For months, six senators — three Republicans and three Democrats — discussed health care reform. The so-called “Gang of Six” was an informal caucus led by Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus and the ranking Republican, his longtime friend Chuck Grassley. The six senators tussled over all sorts of thorny issues with the hope that they could come up with legislation that would attract significant bipartisan support. Or at least that’s what they all said.
So what exactly is happening on Thursday? It’s a White House-organized health care summit where leading Democrats and Republicans will discuss health care reform. If you think this sounds like a strange idea, you’re not entirely wrong. The lead-up to such an idea to achieve bipartisanship is a story of its own.
Despite the goal of the Gang of Six, it was unclear whether those three Republicans were serious about actually trying to pass a bipartisan health care bill. Chuck Grassley and Mike Enzi, two of the Republicans in the Gang, made it clear that they couldn’t support the Senate Finance Committee’s health care bill. Olympia Snowe, the Maine moderate who voted the bill out of committee, made it clear that she wouldn’t support the final Senate bill, which was eventually passed with 60 Democratic votes.
So here was a month long consultation with three Republican senators, ranging from quite conservative (Enzi) to fairly conservative (Grassley) to moderate (Snowe). The Democrats desperately wanted to make a deal that would give them bipartisan cover and the White House supported their efforts. And what did they get for it? They got Chuck Grassley reversing his support for a mandate for individuals to buy health insurance, Olympia Snowe saying she was uneasy about the bill because things were just moving too fast for her despite months of negotiations (she ultimately voted against it) and Mike Enzi accusing Democrats of planning to ration care.
The excuse-making and appearance of bad faith on the part of the three Republicans is a microcosm of their behavior as a caucus throughout health care. They know that the best strategy for the party as a whole is to deny the Democrats any big legislative successes. And since there is a de facto 60 vote supermajority requirement in the Senate, they have the tools to do this.
Health care reform has been discussed incessantly since even before the election. Democrats were holding hearings and putting out proposals once they took the House and Senate and knew that they would have a chance to pass health care reform. Republicans have even thrown some ideas into the ring, although they have spent more time attacking the Democrats’ proposals.
So, the summit will mostly be political theatre, where President Obama will try to leverage his comparatively high popularity and depict the Republicans as not willing to address health care reform in a major way. The Republicans will try to entreat the Democrats to start over, as they have made it clear that they have no interest in negotiation or compromise with the current Democratic health care proposals. Eric Cantor, the second ranking Republican in the House, told the Wall Street Journal that “There is no negotiation when it comes to either the House or the Senate bill..I don’t look at this as negotiation, I look at this to see if the president wants to come clean and start over.”
By “start over,” Republicans clearly mean that they want the process to get drawn out longer and longer so that the Democrats never pass a bill and then get hammered in the midterm elections when the voters blame the majority party for not being able to do anything.
This summit, of course, is pure theatre. Republicans won’t be convinced to sign on to any large-scale Democratic proposal and Democrats won’t start over. In fact, if the Congressional Democrats got their act together, they could pass the Senate bill and be done with this entire mess. But maybe after months of debate in Congress and the addition of the press, a little pointless kabuki is all that’s needed to get this done.