Daily Pulse: GOP Stalls For Time
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By Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium Blogger
Republicans are continuing their attempts to derail health care reform. This week, GOP senators tried unsuccessfully to write further delay into the Senate Finance Committee’s bill, Alex Koppelman reports in Salon:
Working on reform legislation Wednesday, the panel spent most of the morning debating an amendment by Republican Jim Bunning of Kentucky that would have delayed votes on any other amendments until they were written up in official legislative text. The Congressional Budget Office would then have had to post the language for three days before votes—which would, effectively, have stalled any progress on the bill for a week or two, at least. There are, after all, more than 500 amendments waiting to be debated and voted on.
It sounds like a bid for transparency. In practice, there would be a 72-hour window for lobbyists to read the bill and tell legislators how to vote, as Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan) more or less admitted. Roberts said that the amendment would give time for “the people that the providers have hired to keep up with all of the legislation that we pass around here.” The hired guns Roberts mentions are health care industry lobbyists.
At this point, the GOP’s only hope is to run out the clock. Bad faith bipartisanship is a great time waster: Steve Benen of the Washington Monthly notes that Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) is proposing yet another bipartisan group to negotiate the Senate’s health care bill. Grassley and Finance Committee Chair Max Baucus (D-Mont) already wasted the entire summer searching for a bipartisan bill that didn’t attract a single GOP vote, not even Grassley’s.
It’s not like the Republicans have a viable counter-proposal. James Ridgeway notes in Mother Jones that GOP is gearing up to run against health care in the midterm elections. Even the Republican Study Committee, supposedly the party’s legislative idea factory, couldn’t come up with anything besides tinkering with Medicare.
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