The Daily Background
| Who really cares about Olympia Snowe?
by Arlen Parsa
So, Snowe voted for the Baucus Bill.
Does that suddenly make it legislation that has “bipartisan support”? Um, about as much as Michael Steele makes the Republican Party “diverse.”
I could care less about Snowe’s vote in favor of Baucus’ milquetoast bill and I doubt it will fool anybody into thinking the bill is bipartisan in any sense of the word, but I suppose it could have one bright side: if Democratic leadership in the Senate could use her vote in favor to push centrist Dems to support whatever the final bill looks like.
In other words, if Reid really ends up needing to whip super hard for votes on the final bill, he can go to the holdout Dems and say, “Look, are you really willing to go on the record as being more conservative than a Republican on this very Democratic piece of legislation?”
But who knows if that’ll happen. Reid has certainly disappointed time and time again, that’s for sure. Maybe with his re-election at stake next year he’ll be a better Democrat but it’s hard to say. With regard to Reid, I’ll also be interested to see what he puts together in conference committee when the various bills are combined. The Baucus bill is definitely the most conservative of all the bills that have come out of the myriad House and Senate committees, and Reid shouldn’t treat it as if it were more weighty than it is: it’s just one bill among many Democratic bills that have been passed by the various committees that have jurisdiction over health care.
