Good Grief! Olympia "Lucy" Snowe has the football firmly in hand [View All]

[Kurt_and_Hunter]

Unlike some folks, Snowe has been very clear about what she will not support.

She is running around TV saying that not only will she not vote for a bill with public option, but will also not vote for a bill with almost ANY feature more progressive than the Baucus bill. And she hasn't even said she would vote for the Baucus bill on the floor.

Either HCR is completely gutted or she doesn't vote for it. This isn't reading between the lines... it's all she talks about. It is all she has EVER talked about.

That should make her roughly as relevant as Jim DeMint. Instead she's the king-maker.

Now she's out there flogging a trigger that is one of the few 'compromises' that would play out as actually being worse than nothing. (It would never kick in and would politically freeze other actions going forward. Sometimes no solution is better than a bogus solution, since at least with no solution it's easy to see there's a problem.)

I said it yesterday and I'll say it again... Snowe voting for the Finance bill was a negative development for HCR in America. Her vote was not needed to move the Baucus bill out of conference. Her vote served only to accrue power/influence to herself.

Right now she is "relevant" and as long as she is "relevant" Reid is less likely to include the HELP bill PO in the merged bill that reaches the senate floor. (Which he probably doesn't want to do anyway, but Snowe provides cover.)

If the PO is not in the bill as presented to the full senate it has to be added by amendment--a serious problem since though one can appeal to blue-dogs to vote for cloture on an entire bill the blue-dogs will not vote for cloture on a specific PO amendment.

So we are right where we have always been... hoping for a conference report miracle.

The only path to even lame-but-acceptable HCR is for the conference to ignore the Senate's input and go with pretty much whatever the House passes, then get 50+1 in the Senate.

If that happens, awesome.

But please recognize that either

1) this whole thing has been meaningless window-dressing since the whole deal was always wired with a cool bill being crafted in conference no matter what happens in the Senate (awesome), or...

2) this whole thing has been a cynical sell-out involving dangling the conference scenario simply to freeze the left. Then, when some weak bill comes out of conference the suckerocracy will be appealed to to rally behind it as "the best possible bill." (not awesome)