“Joe Lieberman is the least of Harry Reid’s problems,” the Senate Majority Leader said last month. If this statement initially raised eyebrows (why he is not sounding more worried?), we know now what Reid meant: Joe Lieberman is the least of Harry Reid’s problems, because Harry Reid is prepared to give Joe Lieberman whatever he wants to ensure some version of health-care reform passes the upper chamber this year. The result is not pretty for liberals: The Senate leadership is dropping not only the public option but also what the so-called Gang of Ten spent a week negotiating in exchange, namely the Medicare buy-in.
The Medicaid expansion had already been abandoned late last week, which means progressives are accepting to give away what had come to be their most prized provision without receiving anything in return. Just last week the likes of Schumer and Carper were trying to craft some sort of watered-down deal (a trigger, or an opt-in, or some sort of more convoluted mechanism) that’s quite a blow; from what I am reading at this point, it’s unlikely the bill will contain any remnant whatsoever of anything that might vaguely resemble a public option. (TPM reports that the White House instructed Reid to go as far as drop triggers to satisfy Lieberman.)
In the middle of these latest developments is Lieberman, whose behavior is increasingly resembling that of a sociopath.
Let’s set the context: Following warnings from a group of moderate Democrats that they would oppose cloture if the bill was not modified, the Senate leadership organized meetings between a group of 10 senators last week to reach an agreement on how to proceed. Lieberman did not bother showing up at the meeting, but he sent word via staff members that he was willing to support replacing the public option with a Medicare buy-in, provided the Congressional Budget Office’s score is favorable - a condition that was identical to those of most of the other negotiators. With Lieberman’s green light, Senate Democrats triumphantly announced that they were close to a deal and Reid sent a new version of the bill to the CBO.
Some hints of what was to come appeared late last week, when Lieberman started to criticize the buy-in proposal. Fast-forward to Sunday morning, when he announced that expanding Medicare was a non-starter he would be sure to filibuster because it would (he said) increase the deficit. The twist: Lieberman switched his position before the CBO released its score, which was expected to show no such thing. He went on to repeat his statement to Reid, who was reportedly dumbfounded and infuriated - though naturally not enough for any hostile blind quotes to seep through to the press, a contrast to the intensity of the criticism Democratic aides aimed at Byron Dorgan this week-end over the reimportation issue.
In short, Lieberman managed to pull off a complete flip-flop in a matter of days without receiving any new information. In the process, he managed to backstab Democratic leaders, who thought they had reached 60 votes based on the Connecticut Senator’s private assurances.
The revelation tonight that just three months ago Lieberman had voiced support for a Medicare buy-in program makes the senator’s chance look even more transparently unprincipled. Just as he did when he was denouncing the public option, Lieberman has been using arguments that have contradicted his often stated beliefs (many of them he uttered just months ag0), he’s been relying on claims that are so easily disprovable that it’s hard to believe he thinks they are valid, and he has shown no consistently from one day to the next. It’s progressively become clear that his main objective is to appear as an unreliable negotiation partner.
Whatever one thinks of the Senate’s other conservative Democrats, Lieberman’s behavior is not comparable to those with which he is sometimes associated. Ben Nelson, Blanche Lincoln and Mary Landrieu might be threatening to filibuster, but they haven’t been moving the goal posts from day to day; they might be demanding concessions from liberals, but they haven’t come out blasting what just a few days before they were the ones advocating as a compromise that would push the bill their way; they might be too close to insurance companies, but at least that means they are motivated by considerations related to health care so that we can make sense of their actions.
By contrast, Lieberman has been acting like he thinks this debate is an inconsequential game with which he can amuse himself and his flip-flops leave me no other choice but to agree with Ezra Klein that he is first and foremost motivated by revenge over his lost presidential dreams and over his loss in the 2006 primary. This might be a cliche, and it might be unthinkable for most of us that a senator would be willing to thwart million of people’s access to health insurance for such petty reasons, but how else to explain the fact that he now suddenly opposes reforms that he seemingly supported for most of his career? How else to explain that he denounces a policy proposal only after it has been embraced by the left?
Even mainstream journalists like Howard Fineman now see no other way to interpret Lieberman’s pathetic behavior, and it would only be appropriate in a healthy democracy for the Connecticut Senator to lose his credibility among commentators and pundits. Why don’t next Sunday morning’s shows try inviting Blanche Lincoln, Mary Landrieu or Jim Webb rather than Lieberman?
There are obviously other factors than Lieberman at play here, starting with the White House. Beyond the very limited leadership Obama has exercised on the issue (urging Democrats to follow the lead of their most moderate senators could only get the party so far), he has long since emerged as an obstacle rather than a proponent of a public option. Now, there are mounting reports that Rahm Emanuel visited Reid’s office today to essentially order him to give Lieberman what he wants - including dropping anything resembling a public option (including a trigger) and the Medicare buy-in.
It might not have yielded any positive result for the White House to pressure Lieberman the way they’ve been known to browbeat liberals; but the fact that it took less than 24 hours between Lieberman’s comments and the administration’s decision to grant him what he wants (rather than, say, agitate the threat of reconciliation) suggests first that they did not need much convincing that these were acceptable concessions and seocnd that there is next to no point at which they would consider alternative routes to giving Lieberman free reign.
There would of course be a lot for Democrats to lose in using reconciliation, but they did go through the trouble of putting it in the reconciliation instructions of last spring’s budget bill - not to mention that they surely did not expect to deal with this irrational a senator. Given Ezra Klein’s good summary of what reconciliation would entail, it’s hard not to conclude that this primarily stems from an ideological consideration (most Democrats’ reluctance to prioritize expanding the public sector) and an arbitrary temporal one (the desire to finish debate before Christmas, a calendar that was first endangered by Obama and Reid allowing Baucus to take far more months than he was supposed to in order to draft a bill).
What is next for the health-care bill? The legislation that will emerge out of Congress should be far closer to the Finance Committee’s bill than what had come to look likely in recent weeks. Jay Rockefeller and Tom Harkin made it clear tonight they would do nothing to change the bill at this point while Roland Burris backtracked from his pledge to vote against a public option-less bill. “I am committed to voting for a bill that achieves the goals of a public option,” he said today, a far cry from his earlier statements. Simultaneously, there is increasing talk of Democrats bypassing the conference committee; even if that does not occur, the mere fact that it is being discussed as a plausible option shows us where the balance of power lies in the 111th Congress.
Is Lieberman maybe trying to make the Dems look bad so that they don’t get more Senators in the Fall of 2010 election? After all, if even one more Dem was elected to the Senate, Lieberman would lose most all of his leverage, perhaps even his chairmanship of the Homeland Security Committee He is number 60, in the Democrat caucus. This is really really really cynical of course, but he is just a horror show.
I don’t get why so many Democrats are all that upset. As Taniel says, they are essentially getting the bill that came out of the Finance Committee several months ago. That should be a tremendous victory for the Democratic Party — and was heralded as such at the time.
I don’t understand how the liberals in the party ever expected to get anything more. The votes were never there. Folks like Landreiu, Nelson, Lincoln, Conrad, Baucas, Pryor (and probably several other members of the Dem caucas) never wanted to go any further than the Finance Committee bill. Any statements to the contrary were nothing more than a kabuki dance to appease the base.
The problem was that the liberal base and the liberal portion of the Democratic Senate caucas got greedy and tried to push the Finance Committee bill to the left. For a while they seemed to score some success — but their efforts were doomed. Senators were willing to appear supportive of efforts to include a public option and/or a buy-in order to make it appear that they were taking the views of the base into consideration. But the votes were probably never there.
So now we are back to the Finance Committee bill. But now that bill is less popular with the American people and its passage appears more like a retreat than a triumphant victory. Not to mention that the Dems lost several months of precious time in order to get it passed.
Being too greedy usually comes back to bite you in the ass.
Turns out that Nate Silver already explained this better than I did. http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/12/public-option-fight-may-not-have-been.html
K.G.,
I agree completely about party leadership getting greedy and discussed this same subject at length earlier today in Taniel’s posting on Gordon. This newer piece on Lieberman is not just about healthcare though. Lieberman is in the news every time I turn around. He is obnoxious and is getting more and more erratic.
I think a big part of what lieberman is doing is to get revenge on the liberal Dems who primaried him in 2006, but there could be more logical reasons why he’s doing it too. He probably wants to run for reelection in 2012 and maybe he feels the only way to win is by endearing himself to the GOP so they will support him. I may be giving lieberman too much credit however.
As I wrote elsewhere, Democrats must be suffering from some kind of mass masochism. I can’t explain otherwise why they refuse so stubbornly to use reconciliation when Republicans didn’t even think twice when it was their turn to pass the Bush tax cuts.
In 2007, Bob Novak accused Mitch McConell of dereliction of duty when he failed to whip up Republican votes to pass the McCain-Kennedy immigration reform bill. I think we can safely say now that Obama is guilty of the same thing on health care.
Between this failure and the Taibi article I can see why so many Democrats are now openly threatening to sit on their hands during the 2010 election.
Good write-up, Taniel. I can’t believe we have to suffer through three more years of this guy. Maybe he should be Gates’s replacement.
KG: This bill is the right-most option of the right-most option of the right-most option that is even plausible. (In other words, compared to half a year ago, this is the Ben Nelson’s dream come true.) And hey, let liberals dream that they’ll get full government-run insurance that saves the government money, gives better care and is waaaayyy cheaper. Who cares if its worked in fifteen other countries? America is just too…
I don’t get why so many Democrats are all that upset.
Because Lieberman has been doing a bait-and-switch. It would have been one thing if he had always been opposed to a Medicare buy-in. But he supported the idea as recently as three months ago. Like Landrieu, Lincoln and Nelson, when the idea was floated for the bill he said he wanted to see the CBO scoring on the bill before making a determination. A fair point.
But then, inexplicably, he came out Sunday saying that he would filibuster a Medicare buy in without even waiting for the CBO analysis. His arguments against it, as well as the public option, simply make no sense or are based on lies.
His actions seem based on whims and vindictiveness rather than principled opposition. Such an individual cannot be negotiated with. What new demand will he make next, contradicting his formerly stated position?
kewgardens, it’s hard for me to see how one could argue Democrats were too greedy (especially in expressing anger towards Lieberman) considering that the only reason the Medicare buy-in emerged as an option was that all 60 Democratic senators said they would support it (depending on the CBO score, sure, but that hasn’t even come out yet).
Medicare buy-in is not the same thing as a public option, but it certainly is an expansion of government-provided health care and that’s something many liberals were ecstatic with - something Lincoln, Landrieu, Nelson and Lieberman were not threatening to filibuster until the latter decided it was time to lose whatever credibility he has left as an honest negotiator.
I agree with the consensus that Lieberman is getting revenge on the liberal Dems and that his rational for not supporting the Medicare buy in doesn’t make logical sense.
David Kurtz in TPM makes a good point in that Lieberman has said recently that the Baucus bill covered the same territory as the Medicare buy in. If that is true, why bother to defeat the whole health care reform on a redundancy?
If, as most now contend, we are now back to the bill that came out of the Finance Committee why not stop talking to Lieberman and give Snowe whatever she wants for her support. She supported that bill and I think, in her heart, she doesn’t really want to oppose the final bill. It would be much better for health care reform, and Democrats, to have her support and let Lieberman vote however he wants.
I agree with Fritz. Rather than giving whatever Lieberman wants, Id say Democrats should be giving whateve Snowe wants, as she seems both more consistent and more liberal in terms of health care. She was the one who proposed the trigger option that several moderate Democrats were not comfortable with. I strongly suspect the GOP wants to have unaminous opposition to the Democrat’s plan, and that is this GOP pressue, and not her own personal feelings on the matter, that is making her reluctant to vote for cloture on whatever bill comes out. Considering the liberal nature of Conneicut, his behavior seems out of step with his consituents, and I do beleieve that he feels that endearing himself to the center right and being the de facto GOP’s choise in 2012 (like in 2006) is is best chance of winning reelection.
I wonder if Lieberman speaks for several Senators who want to kill the Medicare-buyin, but don’t want to be seen doing so by liberals. Since Lieberman’s reelection depends more on conservatives and independents, it makes more political sense for him to publicly make trouble than it would for, say, Blanche Lincoln, who is facing a primary challenge. This might explain why Obama elected to give in so quickly.
kewgardens - the Democrats were greedy because they wanted to go with 4 out of the 5 reporting committees and didn`t just want to go along with one Senate committee. Maybe they thought having 58 Senators elected as Dems would be sufficient. It worked for the GOP when they had 51 for a time.