Progressive Senators Push Reid on the Public Option

With the CBO score on the Senate bill expected at any moment, last night progressive Senators met with Harry Reid to remind him that the vast majority of the caucus supports the public option, has compromised enough, and don't want to see it watered down any further.

Sherrod Brown, who requested the meeting, told the NYT's David Herszenhorn

"Most of us in the caucus want a strong public option, support the Reid way of doing it," Mr. Brown said. "And we’re confident that over time, as the debate unfolds and we take amendment after amendment after amendment, that we can get 60 votes."

"Obviously there are a couple of senators on our side that need some convincing," Mr. Brown said. But he said that there was no willingness to make further concessions.

"We figure on the public option there has been a lot of compromise already," he said. "People who oppose the public option, you know, the overwhelming number of Republicans — maybe all of them — and the couple or three Democrats, will have their chance on the floor to do amendments."
....

"I don’t think in the end, anybody here in our caucus wants to be on the wrong side of history, wants to kill on a procedural motion, something as important as this," Mr. Brown said. "It’s the most important thing they ever will have voted on except perhaps the Iraq war."

....

"A large number of people in this country including many, many doctors wanted Medicare for all," he said. "That didn’t happen. Then we wanted a strong public option tied to Medicare rates. Then we wanted a public option building the Medicare network. That didn’t happen. Now we are saying public option coming out of the HELP Committee. And now we’re saying public option with the state opt-out. Where was the compromise coming from their side?"

Here he is this morning, reiterating those points on the Dr. Nancy show and refuting her "ram it down their throats" possibility of using reconciliation to pass this bill.

SNYDERMAN: Talk about procedure, let's talk about votes, 51 votes if you want to ram this down someone's throat, 60 I think is the magic number....

BROWN: Well, I just don't think it's ramming anything down anybody's throat. You know, nine years ago--I don't hear all of you in the media talking about this--but President Bush got his tax cuts for the rich rammed through Congress in May, four months after they began. They didn't think anything of you've got to read everything in the bill, the public's got to have it on the Internet for so many days and weeks and months, slow down--none of that and it was a terrible decision that obviously turned us from surplus, that plus the war, to a terrible, terrible deficit that got us into the economic problem. So I don't really need to hear this ramming anything through. We've been working on this in some ways for 75 years, but certainly working on this all  year. I want to get a big vote.... I want to do it with as many votes as we can. There's no discussion now of doing it wiht 51 votes, we want to do it with as many as we can....

CongressDaily adds (subs. req.)

Brown and other senators leaving the meeting would not share whether they discussed the possibility of using budget reconciliation procedures to pass a bill with a public option.

"There's a lot of moving parts here," he said. "No, I don't think it's clear at all that that's the choice -- of reconciliation or the public option."

Reid spokesman Jim Manley said reconciliation "is not what we are working on right now."

"It was about getting everybody singing on the same page," Senate Democratic Conference Vice Chairman Charles Schumer of New York said of the meeting.

There should be discussion on doing it with reconciliation. There should be the willingness on the part of Senate leadership to show the very few foot-draggers in the caucus that they are willing to do this without them, to leave them behind on taking this historic vote. Good for the progressives for drawing the line on compromise, but it might not be enough to rely upon the ConservaDems desire to be on the right side of history. Until their bluff is called on this and on Stupak, they're going to continue to hold out.