One of the biggest difficulties with the plan Harry Reid is floating to include an opt-out public option in the base health care bill is that it turns over veto power to every single Democratic senator. The plan eschews the hard-won support of Sen. Olympia Snowe in favor of attempting to get a better piece of legislation prior to the Conference Committee. But that means that no Republicans support it. And that means that Reid needs every single Democrat, plus Bernie Sanders and Joe Lieberman, to vote for cloture and kill the Republican filibuster. And the problem with that is that senators Ben Nelson, Evan Bayh, Mary Landrieu, Kent Conrad, Blanche Lincoln, and Joe Lieberman have all expressed that they do not support a public plan even if it has an opt-out provision. Reid can get them to vote for cloture, perhaps, but he will have to compensate each and every one of them in some way. Their price may be a vote on amendments that have the potential to blow up the deal. The opportunities for mischief are very high.
“He’s knows what he’s doing is a gamble,” Reid spokesman Jim Manley said. “But more and more, he’s convinced it’s the right thing to do.”
Or, as someone told Ezra Klein:
On Thursday night, Reid went over to the White House for a talk with the president. The conversation centered on Reid’s desire to put Schumer’s national opt-out plan into the base bill…One staffer briefed on the conversation says “the White House basically told us, ‘We hope you guys know what you’re doing.'”
Now, to go back to my last post, last July the president explained his strategy to me and others in the progressive blogosphere:
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…Does it have a serious public option in place? …Conference is where these differences will get ironed out…But I’m not assuming either the House and Senate bills will match up perfectly with where I want to end up.
The president never thought he could get a public option (robust, or not) in the pre-conference Senate bill. The reason is obvious. He didn’t have any Republican support for it, he didn’t even have support for it from enough Democrats on the Finance Committee, and cloture was unreachable with less than 60 members of the Democratic Caucus, but he only had a sketchy 59 members in the Caucus.
His stated plan was to get the House and the Senate to pass their bills and then fight to make sure that the Conference Report included the following:
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.
If this plan was going to work, it was going to rely on two things. First, the House was going to have to pass a public option (the stronger, the better) so that he had something to work with in Conference. Second, he was going to have rely on the sheer momentum for reform that would be created by both houses of Congress passing a bill, to bully the whole Democratic caucus to vote for cloture. But, even this plan seemed out of reach so long as the Democrats could not rely on both Byrd and Kennedy to be available for a vote.
This meant he had to do two things. He had to consider what it would take to win over Olympia Snowe (in the event that either Byrd or Kennedy were not available to vote). And he had to have the back-up plan of using the budget reconciliation process if either Snowe’s price was too high of both Byrd and Kennedy were unavailable to vote. Or, of course, there were conservative Democrats who were exacting too high a price for their cloture vote.
Think about these hurdles for a moment. Even in the best case scenario, each and every Democratic caucus member would have to be willing to vote for cloture. That meant that Obama couldn’t piss off any of them. If Kent Conrad wanted to explore co-ops, that was just something that had to be indulged. If the Finance Committee wanted to go in a totally different direction than the other committees, their views had to be respected. The question isn’t whether or not Obama has been playing 11-Dimensional Chess, but how anyone could expect him to succeed doing anything less.
So, now the stars have aligned in a way even the biggest optimist could not have anticipated. We have 60 healthy members of the caucus (for now, anyway). It is at least theoretically possible to pass a public option through the Senate on the first pass. Harry Reid is under immense pressure to make the attempt. The White House has to decide whether Reid can actually pull it off, and whether the reward outweighs the risk. After all, the plan all along assumed that the Senate could not do this, but that they could succeed in getting a public option passed anyway. What if they follow Reid’s plan and it backfires and the Senate can’t pass anything? What if what they pass includes undesirable amended language that it is impossible for them to strip out in Conference? Why lock in things that are unnecessary and hard to remove?
The calculations are incredibly complex, and the Obama administration has always followed a strategy of moving the ball forward and disempowering any single senator’s ability to obstruct. Now, I don’t really buy the narrative that has been told about Reid’s Thursday meeting with the White House. I don’t think Reid would float the opt-out compromise publicly to see how it would fly with the White House. He must have received permission to float it from the White House. In essence, they said, ‘okay, if you think you can get cloture for this, go ahead and float it and see what reaction you get.’ And, when they met at the White House, it sounds like they were willing to go along with Reid’s plan but were also nervous about placing veto power in people like Ben Nelson and Joe Lieberman’s hands. Thus, “We hope you know what you’re doing.”
If Reid gets double-crossed, or the process produces some poison-pill amendment, then the whole effort to pass this under regular order will fail, and fail because of a lack of Democratic unity. That won’t mean that the president won’t be able to revert back to the budget reconciliation process, but it will be a major blow to the momentum for reform that could derail even the effort to do it through budget reconciliation.
It’s a very high risk proposition. This isn’t about whether to pass a public option or not. It’s about passing a bill through the Senate on the first pass.