MSNBC The Rachel Maddow Show - 21 August 2009: Rachel on the 'Gang of Six,' the Senate Finance Committee, and the status of Health Care Reform in the Senate. She speaks with Democratic Congressman Anthony Weiner of New York.
RACHEL: (Quoting Olympia Snowe) 'No public option on the table.' Not on the table. Since the White House has been fastidiously reiterating all week long how much the President wants a public option for insurance in the bill, I can't wait to hear the White House reaction to that.
BILL BURTON, WHITE HOUSE DEPUTY PRESS SECRETARY (VIDEO): Well, that's democracy, isn't it? You've got folks who come from all different spectrums who are trying to get something done.
RACHEL:
Wait, that's democracy? The President says he wants a public option. Three committees in the House have already voted in favor of a public option. The one committee in the Senate that's already voted has voted for a public option. The top Democrat on health care in the Senate - conservadem Max Baucus - put in writing at the start of the health care fight that he was for the public option. A new poll just out shows 77 percent of Americans support a public option, and, by the way, Democrats have 60 seats in the United States Senate.
But the public option is not even up for discussion in the Senate anymore. It's not even on the table. That's democracy? This tiny minority of Republicans gets to decide what's in a bill that they basically admit that they're never going to vote for anyway. That's democracy?
Sen. Baucus himself admitted today that the Republican leadership is "doing its utmost to kill this bill." Trying to kill the bill, planning on voting against it, all the while somehow persuading Democrats to make changes to the bill that the Democrats, purportedly, don't really want to make.
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RACHEL: If there are zero Republican votes for health care reform, what is the best Democrats can do in terms of policy, what can be done without Republicans.
REP. WEINER:
Well, one thing we have to stop doing is negotiating against ourselves. I mean, every time I turn on the television, I find another Democrat or even sometimes the President backing away from the basic principles that are going to make health reform work. And we have to stop that. I mean it's pretty clear - and you had this group of members of the House and Senate, none of who are in touch with the mothership - you know, you have these guys who basically are the problem. There's not a single Republican vote that I've seen for the thing.
So I think that what we should be doing is trying to figure out what we as Democrats, who were elected to turn this country around, what we should be thinking of doing. Look, we have the majority in the House and the Senate and the Presidency; if we are going to keep worshipping at the altar of bipartisanship as an ends rather than a means to getting good policy, I don't think we're going to be any further down the road. So I think we should stop that right now.
And I'll tell you something else, you had for the longest period of time this Gang of Six on your screen there.
Who are these guys? These are not people you would turn to for most policies and certainly not to make health care policy for the country, and yet somehow we've seen it in our interest as Democrats to outsource to that group just about the most important decisions we're going to make here about health care reform, and I gotta tell you a lot of my colleagues are not going to have it.
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We as Democrats, frankly, can't leave that committee in charge of what's gonna come out here, cause they're getting it wrong just about every single day. And what really troubles me is I need the President to make it very clear he understands that. I need him to say, 'look, we're watching the direction this committee was going, we wanted the Senate Finance Committee to be part of this. They're going in the wrong direction, they're going away from single payer, away from a public option. And so we're basically gonna say we really don't care about them that much anymore. We're gonna go to the full House and the Senate.' And I think we have to get something else... Let's try and get what we can from the majority of the House and Senate. We're gonna go through this process called reconciliation which allows us to do with 51 votes in the Senate. Let's use it. Let's try to get the best we can here.
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I think that after going through what we've gone through,
if nothing else, we've turned people on to the idea that, look, we have to solve this problem. And if we wind up with something that's so watered down just so we can say we put one up on the board, I don't think that's a legacy that, never mind President Obama, Congressman Weiner is not going to want to run on...
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RACHEL: To be clear, though, no public option in the bill, you're going to vote 'no.'
REP. WEINER: I don't see any way that we control costs if we don't. Look,
I think right now my push to get a single payer plan through the House probably has as many votes as anything right now. Because more and more people are coming to the place of 'why are we walking away from our basic principles?'MORE
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