Instead of pushing on full steam for health reform, the reaction from the White House is to shift to job creation, reducing the deficit, and taxing the banks before health care reform. Here's the quote from Rahm Emanuel:
With Mr. Obama’s health care overhaul stalled on Capitol Hill, Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff, said in an interview that Democrats would try to act first on job creation, reducing the deficit and imposing tighter regulation on banks before returning to the health measure, the president’s top priority from last year.
Call me silly, but I don't think we should put health reform on the backburner right now. Now is the time to keep the steam going forward, and as Nancy Pelosi famously said:
"You go through the gate. If the gate’s closed, you go over the fence. If the fence is too high, we’ll pole vault in. If that doesn’t work, we’ll parachute in. But we’re going to get health care reform passed for the American people."
It's too bad that Senator Landrieu couldn't be more like Nancy since she was whining about President Obama implying in the SOTU that the Senate had dragged their hands over the past year.
Here's Senator Landrieu's whinebelow:
The president's criticism of the Senate in the speech was "a little strange, a little odd," Landrieu said.
"Moderate Senate Democrats, who give the Senate the 60 votes, come from states that have to appreciate a broad range of ideas," Landrieu said. For a president who ran on post-partisan platform, "it doesn't do a great service to then say everything the House caucus passes without Republican votes, the Senate should take. It is the reverse."
I'm not shedding a tear for her or any of the conservative Senate Democrats that worked over the past year to block this health reform bill and water it down to satisfy their pet peeves. They need to stop their whining, and grab a mop and get to work on finishing health reform for us by fixing their bill via reconciliation first.
CALL YOUR DEMOCRATIC SENATOR AND TELL THEM TO FIX THE SENATE BILL FIRST VIA RECONCILIATION! PLEASE REPORT YOUR CALL HERE!
Keep up the calls to the Senate all day long, and tell them to finish their job that they were elected to do. They shouldn't be dragging their asses on this anymore. Tell them to fix their Senate bill first via reconciliation, and then the House will pass it.
Health reform should not be put on the backburner, and now is the time to crash the gate! It's time for the Senate to put up or shut up on this issue.
UPDATE: Here's Ezra Klein below on why the message from Rahm doesn't work:
The timetable Emanuel is laying out makes little sense. The jobs bill will take some time. Financial regulation will take much longer. Let's be conservative and give all this four months. Is Emanuel really suggesting that he expects Congress to return to health-care reform in the summer before the election? Forgetting whether there's political will at that point, there's no personnel: Everyone is home campaigning.
Moreover, there's a time limit on health-care reform. The open reconciliation instructions the Senate could use to modify the bill expire when the next budget is (there's disagreement over the precise rule on this) considered or passed. That is to say, the open reconciliation instructions expire soon. Democrats could build new reconciliation instructions into the next budget, but that's going to be a heavy lift. The longer this takes, the less likely it is to happen. And Emanuel just said that the administration's preference is to let it take longer. If I were a doctor, I'd downgrade health care's prognosis considerably atop this evidence.