Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid doesn’t seem to be on the same page as President Obama on the importance of sticking to a deadline. This afternoon, he said he doesn’t mind giving the Senate Finance Committee more time to work out a health care bill that can win the support of three key Republicans, even if it means the full Senate won’t be able to pass a bill before the August recess.
Harry Reid (CQ/Ryan Kelly)
Obama’s call for the House and Senate to pass bills before August may have been necessary to keep the pressure on lawmakers;
as he said at last night’s news conference, “if you don’t set deadlines in this town, things don’t happen.” But it also guaranteed that the media would become fixated with the deadline for its own sake, and as it inevitably slips, it creates the impression of failure even though lawmakers are grappling with real and complicated health care issues.
Reid doesn’t seem to share the view that a delay could kill the health care effort by losing crucial momentum. The Nevada Democrat says the three Finance Committee Republicans who are trying to strike a bipartisan deal — Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, Olympia J. Snowe of Maine, and Michael B. Enzi of Wyoming — are serious senators and deserve time to work something out with Finance Chairman Max Baucus of Montana.
If they can do that, he says, he’ll spend the August recess trying to work out a merger between the Finance bill and the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee bill, which are likely to be substantially different.
“Working with Republicans, one of the things that they ask is that they have more time. So the decision was made to give them more time,” Reid told reporters. “I don’t think its unreasonable. This is a complex, difficult issue. As we know, the HELP Committee took a month. The Finance Committee has been working to come up with a bipartisan bill for much longer than that.”
“It’s better to have a product that is one based on quality and thoughtfulness,” Reid said, than to try to rush the talks to beat a deadline.
Of course, Reid will eventually have to decide whether the three Republican votes will be worth the price of the policy concessions Baucus will have to make — assuming they actually get a deal. The Obama team will have to decide that too. Then, even if they’re convinced the price was worth it, they’ll have to convince the Democratic base, much of which is puzzled over why they need to deal with Republicans at all after voters rejected the party in the last two elections.
Still, whatever the Finance team comes up with is still only a starting point. It’s not going to be the final health care bill any more than the HELP Committee bill will be, or any more than the House Democratic health care bill will be. The process of getting an acceptable final product, that somehow combines all the liberal and centrist approaches, is what has made the August deadline so unrealistic all along.
Obama may well be getting results by keeping the pressure on Congress. But now, Reid’s remarks are a sign that he and the Finance Republicans have common cause: They need time to do their jobs.
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