One of the things I think politicians are least inclined to do is to create problems for themselves on bills that will never become law. So, for example, so long as ‘centrist’ Democrats knew that the Employee Free Choice Act would never become law, they were all willing to vote for it. But, once it became clear that a united Democratic caucus and a Democratic president could pass the EFCA into law, several Democrats flipped and decided to oppose it. They didn’t want to alienate labor unions and Democratic activists by voting against the bill when they knew it would fail, but they were more concerned about alienating Big Business when they knew it might pass.
The same thing is going on now with the debate over a public option in the health care bill. I don’t recall a single Democrat who was running for president who didn’t run on at least a public option. And I don’t remember when senators like Max Baucus, Jon Tester, Kent Conrad, Ben Nelson, and Tim Johnson were endorsing candidate Obama that any of them complained about his health care proposals. Well, Obama won and the Democrats have sixty votes in the Senate, and they can pass single-payer health care if they want to. If they thought that the health care bill would fail, they’d probably support the public option. But they know that they have to pass a health care bill. So…now a bunch of them oppose it.
While the public’s support for a public option varies by state and region, it is overwhelmingly popular on a national level. Obama wants a public option and because he campaigned on providing one and won the election by a wide margin, he has a mandate for one. Yet, nearly a dozen Democrats have expressed some degree of reservations or even outright opposition to a public option. This is true in spite of the fact that none of them said a peep about opposing one during the primaries or the general election.
Prior to reaching the magic threshold of sixty senators, the Democrats had the excuse that they needed at least one Republican vote to achieve cloture and bring a health care bill to a vote. But, now, their only excuses are either that due to the illness of one or two senators they are not at full strength or that one or more of their own members won’t support the public option.
Assuming the Democrats can count on Sens. Byrd and Kennedy to show up for a cloture vote, the only way the Senate can fail to pass Obama’s signature program is if they harpoon it themselves. And that appears to be exactly what they are intent on doing. And they are going to do it on an issue that has the support of approxinately three-quarters of the electorate.
There are a couple of obvious steps the Obama administration can take, but they are similar enough that only one of them makes sense. The administration can ask Democratic senators who oppose the public option to vote for cloture to break the filibuster and then vote their conscience on final passage. After all, it is unseemly for Democrats to filibuster their own majority leader’s agenda. Or, the administration can let the Ben Nelsons of the world kill the bill, and then attempt to pass it in October using the Reconciliation Process which only requires fifty votes.
However, there is no point in doing the latter if they can accomplish the former. In both cases, final passage requires fifty votes. In both cases, the bill passes over the objections of a few ‘centrist’ Democrats. But, in Reconciliation, only the elements of the bill that have an impact on the budget deficit are germane, and all kinds of mischief can be created by Republicans who are willing to raise points of order to strip the bill of budget-neutral but regulatorily critical elements.
Moreover, bills that pass through the budget reconciliation process have sunset provisions that make them vulnerable in future Congresses that might be unwilling to reauthorize them (see Bush tax cuts).
It is much preferable to pass the whole bill in the regular order. That means, the administration must attempt to get all the Democrats who oppose the public option to agree to support an up-or-down vote. And that is where activist pressure can be brought to bear to push health care with a public option over the finish line.
