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February 15, 2010
Health Care Compromise Bill Ready
I spoke to the White House over the weekend and they indicated that the president's package will not be a new White House plan, but a compromise between the House and Senate bills. That is to say, the White House expects that the House and Senate will have a compromise plan by February 25th.That's not necessarily surprising: The two chambers were pretty close to agreement on a compromise package before Scott Brown's election threw everything into chaos. Presumably, that'll be dusted off for this meeting. The Republican response to this is that they're demanding that the House and Senate refrain from coming up with any unified plan before the summit, which is sort of an odd argument. In essence, the Republican position is that a free and frank exchange of ideas sounds great as long as the Democrats don't bring their ideas.
The fact that Republicans are making bizarre requests to change the rules of the summit rather than just ignoring the gambit altogether suggests they've not figured out how to deal with the event. This is the first time since the Massachusetts election, in fact, that's it's been them, rather than the Democrats, who've seemed confused. The White House deserves some credit for that, and we'll see if they can keep congressional Democrats in line long enough to press the advantage.
You can download the full letter here (pdf).
Posted by Mike at February 15, 2010 05:33 PM
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