http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2009/08/why_is_max_baucus_sticking_by.htmlWhy Is Max Baucus Sticking by Chuck Grassley?
"I walked away from Senator Grassley. I tend to work with Senator Grassley. But there comes a time when you just gotta say, 'Sorry.' These things get watered down too much, it's just not right, so I just broke with him on that and pushed through a Medicare bill that finally got 60 votes. We had to work hard to get those 60, because Grassley didn't agree, but that was the right thing to do. So when Ted Kennedy walked on the floor to cast the 60th vote, that's a moment I'll always treasure."
That was Max Baucus, last August. I spoke with him in a seedy Denver burger bar during the Democratic National Convention. He was the one who brought up his willingness to break with Grassley. He wanted to convince me that bipartisanship was not, for him, an end in itself. That "these things get watered down too much." The example he was using was a fix for doctor compensation in Medicare. A few months later, he broke with Grassley again, passing a more generous expansion of the Children's Health Insurance Program than his frequent partner could stomach.
To put this another way, on the two major health-care votes of the last few years, Baucus couldn't partner with Grassley on either of them.
The recent example people bring up of a successful Baucus-Grassley partnership is the stimulus bill. There, Baucus conducted extensive negotiations with Grassley and managed to keep his friend committed to the package. The legislation passed the Finance Committee 14 to 9. Grassley voted with the majority. But Grassley did not vote for the final incarnation of the stimulus bill. To secure passage in the wider Senate, and then to find a compromise that the House and Senate could live with, the stimulus bill was amended in ways that Grassley couldn't support. He voted against the final piece of legislation.
There's no scenario in which I can imagine the Gang of Six negotiations producing a more secure product. The White House cannot credibly claim to preserve its compromise against the wishes of other Democrats in the Finance Committee, the HELP Committee, the Senate and the House. As such, there's no plausible endgame here. Chuck Grassley can't, and won't, support the final bill. He has said as much. Baucus saw him defect on stimulus, and Baucus, in recent years, has repeatedly had to abandon Grassley on much less controversial health-care reforms than this one.
Yet Baucus has put himself completely on the line to preserve Grassley's role in the process. He's taking an enormous amount of fire for prizing bipartisanship over speed. He's increasingly loathed by liberals and facing an enormous amount of anger from the other members of his committee. There's even talk of reforms meant to deprive him of his chairmanship. And Grassley, for his part, is raging against the bill in public and doing nothing to provide cover for his friend or inspire confidence in the process.
I want to offer a clean conclusion here. I want a neat theory of what the Gang of Six is attempting, or how they see this playing out. But I don't have one. It's the single part of the process I really and truly do not understand.
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
