After Obama Pressure, Senate Dems Put Health Care Reform Fate In Reid's Hands
After feeling pressure from President Obama Monday to get a health care overhaul through the Senate by the August recess, two of the more cautious leaders of that effort in the slow-moving body deferred to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.).
"I saw that the leader said he thought we could do it, so where there's a will, there's a way," said Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.). He said he didn't personally see, however, how it could be done.
"I think we'll certainly be through the committee, but with the Supreme Court [confirmation fight], I don't see how we'd get through the floor," he told reporters before a lunch with Democratic colleagues. "It's hard to see how you do both."
Conrad has long been skeptical that a final bill could move through the Senate by August. Democrats fear that if the bill drags on into September the momentum will be lost. Obama has said that if health care reform isn't accomplished this year, it won't get done during his presidency, which has created an intense sense of urgency.
Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.), who is leading the reform effort in the Finance Committee, said that getting done by August was "a lift, but one that we can accomplish."
"That's more up to the leader. That's more the nature of a scheduling issue," said Baucus. "The goal is to get an agreement and we'll try our very best to get one."
The deference puts the onus on Reid to push through one of the cornerstones of the progressive agenda over the course of a few weeks. "The goal still is to get a bill done in the next couple of weeks before the start of the August recess," said a Reid spokesman.
Sen. Susan Collins, a key swing-voting Republican from Maine, was more certain when asked if she thought the deadline was realistic. "No, I don't," she said.
The end of the calendar year was a doable deadline she said, and dismissed the strategy of passing an imperfect bill quickly and then settling on some details in conference committee negotiations with the House.
Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), who will run the GOP's Senate reelection efforts for 2010, will have a substantially easier job to do if Democrats fail to pass heath care reform. Cornyn doesn't think Senate Democrats will meet Obama's deadline.
"If I were a gambling man, and I'm not, I would bet a lot of money it's not going to happen," he told the Huffington Post.
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First Posted: 07-14-09 01:28 PM | Updated: 07-14-09 02:22 PM