Sen. Max Baucus of Montana, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, voted Tuesday against attempts by fellow Democrats Jay Rockefeller and Charles Schumer to add a government-run health insurance option to his committee’s version of health care reform — not because he opposes the idea of a so-called public option, he said, but because including a public option will guarantee a filibuster and he wants his committee to approve “a bill that can become law.”
Conventional wisdom says Baucus’ committee is working on what will become the Senate’s version of health care reform and that odds are against a public option. Still, some form of the public option may yet survive. Four other versions of health care reform — three in the House and one approved by the Senate health committee — include a public option, and the legislative process doesn’t end with the Senate Finance Committee’s work. It takes a slog to pass a bill.
And, in the Senate, it takes 60 votes to end debate on a bill so at least 51 senators can then pass it. The filibuster has been a part of the Senate practically since the body’s formation. (Go here for a history of the filibuster.) The filibuster of popular imagination — of a determined senator or group of senators speaking for hours on end to block legislation (think Jimmy Stewart in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington”) — no longer really exists. Cloture, a mechanism adopted by the Senate in 1917, has taken its place, and as the Senate has become more evenly divided since the late 1970s and early 1980s, and thus more partisan and hardened ideologically, the number of cloture votes has increased many-fold. What once was a rarity has become a regular part of the Senate’s legislative routine.
(There is no filibuster in the House because the House can limit debate by time. Each chamber sets its own rules and can change its rules whenever it wants.)
Democrats currently enjoy a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. Not only do they have more than enough votes to pass a health care bill, but they also have enough votes to end debate on a bill. Republicans threaten to filibuster health care legislation (practically any health care legislation), but it’s not only Republicans who threaten the public option, it’s some Democrats, too. Specifically on the Finance Committee, it’s Baucus, Kent Conrad of North Dakota and Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas, all three of whom voted against both public option amendments offered Tuesday.
You’ll recall that Baucus and Conrad were part of the Gang of Six, a bipartisan group of six Finance Committee members brought together this summer by Baucus to try to craft a bipartisan health care bill. It was never clear whether Republicans Charles Grassley and Mike Enzi were negotiating in good faith and they and Olympia Snowe voted against Tuesday’s public option proposals. Of the Gang of Six’s three Democrats, only New Mexico’s Jeff Bingaman voted for the Rockefeller and Schumer amendments. As I noted in a previous post — and I mention this for what it’s worth, and for what it might or might not now say — Bingaman has collected the fewest campaign contributions from the health care industry thus far this year ($2,000 compared with Baucus’ $121,000, for example) and comes from the only truly diverse state of the states represented by the Gang of Six.
And, again, for what it’s worth, and for what it might or might not now say, the health care industry gave Lincoln, who’s up for re-election next year, more than $350,000 from January through June, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics.
So is it time for supporters of a public option to give up in despair and await their biggest fear — “insurance reform” that benefits no one but the insurance companies and actually makes matters worse — to become reality? It’s hard to say. Like I said, a lot can happen in the weeks ahead, and there are a few politically tricky ways around a filibuster. For the moment, though, health care reform is in the hands of Max Baucus, a man who says he supports a public option, but not more than he supports the legislative process. Putting together a bill that can pass Congress is all well and good, but reform crafted solely to avoid a filibuster may be no reform at all.