The Road Ahead For Obamacare

BooMan continues to have a pretty damn good record of prognostication on where Obamacare is going as it makes its way through Byzantine and uncharted waters. The next phase of the game is now underway.

When I gamed this out during the spring and summer, I came to the conclusion that the president wouldn't get any health care bill at the 60-vote threshold, even one that was badly watered down. But, for appearances sake and as a matter of strategy, he had to give an honest try. For me, that was what all the nonsense with the Finance Committee and the Gang of Six was all about. But, despite winning over Olympia Snowe, the challenge of reaching 60 votes has always been about a few corporate whores in the Democratic caucus. I will name them: Joe Lieberman, Tom Carper, Evan Bayh (all former chairmen of the Democratic Leadership Council), Kent Conrad, Ben Nelson, Blanche Lincoln, and (possibly) Mary Landrieu. None of these senators wants to enact the health care plan that the president ran on. And, without their support for cloture, we simply cannot pass a good health care bill in the Senate. It's easy to apply a shithammer's worth of pressure on a single wayward senator, but it's a lot harder to deal with a bloc of corporate shills.

Therefore, I had assumed that the effort to reach 60 votes would fail. But we are right in the thick of the end game now. Never before has a health care bill of this scope passed through all the congressional committees that have jurisdiction. There is a lot of momentum for passing a bill through regular order. If the effort fails, the Senate wants to be able to blame the House, and vice-versa. The progressives want to blame the centrists, and vice-versa. The Democrats and the White House want to blame the Republicans, and vice-versa.

It's this blame game that will do the most to imperil final passage. House Progressives seem resolved to force through a bill that has a robust public option. Senate centrists seem resolved to block any bill that has a robust public option, or any public option at all. Harry Reid and the White House want a public option, but Reid doesn't want to get blamed if he can't get 60 votes.

There are three big speed humps, or votes. The House has to pass a bill. The Senate has to pass a bill. And then those two bills have to be melded into one Conference Report, and passed again by both houses. Reid and Pelosi have a decision to make. As it stands now, they are both poised to pass bills that are incompatible with each other. They can try to bridge the divide now, as they craft their respective bills, or they can try to bridge the divide in the Conference Committee that has the responsibility of reconciling the two bills.

If this process is going to succeed in producing health care reform at the 60-vote threshold, a grand compromise has to be reached at some point. The Schumer Opt-Out Plan might be the best solution.

And as he goes on to say, if it doesn't work, the White House still needs to stick it out with their plan and go for reconciliation.

The question is how many of the ConservaDems in the Senate will be looking for their thirty pieces of silver...and their pound of flesh? The Republicans remained completely irrelevant until Olympia Snowe crossed party lines. Now she's the way in as well.

Something has to give in the next few weeks. Who will have the upper hand?