Republican Scott Brown’s upset win in Massachusetts last night has threatened to derail any hopes of passing a health reform bill this year, as the White House and Democratic leaders faced growing resistanc from rank-and-file members to pressing ahead with a bill following the Bay State backlash.
Democratic leaders insisted they planned to press ahead with health reform, and met late into Tuesday night in Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office. But they made no decisions about how to proceed, now that Brown has swept away the Democrats’ filibuster-proof 60-vote majority in the Senate.
Their options are few, and extremely complex, mostly involving legislative tactics that would be difficult to pull off in the best of circumstances, let alone at a time when members are worried they could be the next Martha Coakley – a seeming Democratic shoo-in laid low, in part, by health reform.
And already Tuesday night, Democrats were being forced to come to terms with the prospect that their decades-long goal of health reform might once again fall short, despite getting closer to becoming law than ever before.
Pelosi insisted Democrats could still make it happen. “We will get the job done. I am confident of that. I have always been confident of that,” she told reporters as she left the Capitol at 11:30 p.m.
“Massachusetts has health care and so the rest of the country would like to have that too,” Pelosi said, referring to the state’s health care program. “So we don’t [think] a state that already has health care should determine whether the rest of the country should.”
But it wasn’t clear last night how Democrats could do it, or how hard the White House is prepared to push. A statement by Press Secretary Robert Gibbs announcing that President Barack Obama called Coakley and Brown made no mention of health reform.
The White House’s preferred option is for the House to approve the already-passed Senate version of health reform, to avoid the need for another vote in the Senate. But several House members said last night they’re not prepared to pass the Senate bill alone – even if it means health care reform would die.
In fact, early signs of split emerged as the polls closed in Massachusetts – between leaders like House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer who said “the Senate bill is better than nothing,” and individual members who refused to swallow the Senate’s version of health reform whole.
And with the winning majority for a health reform bill in the House so thin, almost any defections at this point would be fatal to reform’s prospects.
“I’ve maintained for months now that incremental reform in the health care package would make much more sense from my perspective,” said California Rep. Jim Costa, one of the last Democrats to vote “yes” on the House bill.
He said he’d like to see Obama tell voters that “we may have been overreaching” and then push for a scaled-back bill that focuses on things more people can agree on, like insurance reforms. He said it’s not just a question of the House bill versus the Senate bill. “For me, it’s broader than that,” Costa said.
Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.), one of the leading advocates for health reform in the House, urged fellow Democrats to heed the message of Massachusetts and pivot toward creating jobs, perhaps with a health-care component added in.
“If there isn’t any recognition that we got the message and we are trying to recalibrate and do things differently, we are not only going to risk looking ignorant but arrogant,” he said.
One other option available to Democrats is ramming a revised reform package through the Senate in the roughly two weeks before Brown takes office. That idea already was fading in popularity before Tuesday’s vote, with Democrats knowing they’d be slammed for such a political power-play.
But moderate Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.) effectively put the idea to rest Tuesday night, calling the Brown victory a “referendum” on health reform and taking a swipe at his party’s leadership by calling for more transparency in the process.
“To that end, I believe it would only be fair and prudent that we suspend further votes on health care legislation until Senator-elect Brown is seated,” Webb said in a statement.
Still, Democrats are floating the idea of a two-step process – passing the Senate bill in the House in step one, then passing a second “clean-up” bill to fix the things in the Senate bill that House members don’t like. The Senate then would have to pass the clean-up bill in a reconciliation process – meaning it would only need 51 votes.
But the deep resistance to the Senate bill among many House members shows that even this legislative tactic would be difficult to pull off.
Rep. Stephen Lynch (D-Mass.) was skeptical of the two-step scenario. “I’ve heard that theory but I don’t know if it works,” he said. “The problem is this we are spending almost a trillion dollars and folks are telling me I should vote yes and we will fix it later. You wouldn’t buy a car for a trillion dollars and say yeah, it doesn’t run but we will fix it later.”
Rep. Brad Ellsworth (D-Ind.) said, “We were fully expecting to go some kind of conference committee and work out those differences [with the Senate]. And there are still differences to work out. I cannot imagine, from one person, one member from Indiana, that this House would accept the Senate bill as is.”
Liberal activists pushing for health reform pressed Democrats to keep up the fight. Health Care for America Now’s Richard Kirsch said, “When it comes to the need to make good health care affordable, nothing is different today than it was yesterday. Congress must keep going and finish reform right.”
But Brown himself called his election a message that voters – particularly independent ones – didn’t want to embrace Obama’s vision of reform.
“People do not want the trillion dollar health care plan that is being forced on the American people, and this bill is not being debated openly and fairly. It will raise taxes, it will hurt Medicare, it will destroy jobs and run our nation deeper in to debt,” Brown said in his acceptance speech.
And in the Senate, two moderates, Democrat Evan Bayh of Indiana and Independent Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, separately raised concerns Tuesday about the direction of the Democrats’ agenda, with Bayh saying he feared the Democrats’ policy plans had gone too far to the left.
“It’s why moderates and independents even in a state as Democratic as Massachusetts just aren’t buying our message,” he told ABC News. “They just don’t believe the answers we are currently proposing are solving their problems. That’s something that has to be corrected.”
As the early results poured in, House leaders and the three chairmen with jurisdiction over the bill walked their colleagues through changes that had been negotiated with the White House and Senate – but barely mentioning the political meltdown in the Massachusetts.
Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.) told colleagues that the three parties were close to an agreement on adding a new Medicare tax on unearned income for individuals who make more than $200,000 and couples who earn more than $250,000, people present said. On a normal night, that would amount to big news.
On Tuesday, it was a sidebar to the drama resolving itself in Massachusetts.
Weiner said the tone of the caucus meeting was “whistling past the graveyard.”
After the meeting, House Democratic caucus chairman John Larson (D-Conn.) said of the bill: “The reports of its death – as Mark Twain would say – have been exaggerated.”
He downplayed the negative comments from members, saying they routinely leave caucus meetings and declare it dead. “Every time we come out of a caucus, everyone pronounces the bill dead or it’s not going to pass,” Larson said.
Earlier Tuesday, Pelosi said Tuesday that House Democrats are still “right on course” with the health care reform bill, regardless of what happens in the Massachusetts special election.
But by Tuesday night, in the caucus meeting, Pelosi said, “Whatever happens tonight, we can’t ignore it,” according to the notes of someone present.
House Republican Leader John Boehner fired back at Pelosi’s “right on course” comment, with spokesman Michael Steel saying, “Regardless of what happens in Massachusetts, it’s clear that jamming this government takeover of health care through Congress will set off a political firestorm. The American people are screaming, ‘stop’ at the top of their lungs, and out-of-touch Democratic leaders ignore them at their peril.”
Despite the deep misgivings of rank-and-file members, a decision to abandon health care reform would contradict every major rationale offered by the president and congressional Democrats as to why they pushed so hard for it over the last year.
Before Tuesday, Obama and congressional Democrats were actually on the verge of passing a major overhaul of the health care system that has eluded generations of presidents and lawmakers. Giving up on it now might appear reasonable from a political standpoint in light of a Massachusetts defeat, but some Democrats fear they will look back at some point and regret deserting the bill given how far along they actually were.
The move would also run counter to the reputed ethos of the Obama White House, which regards itself as taking the long view and not reacting to every development. Plus, Obama and Democrats have argued they cannot solve the nation’s budgetary problems before dealing with health care. Those policy challenges will still be present after the polls close in Massachusetts, Democrats argue.
“For a lot of us it is our second round, and the most important thing is we know we will never get this economy under any kind of control until we get health care costs under control,” Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-N.Y.) said. “We’re not doing this to aggravate people.”
From a political standpoint, the White House will argue that Democrats own the bill either way. Most members of Congress have already for voted for the legislation, so they should take this last push to get it over the finish line and have a product to tout at the end — rather than failure.
But under the most-discussed scenario, the White House and Senate leaders would need to convince a skeptical House to trust them – that the Senate will approve the same set of changes as part of a reconciliation bill. With relations between the House and Senate strained, at best, it will be a tough lift, aides said.
But if the alternative is no bill at all, Democrats may have little choice.
{Politico/Noam Amdurski-Matzav.com Newscenter}
Hopefully the bill won’t pass, keeping many more people alive (my friends father only remained alive since he was able to reject the doctor’s death sugestion recently. He has been released from the hospital!)