Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) probably won’t be talking about the new September 15th deadline for the unveiling of the Senate Finance Committee’s health care reform bill.
“I had a meeting last Monday with a number of consultants. They all said, ‘Get off this exact date. The American people don’t care about exact dates. All they want is something to get done.’ So I listened to them,” Reid said.
Reid might not like deadlines, but some of them aren’t so arbitrary. If the Finance committee doesn’t present a bill by September, there will be precious little time before Congress votes on a budget reconciliation bill–and when that comes around he’ll have to decide whether to circumvent the normal process and pass reform of some kind without Republican votes, or whether he’ll put his faith in Republican negotiators who haven’t really been playing along thus far.
