Behind, where Bush promised him a lot for money for education and then broke his promise after the bill was passed; and on the Medicare drug bill a couple of years later, where the decent compromise he forged in the Senate got rolled in the Republican controlled conference committee, and they passed a bill that was a pure giveaway to the pharmaceutical industry.
Unfortunately, another fine Senator, Chris Dodd, is letting the legacy thing cloud his judgment. Dodd is complaining about President Obama's strong new push for a more progressive financial reform policy. Yesterday, in a committee hearing, Dodd said that the new proposals are "adding to the problems of trying to get a bill done...I don't want to be in a position where we end up doing nothing because we tried to do too much at a critical time." Dodd has been working closely with Republicans on the Finance Committee in the hopes of getting a compromise that can get 60 votes, and all of a sudden the White House is upsetting the applecart by pushing for more. Dodd knows that he needs Republican support to pass a bill in the Senate, and that to get Republican support he has to have a bill acceptable to the big banks. With him retiring, he wants one final legislative feather in his cap, so if he needs to cut a deal with the big banks, he'll do it.
Now I admire Chris Dodd a great deal. He has spent a career on the frontlines fighting for poor kids and families, and against stupid wars. But on this issue he is dead wrong. His legacy is just fine without adding a watered down and ultimately ineffectual financial reform bill to his list of legislative accomplishments. What is needed now, both for Democratic political prospects in general and to make the policy effective in reining in the power and excesses of Wall Street, is to pick the fight with the Republicans and bank lobbyists. As President Bush might have said, bring it on.
There are two dimensions to this, one on the policy side and one on the political. It is a simple fact that the longer this issue stews, and the more high-profile pressure is placed on the big bank lobbyists, the better the policy we are going to get in terms of doing things that really matter in terms of financial reform. If you tell the Republicans on the committee that we are only going to do this in a bipartisan way and we want to make you comfortable with signing off on the legislation, it puts them in the catbird seat, and the legislative language we get becomes gruel real fast. If on the other hand we raise the stakes, say (like the President in the State of the Union) that we're only going to do financial reform if we can do it right, and really start banging the Republicans for doing Wall Street's bidding, I think that after a few weeks on the grill will make at least a couple of them far more likely to agree to something real. Once it gets to the floor: if the Republicans threaten filibuster, tell them to go ahead and make our day. Bring the bill up, debate really popular amendments, and let them keep blocking a vote on the issue. I suspect that it wouldn't take very long for the Republicans to decide that we ought to let this bill pass rather than face week after week of getting public heat for being the big bankers' best buddies.
On the politics of this, Democrats have nothing but upside in picking a fight and letting it cook for a while. Every day that Democrats are seen as trying to pass the strongest possible bill to hold the banks accountable, and every day that Republicans are seen as helping Wall Street block it, is a good day for the Democrats in terms of the 2010 elections. Democrats have the political high ground here, and they damn well ought to use it to get a better bill.
Senator Dodd, I love ya like a brother. You already have a great legacy. Don't tarnish that legacy by having the final act of your long and distinguished Senatorial career being giving the big banks and their Republican allies everything they want in order to get easy passage of a watered down bank bill, hurting both the economy and your party in the process. It's time to pick a fight.
Update: Check out this article from WSJ that talks about how Republicans are running to Wall Street donors, telling them it's the Republicans who will save them from any financial reform legislation that would actually do anything to them. All the more reason to raise the stakes on this fight and go for it. Wall Street is going into high whine mode about mean old Democrats attacking them. Good. Now let's go the mat, and win the fight both on policy and politically.
A crowd of thousands gathered on Capitol Hill Tuesday, to lobby for and support immigration reform, as Debayani Kar writes for RaceWire. Representative Luis Gutierrez (D-IL) of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus "presented his key principles for comprehensive immigration reform" at the rally. They include:
So we are now finding out the answers to some of our questions about which members of Congress actually represent We, the People...and which ones represent, Them, the Corporate Masters.
We have seen a Democratic Senator propose a policy that would put people in jail for not buying health insurance and a Democratic President who has taken numerous public beatings from those on the left side of the fence for his inability to ram something through a group of people...and yes, folks, the entendre was intentional.
But most of all, we've been asking ourselves: "why would Democratic Members of Congress who will eventually want us to vote for them vote against something that nearly all voting Democrats are inclined to vote for?"
Today's conversation attempts to answer that question by looking at exactly how money and influence flow through a key politician, Montana's Senator Max Baucus-and in doing so, we examine some ugly political realities that have to be resolved before we can hope to convince certain Members of Congress to vote for what their constituents actually want when it really counts.
Conventional wisdom has a powerful grip on the minds of most political players inside the beltway, no matter what common sense, actual political reality, the best policy arguments, and actual polling say. Pundits, traditional media reporters, columnists, powerful lobbyists, insiders, White House officials and Senators go into a legislative battle convinced that a certain scenario will play out, and keep telling themselves that over and no matter what. This standard fact of DC life has been especially true in the health care fight, the CW being that a more progressive bill could never get through the Senate, therefore the Senate Finance bill would be the compromise everyone would have to live with if we were going to get health care reform done this year. Sometimes, though, conventional wisdom runs into a brick wall of political reality and common sense, and the latter occasionally prevails, because at the end of the day, elected officials will have to defend their votes made on the floor of the House and Senate. In health care, we may be getting to that moment.
I explain why, and discuss more on the politics of the situation, in the extended entry.
Yesterday, the powerful Senate Finance Committee met to debate two amendments that would have inserted a public option into the committee's health reform bill. Both amendments were defeated as key Democrats sided with Republicans and the insurance companies. David Corn of Mother Jones diagnoses what ails Senate Democrats. It's split personality disorder: "They are the best friends of the health insurance industry. They are fiercest foes of the health insurance industry."
Sen. Jay Rockefeller's (D-WV) strong public option amendment was defeated 15-8 because senators Max Baucus (D-MT), Kent Conrad (D-ND), Blanche Lincoln (D-AR), Bill Nelson (D-FL), and Tom Carper (D-DE) joined the committee's ten Republicans. In the next round of voting, Nelson and Carper backed Chuck Schumer's (D-NY) amendment, but Baucus, Conrad and Lincoln stuck with the GOP and voted it down. Ironically, as Corn observes, the Senate Democratic communications team was busy emailing blistering indictments of the insurance industry while key members of the caucus were doing the insurers' bidding.
John Nichols of The Nation worries that yesterday's defeat is a sign that Congress is backing away from a public option, which was itself a compromise alternative to a single-payer, Medicare-for-all type system:
Baucus, the insurance-industry representative who doubles as a Democratic senator from Montana, long ago rejected the notion that a robust public option might be a part of any healthcare reform measure that would pass the Senate.
The Senate Finance Committee went on to add tens of millions of dollars for discredited abstinence-only propaganda for teens, as Mike Lillis of the Washington Independent reports. Well, at least pseudoscience has a public option. If kids can learn this nonsense for free at school, maybe they'll ditch church, where you have to put your money in the collection plate to hear the sermon.
Chris Bowers of AlterNet argues that a public option still has 51 votes in the Senate. Which means that the Democrats could still pass a healthcare bill by majority vote in the upper chamber, if they decided to forgo their quest for a filibuster-proof 60 and pass the bill through budget reconciliation.
Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA), chair of the Health Education Labor and Pensions Committee, claims to have the votes to pass a plan with a public option, Lynda Waddington reports in the Iowa Independent. Harkin believes that the full Senate should have the opportunity to vote on the public option, considering that it's part of four out of the five bills that have been approved so far.
The fight for a public option isn't over yet. To date, all of the other health reform bills that are out of committee include a strong public option. The next step is putting these bills together to create the final legislation for the House and Senate to vote on.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about health care and is free to reprint. Visit Healthcare.newsladder.net for a complete list of articles on health care affordability, health care laws, and health care controversy. For the best progressive reporting on the Economy, and Immigration, check out Economy.Newsladder.net and Immigration.Newsladder.net. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of 50 leading independent media outlets, and created by NewsLadder.
As Chris noted, today we lost two amendment votes in the Senate Finance Committee on the public option, one offered by Sen. Rockefeller (8 ayes, 15 nays), and one by Sen. Schumer (10 ayes, 13 nays). Traditional media outlets everywhere are reporting this is a massive defeat for the public option, but I don't see it that way- in fact quite the opposite.
I have said before (most recently here) that the Senate Finance Committee was conservative, in fact the most conservative committee makeup in the Senate, and that we would be likely to lose these votes:
With numbers like this, and with the entire Democratic base mobilized intensely around the issue, you would have to be politically tone deaf as a Democrat to oppose this, but this is the Senate Finance Committee, so public option advocates are likely to lose these votes. The question, though, will be the margin. On a committee this conservative, far more conservative than the Senate as a whole, if we only get seven votes for the public option amendments, that would have to be considered a major political victory, and a sign that the public option can definitely get a majority vote on the floor.
So getting 10 votes on this is promising for those of us who believe a public option is essential. Baucus, Conrad, Lincoln, Carper, and Bill Nelson are five of the ten most conservative Dems in the Senate, and on the Schumer amendment, even two of them went with us. President Obama is for it, a majority in the House is for it, and the whip count we're running right here at OpenLeft.com shows that 51 Democrats are in favor of it. And today Tom Harkin confirmed that our whip count is right:
"I have polled senators, and the vast majority of Democrats -- maybe approaching 50 -- support a public option," Harkin said told the liberal "Bill Press Radio Show." "So why shouldn't we have a public option? We have the votes.
"I believe we'll have the 60 votes, now that we have the new senator from Massachusetts, to at least get it on the Senate floor," Harkin later added. "But once we cross that hurdle, we only need 51 votes for the public option. And I believe there are, comfortably, 51 votes for a public option."
Will all this evidence, the public option will only be hard to beat if Democratic leaders decide they don't want to do it.
The most conservative committee in Congress is finally getting ready to consider the first public votes on the public option, with amendments by Schumer and Rockefeller that will likely be considered on Tuesday. The Finance Committee, led by two of the most conservative Democrats in the House or Senate -- Max Baucus and Kent Conrad -- will be the first place the public option finally sees the light of day, getting debate and votes in front of everyone.
Given the poll numbers, and Baucus' past statements supporting the public option, you would think this would be a no-brainer, that no Democrat would want to risk alienating voters who overwhelmingly support it, or the fired-up party activists and donors who have been passionately fighting for it for months. Look at the polling analysis just done by Health Care for America Now:
Support for Individual Mandate Contingent on Public Option: The polls, conducted by Anzalone Liszt Research and Lake Research Partners for Health Care for America Now in mid-September, each found that likely 2010 voters oppose "requiring everyone to buy and be covered by a private health insurance plan" but support "requiring everyone to buy and be covered by a health insurance plan with a choice between a public option and private insurance plans." A mandate that individuals have coverage or pay a fine is a key feature of health care reform proposals that require insurance companies to cover everyone regardless of pre-existing conditions.
Nationally, voters oppose a mandate to purchase private insurance by 64% to 34% but support a mandate with a choice of private or public insurance by 60% to 37%.
"Requiring everyone to buy and be covered by a private health insurance plan"
National: Oppose 64% to 34%
House Swing: Oppose 60% to 34%
Maine: Oppose 55% to 35%
"Requiring everyone to buy and be covered by a health insurance plan with a choice between a public option and private insurance plans"
National: Favor 60% to 37%
House Swing: Favor 50% to 46%
Maine: Favor 55% to 40%
Note: In all three polls, half of those surveyed were asked each question.
All of the health care reform proposals that have passed Congressional committees to date, including three House committees and the Senate HELP Committee, include an individual mandate and the choice of private or public health insurance. The Chairman's mark introduced into the Senate Finance Committee includes the individual mandate without the choice of a public health insurance option.
With numbers like this, and with the entire Democratic base mobilized intensely around the issue, you would have to be politically tone deaf as a Democrat to oppose this, but this is the Senate Finance Committee, so public option advocates are likely to lose these votes. The question, though, will be the margin. On a committee this conservative, far more conservative than the Senate as a whole, if we only get seven votes for the public option amendments, that would have to be considered a major political victory, and a sign that the public option can definitely get a majority vote on the floor.
Of course, the traditional media won't report it that way -- anything that goes against their cast-in-iron conventional wisdom belief that the public option is dead will not be reported. Chuck Schumer nailed it last night on Rachel Maddow: this is just the first step, in the most conservative possible setting. This vote is all about laying the ground work for the Senate floor fight and the conference committee fight after that, both of which are far more favorable to public option advocates. With polling numbers like those above, and an activist base on fire on this issue, it is going to be more and more difficult for Democrats to vote against the public option when they have to vote in the light of day.
The public option remains in limbo. The Senate Finance Committee is fine-tuning the bill it unveiled last week, which does not include a public option. However, Brian Beutler of TPM reports that Democrats have already submitted three separate amendments that might add a public option.
Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) submitted what he calls a "level playing field" amendment, which would, incongruously, create a public option that couldn't set its own rates. A second amendment submitted by Schumer and Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA) would create a public option much like that outlined the HELP Committee bill. Finally, Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) submitted an amendment that would create a robust public option, much like the one originally drafted in the House.
It's pretty clear that no bill containing a public option in its first draft will get 60 votes in the senate. However, as Beutler reports in a second TPM piece, the Democrats are seriously revisiting the prospect of using budget reconciliation to get a health care bill through the senate with a simple majority. However, Beutler explains that Democrats are reluctant to go the reconciliation route because senate rules restrict the kind of bill that can be passed through reconciliation. For example, only provisions that "materially affect" spending can be passed through reconciliation. But what qualifies as a material effect?
Meanwhile, President Obama continues to insist that the public option isn't dead yet, Steve Benen reports in the Washington Monthly.
In other news, women's health remains a hot topic in health care reform. To understand why health care reform is especially critical for women, Public News Service interviewed Dr. Susan Wood, a scientist who famously resigned from the Bush-era Food and Drug Administration over the politicization of the approval of Plan B. Since leaving the government, Wood has returned to academia to study women's health. Some of her key findings include:
About 20 percent of women under the age of 65 have no health care insurance; in some states, women are denied coverage if they have experienced domestic violence; and when women do have coverage, they are charged higher premiums and often see a long list of preexisting conditions that are excluded, with pregnancy sometimes on that list.
If there is a public option, will it cover abortion? Rep. Lois Capps has written an amendment addressing that question. She explains her proposal in her own words at RH Reality Check.
Uncertainty remains high as the senate inches towards a bill.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about health care and is free to reprint. Visit Healthcare.newsladder.net for a complete list of articles on health care affordability, health care laws, and health care controversy. For the best progressive reporting on the Economy, and Immigration, check out Economy.Newsladder.net and Immigration.Newsladder.net. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of 50 leading independent media outlets, and created by NewsLadder.
When you get down toward the end of a legislative fight as big, complex, messy, expensive, painful, and politically and economically significant as health care, every day is a wild ride with highs and lows. You never know where you are going to end up on that day, let alone at the very end of the battle. The latest developments in health care are just the latest in this long saga.
The worst moments of the last few days are diving into the details of this godawful Senate Finance Committee bill. It's hard to know whether to laugh or cry. I mean I knew the bill coming out of Finance would be the lowest moment in the debate. I (and everyone else following this debate) have been predicting that since this fight began. But when you look at how bad this thing truly is, it makes your head swim. The bill makes it harder for women to be covered for abortions and legal immigrants to be covered at all. It penalizes employers for hiring poor people. It makes health insurance coverage unaffordable for many middle income people. It taxes high quality insurance plans. It provides no actual competition for private insurance plans, and no check on insurance companies' power. It is just a rotten, rotten bill all the way around, almost certainly worse than existing law, which is hard to do.
On the other hand, a lot of good things have happened this week. The AFL-CIO convention was one big strong pushback against the Baucus bill and in favor of the public option, the highlight of which was AFSCME President Jerry McEntee leading a chant of "Bullshit!" on the convention floor in response to the Baucus bill. At Obama rallies in Minneapolis and College Park, MD, the mere mention of the public option brought waves of uproarious cheers, while the mention by the President of the Baucus plan at the MD rally brought a massive round of loud boos. In the Senate, progressive members of the Finance Committee rebelled against the Baucus bill, likely forcing him to make changes, while a Senate Democratic caucus last night had Baucus retreating. And in the House, Nancy Pelosi once again made clear the importance of a very strong bill including a public option.
One final note I might add. At times in this long and ugly debate, the collective weight of the traditional media's conventional wisdom and signals by various political insiders have made public option advocates a little (or more than a little) discouraged. But I see new life and drive in their efforts- new ads going up by a variety of groups, some big direct action efforts being launched next week, grassroots lobbying efforts picking up steam. And some of them, by the way, are by organizations with very close ties to the White House, like Americans United for Change- if the White House thought the public option was dead, I doubt if AUFC would be making this kind of push.
The Baucus bill is an unmitigated disaster. In the 20-plus years I have been working on the national health care issues, it is easily the worst single bill I have ever seen introduced by a Democratic member of Congress. But it feels like a whole lot of people are beginning to understand that, and that the drive for a good health care bill is alive again.
Opponents of health care reform are trying to pit the insured against everyone else. Conservative Republicans like Rep. Mike Pence warn that if we get a public option, millions of Americans will lose their private coverage because so many employers will stop offering private insurance. What Pence doesn't say is that right now, employers can stop providing insurance at any time and their workers will have nothing to fall back on. As costs rise, fewer and fewer employers are providing any health insurance at all.
Most insured people have no idea how fragile their coverage is under the status quo.
The Uptake carries President Obama's address on the uninsured, in which he hammered home the message that anyone under 65 can lose their coverage at any time. Luckily for those over 65, they have a popular public option, Medicare.
There are lots of ways to become uninsured, including job loss, employers cutting off benefits, or insurers kicking customers off the rolls. As Obama said:
Over the last twelve months, nearly six million more Americans lost their health coverage - that's 17,000 men and women every single day. We're not just talking about Americans in poverty, either - we're talking about middle-class Americans. In other words, it can happen to anyone. And based on a brand-new report from the Treasury Department, we can expect that about half of all Americans under 65 will lose their health coverage at some point over the next ten years.
It's common knowledge that insurance companies drop customers with preexisting conditions and cut paying customers off when they get sick. It might surprise you to learn that domestic violence counts as a preexisting condition in many states.
Amie Newman of RH Reality Check reports that the insurance industry figured out what feminists have been saying for decades: Once a man becomes a batterer, chances are he'll continue to abuse his wife with increasing brutality. If you're a human being, that's an outrage and a tragedy. If you're a conscience-free health insurance provider, it's a big red flag to drop victims because their wounds will cost you money. This is the logic of for-profit health insurance in a microcosm: Identify the most vulnerable and purge them because they hurt your bottom line.
Meanwhile, the Senate Finance Committee is set to unveil its long-awaited bill today. The committee will vote on the bill next week. We'll examine the bill in tomorrow's Pulse.
After a seemingly endless quest for a bipartisan bill, Finance Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont) is signaling that he's prepared to move ahead without GOP support. Good thing, too. Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) swears he's serious about bipartisanship, according to the Iowa Independent, but he spent the summer telling tall tales of death panels and fundraising as an opponent of "Obamacare." Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), one potential Republican swing vote, now says she rejects the very idea of public/private competition, according to Steve Benen at the Washington Monthly.
Finally, you can use the Washington Independent's new Public Option Scoreboard to keep track of every senator's position, based on their public statements.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about health care and is free to reprint. Visit Healthcare.newsladder.net for a complete list of articles on health care affordability, health care laws, and health care controversy. For the best progressive reporting on the Economy, and Immigration, check out Economy.Newsladder.net and Immigration.Newsladder.net. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of 50 leading independent media outlets, and created by NewsLadder.
I have written several times of the media's fixation with the bill that comes out of the Senate Finance Committee on health care. It's finally starting to move now, creaking its way up the track like a half-dead carcass. Traditional media will act like whatever is in the Senate Finance bill will be the bill, that the deal is done. Not even close, folks.
Here's why the Senate Finance markup that will come out next week is nowhere close to what will be in the final legislation:
1. Finance chair Max Baucus has already messed up by not consulting with a half-dozen of the more progressive members of the committee. I am hearing numerous reports, some of which have surfaced publicly, that some of them are rebelling at the awful piece of mangled legislation being thrust in front of them. Given that Snowe is the only Republican that there is even a ghost of a chance of voting for the bill, Baucus has to get all or at least most of the Democrats on board, and I believe if the committee progressives work together, they can force some changes for the better.
2. The bill that makes it out of Finance will be so convoluted, contradictory, distorted, held-together-with-duct-tape because of all the compromises Baucus is making that Democrats will have to remake it in later stages even if they don't want to- and a great many of them want to.
3. Harry Reid still needs to marry the Finance bill and the HELP committee bill. Tom Harkin, who took over the chairmanship of the HELP Committee after Ted Kennedy passed away, is from what I hear bound and determined to make a major push to have the language of the HELP bill be a major part of the package that goes to the floor, including on the big issues like the public option and affordability for the middle class. He is being supported not only by the Democratic members of his committee but by outside progressive forces.
4. The floor fight will be wild and wooly, but I suspect that progressive forces may have an advantage in adding positive amendments to the mix in the light of day in a floor fight. The Republicans will offer all kinds of goofy amendments designed to mess up the bill, but they have two problems: they only have 40 votes, and the public polling on the GOP's actual health care proposals are very bad. Given that, Republican efforts to worsen the bill have little chance to succeed. Progressives, on the other hand, want to improve the bill by doing things that are actually popular: the public option (consistently polls in the 60s and 70s); taxing the wealthy instead of middle class workers with good insurance plans; making health insurance more affordable to the middle class. All of these are going to be pretty hard to vote against on the Senate floor.
5. Finally, to return to a theme I have been rather repetitive about in recent months, it is abundantly clear that House progressives, if they stay strong and stay together, have the negotiating power to block a bad bill. If they don't wilt, if they don't let themselves get picked off one by one, they can negotiate for a good health care bill, one that has a public option, one that is affordable for the middle class, one that forces insurers and providers to do real cost containment.
The traditional media will fall all over themselves to pronounce whatever Senate Finance does to be chiseled in stone. But progressives, if they work together and negotiate tough, can write a bill that will work, a bill on comprehensive health reform that we can all look back on as one of the greatest accomplishments of the era.
Senator Max Baucus's draft of health care legislation appears to be set for release tomorrow night. The Senate Finance Committee is scheduled to start the "mark-up" process--debate and amendments--on September 23rd. Or, at least that is the latest deadline Baucus is floating:
Baucus (D-Mont.) told the Wall Street Journal that the bill, expected to cost $880 billion over the next decade, is "on track" for debate by the committee starting Sept. 23.
There are going to be a lot of amendments offered by both Democrats and Republicans during the mark-up process. Many of these amendments will be attempts by Democrats on the Finance Committee to improve the bill. Baucus doesn't think they will pass:
Based on the comments by several committee Democrats after a meeting Monday evening, that mark up could be a lengthy one.
Baucus acknowledged that the mark-up could prove a busy one but predicted that Democrats would support the package he plans to unveil Wednesday without major changes.
"I don't see any deal-breaker amendments," Baucus said. "Put it this way: It's unlikely that any amendments, which basically change the framework, will be accepted."
If there is an amendment to include a public option in the bill, it will go a long way toward clarifying the Senate whip count picture. Five of the Democrats who have been the most difficult to pin down on the public option--Max Baucus, Kent Conrad, Tom Carper, Blanche Lincoln and Bill Nelson--are on the Finance Committee. Another Democrat, Ron Wyden, has expressed that he is open to a public option, but has not firmly committed.
These six Democrats represent nearly half of the remaining "maybe" votes in the Senate on the public option. As such, a committee vote on a public option will go a long way toward clearing up the whip count picture on the public option in the Senate. Even an amendment on the public option that doesn't pass could net us three or four new "yes" votes. Since we are currently at 44, that would push us to the brink of 50 and proof that a public option could pass the Senate under reconciliation / after cloture / via the nuclear option or any other procedural move to get an up or down vote.
No Democratic Senator is going to get out of this one without voting on the public option. Even before the floor vote, a whole bunch of fence-sitters are going to have to tell us which side they are on next week.
Big news broke over the weekend: Evidently, the president lit a fire under Max Baucus (D-Mont) and the Senate Finance Committee by unexpectedly announcing last week that he'd be laying out his own vision for health care reform this Wednesday. Just weeks ago, committee member Kent Conrad (D-ND) predicted the Finance Committee wouldn't have a bill until November. But Baucus circulated a legislative framework over the weekend.
Baucus's bottom line: There will be no public option. Instead, the government will spend hundreds of billions of dollars to subsidize the same old expensive, inadequate private insurance system that health care reform was supposed to reform. The insurance companies get 46 million new customers, and in return, they will pay higher taxes to offset the cost of the subsidies-a kickback to Uncle Sam.
Last week Brian Beutler of Talking Points Memo and I sat down to discuss some burning questions in health care reform: What's the president's thinking on the public option? What leverage does he have over the progressives in the House who demand single payer and/or the Blue Dogs in the senate who reject it? Why is Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) the last best hope for bipartisanship? (The transcript of our discussion has been edited for brevity and clarity.)
You said the [week of September 1] really stood out from the last month in terms of the health care debate. How so?
Maybe the last two days just stood out from the previous month. ... Obama's approval [rating] slid and popular support for the idea of healthcare reform slid. And August came to an end and the President's vacation is winding down, and suddenly the administration realizes that Congress is coming back and they are going to have to do something. And so, it seems they start leaking to a bunch of high profile reporters that they are going to perhaps ditch the public option as part of a grander move to regain control of the debate.
Are the anonymous leakers saying in so many words that they want to ditch the public option?
Well, it's unclear what they are actually going to do. The Public Option would die with dignity. [If] that is accomplished, the President could maybe win over some Republicans, grab the debate and spell out in clearer terms what he wanted [beyond] the public option. He could do this all in a big speech for Congress which is scheduled to happen Wednesday.
Isn't this just a repeat of what we saw during the week of August 20, when the White House seemed to be doing a good cop/bad cop routine where an anonymous aide would leak "to hell with the liberals and the public option" and then another adviser would say on the record how much the president loves the public option?
It could just be a replay. Once those stories came out, the picture sort of fogged up. [There were] secondary reports that the President was courting Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) again-as if maybe one Senate Republican would vote with him on health care reform. Snowe's idea [includes a] public option, but you attach it to a trigger mechanism so that it is only enacted if the rest of healthcare reform is unsuccessful at bringing down prices and expanding coverage. And that's sort of been unacceptable to reformers and progressives, but ... that might be the pound of flesh that she yields from the bill. It fits in with the picture that the leakers painted ... that the public option was no longer going to be one of the key features of the bill.
You wrote about how budget reconciliation could be used to get around the filibuster. How would that work?
The greater problem is the structure in the Senate, where legislation can pass with a majority vote-but only after Senators have debated the bill for as long as they want. As long as 60 Democrats aren't there to shut the minority up, debate can go on and on and on. [ED note: AKA filibustering.] And for every major piece of legislation you see. this happens. ...
There's this de facto 60-vote rule on most legislation, at least in this Congress and the previous Congress since the Democrats took it over. It's extremely difficult to pass a bill through just the regular procedure without either having to concede a bunch of substantive provisions ... or just give up on the bill entirely. [There are] 59 members of the Democratic caucus right now, and maybe 10 of them are mushy on the more progressive part of the President's agenda. Even if all of them are onboard, you're still one vote short of what you need to end debate. And that is why Olympia Snowe matters right now.
So the House would pass the bill and the Senate would pass a bill with budget reconciliation?
They could in theory. Budget reconciliation is sort of like a magic bullet. Every year, the Congress can pass what is known as a budget reconciliation bill. It sets new taxes, or moves money around within the federal budget to basically do what the Congress's budget lays out. It ... was made exempt from the filibuster because Congress [has to] set a budget. ... They need to make sure that money is there and can't have Senators filibustering it just because they're in a fit of peak. So that bill can't be filibustered, but at the same time, the legislation that can be passed in it has to be relevant to the budget, it has to move money around in some way.
So you can pass a lot of elements of healthcare reform in theory-you can pass subsidies to poor people and middle-income people. And you can pass Medicaid expansion, and you might even be able to pass the public option because the public option may need subsidies of its own and could drive down other costs and be a big moneysaver.
How might the president pressure progressives into accepting the bill?
My sense is that the President [will pressure] progressives to back off on the public option. But that could change. Trying to figure out what is going to happen is kind of like trying to move 23,000 moves ahead in a game of 17 dimensional chess. ...
[Obama can] say is that what he's planning will, while not perfect, help a lot of people make the healthcare system more progressive than it was. ... But it would really harm the democratic party and his presidency if the whole project failed and nothing passed. Obama doesn't have a tremendous amount of leverage. [Many] progressive members of Congress are progressive because they don't have viable challenges. They come from progressive districts, with constituents like them, approval ratings in the 60s, 70s, and they aren't going to lose to a member of the opposite party. So in that sense, they can do what they want.
How can Blue Dogs say that progressives should suck it up and vote for every bill when they are never prepared to do the same thing?
... It would at least be a good experiment, for the party and the country, for the [Blue Dogs] to be put on the spot. They believe that their jobs are on the line if they vote for controversial legislation. I don't know how those conversations go when political members of the administration confront these guys and say 'You got into politics to make the world a better place, not to just have a tenure job on Capital Hill. So you're going to vote yes on this and if you lose your jobs as a result, then you did the right thing and we'll make sure that the Democratic party infrastructure is there for you ... .' But that's not the way the party thinks. [It's a] game of building an unstoppably large coalition, and that becomes the goal in the end. And at some point you lose sight of why you are amassing this giant congressional majority and you're never willing to say, well we built this 70 whatever majority so that we could sacrifice some of these seats and do something really impressive and progressive for the good of the country.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about health care and is free to reprint. Visit Healthcare.newsladder.net for a complete list of articles on health care affordability, health care laws, and health care controversy. For the best progressive reporting on the Economy, and Immigration, check out Economy.Newsladder.net and Immigration.Newsladder.net. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of 50 leading independent media outlets, and created by NewsLadder.
Ed. note: The Weekly Pulse is becoming the Daily Pulse for September. Every weekday, we'll bring you highlights from the health care reform debate, including exclusive video interviews with leading experts and independent journalists each Friday. Even better, you can be a part of the conversation. Stay tuned to find out more!
A power shift is underway in Washington. Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick announced on Monday that a special election to replace the late Sen. Ted Kennedy would not take place until January 19, 2010. With Kennedy's seat empty, the Democrats no longer have the 60 votes they need to break a filibuster in the Senate. Up until this point, the White House was hoping for a compromise bill that the entire Democratic caucus, and maybe even a few Republicans, could agree on.
Steve Benen of the Washington Monthly notes that the Gang of Six has made itself irrelevant. These powerful members of the Senate Finance Committee were in charge of hammering out a bipartisan health care bill. They forgot that they were only powerful if people believed a bipartisan compromise was attainable.
Talking Points Memo reports that the White House has given up on Republican gangster Sen. Mike Enzi (R-WY). They finally got the hint when Enzi told a radio listeners that Democrats wanted to kill the elderly with comparative efficacy research. The White House should have cut its losses two weeks ago when Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) repeated the "death panel" meme at a town hall meeting. Grassley has also been raising money campaigning against "Obama-care."
It's looking more and more like the Democrats will have to look to budget reconciliation, a special parliamentary procedure that could sidestep a filibuster and pass a healthcare bill by a simple majority vote.
America's Health Insurance Plans, the industry's top lobby group, dispatched 50,000 employees to town halls to fight the public option. Stephanie Mencimer of Mother Jones took a cue from Michael Moore in Sicko. She asks AHIP what kind of insurance their top lobbyist has. Mencimer says AHIP was so standoffish you'd think she had a preexisting condition.
In Mother Jones, Ben Buchwalter and Nikki Gloudeman take a closer look at the corporate megabucks behind the town hall brawls. Corporate enemies of healthcare reform are using front groups like FreedomWorks to organize angry mobs at town hall meetings. Zach Roth of TPM Muckraker reports that "legendary GOP bamboozler" Howard Kaloogian has launched a tea party bus tour to protest healthcare reform.
Speaking of frauds, you've probably heard about so-called crisis pregnancy centers that pose as abortion clinics in order to cajole women into having babies. Ever wonder what happens to those babies? In the Nation, Kathryn Joyce goes inside the world of high-pressure Christian adoption agencies that support desperate women, as long as they promise to give up their babies.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about health care and is free to reprint. Visit Healthcare.newsladder.net for a complete list of articles on health care affordability, health care laws, and health care controversy. For the best progressive reporting on the Economy, and Immigration, check out Economy.Newsladder.net and Immigration.Newsladder.net.
This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of 50 leading independent media outlets, and created by NewsLadder.
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