From Roll Call today comes the latest episode in the tired series known as The Party of “No”:
Senate Republicans, acknowledging they lack the votes to block a health care reform bill outright, have implemented a comprehensive political strategy to delay, define and derail.
With Democratic leaders and White House officials holed up in Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s (D-Nev.) office negotiating a final bill, Republicans are demanding a deceleration of the process and moving to define whatever plan that emerges as a combination of Medicare cuts, tax increases, higher insurance premiums and rising overall costs.
Such legislative nihilism from the GOP isn’t new. What’s striking, however, is how little sting their charges have. When Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY.) complains that Democrats are trying to rush the bill through without GOP feedback, it rings hollow.
Perhaps the credit for that should go to Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT). Many progressives chafed at Baucus’s insistence on a plodding, methodical process that made a good-faith effort to include moderate and conservative input. The finance committee’s deliberations may have seemed painstakingly slow, but it did yield a Republican supporter — Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-ME) — and a bill that, whatever one thought of it, could not be labeled a rushed and partisan product. In other words, Baucus’s process has, to some extent, inoculated the reform effort from Republican charges that the process hasn’t been deliberative or bipartisan enough.
We’ve seen this before, of course. In the negotiations over the stimulus bill, President Obama came under fire for bending over backwards to reach out to Republicans, as critics pointed out that few, if any, would jump aboard. Obama probably knew this, but also knew that the process, and public perceptions of it, matter. In the end, the administration got the stimulus bill it wanted with some Republican support. Moreover, Obama did it while burnishing his credentials as a pragmatic problem-solver and leaving Republicans looking like unreasonable obstructionists. The health reform debate seems like it’s following the same contours. In retrospect, Baucus may have played this right all along.
