There is a lot of anger today because the Senate Finance Committee rejected two public option amendments. I suppose it is valid to be pissed off at the Democrats who voted against the president’s agenda, but we’ve known this day was coming for nine months. The entire debate about health care this year has been predicated on the fact that the Finance Committee would never report out a bill with a public option. Everything the administration has said and done since the spring has been done with that unalterable inevitability in mind. It won’t mean much in the end, but this result might just allow Olympia Snowe to vote for the Finance bill, giving it a tiny sheen of bipartisanship. I don’t think we want that, however, because it will dampen the impression that the Republicans are united in opposition to the passage of any version of health reform. It would also give the Finance version of the bill a slight boost over the HELP version when it comes to time to meld them together for a vote on the floor of the Senate.
Regardless, the administration has known from the beginning that they would not a get a bill worth signing out of Finance. These votes are no more than window dressing and posturing. The single goal is to get something out of Finance and then meld it into something that can get 60 votes for cloture. It’s not even critical that the public option is in the melded bill. As long as it is in the House bill, it can get included during the Conference Committee. However, it is important that there is momentum for the public option (something HELP chairman Tom Harkin understands well).
The ideal situation from a parliamentary point of view is to include the HELP version of the public option in the base bill, and then force the opponents to strip it out with an amendment. But that might not work out for the best. For example, if the Senate has a knock-down drag-out fight over the public option and defeats it, it will be harder to get them to turn around and support it if it comes back at them in the Conference Report. The liberal majority in the Senate Democratic Caucus might be better served to save their ammunition. Pass whatever can pass without a lot of fuss and then fight like hell to include the House’s public option in the Conference Report. I could go either way on the strategy. The most important thing is that the progressives in the House hold firm in their pledge to vote against a Conference Report that doesn’t have a public option. They must make sure it is included in the House bill and they must prevail for its inclusion in the Report.
If they do, the only way they can fail is if there are Democrats (or Lieberman) in the Senate who will filibuster this at the end of the process. And, if that happens, we just go to the reconciliation process. I don’t sense that the administration is wobbly on this at all, although I’m sure they are plenty nervous. They are a lot of balls in the air at the moment, and anything can still go wrong.
