Snowe Tells Baucus, No Deal

As my brother would say, What a tool. He really thought he could get Republican support if he only gave up enough, ceded enough ground, mollified and appeased just a little more. Good going, Max. You jettisoned the public option to get the support of so-called “moderate” Republicans, and now you’re left with nothing.

Josh Marshall has a one-line commentary: “Republicans really came through for Max Baucus.” Pithy.

Or, as Nate Silver puts it in his post title, “Baucus Compromise Bill Draws Enthusiastic Support of Senator Max Baucus.”

Firstly, there’s Jay Rockefeller, who opposes the lack of a pubic option.

Ron Wyden doesn’t think the subsidies are sufficient.

Then there’s Olympia Snowe, who doesn’t like the funding mechanism.

John Kerry also has issues with the funding plan — different issues than Snowe does — and implies that the bill needs significant changes.

Mike Enzi and Chuck Grassley, who were never really on board in the first place, have alitany of objections.

Kent Conrad now wants the CBO to score the bill with a 20-year time window — an unorthodox move which could have a variety of motives, but if nothing else introduces another wrench into the works.

At least Jeff Bingaman is still on board. For now.

These are not just any old random set of Senators opposing Baucus’s plan — these are the thought leaders on health care reform.

Negotiations are funny things. Sometimes the scariest moments come when you’re closest to a settlement, as all sides feel emboldened to take the last opportunity to demonstrate resolve. Leverage in a negotiation is not necessarily a zero-sum affair, since nobody has any leverage if there’s no hope to reach an agreement. So some of this maneuvering, perhaps, is a reflection of the bill moving closer to passage and not further away.

But let’s be clear — some of this is Baucus’s chickens coming home to roost. When you make a unilateral decision to negotiate with only five other people from a 23-person committee and 100-person Senate, and two of those five people have clear electoral disincentives against supporting any plan that you might come up with, the negotiations are liable to end in failure far more often than not. The flurry of on-the-record statements against Baucus’s reform plans –not “leaks”, not trial balloons — points toward a defective process.

Greg Sargent has more on Grassley:

As you may have heard, Grassley announced in a statement last night that he can’t support the health care bill that is expected from the Senate Finance Committee today, citing concerns about abortion and illegal immigrants. But I wanted to focus on this amusing nugget from Grassley’s statement:

“On top of all that, there’s no guarantee that a Finance Committee bill, even if it becomes bipartisan, will stay that way after it leaves the committee. An overriding issue for some time has been the fact that members of the Democratic leadership haven’t made a commitment to back a broad bipartisan bill through the entire process.”

Grassley’s position really appears to be that a key reason he can’t back the bill now is that Dems haven’t sworn a blood-oath not to do a bill alone later if no bill emerges that can get “broad” Republican support. This amounts to asking Dems to promise in advance to donothing at all in the event that a “broad” number of Repubicans don’t agree to get behind some kind of compromise bill.

By this standard, in order to satisfy Grassley’s definition of true bipartisanship, Dems quite literally must cede all their power and leverage in advance, even as Republicans are refusingen masse to back any proposal that can reasonably be called a compromise. That really is Grassley’s position, with no exaggeration.

… [W]hat this really means is that in order to meet Grassley’s definition of bipartisanship, Dems must effectively hand over to Republicans total veto power over health care reform. It’s that simple.

All links via Memeorandum.