Joe Sudbay at AMERICAblog thinks that the White House sent Valerie Jarrett, David Axelrod, and Rahm Emanuel out on the Sunday morning talk shows to demonstrate their lack of support for a public option. I think his reaction to their comments is a natural and understandable one, but it isn’t necessarily the correct one. Let’s start with the fact that all three of them stated their preference for a public option. The reason that fact is automatically discounted is because they all followed up their assertion of support for a public option by saying that they could accept a bill that didn’t contain one. So, the logic goes, they aren’t really supporting the public option if they aren’t fighting for it. Instead, they are showing weakness and inviting Congress to send them a bill without a public option.
This logic is close to unassailable, but not quite. Let me go back to what I’ve been saying all along. There has always been enough opposition to the public option among Senate Democrats to assure that one could not pass the sixty-vote threshold. Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA) has identified somewhere between fifty-two and fifty-five votes. If the Obama administration had taken the position that the public option had to be in any bill they would sign, there could have been no progress in passing a bill through the Finance Committee and no credible negotiations with any Republican senators.
That is still the case. As the White House and Senate work to meld the HELP and Finance bills into something that can win 60 votes for cloture, it has to find some middle ground between the two. I don’t think the administration would facilitate that process by suddenly taking a hard-line and insisting they will veto any bill without a robust public option. It is more likely that the effort to pass a bill in the Senate would stall, as senators would lose their ability to negotiate and win concessions for their support.
For this reason, I think the administration feels constrained against making a hard stand right now. I don’t think they were sent out to signal they are soft on the public option. I think they sent that signal because they don’t want to take a final stand prematurely and are therefore unwilling to answer the question in any other way. The message they wanted to send was that health care reform is on track and moving forward. That they sent another message, of weakness, was probably unintentional and unavoidable in the face of good questioning.
But, you probably want to know, when is the administration going to make a stand? Honestly, I don’t know if they will. But, if they do, they will probably do it once both the House and the Senate have passed their own versions of the bill.
If you want to identify a sign of capitulation, look to the House, not the Senate. There is no reason to make the Democrats in the House take a tough vote on a robust public option if the whole thing is going to be jettisoned in Conference. As long as Pelosi is standing firm, you should maintain your optimism. If the House passes a robust public option and the Senate passes something less (perhaps a state opt-out provision, for example) then the time for the White House to come down hard in favor of the House version is in the Conference Committee.
There are two reasons for this. First, in working out the compromises needed to pass a bill in the Senate, most of the work will be done and the contours of the battlefield will be totally defined. Second, once a bill passes both houses of Congress, it will have so much momentum that it will be really difficult for any member of the Democratic caucus to block a vote on final passage.
So, to summarize, there are different ways to read tea leaves. But those who have been waiting for the administration to make a veto-threat on the public option are probably reading the wrong leaves. The outcome is uncertain, but the place to look is actually in the House.
