Must Have Had A Restful Vacation

Robert Gibbs appears to be on his game today. In response to Fourthbranch's rantings on Fox News, he gave the appropriate rejoinder:

I’m not entirely sure that Dick Cheney’s predictions on foreign policy have borne a whole lot of fruit over the last eight years in a way that have been either positive or, to the best of my recollection, very correct.

In other words, why would you give a crap what Dick Cheney has to say?

Later, asked about Mike Enzi attacking health care reform while also serving as one of the key bipartisan negotiators, Gibbs replied:

"In Senator Enzi's case, he doesn't believe there's a pathway to get bipartisan support and the President thinks that's wrong," Gibbs said. "I think Senator Enzi's clearly turned over his cards on bipartisanship and decided that it's time to walk away from the table."

Now it's time for the President to walk away from the table. Not sure if Gibbs' new, more aggressive approach signals something similar from Obama, but I know that the base would reward such feistiness.

Rubber, Meet Road

We know that the entire conservative movement is laboring tirelessly to block meaningful health care reform this year. They are armed with lies, false outrage, and the ability to whip their supporters into a frenzy with carefully deployed buzz-words. And this goes too for those pretending to engage in bipartisan talks in the Senate Finance Committee's Baucus caucus:

Mike Enzi, one of three Republicans ostensibly negotiating health care reform as part of the Senate's "Gang of Six," told a Wyoming town hall crowd that he had no plans to compromise with Democrats and was merely trying to extract concessions.

"It's not where I get them to compromise, it's what I get them to leave out," Enzi said Monday, according to the Billings Gazette.

Enzi found himself under attack at the town hall simply for sitting in the same room as the three Finance Committee Democrats. Republicans in the crowd called for him to exit the talks. He assured conservatives that his presence was delaying health care reform.

"If I hadn't been involved in this process as long as I have and to the depth as I have, you would already have national health care," he said.

"Someone has to be at the table asking questions," Enzi said. "If you're not at the table, you're on the menu."

His alibi for being in the same room as Democrats is that he's there to block reform. So with each day Baucus and Kent Conrad and Jeff Bingaman stay in that room, they enable this obstruction.

I've been saying this for months, but you don't have to wonder any more about the GOP's role in health care reform. And I mean the whole GOP. They exist solely to block it. So if the Democrats actually want a bill, they'll have to get it over, around and through Republicans, not with them. Thinking anything different is just living in a dreamworld.

This comes back to the leadership of the President. This WaPo story is on a completely different subject, but it gives voice to the frustrations of millions upon millions of Obama supporters. They're wondering whether their President bears any resemblance to their candidate.

In recent weeks, as even staunch supporters of the Obama administration's $787 billion two-year stimulus package have questioned the program's lagging pace of job creation, a small but increasingly restive group of African American municipal officials in Southern states have complained that not enough money is reaching communities like those found in the chronically impoverished Delta. Their ranks include (Greenville, MS mayor) Hudson, who frequently encounters constituents steadfastly loyal to Obama but nonetheless asking when help from his administration is coming.

Hudson's life has changed significantly since the president's election. The White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs has made her a regular participant in conference calls with other mayors and leading county officials. But with her new access to the powerful in Washington have also come reminders of the expectations that follow any charismatic figure entrusted with the presidency. "I know things have been a little slow for some people," she says. "People see me in our Wal-Mart here and ask, 'We have a new president: When is it all going to get started? When are there going to be jobs?' . . . People here were anticipating that there was going to be a big package of jobs and money with a wrapped bow signed 'Obama' at the bottom."

In other parts of the rural South, local government representatives have also given voice to the mounting frustrations of their communities. The objections are wide-ranging -- everything from stories of confounding red tape in the stimulus program's application process to a general lament that federal officials have sometimes overlooked small communities devoid of the kinds of staffing, computer resources or technical expertise needed for preparing sophisticated grant proposals.

People may not know the ins and outs of the legislative process, but they know they voted for hope, and they want help. Some of the calls may be impractical or rushed, but people thought they were voting for a new era of leadership, and seven months in, they're waiting for that leadership to take hold. In a sense, Obama is a slave to a legislative process that resists change in very significant ways. At the same time, he is not impotent. He can forcefully rebut the fiscal scolds who use every opportunity to argue against something new, whether the economy is booming (don't mess with a good thing) or in crisis (don't add a burden now). He can figure out the legislative means to navigate the bottlenecks of the Congress, bypassing committees or using reconciliation or breaking filibusters.

Nobody says it'll be easy. But at this point, failure to pass anything will demoralize the base and leave progressive change in the waiting room for perhaps another generation. From a political perspective, the Democrats have no choice. And they have no partner on the other side of the aisle. They're going to have to take the leap themselves - and given that, they'd better make any reform the best it can be, or even passage won't save them.

Baucus Caucus: Less Health Care For America NOW

The six-headed Presidential hydra, also known as the sub-group in the Senate Finance Committee, has decided to ignore everybody and keep working diligently to do absolutely nothing on the health care bill.

Senate health-care negotiators agreed late Thursday to ignore the increasingly strident rhetoric from Republican and Democratic leaders and to keep working toward a bill that can win broad support from the rank-and-file in both parties, according to sources familiar with the talks.

In a conference call, the three Democratic and three Republican members of the Senate Finance Committee agreed to redouble their efforts to craft a less costly alternative to the trillion-dollar initiatives so far put forward in Congress. They discussed the possibility of also reining in the scope of their package, the sources said.

The senators rejected the idea of imposing a deadline on their negotiations, and they agreed to talk again Sept. 4 -- four days before lawmakers are scheduled to return to Washington from their August break. The consensus, one participant said, was "to take your time to get it right." [...]

Before leaving for the month-long recess, Baucus had pegged the cost of the negotiators' ideas at less than $900 billion over the next decade. Thursday's discussions focused on driving that cost lower, the sources said.

Their draft bill was already woefully short in terms of subsidies for those who can't afford insurance. The Gang of Six wants to drive them even lower.

I'm sure the people most enamored of themselves did reject having a timeline on their circle jerk. But look who is making these decisions. Chuck Grassley has basically said he'd vote against his own bill, even if he gets everything he wants, if he cannot get more than 80 Senators total on board. The #2 ranking Republican in the Senate has already said that votes for reform aren't coming. So Grassley, one of the key negotiators here, has admitted that he won't support anything the Gang of Six does. Mike Enzi is probably stronger in that direction. Olympia Snowe admitted today that the public option was never on the table in this Gang of Six, and that co-ops are worth exploring, even though two months ago she called them worthless. Kent Conrad has been ideologically opposed to the public option for as long as anyone can remember, and came up with co-ops, in all likelihood, as a way to steal seed money for the "non-profit" Blue Cross of North Dakota, which has captured 90% of the market in his home state. Max Baucus admitted as far back as March that the public option was nothing but a bargaining chip. Jeff Bingaman hasn't been getting nearly enough heat for being part of this charade, but he has talked the talk on co-ops as well.

These six Senators, who come from states representing 2-3% of the population, have proposed ideas out of step with 77% of the public, and think they're entitled to hijack the entire process in Congress to serve those ends.

The question is what to do about this. 270,000 people listened to the President's strategy session yesterday, and over 5,600 supporters have contributed almost $350,000 to lawmakers standing up for the public option. These six lawmakers, most of whom probably want no bill at all, know that the longer they hold up the process the harder it becomes to pass anything. Harry Reid needs to use whatever means necessary to force a bill out of the Senate - discharge petitions, going around the committee of jurisdiction, whatever. At that point, we're talking about a conference committee. Which is what Obama has asked for all along. The problem is a matter of trust, as Paul Krugman put it today.

...Chris Bowers is right that this is the worst part about it - the Senate Finance Committee has decided to take two additional weeks off before meeting again. They are so bound and determined to get health care right that they'll do nothing for weeks, presumably in the hopes that health care reform will die on the vine and they won't have to do anything at all.

Glide Paths

I trust Orrin Hatch to know a bit more about his fellow Republicans than Max Baucus:

Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), who has a long history of teaming up with Democrats on healthcare legislation, says Democratic healthcare reform plans now under consideration are “out of this world.”

Hatch also told The Hill in a Friday interview he would be “shocked” if Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Mike Enzi (R-Wyo.) sign onto a healthcare deal with Democrats given the current trajectory of the legislation.

Seems kind of futile to keep negotiating with two people who will never agree to your terms. Unless your goal, too, is delay.

What this delay has started to cause, according to Jon Cohn, is a change in rhetoric from the White House that could signal a major change in the scope of the bill.

The trouble is the Senate, where the last committee to consider reform, the Finance Committee, remains exactly where it has been since early summer: Stuck. The committee remains divided over several issues, chief among them how to come up with the approximately $1 trillion (or more) it will take to pay for coverage expansions in the first ten years. And while some of the problem seems peculiar to the makeup of that committee--and the determination of its chairman, Max Baucus, to include Republicans who are highly suspicious of the whole enterprise--the same problem exists in the overall makeup of the Senate, where not even all Democrats are yet on board with the kind of effort the party leadership in mind.

On Sunday, Ceci Connolly of the Washington Post reported that administration officials have changed their rhetoric--and that some now talk, quietly, of putting the country on a “glide path” to universal coverage rather than achieving it in the next few years. This is an important development although not an unexpected one. The White House and its allies plan for all contingencies. There has always been a “Plan B” in case the support for full coverage, along with comprehensive reform, wasn’t there. And there have always been key players--both in the White House and Congress--who have thought maybe “Plan B” should be “Plan A.” After a rough few weeks, when the president’s poll ratings began to slip and the opponents of reform managed to gum up the works in Congress, such an outcome seems increasingly likely.

We have a pretty good idea of what that would mean, in terms of policy. Leaks out of the Finance Committee suggest that, absent support for a program with all of the funding and regulation reform needs, legislation would be far from ideal. It’d mean less financial assistance both for people who don’t have insurance and those who now struggle to pay for it. It’d mean less financial protection for people who get sick. It’d mean less choice for people who want a range of options, including a public insurance plan, from which to choose. (For more details, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has a full analysis.)

Working- and middle-class people, many of them now struggling to pay for insurance or at risk of financial catastrophe in case of illness, would be the ones to receive less in a watered down reform. This makes for both bad policy and bad politics, in no small part because the two are closely related. A reform that the middle class perceives as offering few benefits at substantial cost would be a prime candidate for rollback in coming years.

The delay caused people to believe that enthusiasm for reform in Washington had slipped, which caused a similar loss of enthusiasm throughout the country. And this led the White House to scale back their rhetoric (which I actually think is a good thing - make it bite-sized for public consumption), as well as potentially scaling back the whole policy. Sounds pretty well-coordinated to me.

It's almost as if Grassley and Enzi are following a design to hold up any bill and let the cracks in the Democratic coalition come to a head.

I hope I don't get hungry on more than that half a loaf for the next few years.

Enzi Invents New Six-Member Unicameral Parliament, Appoints Self Prime Minister

Steve Benen hit this yesterday, but I just noticed it. Mike Enzi, like most Senators, finds himself very, very important. So much so that he believes the November election leading to 60 Democratic Senators, 258 Democratic House members and a Democratic President sent the message that his word must be law.

With liberal Democrats on and off the Finance Committee already angling to pull the measure to the left when it is combined with a rival passed by the Health Committee, Enzi indicated his support is contingent on Democratic leaders leaving any Finance Committee agreement intact.

“I also need commitments from Sen. [Harry] Reid [D-Nev.] and Speaker Pelosi, as well as the administration, that the bipartisan agreements reached in the Finance Committee will survive in a final bill that goes to the president,” Enzi said.

There are six Senators involved in the Baucus caucus in the Senate Finance Committee. Together they represent about 2.8% of the total US population.

Let's add in some additional facts. Five Congressional Committees are working on health care legislation. The legislative process works like this: the bills coming out of the committees in the respective chambers are merged into single bills for a floor vote. Senators and House members have the opportunity to offer amendments. Those amendments are voted up or down, then there are final votes on passage of the bill in the House and the Senate. The bills coming out of the respective chambers go to a conference committee, where they are merged, with the details ironed out, and then returned to each chamber for a final vote.

That's how government works.

Mike Enzi's conception of government is this: Mike Enzi agrees to a compromise with 6% of the total Senate representing 2.8% of the population, and it becomes law.

I will say that his version has speed on its side.

The bill Enzi wants to fast track has a favorable CBO score going for it, reportedly costing under $1 trillion over 10 years and covering 95% of all Americans. But the only way to do that is to cut subsidies to the bone, making coverage unaffordable; or to phase in the program later in the ten-year budget window, maintaining the current broken, crappy system for as long as possible. It also apparently eliminates the successful Children's Health Insurance Program.

And by the way, they can't get it done until after the August recess.

Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, and Sen. Michael Enzi, R-Wyoming, dropped the bombshell news to CNN and two other reporters in Capitol hallways Wednesday night. They have spent weeks behind closed doors, trying to hammer out an agreement with their Democratic counterparts on the Senate Finance Committee but said too many issues remain unresolved, making it virtually impossible for them to sign on to a deal before the break.

“There are a lot of tough decisions to make and they aren’t going to be made real quickly,” Grassley said late Wednesday when asked whether negotiators should kick their talks over to September.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nevada, had already postponed Senate floor action on health care legislation until the fall, but Democrats had hoped the Senate Finance Committee could finish its work before the summer break. In fact, one senior Democratic source said meeting that deadline was the central thrust of the president’s meeting with Reid and Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, D-Montana, last Friday [...]

Enzi, a soft-spoken conservative, was furious about headlines Wednesday morning that suggested he was close to reaching a deal with the Democrats.

“I felt my reputation was in danger,” he said.

In Enzi's world, signing on to a compromise with Democrats would ruin his reputation. So obviously we should just let him set the policy by himself. After all, 189,046 voted for him last year.

The silver lining here is that liberal Democrats in the House are resisting going along with this nonsense. From CongressDaily (sub. req.):

A trumpeted healthcare reform agreement with conservative House Democrats set off a firestorm of criticism from the party's liberal wing Wednesday, pushing back proceedings in a key committee and casting doubt on the strength of the leadership-backed accord.

Leaders and White House officials worked for days to reach an agreement with Blue Dogs, who had been holding up the legislation in the Energy and Commerce Committee because of concerns about cost, burdens on small business and a public insurance option [...]

"There's angst; there's questions; there's some anger," Rep. Eliot Engel, D-N.Y., a member of the Energy and Commerce Committee, said of the meetings with Waxman. "The question is, have we given up too much for the goals that we need?" he said of the agreement. "I don't want to see the insurance companies subsidized by middle-income taxpayers."

The Progressive Caucus called the Waxman/Blue Dog deal "unacceptable" and vowed to defeat such a compromise on the House floor.

Meanwhile, in the best news I've heard in years, Senate Democrats are making threats to Max Baucus' committee chair.

In an apparent warning to Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.), some liberal Democrats have suggested a secret-ballot vote every two years on whether or not to strip committee chairmen of their gavels [...]

"Every two years the caucus could have a secret ballot on whether a chairman should continue, yes or no," said Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), the chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee. "If the ‘no’s win, [the chairman’s] out [...]

Some senators suggest privately that Baucus might be more open to persuasion if his chairmanship is subject to regular votes.

Another senior Democratic senator endorsed Harkin’s suggestion but declined to speak on the record for fear of angering Baucus.

"Put me down as a yes, but if you use my name I’ll send a SWAT team after you," said the lawmaker when asked about a biennial referendum on chairmen.

Civil rights legislation in the 1960s didn't move forward until the House Rules Committee chair, a segregationist Southern Democrat, saw his power neutered by an expansion of the committee. Process changes often precede policy changes. Sen. Baucus, take note.

Forget Bipartisanship

The Senate HELP committee held four weeks of markup hearings on their health care bill. They accepted 160 Republican amendments. They allowed virtually every amendment, every concern of Republicans to a free and open vote. And in the end, the bill split entirely along party lines.

A Senate committee became the first congressional panel to advance healthcare reform legislation this year, marking a significant step toward the achievement of President Obama's foremost domestic initiative.

On a party-line, 13-10 tally, the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee voted to move its portion of the upper chamber's healthcare reform legislation to the floor [...]

HELP Committee ranking member Mike Enzi (R-Wyo.) slammed the bill and the partisan nature of the panel's proceedings. "The bill lays the groundwork for a government takeover of healthcare," Enzi said.

I don't know how many times you have to say this. Republicans will not vote for health care reform. If so much as one of them does, I would be stunned. And it appears that the political staff in the White House understands this as well.

Both Axelrod and White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel said taking a partisan route to enacting major health-care legislation isn’t the president’s preferred choice. Yet in separate interviews, each man left that option open.

“We’d like to do it with the votes of members of both parties,” Axelrod said. “But the worst result would be to not get health-care reform done.” [...]

Emanuel, making a theoretical case for a party-line vote, offered a definition of bipartisanship based not on roll-call votes but on whether Democrats have accepted Republican ideas during the process of negotiations.

He said Democrats already have passed that test, pointing to Republican amendments that the Democratic-controlled Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee has adopted.

“That’s a test of bipartisanship -- whether you took ideas from both parties,” Emanuel said. “At the end of the day, the test isn’t whether they voted for it,” he said, referring to Republicans. “The test is whether the final product represented some of their ideas. And I think it will.”

Now Republicans will stick out their pinkies and rattle their teacups about the shocking partisanship on display, and whine about how they've been shut out of the process. But they would always say that, and predictably, it's not true.

This is the right approach, and now the President needs to collect the votes necessary for passage. Organizing for America released an ad today that will air in key states, targeting moderate Democrats and a few moderate Republicans, and imploring them to get health care done. It has no specifics, but collects a series of health care horror stories and shows the broken nature of the current system.



This will be the toughest lift of the Obama Presidency, but if he really wants it, he can get it done.

...Here's the acting chair of the HELP Committee, Chris Dodd, offering to accept 64 amendments by unanimous consent, but the Republican leader refuses to allow it in an effort to drag out the process. This is the minority's entire raison d'etre on this bill.

Solis Finally Gets A Committee Vote Tomorrow

Good news: Hilda Solis will get a long-awaited confirmation vote to be the Secretary of Labor tomorrow in the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions. The hold-up was ridiculous, based on "confusion" on Solis' stand on the Employee Free Choice Act, when it was extremely clear where she stood (in full support), and even more clear that as a legislative issue she would have little to do with the legislation until it was enacted. Earlier in the day, Think Progress noted that the right wing was attempting to Daschle-ize Solis for completely bogus reasons:

In the wake of Daschle’s departure, the right-wing is gunning for another Cabinet victim — Rep. Hilda Solis (D-CA), the nominee for Labor Secretary. The Heritage Foundation writes, “Hilda Solis: The Next Tom Daschle?”

According to The Hill, Sen. Mike Enzi (R-WY) “has questioned whether Solis had done lobbying work while she was both a House member and an official at a pro-labor group, American Rights at Work” (ARW) [...]

As for the “conflict of interest” that the right wing is highlighting? Solis wasn’t paid for her activities with ARW, and as the Washington Independent pointed out, her role was well-known and ceremonial:

"What would be the charge? Either that she participated in lobbying by being a leader with ARW, or that she erred by originally not mentioning this job in her disclosure documents. Two reasons this might not work: Solis’ role in ARW was well-known and ceremonial (it’s on their Website), and no congressman has hinted that he/she would file a complaint that could make a splash but not be deemed frivolous and politically motivated."

This is typical right-wing obstructionism designed to score political points. Let's hope Solis is confirmed be a wide margin tomorrow. It's beyond ridiculous.

Related: CA-32 candidate Emanuel Pleitez, one of at least three to declare for Solis' seat, has some good thoughts about the culpability of credit rating agencies in the financial meltdown.

Support For Labor? Prove It.

This morning at the White House, President Obama not only named his Task Force on the Middle Class headed up by Joe Biden, but signed three executive orders protecting labor rights.

So I'm going to be signing three executive orders designed to ensure that federal contracts serve taxpayers efficiently and effectively. One of these orders is going to prevent taxpayer dollars from going to reimburse federal contractors who spend money trying to influence the formation of unions. We will also require that federal contractors inform their employees of their rights under the National Labor Relations Act. Federal labor laws encourage collective bargaining, and employees should know their rights to avoid disruption of federal contracts.

And I'm issuing an order so that qualified employees will be able to keep their jobs even when a contract changes hands. We shouldn't deprive the government of these workers who have so much experience in making government work.

Labor leaders were invited to the signing ceremony today, and approved of the executive orders.

Our economy has always depended on working families. In our current economic crisis, their recovery is our country’s recovery. Now is the time to ensure that every worker has a living wage, affordable health care, a secure retirement, and a safe workplace.

The Executive Orders President Obama signed today are important first steps. This administration recognizes the federal government's responsibility, as the nation's largest purchaser of goods and services, to set model employment standards for private sector workers – and for the federal workforce.

All good stuff. But one thing struck me. Later on in the event, Joe Biden talked about "restoring labor's place in the Department of Labor." Seems to me that would begin by getting your Labor Secretary confirmed instead of having the GOP block her confirmation.

President Obama's choice to head the Labor Department is trying to overcome resistance to her nomination from Republican senators, who contend she dodged important questions during her confirmation hearing.

Rep. Hilda L. Solis, a Democrat from El Monte, is one of several prominent Cabinet nominees still awaiting confirmation more than a week after the president took office [...]

Solis' nomination has been in limbo since Jan. 9, when she failed to impress Republican senators during a confirmation hearing before the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, chaired by Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass).

The committee has taken no action on her appointment and has none scheduled. In Solis' camp, frustration is mounting.

It looks like Mike Enzi, the ranking member on the committee, is driving this. They keep citing her "evasive answers" in hearings but that's a load of bull. Solis' record is crystal clear. Obama's people have no sense of urgency around this, which is weird. Major decisions are being made on the economy right now and the Labor Secretary is not in place. Seems to me that would be a good way to display support for organized labor.