President Obama may be putting the screws to the Senate Finance Committee, whose health care reform draft bill is weeks behind schedule. But key members of that panel–members who, by pure coincidence, have been lukewarm to the idea of broad reform–think that meeting the dread August recess deadline will be difficult, if not impossible.
“It’s hard to see how you do both,” Sen. Kent Conrad (D-ND) told Politico, speaking of Senate leaders’ desire to confirm Sonia Sotomayor before recess.
“It would be overly ambitious to attempt to do this before the August recess,” said Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-ME)–a moderate whose support the White House has courted, but who remains opposed to offering a public option unless it’s tied to a trigger mechanism, which would delay its implementation indefinitely.
Democratic leadership is by and large more hopeful, and the committee’s chairman Max Baucus (D-MT) seems to be somewhere in between. “I think it’s a lift but one we could accomplish, one we could handle,” he said. “I’m not going to guarantee that it’s going to happen.”
