I wish I could embed
this video of Senator Max "Captain Inneffective" Baucus talking to the editorial board of the Helena Independent record but even though I can't, I highly recommend you go to the link and watch it. For most of the video Baucus comes off as a pretty good choice to steer health care reform through the Senate, but two issues which are really one issue end up exposing not just his problem but also the problem of Democrats in the Senate being led by Harry Reid.
The two problems that come out in the interview is that for one Max Baucus has decided to bring in three Republicans to negotiate with three Democrats on the Senate Finance committee without paying any attention to the actual party make up of the committee nor the political leanings of the 3 Republicans he invited over. The only Republican out of the 3 that is even remotely reasonable is Olympia Snowe and she is a centrist of the worst kind. She doesn't look for a middle ground of policy, what she looks for is the least controversial course of action. Or at least what is percieved as least controversial. So she is not going to push for good policy if it can at all be painted as controversial. And remember she is the gold standard of this motley crew.
Then you have Senators Chuck Grassley and Mike Enzi who both claim to be staunch conservatives which really translates into being staunchly against Democratic governance. There is pretty much zero chance that either of these guys are going to vote for a final health care reform bill, and yet here they sit in negotiations no doubt watering down the bill while offering little if anything up as a sacrifice in these so called negotiatioins. Not only are the undermining the efforts inside these sham negotiations, they are also undermining them in public too by making several statements which were meant to validate bogus smears and rumors about the health care bills that have already passed and in the case of Chuck Grassley actually gloating about the fact that he helped to insure that no bill came out of the Senate Finance committee before the August break which gave the GOP and their insurance industry cohorts the opportunity to launch these ambush attacks at Democratic townhalls.
The second issue is Baucus' repeated insistence that he is trying to put together a bill that will get 60 votes. This is his response again and again when asked about whether or not he will include a public option in the bill. The clear implication, although he is too chickenshit to say it plainly, is that there is no way to get 60 votes for a public option. Now he gives a pretty lame excuse in my opinion at first when explaining that Senators Ted Kennedy and Robert Byrd are ill. I have to believe that if there was a vote for cloture on health care reform and Senator Kennedy's vote was needed that he would find a way to make it there if he wasn't on his death bed. And Robert Byrd, while ill, has been back to work since before the August break. Eventually you hear Baucus admit that there are also 4 or 5 other Democrats who say they are against a public option.
But here is my thing, I can accept that some of our more conservative Democratic members of the Senate may be against a public option and that they want to vote their conscious. What I can not accept, nor can I understand why the Obama administration is willing to accept, is that any of those members would support a Republican filibuster of health care reform. If there was ever an action that a Democratic member of the Senate could do to provoke a harsh backlash from the administration it should be supporting a filibuster on major Democratic legislation. That action should lead to that Democratic Senator becoming a parriah in the party and all financial support should be from that point on shut down. Any parochial interests ie earmarks should be cut from just about every appropriations bill and a suitable primary opponent should be sought post haste.
Voting no on an up and down vote is one thing but voting no to help prevent such an up and down vote on Democratic legislation is just beyond the pale.
Now back to Baucus, these two issues that he raises through out the interview are intertwined and that's where I think it shows he totally screwed the pooch when it came time for him to decide how this bill would be crafted. On the one hand he believes that he is going to need 60 votes for cloture to get the bill through because of course the Republicans are going to filibuster. Well to me that is even more of a reason to let the process play out as it normally would in the full committee. For one, most factions would all get a fair hearing and be able to put their ideas forth about the legislation. For two it would all be out in the open for the world to see exactly how these negotiations are happening. And for three and maybe biggest of all, the leadership would be able to gauge by their demeanor which Republican Senators might be ripe to be picked off for a vote.
If its true that Baucus feels like we need Republican support to over come a filibuster then the only legitimate votes he should have been looking for are those to replace Senator Kennedy's and Senator Byrd's. That means he basically needed to find two votes at the most. So how in the hell did he come up with Grassly and Enzi to try to accomplish that goal? Thats the question I want to ask because the truth is, if the public option dies, much of the credit or blame will and should go to his choice of these right wing buffoons as negotiating partners. In his quest for 60 votes he is negotiating with at least two people who have always been against a public option. And by keeping the negotiations behind closed doors he eliminaed even the slim chance that the negotiations themselves might have attracted support from othe Republicans in Congress. And now the threat of a filibuster compells him to not even give the public option a shot of being in the bill lest the two guys he is negotiating with whom are never going to vote for this bill anyway, won't vote for a bill with a public option.
My head hurts.
But there are several fixes to this situation if you ask me. The first would be to drop this Gang of Six bullshit and just take the bill back to where it belongs in the full Finance committee and push it through from there to the floor of the Senate. The other fix would be for the White House and the DNC to step in and threaten to destroy any Democrat in the Senate who supports a Republican filibuster while also courting the full range of potential Republican allies on health care reform like Senators Susan Collins, or George Voinovich, just in case Kennedy or Byrd can't make the vote. The fourth, and honestly what is most preferrable to me, is for Baucus to tell the Republicans in the Gang of Six to get bent and push a Democratic bill through committee with a strong public option and then dare the GOP to filibuster. Allow them to shut down the Senate and make sure that their actions are on CSPAN.
Now contra public belief if the Republicans want to filibuster a bill they do not have to talk continuously like Jimmy Stewart did in the movie Goes To Washington. However they do have to make several procedural moves hour after hour and day after day to keep a filibuster going. This is an issue that is so important and so decisive that it is the perfect opportunity to actually call the Republican's bluff. Let's see how many of them will continue to support a filibuster with the nation watching. Let's see how many of them are willing to stand between poor people getting health insurane. Let's see how many of them are committed to helping health insurance companies discriminate against people with preexisting conditions. And lets see how much resolve they have as people continue to lose their jobs and thus their health insurance and are waking up to what that really means.
But for that we would need a strong Majority Leader and unfortunately we don't have one. Harry Reid should have shut down Max Baucus from the moment he came up with his Gang of Six approach. He should have threatened to strip his chairmanship if he would not put the negotiations back in the full committee. And biggest of all Harry Reid shoudl have put the fear of God in any Democratic member of the Senate who dared to say they would ever consider supporting a filibuster of a health care reform bill.
Now the good thing is that there is still a little bit of time for wiggle room, but what we need right now is a strong Democratic leader to step forward and kick the caucus members in the ass and get them back on track. That could be President Obama, that could be Harry Reid, or better yet it could be a Senator like Chuck Schumer or Dick Durbin who wants to go for Reid's crown and uses this opportunity as a shot across the bow. I honestly don't care who does it but dammit it needs to be done. We can get a progressive bill with a public option through both house of Congress. All it takes is somebody with balls enough to stand up to the ConservaDems and get them to toe the line on a cloture vote and for someone to step to Max Baucus and tell him that his services are no longer needed.
The truth of the matter is that with a change in the process and a change in tactics I feel good in predicting that in the end we will still peel off a few Republicans. But first we need a bill out of committee to get them on board with in the first place and second of all we need a good bill with a public option so that all of the Democrats can feel good voting for cloture knowing that the bill will deliver on everything President Obama promised.
The question for me now is who, if anyone, will step up to the plate and assume the mantle of Democratic leadership. Its all right out there for somebody. I just hope it happens soon.
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