The August Deadline: There Is No Spoon

As unlikely a cool cat as Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman has commented on President Obama’s referencing “the red pill and the blue pill” (Obama’s standard way of talking about comparative effectiveness research) as a shout-out to the sci-fi epic “The Matrix.”  So I have another scene from “The Matrix” that sums up how I feel about Congress missing its self-imposed deadline of the August recess.  It’s not unlike the “jump” scene in the first movie, where the rebels are waiting to see if Keanu Reeves will prove himself The One by being the first trainee to ever successfully defy gravity by leaping tall buildings in a single-bound.  After much anticipation that he’ll succeed where so many have failed, Keanu psyches himself up… leaps… and face plants into the sidewalk.

The youngest member of the team is confused.  He wants to know what it means.  “It doesn’t mean anything,” he’s told.  “Everyone falls the first time.”

The August Recess deadline first materialized in March, and at the time I remarked, “these would be ambitious dates for just building the bill in their committees, given the whole host of issues to consider – let alone getting a final bill to the White House.”  Looking back, it appears I was too pessimistic.  Here we are, with a House bill that has already passed through two out of three committees and still has a long shot of getting passed on the House floor before Congress breaks for a month.  Similarly, the Senate Finance Committee – the epicenter of progress grinding to a halt on health care for the past month – is showing signs that they might just have their bill voted out of committee by August 7.  For the record, I don’t put much stock in this latest date.  After all, it'd be a whopping 5 weeks late if it made it.  But I can’t dismiss the possibility out of hand – Max Baucus might surprise me yet.

If health care reform doesn’t pass the House or the Senate Finance Committee, it doesn’t signal the end of reform.  Far from it.  Three out of five committees have voted out their health care legislation.  Not only did we not get that far under Bill Clinton, it didn’t happen for Harry Truman, as his bill for National Health Insurance was bottled up in what was then the Senate Labor and Public Welfare Committee.  We’re in unprecedented territory here.  As Nate Silver points out, the media furor that’s accompanying the public acknowledgement that the deadline is going to slip is itself symptomatic of the current ADD tendencies of the press:

But almost always, those observations are formulated based on events of the past and sloppily extrapolated to imply events of the future, often to embarrassing effect: see also, New Hampshire, the 15-day infatuation with Sarah Palin, the Straight Talk express being left for dead somewhere in the summer of 2007, the overreaction to "Bittergate" and the whole lot, and the naive assumption that Obama's high-60's approval ratings represented a paradigm shift and not a honeymoon period that new Presidents almost always experience.

Personally, I may be pessimistic about Baucus’ timeline, but I’m optimistic that the bill that comes out of Finance will be the better for it slipping.  This isn’t because I believe in the salutary effects of bipartisanship for bipartisanship’s sake.  It’s more because if Baucus and Senate Finance had hit their original deadline, I’d probably have hated the result.  Remember, before it became obvious that Finance was still in search of a consensus, they were talking about triggers on the public plan, a harebrained health co-op, cutting the subsidies that make the scheme work for the sake of making the superficial price tag of the bill cheaper, and a whole host of other truly terrible ideas.  Rather than stamping such improvisations with the imprimatur of “bipartisanship,” Finance quickly demonstrated how untenable they really were.  The only Republican who went for the trigger was Snowe.  Republicans never bit at Conrad’s health co-op, and only wanted to water it down further.  After weeks of negotiating financing schemes in the hopes of finding the one “we’ll all jump together” solution that would be palatable to Republicans and Democrats, it turns out there aren’t any.  As Ezra Klein notes, “One of the meta stories of this whole process was that the Senate Finance Committee was supposed to prove that bipartisanship could still work to pass major legislation. Instead, it's proving that it can't.”

Put another way, in the end, Keanu not making the jump didn’t mean all that much – but that’s because there was going to be a lot more fighting to come, no matter what.

(Photo credit:  MacQ on Flickr.)