Pat Dollard

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POLITICO:

With their health care plans in a holding pattern — and no George W. Bush to kick around anymore — Democrats are casting about for somebody to blame.

House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn says that Republicans have “perfected ‘just say no.’” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said insurance companies are chalking up “immoral profits.”

But even if they won’t acknowledge it publicly, most Democrats in Congress know the truth: It’s their own colleagues who are slowing down progress in both the House and the Senate.

Back in 2005, Democrats made a concerted push to recruit conservative candidates to help them win in Republican-leaning districts. The strategy worked, propelling the party to power in 2006 and giving it a larger majority in 2008.

But now Democrats at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue are grappling with the downside: To get health care reform through Congress, they’re going to have to get it past these new, more conservative members of their party — specifically, the seven Blue Dogs on the Energy and Commerce Committee who have delayed consideration of the bill.

The frustration bubbled over last Friday after negotiations broke down between the Blue Dogs and Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman (D-Calif.). Afterward, the chairman complained, “We’re not going to let them empower Republicans to control the committee.”

During a meeting of committee Democrats shortly afterward, New York Rep. Eliot Engel and others gave the two Blue Dogs in attendance — Arkansas Rep. Mike Ross and Ohio Rep. Zack Space — a piece of their minds, those in attendance said afterward.

And on Monday, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman raised the possibility that some Blue Dogs are dragging their heels because they want Obama to fail — both on health care and at the polls in 2012.

“Perhaps their bottom line is that they don’t want a bill,” said Illinois Rep. Jan Schakowsky, a leading progressive. “Some of us feel this has become a constantly moving target.”

“I’ve listened carefully to what they want, and I have yet to hear how money will be saved,” she added.

Pelosi won’t go that far, but she, too, knows where the holdup is. Asked Monday about the prospects for a vote on a bill this week, the speaker said, “We’re on schedule to do it now or do it whenever. … A lot depends on when the Energy and Commerce Committee finishes its work.”

But the fact remains that House Democrats owe their majority to lawmakers such as Space and John Barrow of Georgia or Baron Hill of Indiana — two fellow Blue Dogs on Energy and Commerce — so they push these members at some peril to the party.

“These guys are the majority makers,” said Michigan Rep. John Dingell, the former chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee
who has attended key negotiating sessions with the Blue Dogs. “These guys gotta fight to stay. … They can warn us about pitfalls that we, in our arrogance, may not see. Their concerns are legitimate.”

Dingell, Waxman’s longtime rival, whom the Californian dethroned last fall, has been a quiet presence in the chairman’s negotiations with Blue Dogs and could help break the deadlock, fellow Democrats suggest.

“Don’t underestimate the John Dingell factor,” said California Rep. Lois Capps, a Waxman supporter who said committee members would like to see their old boss tally a historic win on the hallmark issue of his career.

Dingell, who long ago embraced his father’s push for universal health care, has been meeting with Blue Dogs, both one on one and in groups, for months to talk health care. Waxman also invited the former chairman to attend his own briefings with the group, aides said. And the Michigan Democrat attended a key negotiating session at the White House last week.

At this stage in the debate, Waxman and the speaker could use just about all the help they can get. While there’s still an outside chance that the House will vote on a bill before members leave town at the end of the week — as the president had originally hoped — leadership aides suggest that a more realistic target would be getting the bill through the Energy and Commerce Committee before recess.

During a Monday afternoon news conference, Pelosi seemed to leave the door open for any possibility.

“I have said that I wanted a bill to pass before the August recess,” the speaker told reporters. “But I’ve also said we need time not only to get the bill written but to have plenty of time to [read it], and I’ve also said that we need to see the direction that the Senate is going, so we can do as much as possible in advance of September.”

Democrats in the House have been waiting weeks for the Senate Finance Committee to show some signs of progress, and that frustration is also starting to boil over.

Maryland Rep. Chris Van Hollen, who chairs the Democrats’ campaign arm in the House, questioned the “political will” of his Senate counterparts to complete a deal.

“What concerns me about what’s happened in the Senate Finance Committee is that they’ve had a whole lot of time to work these things out and just don’t seem to be able to break the impasse,” Van Hollen said in an interview on Bill Press’s national radio show.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce only fed that frustration by sending a letter to Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) and Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley, the panel’s top Republican, thanking the two for their work on a bipartisan compromise and asking them to complete it by the August recess.

“The Chamber also believes that it is important for the committee to act promptly, preferably before the August recess, to approve a bipartisan bill consistent with these principles, as it is now apparent that we will be forced to oppose the legislation being considered by the House. The business community vitally needs better policy alternatives to be proposed by Congress,” the Chamber’s chief lobbyist, Bruce Josten, wrote.

Josten urged the senators to focus on finding comprehensive, bipartisan reform that improves quality, lowers costs and fairly regulates the insurance market to create a competitive marketplace.

A bipartisan group of Senate negotiators resumed their discussions late Monday afternoon. Their staffs worked through the weekend, meeting Sunday with White House budget director Peter Orszag and health reform director Nancy-Ann DeParle.

The Senate Finance Committee moved closer to eliminating two provisions favored by many Democrats: a requirement on employers to provide insurance or pay a government penalty, and a public insurance option, a senator and health-care insiders said Monday.

If that’s the shape of the final Senate Finance bill, Baucus is likely to come under even greater pressure from fellow Democrats who accuse him of abandoning key Democratic priorities for reform to win Republican votes. But Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) stressed to reporters Monday that no final deal had been reached.

Senate aides also appeared to be revisiting the idea of taxing certain cosmetic surgeries as a way to fund the $1 trillion overhaul. Treasury Department economic adviser Gene Sperling earlier this month proposed the excise tax — sometimes referred to as a “Botox tax” — on elective plastic surgeries as part of an administration effort to offer new options for closing the funding gap, according to a committee aide familiar with the talks.

But the discussion had yet to reach the member level as of Monday. It was described by one aide as one idea on a list of options.

Sens. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) and Snowe said they have not discussed it.

“I never heard one word about that in any of these deliberations,” Conrad said.

Back in the House, committee staff who wrote the bill walked rank-and-file Democrats through the legislation in detail during a sparsely attended five-hour briefing in the Capitol basement Monday.