On July 20th, I was on a conference call with the president that I described here. Fortunately, Ezra Klein produced a transcript so that you don’t have to take my word for what the president said.
The House bills and the Senate bills will not be identical. We know this. The politics are different, because the makeup of the Senate and the House are different and they operate on different rules. I am not interested in making the best the enemy of the good. There will be a conference committee where the House and Senate bills will be reconciled, and that will be a tough, lengthy and serious negotiation process.
I am less interested in making sure there’s a litmus test of perfection on every committee than I am in going ahead and getting a bill off the floor of the House and off the floor of the Senate. Eighty percent of those two bills will overlap. There’s going to be 20 percent that will be different in terms of how it will be funded, its approach to the public plan, its pay-or-play provisions. We shouldn’t automatically assume that if any of the bills coming out of the committees don’t meet our test, that there is a betrayal or failure. I think it’s an honest process of trying to reconcile a lot of different interests in a very big bill.
Conference is where these differences will get ironed out. And that’s where my bottom lines will remain: Does this bill cover all Americans? Does it drive down costs both in the public sector and the private sector over the long-term. Does it improve quality? Does it emphasize prevention and wellness? Does it have a serious package of insurance reforms so people aren’t losing health care over a preexisting condition? Does it have a serious public option in place? Those are the kind of benchmarks I’ll be using. But I’m not assuming either the House and Senate bills will match up perfectly with where I want to end up. But I am going to be insisting we get something done.
Here’s my paraphrase:
In the end, Obama made an observation that I have made many times before. The House is going to introduce several different bills from different committees (Health & Education, Energy & Commerce, and Way & Means) and so is the Senate (HELP & Finance). All of those bills will eventually be combined into one, so it doesn’t matter tremendously if one of them lacks the public option. The whole thing is going to go down after the House and Senate have each passed their bills, when those bills have to be reconciled in a Conference Committee. It is the Conference Committee that will produce the final product. What Obama wants right now is for the House and Senate to each pass a single bill before they go into the August recess. That will be the completion of the first step.
When they come back in September, they will have the vote on the reconciled bill. If the Dems can get 60 votes in the Senate, then Obama will sign it, and it will become law. If the Dems can’t get 60 votes in the Senate by October 15th, then they will revert to the budget reconciliation process that only requires fifty votes. The latter process is inferior for a variety or reasons that I will not go into right now, but it can get the job done if it becomes necessary.
The bit about using reconciliation was gleaned from the president’s response to a question from Jonathan Singer of MyDD.
Unfortunately, the president’s message wasn’t absorbed by many of the people on that call. As it turned out, the Finance Committee stalled in July and could not report out a bill before the August recess. Honestly, the president made it plain that he didn’t give a shit what was in the Finance bill just so long as it finished its work so the process could move to the next step (where we are now). That’s what I reported to you at the time and have been reporting ever since.
I didn’t spend a lot of time on the intertubes today, but it was clearly a day when the leaks were flying and everyone was trying to read the tea leaves.
Let me tell you something. If Harry Reid went up to the White House with a plan to pass a public option and the president did not like the plan, you never would have heard about it. Reid never would have taken the step to float putting the public option in the base bill if he didn’t already have a green light from the White House. The truth is that the administration never believed they could pass a public option through the Senate on the first pass. That was what Obama was telling us on that conference call back in July. But things changed when Kirk replaced Kennedy and Byrd regained his health. We have 60 senators now, and if Reid thinks he can get 60 votes for cloture that changes the plan.
The original plan assumed that the Senate would fail to pass any bill, and was based on making sure all the blame for that fell on obstructionist Republicans. Then they would go to the budget reconciliation process. However, with 60 senators it’s impossible to put all the blame on Republicans if the bill stalls in the Senate. Now it is worthwhile to cut a deal. But it has to be a deal that gets the president what he said he wanted all along. He never cared about the details so long as he could get what he wants in the Conference Committee. So why do we have to freak out everytime someone leaks something that sounds an off note?
