Republicans tweak Sanders over health care, but Cassidy-Graham could open a path for his bill

PowerPost Analysis

By David Weigel September 20 at 5:21 PM

One short week ago, 16 Senate Democrats and dozens of progressive groups rallied with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) to celebrate the release of his Universal Medicare for All bill — a moonshot that they hoped would reset the national conversation on health care.

Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) sounded downright giddy. His own legislation to curtail the Affordable Care Act, and block grant Medicaid, was released just a few hours before Sanders’s, to a smaller but just as skeptical group of reporters.

“You’re skipping Bernie for this?” he joked. Before he got to the substance of the Cassidy-Graham bill, the senator framed it as an alternative to the Sanders bill, a way to stop an inevitable lurch toward European-style universal coverage: “Hell no to Berniecare!”

The momentum for Graham’s bill, and the surprise reanimation of a repeal effort that has been declared dead twice before, has sparked one of the Capitol’s most cherished traditions: panicky Democrats taking shots at each other. Egged on by Graham, and by a snarky Republican National Committee, a few liberal analysts and Democratic pols have asked whether Sanders bears some responsibility for the 11th hour repeal fight.

“I thought that anyone who believed that you should take your eye off the ball before Sept. 30 wasn’t being smart,” Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.), one of 30 Democrats who did not endorse the Sanders bill, told Politico.

Link to tweet

Sanders, who since his presidential bid has become judicious about talking to reporters in Senate hallways, was particularly tight-lipped at Tuesday’s lunches, saying only that single-payer was “where the American people want to go.” He had, after all, delayed the release of his bill several times, partially to get more input from Democrats, but largely to avoid confusing the Democratic caucus’s united stance against repeal.

But did he crack the door open for Republicans this time? Most of his colleagues say no; those who don’t reject the idea outright acknowledge that the GOP was never going to let the Sept. 30 reconciliation deadline pass without another run at health care. One pointed out that the Sept. 30 deadline itself came after Sanders, the ranking member of the Senate Budget committee, got the Senate parliamentarian to clarify that Republicans could not drag the issue out forever — a development that Democrats considered to be a win.

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