Olympia Snowe will oppose the Senate health care bill because it’s being “rushed.” Right. I remember her saying exactly the same thing before the August recess. It should be noted that everything Snowe didn’t like about Harry Reid’s bill has now been stripped out. There’s not much daylight between the measure she voted for in the Finance Committee and the one she now opposes. In the final negotiations, she proved to be largely irrelevant as Democrats ended up giving in not to her demands, but those of Joe Lieberman.
Still, her bogus rationale for opposing the legislation should leave no doubt as to whether she was actually negotiating in good faith. And when you negotiate with someone who has no stake in passing the bill, you generally make the bill worse. As she did.
So this looks to be a “Democrats-only” affair, and all 60 members of the fractious caucus held together in the wee hours of Monday morning to break the first in a series of GOP filibusters. As stated earlier, this all but ensures passage on Christmas Eve.
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Matthew Spieler
Matthew Spieler is a former policy analyst for Congressional Quarterly, where he covered health care, education, labor, and veterans’ affairs. A graduate of The George Washington University, he has also worked as a reporter for CQ covering ...
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