So the picture on Capitol Hill may now be one of grinning Democrat faces — but for how much longer? Early today, health-care reforms backed by President Barack Obama finally scraped past the crucial Senate hurdle, with the Democrats getting the required 60 votes to move the bill to a final vote by Christmas Eve.
Yet this Democratic victory has bred deep resentment in the Republican caucus. Reports from Washington suggest that a new era of partisanship is about to begin, boding ill for yet-to-be-passed bills still tied up in the Senate.
The key concern is that Republicans will choose to play politics, causing domestic intransigence to weigh down on globally important issues such as climate change and nuclear weapons proliferation.
Climate change legislation, which Senate Democratic leaders aim to bring to the floor by next spring, has been hotly opposed by Republican senators, particularly those from the manufacturing states. The failure of the bill to pass through the Senate before the recently ended Copenhagen summit was blamed as one of the reasons for the world’s subsequent inability to agree on a legally binding treaty, demonstrating how America’s domestic problems have impeded global co-operation.
Similarly, Obama wants the Senate to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, a legally binding agreement that calls for a world halt to nuclear weapons testing which the US Senate declined to ratify in 1999. To date, the treaty has been signed by 182 countries, but has yet to come into force because the US and eight other countries have yet to give it their approval.
Both bills require a 60-40 majority to pass, making a show of bipartisanship all but crucial for any hoped-for success: with exactly 60 Democratic senators there is no room for manoeuvre. And, remember, Obama’s stated goal was to achieve a bipartisan health bill — a forgotten hope.
Republicans are convinced that the Democrats are heading towards an “historic mistake” and intend to force a series of six procedural showdowns to keep Senate in session right through Christmas Eve — a tactic designed to drag the final vote out until after the Democrats’ self-imposed deadline. If successful, this would further delay attempts to work out a compromise between the House’s and the Senate’s health-care legislation.
Moreover, the Democrats’ hard-fought win still hangs in the balance — the absence of a single member of the Democratic caucus could derail the bill’s progress.
“What the American people should pray is that somebody can’t make the vote,” Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, a leading Republican opponent of the health bill, was quoted as saying.
The Senate bill, as it now stands, will significantly transform the US health-care system, mandating almost all Americans to buy insurance, with those from lower-income groups receiving subsidies to do so. It would mean 94 per cent of Americans under the age of 65 would have medical coverage by 2019.
But compromises had to be made in order to win the necessary votes.
The option of a new government-run insurance plan to compete with private insurers was dropped, while support had to be given to revised language on abortion in order to win the crucial 60th vote from Senator Ben Nelson from Nebraska — one of the most conservative Democrats. The bill now says that states can opt out of insurance plans that cover abortions, and state “insurance exchanges” will have to offer at least one plan that does not fund abortions.
Nelson’s support for the bill was also given on condition that the federal government will permanently fund Nebraska’s bill for Medicaid, the insurance plan for the poor.
Such wrangling for votes has attracted fierce criticism that the concessions made to Nebraska are akin to bribery and corruption. Senator John Cornyn, a Texas Republican, described the effort to get the 60 votes as “basically a pay-to-play approach . . . and it’s just repulsive”.
However, this does not mean that the haggling is over. The bill will have to be merged with the House’s version, which still restrains the government option and places stricter limits on abortion funding, before going back to both houses for another vote.
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