Jane Hamsher and John Cole are in a shouting match, and that’s fine. I don’t care. One bone of contention between them is rather important, though. Hamsher claims that 53 Democratic senators were on the record at one point or another as being in favor of a public option. Cole, on the other hand, claims that there were never enough votes to pass a public option. As it happens, they are both correct (or nearly so, as Hamsher links to an article that documents that 51 Democrats were in favor of a public option).
How can they both be correct and still be arguing with each other? Well, Hamsher points out correctly that the Senate Dems eventually had to resort to the Budget Reconciliation process to finish off the bill. And the Budget Reconciliation process only requires 50 votes (plus the vice-president’s tie-breaker). So, if there were 51 votes for a public option, it could have been included in reconciliation.
Cole counters that it required 60 votes to pass the main bill, and that there were never really even 50 votes for a public option because some of the Democrats were lying about their willingness to support one.
While Cole’s argument involves more conjecture, he’s nonetheless right.
What was needed was a different question from the one Hamsher was asking. Instead of asking whether senators supported a public option in the abstract, they needed to be asked if they supported using the Budget Reconciliation process to get one. On that question, there were never 50 senators voting in the affirmative. What it amounted to was that there were a few senators who expressed support for a public option, but not for “ramming it down the throat” of the Republicans with the reconciliation process. And, since that argument doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, it’s probably safe to agree with Cole that they were basically lying about their support for a public option. They told the base what it wanted to hear, but they hid behind procedure. Although, I admit, there were technical problems with fitting a public option into the reconciliation process that were valid concerns.
But this goes all the way back to the first months of the Obama administration. It was clear in the spring that the Senate Finance Committee didn’t have the votes to pass a public option. And Kent Conrad, who is a member of that committee, as well as the chairman of the Budget Committee, was telling anyone who would listen that he didn’t support using the Budget Reconciliation process for the health care bill.
It’s hard to move a process that involves getting the chairman of the Budget Committee to do something he says he absolutely will not do.
The administration’s strategy took account of the aversion of many Senate Democrats for using reconciliation. In the end, the loss of Teddy Kennedy’s seat gave them no alternative, and they made Conrad walk the plank. But that doesn’t mean that they ever had 51 votes for including a public option in the reconciliation process.
Where Hamsher is on strong footing is that it should have been possible to pass a public option using reconciliation if the Democrats who said they supported a public option were actually willing to vote for one when the time came. They weren’t.
The end result of the health care debate wasn’t inevitable. The rise of the Tea Partiers and unexpected loss of Kennedy’s seat dramatically weakened the final product. Max Baucus could have moved his bill faster through the Finance Committee so that it could have been melded with the HELP bill before the August recess. The president could have fought harder than he did for the worthy provisions that ultimately were defeated. But, it simply isn’t the case that the votes were ever there for passing a public option through the reconciliation process. And I don’t place a whole lot of blame for that on the administration. They knew that to be the case at the outset, and conditions did not improve.
