Health Care Onus On Westerners Baucus, Reid
For better or worse, the burden to design a plan that provides health insurance to every American who seeks it without adding to the deficit – and that can get 60 votes in the Senate – is falling on Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus and Majority Leader Harry Reid.
While President Barack Obama says failure is not an option, the solution to this quandary has eluded presidents and congressional titans past and may yet stymie the weathered partnership between the two conservative Democrats.
Reid, 69, and Baucus, 67, are deep in multidimensional and simultaneous negotiations taking place among senators of both parties, countless coalitions, interest groups, their own constituents and the White House.
“All these gyrations,” as Reid put it, must produce a bill before the Senate recesses at the end of next week, a self-set deadline that theoretically would allow for floor debate this fall.
“I have a responsibility to get a bill on the Senate floor that will get 60 votes,” Reid, who is up for re-election next year, told reporters Tuesday. “Thats my number one responsibility and there are times when I have to set aside my personal preferences for the good of the Senate and, I think, the country.”
Sixty is for later in the process. For the moment, Baucus is focused on a smaller number, six: specifically, three Democratic and three Republican members of Baucus tax-writing Finance Committee. They are Democratic Sens. Baucus, Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico and Kent Conrad of North Dakota, and Republican Sens. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, Mike Enzi of Wyoming and Olympia Snowe of Maine.
An agreement among them would represent a passing grade on the health care plans first test of bipartisanship. Produce a bill, and senators can go home at the end of next week reporting some progress.
But the recess will be no vacation for the forces at work on health care, least of all Reid and Baucus. A message war will ensue, with Republicans demanding a rewrite and Democrats calling for patience. Aides will spend the summer break toiling over how to marry the Finance Committee bill with elements of less viable proposals turned out by other panels.
At some point, Obama and Congress Democratic leaders will have to decide whether compromise would mean the best chance for passage even at the risk of losing the support of their partys liberal base.
The next 10 days are pivotal. The onus to deliver is on Baucus and Reid.
“Their relationship is almost intentionally one of the checks and balances,” said Sheila Burke, who was chief of staff to former Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole and now is a lecturer at Harvard University.
They are two hard-core political operators and stubborn personalities locked in a partnership that Reid described in his memoir as exhilarating during the Bush years when, then in the minority, they teamed to drive a stake into the Republican presidents plan to privatize Social Security.
Reid, a grandfather of 16 and a Mormon, supports gun rights and has voted to limit access to some abortions.
“Harry has to carry a lot of that left-wing stuff, but hes really more moderate,” said Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah.
Baucus, who grew up on a ranch, has a son and is Protestant, has sided with Republicans on the Medicare prescription drug benefit and some of Bushs tax cut extensions.
“There is no one better at forging bipartisan consensus,” Reid said of Baucus.
Their division of labor generally breaks down this way: