Two quick observations on a Nate Silver post:
This is not exactly to suggest that Grassley is bargaining in bad faith. But he has almost no reason to compromise on any points of substance. At best, he's probably somewhat indifferent between a weak health care bill passing and the whole enterprise failing apart; that's a very dangerous person to be negotiating with. The same thing certainly goes for Mike Enzi, who is more conservative than Grassley and hails from a much redder state. Olympia Snowe is different: she is a de facto independent in a very blue state, who might even have some hopes of being on a Presidential ticket someday.
Mike Enzi is not really negotiating in this. He is there as the political officer. The "minder" for Grassley and Snowe. This should be obvious to Baucus. It's obvious to all his colleagues in the Senate, and pretty much everyone else in the world, too.
Instead of Grassley and Enzi, Baucus should be sitting in a room with Ben Nelson and Mary Landireu -- and maybe Olympia Snowe. Those are the swing votes -- the pressure points -- the people with whom there's actually something to be neogtiated. If Grassley wants to come in and snack on beef jerky and spitball a few ideas, then sure -- door's always open. But I don't know what good he's doing the Democrats by being given so leverage over the process.
Absolutely true, and a very important point. Right now, it's Enzi, Grassley and Snowe why? Because these negotiations are ostensibly a function of the Senate Finance Committee. Enzi, Grassley and Snowe are members of the committee, and Nelson and Landrieu aren't.
But so what? The reality, as everyone up to and including Baucus has acknowledged, is that they're after a bill that can get 60 votes. And not only that, but the Finance Committee product still has to be merged with the HELP product, anyway. So what difference does it make whether that's negotiated with the people who hold those votes, or with their political proxies on the Finance Committee? In fact, common sense would tell you that there is a difference, and that it's presumably always better to be negotiating directly with the other parties you're after rather than some intermediary. So if you're aiming for 60, why not negotiate directly with those few votes out there that can get you to 60?
Nobody had any problem with negotiating the settlement to the stimulus impasse outside of the formal framework established for that purpose. Collins, Snowe and Specter weren't on the conference committee, and Snowe isn't on the Appropriations Committee, either. But everyone knew where the votes were, and the negotiations happened around them, with the results carried to the formal committee structures for approval thereafter. Why we should continue with the charade of carrying on these negotiations in the Finance Committee when everyone on the Finance Committee has their eyes on votes outside of the committee membership, anyway, I have no idea.
And I just have to throw in a third point here, now that I think about it:
So what was Baucus hoping to achieve by negotiating with people who have an incentive to see the process fail? There are two basic cases here. Either the Democrats can muster all 60 votes on their own, and Grassley's vote would be the icing on top of Obama's victory cake and would only serve to improve the Democrats' electoral prospects in 2010 and 2012. Or they can't, in which case Grassley has it within his power to cause the Democrats a huge, potentially back-breaking headache.
Democrats in all likelihood can't muster all 60 votes on their own. The probability that Senator Kennedy will ever be able to return to the Senate and cast a vote is, unfortunately, minimal -- and that's an optimistic assessment. Senator Byrd is only marginally more likely to be able to appear. There are, for all practical purposes, still only 58 Democrats in the Senate.
That means that the 60th vote, if that's what we're shooting for, is going to have to come from a Republican. But the political complication in this is that no Republican wants to be that 60th vote all by themselves. There are still a few of them who might be willing to be the 61st vote, so that no one can be singled out as "the one who did it." The two votes we need to get to 60 are going to want company and cover. So it may turn out to be the case (assuming the ability to hold all 58 Democratic votes) that getting two Republicans is actually harder than getting three. And that means the search should be on for #3. Is it Grassley? Maybe. But since it doesn't matter as regards final passage whether that vote comes from inside or outside the Finance Committee, you should probably be looking at a wider roster.
I wrote the other day that it was time to consider easing Baucus out of the driver's seat on this. It's not that he's "too conservative" for this job. It's that he's not doing it, conservative or not.
It seems that call tapped into a sentiment that was much more widely held than I knew. Since the likelihood of that happening is probably pretty slim (think Lieberman), we might as well start looking for other, frankly simpler, solutions. There's really not much reason to remove Baucus as Finance Committee chair, necessarily. But there's plenty of reason to remove these negotiations from the Finance Committee.
If it's all about getting to 60, get to 60 where the 60 are.