The Sunshine Empire

We are nearing the finish line with regards to health care reform, as much as those nutty earl gray ingrates insisted we would not. With the Senate Finance committee’s vote today the Baucus bill was passed to the full Senate for a vote. After only getting Olympia Snowe to vote in favor of passing the bill to the full Senate for a vote, we can now enjoy the conservative feeding frenzy that will result from her breaking from the party of No. Most disagreeing with her move are focusing on her saying, “Is this bill all that I want? Far from it. Is it all that it can be? Far from it. But when history calls, history calls.” What did she mean by that? I took it to say that the bill was close enough to send to the Senate floor for a vote. This is the furthest that true health care reform has come to passage since the days of Theodore Roosevelt, but most take it somehow that she didn’t like the bill but voted for it anyway. Now the politics of the United States Senate are rarely that simplistic and I don’t believe they are now. Take her other statement regarding her vote. She stated, “My vote today, is my vote today. It doesn’t forecast what it will be tomorrow.” Again I’m taking that to mean that she was willing to let it get to a floor vote, but that being no assurance that she will vote for the final bill.

Otto von Bismarck once said that, “Laws are like sausages, it is better not to see them being made.” All that Senator Snowe did was allow the process of merging the various bills in the Senate into one that may or may not be allowed an up or down vote on the floor. Bismarck’s sausage making if you will. I fully expect that she will vote against the final bill that appears before the full Senate because the merging of the bills will result in the re-addition of the public option that Senator Baucus had stripped out. If anything Senator Snowe has done more good for the GOP than the betrayal her actions will be portrayed as. If only barely, she blunts some of the Democratic accusations that Republicans in lockstep are the party of no when it comes to health care reform. In addition she allows Senate liberals the opportunity to start the contentious debate over the public option again. This is valuable because despite public opinion being over 60% in favor of the public option the GOP has shown wonderful skill in demagoging and labeling it in ways that hurt Democrats politically.

The clear political reality though again comes back to Senate Democrats. They have the 60 votes to end debate and bring any health care reform measure to an up or down vote. If they vote for cloture the bill will be signed by Thanksgiving and the Tea party assurance of Obama’s political demise will ring hollow come midterm time. If they do not they have only themselves to blame for what they have wrought.