Now that Baucus has a bill, how should we evaluate his role in the process? Jon Bernstein makes a few points. On the one hand:
bq. Imagine an alternative world in which Baucus in which the Gang of Six was Baucus, Bingaman, Conrad, Snowe…and Schumer and Cantwell, replacing Grassley and Enzi. Suppose that a compromise was available, more or less along the lines that Baucus detailed today, and that Baucus had set a deadline not for September 15, but in plenty of time for a bill to reach the Senate floor before August recess. And, suppose that sixty votes could be found for that bill, so it did pass the Senate floor.
bq. Now, we hit August…and we still have two bills, because there’s no way that a conference committee could have completed its work before the recess. “Death panels” would no longer be something that was (supposedly) in a committee bill; it would be something that House and Senate Democrats had voted for. Sure, it would still be fictional, but at that point the political solution (dropping the misread portions of the bill for now) would be a lot less workable, since everyone would have their votes on record. Same for the supposed provisions about immigrants. Now, it’s true that there will still be a period of time after Democrats have cast their initial votes for the bill but without a final, signed-into-law product to defend, but pushing back floor consideration until after the break minimized that exposure.
bq. …I’ve argued throughout that what Baucus was buying was cover for Democrats who couldn’t get Republican votes. That, I think, has been a success. CNN has Republicans polling 61/35 for obstructionist/constructive. ABC/WaPo has Republicans 62-31 “are not” making a good faith effort to cooperate, compared to a slim majority (50/44) who say that Obama and the Dems “are” making a good faith effort. That’s what Baucus has to show for his negotiations. A Dems-plus-Snowe Gang of Six would have had the GOP squawking that they were left out of the process despite their desperate (and fictional) desire to cut a deal. That’s been fully exposed now, not only to Democratic partisans who always expected it, but to anyone even remotely neutral.
Okay, but on the other hand:
bq. The delay was only OK if it ultimately allowed Baucus to produce a bill he could get out of committee. As I read the reactions yesterday and today, I’m not at all certain that’s the case…but as I always say, you can’t trust what poker players say in the middle of a hand. We’re going to have some votes in committee on various amendments to push the bill in a liberal direction; we don’t know how the votes will fall on those amendments; and we don’t know whether the result will wind up with something that Conrad, Nelson and Lincoln — and Schumer, Rockefeller, and Kerry — can all vote for. I will say one thing: if Baucus can get something through his committee with fourteen votes by the end of September, then he’ll deserve a lot of praise. But it could still blow up, and I’m not convinced that anyone, including Baucus, has a good whip count on committee votes.
Like Jon, I’m also of two minds. But I do think he misses what the Baucus delay may have cost Obama in terms of his overall popularity and in terms of public support for health care reform. Maybe these things are starting to turn around now, and maybe these things won’t ultimately matter, but the delay still seems to have introduced risks. I’m not sure whether those risks outweigh the others Jon notes: the hypothetical risks of having had recorded votes on a bill that could then be attacked re: death panels, illegal immigrants, etc. But that raises other questions like, would members have even scheduled townhall meetings had the bills already gone to conference? If not, then a lot of the cable news hullabaloo may never have happened. There are lots of dimensions to the counterfactual of “no Baucus-induced delay.”
That said, I would wager the following: no matter what process had unfolded over this summer — bill, no bill, delay, no delay, townhalls, no townhalls — there would now be little Republican support for health care reform in Congress and, consequently, strongly divergent attitudes among Democrats and Republicans in the public (as we see now). The two parties in Congress are too polarized and, with loud arguments on both sides of the issue, this polarization tends to be reflected in the mass public. Baucus wanted bipartisanship, but it was unlikely ever to occur.