I can’t say that I see the Senate’s inability to get a health care bill to the floor before the August recess as a positive sign. But I don’t think it is necessarily a big problem, either. I have known for two years that the biggest obstacle to passing a health care reform bill was going to be Max Baucus and his Senate Finance Committee.
On June 17, 2008, I wrote this:
The key to any medical reform in this country runs right through Max Baucus’s Finance Committee and the Senate Republican’s filibuster. The Finance Committee is one of the elite committees in the Senate. No one from the Class of ’06 has yet earned a seat on the committee. The most junior member is Ken Salazar of Colorado, who is hardly a liberal. I’ve long despaired at the makeup of the Finance Committee because it is so conservative that I assume it will never consider a truly universal system of health care. Even if we elect 10 or more new senators this fall, it’s unlikely that any of them will win a seat on Finance until at least two years later.
And what I foresaw is exactly what has come to pass. The Senate health care bill is going to be written by the Finance Committee and the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, which is better known as the HELP committee. Out of the thirteen Democrats on the HELP committee, six (Sanders, Brown, Casey, Hagan, Merkley, and
Franken) have been elected in the last two cycles. The Finance Committee accepted two new members for this Congress (Tom Carper of Delaware and DSCC Chairman Bob Menendez) both of whom came into the Senate prior to the anti-Bush backlash of 2006.
It’s not too surprising, then, that the HELP committee felt they had a mandate from the voters who put both them and Obama in power. They passed a bill through their committee on a strict party-line vote and they didn’t waste a lot of time trying to attract Republican support. The Finance Committee, on the other hand, is made up of a lot of old bulls who fancy themselves moneyboys. You’ve got Standard Oil scion Jay Rockefeller and Heinz ketchup heir-toy John Kerry, and Blanche Wal*Mart Lincoln sitting on that committee, and they think it’s their job to keep taxes low on multibillionaires. So, the Finance Committee can’t agree on how to finance the Health Care bill and they’re holding everything up. But, you know what? It’s okay. We’ve got a similar problem with the Energy and Commerce Committee in the House. There are enough Blue Dog Democrats on that committee to hold up chairman Waxman’s bill.
Let these clowns have the month of August to get a little schooling in the New Media. I welcome their efforts to wring more cost savings out of the plan. Let them work on that. But I don’t think that Obama is going to lose this battle. I have one piece of advice though. Do not ask the House to vote on a bill that raises taxes before the recess when the Senate is taking a pass. It is stupid to ask vulnerable House members to cast painful votes that might not mean anything because the Senate refuses to vote the same way. It’s not stupid because there is something wrong with being principled. It’s stupid because you’ll get the bare minimum of votes, and that will make the job of selling the Senate version much harder.
If the Senate waits, the House should wait, too.
The Finance Commit[t]ee accepted…
Do committee members have a say in who joins? I thought it was a combination of seniority and wheeling-dealing in the caucus before the organizing resolution.
ready to revise your comments that obama’s gonna get his upper-down vote on health care?
cus i’m not seeing that passing.
It’s depressing to watch our government fall apart like this.
Why do we need the Energy and Commerce Committee and the Finance Committee to pass bills when we have bills from HELP and the other House ones? Why not simply bring those bills to the floor?
Because each committee is responsible for a certain part of the bill. The Senate Finance Committee and House Ways & Means Committee are responsible respectively for the tax/funding measures of the bill. Charlie Rangel, the chairman of Ways & Means, put in a surtax on people making $280,000/year and couples making $350,000.
The Finance Committee doesn’t like that.
Ah, okay. Thanks.
That doesn’t answer the question. There’s nothing in law that says anybody has to give a shit what the Finance Committee passes or doesn’t pass. Once again it’s all about petrified old walruses doing their power plays. I wonder how bad it has to get before Americans are finally ready to either radically reform the Senate or get rid of the House of Lords altogether.
But as long as you’re here: are you saying Kerry is among the healthcare obstructionists? The guy too pathetically incompetent to even beat Bush? If so, maybe we dodged a bullet after all.
Like your analysis v. much. Seems to me it’s worth voicing concerns to Menendez – read somewhere that he may be primaried, iirc there’s talk of Cory Booker running, or trying to persuade Cory Booker to run. Not sure whether I believe that, but NJ dem politics is definitely in an uproar now with all the arrests yesterday, and there’s plenty more suspicion to go around. Furthermore cw on NJ blogs is that the newly arrested new Hoboken mayor Peter Cammarano, being just 32, won’t want to spend the prime years of his life in jail, hence will name names. So Menendez could benefit in many ways from taking some credit to get strong public option through the Fin. Com. Would be a nice distraction from headlines. Menendez and Corzine are both Hoboken residents, Menendez for many years, though it’s said he wasn’t on good terms with Cammarano. Both Lautenberg and Menendez are progressive on many issues, though I don’t know if they are billed as progressives. – my 2 cents.
both of menendez and lautenberg voted in favor of the military commissions act of 2006.
good indicator. guess it’s the sept 11 ambit, but they could have voted against using sept 11 as the reason: “based on our terrible experiences that day, we conclude that shredding the constitution is not the way to go.