The Big Bi-Partisan Lie
If President Barack Obama really wanted to show he’s serious about winning over Republicans on health care reform, he could offer up some key concessions at Thursday’s summit, like caps on malpractice awards or allowing insurers to sell across state lines.
And if Republicans wanted to reciprocate, they could at least acknowledge the congressional scorekeepers are right – the Democratic plans cut the deficit in the long term and rein in health care costs.
But that would assume either side is willing to do this.
Heading into Thursday’s summit, there’s been a lot of talk on both sides about how they’re the reasonable ones, willing to meet in the middle – and it’s the other side that’s to blame.
But the reality is, both sides have been responding to the overwhelming incentives to play to the home team, and to tailor their positions to seek partisan advantage and political gain.
So in the end, the health care summit seems most likely to clarify what has been an obvious reality lurking just below the surface at almost every turn in this episode, which is that neither side is really on the level when they say they were committed to bipartisanship.
Nor do they really want to split the difference – to do something in six hours at Blair House that they wouldn’t do all year.
The parties have become so entrenched in their positions that Republicans say they will never accept the Democratic comprehensive reform bill, and Democrats say they will never start over and adopt the GOP’s scaled-back, market-driven approach.
But the opportunities will be there, to be sure. Republicans will push a six-step plan for enacting health care reform, which includes many ideas that have already been embraced to a lesser degree in the Democratic bills.
And a central element of the Democratic strategy – hashed out on a conference call with President Barack Obama himself Wednesday — will involve pointing that out at every turn, to essentially shame the GOP to get on board.
Yet neither side showed any sign of cooling off ahead of the summit.
"If they are coming in and saying start over, there is nothing to talk about,” said Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.)
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) shot back: "Why not start over? The overwhelming majority of the American people want us to start over."
The tit-for-tat continued until hours before the summit convened. House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) pushed to expand the invite list to include governors, but the White House denied the request.
So Boehner offered a spot to Rep. Bart Stupak, a Democrat from Michigan who crafted an anti-abortion provision in the House bill that infuriated liberals. But Stupak later said the minority leader never consulted him.
The White House, on the other hand, extended a last-minute invite to Sen. Olympia Snowe, the moderate Maine Republican who negotiated for months with Democrats but was left off Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s list. She declined.
While Republicans huddled among themselves, Obama dialed into a meeting of top Democrats in House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office to map out a strategy. Democrats view the summit as a confidence-building exercise – it will be a success if Obama shows up the Republicans and, in turn, gives Democrats the political will to take the next step of reconciliation, a senior congressional aide said.
It took a year to get to this point.
Democrats believe congressional Republican leaders were determined, almost from Day One, to kill health care reform at any cost – and McConnell (R-Ky.) acknowledged as much during a POLITICO interview in November.
He said he embarked on a “very systematic and persistent” campaign since Memorial Day -- well before the House or Senate bills were even released -- to undermine support for the president’s reform push.
“For the public to understand there was a genuine debate about policy here, it was important for it not to become ‘bipartisan,’” McConnell said. “On the merits, this was a proposal that didn’t deserve, in my view, bipartisan support.”
“It deserved bipartisan defeat,” McConnell said.
In response, Republicans argue that Obama should have reworked his approach, knowing their objections. Instead, Obama embraced a strategy of limited engagement. He targeted Snowe and met with her repeatedly, once for more than 90 minutes in the Oval Office, hoping to put bipartisan sheen on the bill and provide some wiggle room in the Senate.
“Their attitude towards bipartisanship has been kind of like a shooting gallery, we can pick off two or three Republicans to pass the bill,” Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) said. “That is not the way it is done. The way we do bipartisanship is we sit down at the beginning and agree with each other on how to move forward.”
In fact, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) tried the bipartisan route. He spent almost nine months trying to bring a handful of Republicans onto the bill, and had the support of Obama and Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) in doing it – to an extent. The theory was that if Baucus could convince Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) to come on board, other Republicans in both chambers would follow.
Until July, the approach looked promising. But a cascade of decisions threw it off course.
Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) told conservative activists that they needed to make health care Obama’s Waterloo, infuriating Democrats who saw the remarks as the first public sign that Republicans had no plans to support the bill.
It was around this time that Baucus faced increased pressure from Reid and the White House to wrap up the Gang of Six negotiations, angering Republicans who didn’t want to be rushed.
Yet the Republicans involved in talks – Snowe, Grassley and Sen. Mike Enzi of Wyoming – were also being squeezed. When it appeared that the group was nearing a compromise, McConnell reined them in, extracting guarantees from Grassley and Enzi that they would not sign off on a deal without consent from the caucus, according to congressional aides.
Along the way, Republicans grew more frustrated with Democrats. Obama would say at public events that he would sit down with any lawmaker, only to ignore repeated requests from conservatives. He told the American Medical Association that he was open to reducing medical malpractice costs, on ly to never make a serious push for the reforms that Republicans cared about. Democrats portrayed the Senate Health committee bill as bipartisan because 160 Republican amendments were accepted, only to have their staff later write some of them out of the measure, Republicans have said.
Grassley went to the White House in early August and asked Obama to drop the public insurance option in a bid for bipartisan support. Obama refused, Grassley has said. Democrats, who no longer trusted Republicans, understood the president’s strategy – if he had disavowed the public option, Republicans would have targeted the next major element of the bill.
That was their last interaction before the tumultuous August recess, when Grassley returned home to Iowa and pushed some of the most extreme charges leveled against Democratic health care plan.
By early September, top Democrats were convinced bipartisanship would never happen. And in October, Reid made a decision to cut the cord – initially against the advice of the White House, which was still wooing Snowe – by introducing a Senate bill with a public option that allowed states to opt-out, rather than Snowe’s public option “trigger.”
Snowe, who has said Reid assured her in September that he would go with the trigger, was lost for good. So was any hope of bi-partisanship.
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Sources: CNN, Politico, Google Maps
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