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.

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.

One of the big concerns liberals have about the health care overhaul effort is that President Obama and congressional Democrats will make bipartisanship a goal in itself, compromising the bill into mush to pick up a handful of Republican votes.

Now, Sen. Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut, the acting chairman of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee, is making it clear that he sees bipartisanship as less important than getting a health care bill he considers effective.

“I certainly would love to have bipartisan support in the committee for the final product. But my goal here is to write a good bill. My goal is not bipartisanship,” Dodd told reporters this afternoon. “That can help you get to a good bill, but it’s not an end in itself.”

Guess the liberal House Democrats couldn’t let the centrists go unchallenged. A day after the Blue Dog Coalition declared they can only support a government-run health care plan if it has lots of limits, the Congressional Progressive Caucus said they won’t support it if it has any of those limits.

It’s not a surprise that the progressives would respond that way, but the statement is yet more proof that President Obama and House Democratic leaders will have a difficult balance to strike to get health care overhaul legislation through the House. Even though the House is considered the “easier” of the two chambers — it’s more easily controlled than the Senate, and there are no filibusters — the debate proves the White House can’t take the House for granted.

There’s still no real evidence that Judge Sonia Sotomayor needs to campaign that hard to get confirmed to the Supreme Court. But she’s going to try anyway, starting tomorrow, with meetings with 10 — count ‘em, 10 — senators in one day.

She has heard they filibuster sometimes, right?

According to the White House, Sotomayor will meet tomorrow with the top four Senate leaders from both parties: Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, Majority Whip Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, and Minority Leader Jon Kyl of Arizona. Also on the itinerary are Judiciary Chairman Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont and Jeff Sessions of Alabama, the ranking Republican (for now)(for now) on the Judiciary Committee.

There’s an interesting development that almost got lost yesterday in the escalating partisan warfare over House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s claims that the CIA misled her about interrogation tactics. Sen. Arlen Specter may be getting some traction with his idea on how to avoid future misunderstandings between Congress and the executive branch: Start keeping transcripts of the intelligence briefings for top lawmakers.

Specter, D-Pa. (we’re still getting used to that too), wrote a letter yesterday outlining his suggestion to CIA director Leon E. Panetta, White House counsel Gregory Craig, and the top Democrats and Republicans on the House and Senate intelligence committees. His idea: To avoid any future misunderstandings about what was said in the intelligence briefings, keep transcripts of every briefing given to the Gang of Eight — the four top intelligence committee members and the four highest-ranking House and Senate leaders.

In an interview on MSNBC yesterday, Senate Intelligence Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein of California said Specter might be on to something. She said she’ll discuss the proposal with other committee members and suggested it could become a provision of the annual intelligence authorization bill the committee will start writing soon.

So how’s the Guantánamo Bay debate going so far for Senate Democrats? They’ve already said they’re going to strip out the money President Obama wanted to close the detention facility. But that hasn’t protected them from having to debate the issue. Republicans are still filing amendment after amendment to the supplemental spending bill to ensure that the Democrats keep talking about what to do with the detainees.

Senate majority whip and Obama friend Richard J. Durbin, what have you got?

It was up to Durbin, Obama’s Illinois colleague during his Senate days, to figure out how to argue against the Republican amendments without having a solid post-Gitmo plan to talk about — exactly the situation Senate Democrats wanted to avoid. So in a floor speech this morning, Durbin tried a talking point most Democrats haven’t even mentioned. We already have terrorists on U.S. soil, Durbin said, and they’re not roaming around in our neighborhoods because they don’t get out of prison.

President Obama has asked Congress to send him a credit card regulation bill by Memorial Day. That day is fast approaching. But the bill has been complicated in the Senate with the addition of a gun amendment that liberal Democrats hate, and there’s probably no way to avoid the issue in the House.

How will the House Democrats get the bill to Obama by the deadline? According to Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer, D-Md., they’ll probably do the only thing they can do: Have separate votes on the credit card bill and the gun amendment, and then merge them together and send the whole package to Obama for his signature.

It’s an acknowledgement that the pro-gun rights majority is now strong enough in both the House and the Senate that neither Obama nor the Democratic leadership are willing to pick fights with them — or put their own priorities in jeopardy.

Hey, it’s worked before. Trying to bounce back a bit after last week’s lousy week for the GOP, Senate Republicans returned to a classic theme today: national security and the terrorist threat.

Specifically, they’re warning about the prospect of terrorists running loose in our neighborhoods.

Today’s talking point after the weekly Senate Republican luncheon was about how closing the Guantánamo Bay detention center within a year will be a lot harder than President Obama thinks. And to make it that much harder, Sen. Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga., said he’ll introduce a bill Wednesday that would bar the use of federal funds to release former detainees on U.S. soil.

So it turns out even a disciplined, on-message operation like the Obama White House can get ensnared in a Shakesperian web of political schemery. One of its own making, no less.

The administration's decision last week to release Bush-era Justice Department memos justifying harsh interrogation techniques some have characterized as torture, and absolve the CIA functionaries who carried them out, has emboldened the left flank of the Democratic party to agitate for investigations of the officials who formulated the policies.

As a result, a move designed to validate Obama's decision to overturn Bush's policies has morphed into a highly contentious national security debate that's dividing Democrats on Capitol Hill, emboldening conservative administration critics and very, very effectively overshadowing Obama's top-tier agenda items.

The president and his aides have not made life easier for themselves by sending mixed signals about their appetite for inquiries and prosecutions. So at week's end, let's recap where things stand:

It doesn’t sound like House Minority Leader John A. Boehner of Ohio is losing any sleep over the fact that no Republicans voted for the stimulus, despite President Obama’s visit to the Hill Tuesday to hear their concerns.

In fact, the memo he just sent out to House Republicans, setting up their three-day retreat that starts today, praises his colleagues for not bucking the party line and casting votes that might allow Obama — and the Democrats — to claim they had achieved bipartisanship.

“When we meet later today at The Homestead, we’ll set to work immediately, building on the unity, common purpose, and common vision that brought us together over the past few weeks and culminated in last night’s vote,” Boehner wrote. “I am proud of our team, and eager to get to work.”

Maybe Obama never really had a chance.