White House wants to take a hands-off approach to health care reform until Congress sorts out a new way forward — but insists it’s still engaged on the issue.
Brian Beutler reports on what the Senate’s up to.
I’ve been poking around some sources in Washington, DC (and combining this with what I’ve heard from our TPMDC team) and my sense is that Health Care Reform is both dead and not dead. Let’s say it’s among the Undead. There does seem to be some continuing effort to see how a Senate bill plus amending bill deal might work — both for what would be needed in political terms and what would be workable under reconciliation rules. But there’s also a lot of happy talk about generally marginal and meaningless reforms that might be pushed through as consolation prizes. And what seems unmistakably clear is that the White House is taking an extremely hands off approach to the whole situation.
My strongest sense however is not so much that decisions have been made to drop reform as that it’s something like a matter of survivors walking around — half dazed — after some sort of natural disaster. There is no plan. It actually seems highly, highly fluid and possibly susceptible to dramatic change if any of the key players assert themselves. But I’m not sure there’s anyone really ready to do that, unless rank-and-file Democrats and Reform supporters assert themselves.
Grijalva says absolutely no way to the Senate bill.
I’ve been very hard on the House in this Health Care train wreck. But what we’re learning now is that the White House does not seem to be lifting a finger to move things. From what we can tell, nothing. Robert Gibbs’ statement at the briefing today seems to embody the White House’s stance at a much deeper level than I’d imagined. They just don’t seem to even want to hear about it.
A TPM alum thinks things look brighter for reform than I’m letting on … Read More
Sen.-Elect Scott Brown appears to have endorsed and then tried to wriggle out of endorsing a ‘birther’ congressional candidate who got in trouble for a Obama as bin Laden sign on his front yard.
Howard Dean was just on MSNBC and he seemed to take Nancy Pelosi’s statement at face value that this current legislation is over. And Dems should focus on passing some small helpful stuff and come back and do comprehensive reform later.
“You can’t pass the Senate bill in the House according to the speaker and we have to respect her desires. So pass something through reconciliation. It doesn’t have to be big and complicated. And it shouldn’t be. We’re not going to get the comprehensive health care bill we hoped we were gonna get.”
Here’s the full story.
An aide to a Democratic senator checks in:
The GOP’s argument against health care reform, from the beginning, was that Democrats all secretly want a single-payer system but since that’s a non-starter with The People, they’re trying to pass a bill that looks good on the surface but will force private insurance companies out of business and leave us with no option but to adopt single-payer. They said that about every version of the bill that has been debated in either chamber, even the Senate bill which would actually provide a bunch of new business to private insurers at the taxpayers’ expense, with no public option. Hasn’t it occurred to House Democrats that the GOP would simply say the exact same thing about these “smaller chunks” they’re talking about breaking the bill into? They’d even say it about the stuff that’s considered popular.
One of the results of today’s Supreme Court ruling, according to campaign finance reform advocates, is that companies will be able to avoid disclosing their spending in support of specific candidates by funneling the contributions through entities like the Chamber of Commerce.