Democrats Push Climate Bill Through Panel Without G.O.P. Debate

By JOHN M. BRODER

WASHINGTON — In a step that reflected deep partisan divisions in the Senate over the issue of global warming, Democrats on the Environment and Public Works Committee pushed through a climate bill on Thursday without any debate or participation by Republicans.

The measure passed by an 11-to-1 vote with the support of all the Democratic committee members except Senator Max Baucus of Montana. The seven Republicans boycotted the committee meetings this week, saying they had not had sufficient time to study the bill and demanding that the Environmental Protection Agency conduct a thorough study of its economic costs and benefits.

The move suggests that President Obama and Democratic supporters of the bill will have serious problems assembling the votes needed to enact it when it comes to the Senate floor, probably not before next year.

Senator Barbara Boxer, Democrat of California, the committee’s chairwoman and co-sponsor of the bill, employed a rarely used exception to customary committee rules to muscle the 959-page measure through her panel. She conducted three days of hearings last week on the bill, known as S. 1733, but there was no debate on the complex measure, nor any chance for panel members to offer amendments.

Mrs. Boxer said that the E.P.A. had already conducted a preliminary analysis of the bill and that further study would be costly and duplicative. She said it was necessary to bypass the committee’s rule that required Republican participation because of Republican intransigence and the urgency of the issue.

“A majority of the committee,” she said in a statement, “believes that S. 1733, and the efforts that will be built upon it, will move us away from foreign oil imports that cost Americans $1 billion a day, it will protect our children from pollution, create millions of clean energy jobs and stimulate billions of dollars of private investment.”

The senior Republican on the environment committee, Senator James M. Inhofe of Oklahoma, said the bill would harm the American economy and cost millions of jobs. He said the Democrats’ decision to ram the bill through “marked the death knell” of efforts to enact a comprehensive climate change bill.

Mr. Baucus’s vote against the bill was another ominous sign. He is the influential chairman of the Finance Committee and a senior member of the Agriculture Committee, both of which will have major input in any final climate and energy legislation. He said the bill’s emission reduction targets were too ambitious and its agriculture provisions too weak. He said the measure had a long way to go.

“This is a first step,” he said Thursday. “There will be many other steps.”

Baucus earns his healthcare industry funding

Joan Walsh, Salon.com, Tuesday September 29, 2009 18:30 EDT

On "The Ed Show" Monday night I said Montana Sen. Max Baucus had to decide whether he represented Montana or the insurance industry. Tuesday he made his choice, voting against both public option amendments to the healthcare reform bill in the Senate Finance Committee.

All the Democrats who voted against the public option should be ashamed, but Baucus most of all. The Senate Finance Committee chair's reasoning was bizarre. According to Salon's Mike Madden, whose coverage today was terrific, Baucus admitted "the public option would help hold insurance companies' feet to the fire," then added, "But my first job is to get this bill across the finish line."

No, Sen. Baucus. Your first job is voting for what will work to extend healthcare to more Americans and reduce costs. (And Harry Reid, you might want to have a little talk with your boy from Montana, since it's my understanding the Senate majority leader is in charge of getting the bill across the finish line.)

So let's get this straight: Baucus admits the public option would "hold insurance companies' feet to the fire," but he voted against it? Is there any clearer evidence that Baucus is in the pocket of the health insurance industry? Between 2003 and 2008, according to the Washington Post, Baucus took $3 million from the health and insurance sectors, 20 percent of his total contributions. And he collected half of that money in just the last two years, as the committee he chaired began holding hearings on healthcare reform.

It's possible Democrats can't muster the votes, or the procedural savvy, to pass a bill with a public option, even though a majority of senators, and a decisive majority in the House, support it. But we don't know that yet. It's not Baucus' role to prejudge what can or can't ultimately prevail, when the real action is probably going to come in the conference committee that reconciles what the more liberal House passes with what the Senate decides on. In the meantime, the Obama administration will have to leave the political sidelines and decide which arms to twist: Democrats shilling for the insurance industry, or the progressives who've pledged not to vote for a bill without a public option. There's plenty of political drama yet to come, Max. You didn't decide the bill's outcome with your self-contradictory vote today.

The harder I struggled to understand Baucus' nonsensical self-defense, only one meaning seemed possible: Baucus didn't vote against the public option despite the fact that it would "hold insurance companies' feet to the fire," but because it would. His insurance industry contributors got their money's worth today, but the people of Montana did not. Montana is one of the states with the least health-insurance competition -- 75 percent of its residents are covered by Blue Cross-Blue Shield, according to a 2007 American Medical Association report.

The public option isn't dead, no matter how hard Baucus or Democratic disappointments Blanche Lincoln and Kent Conrad fought to kill it on Tuesday. Not coincidentally, the Institute for Southern Studies reports that Conrad's North Dakota and Lincoln's Arkansas are, like Montana, among the worst states for insurance-company concentration, with 89 percent of North Dakotans and 75 percent of Arkansans covered, again, by Blue Cross-Blue Shield. These are the states where competition from the public option is needed the most.

After the Senate Finance Committee voted, the White House issued a statement saying President Obama still believes in the public option. Sen. Tom Harkin told Bill Press on Tuesday that the public option can pass the Senate "by a comfortable margin." I'm not sure that's entirely true, but Harkin is right to push Reid to include the option in the Senate's version of the bill, and force opponents to muster the votes to strip it out. How would Baucus vote, when a majority of Senate Democrats are sure to reject such a move? There's still time for Baucus to serve his constituents, not the insurance industry, but it's a shame he didn't do so on Tuesday.

-- Joan Walsh

PhRMA’s Big Bribe Comes In

Note From Greetings:
Matt's been a great investigative reporter.. unlike so many pundits. It would be sad if this is true... PhRMA about to run ads to convince Americans the weak Baucus bill is best. (With Obama's support?) Time will tell... let's hope not.... But also make sure you're heard. (Dropped for pre-existing conditions is to your benefit??)

True/Slant
by Matt Taibbi, September 14, 2009 Taibblog

The drug industry’s trade group plans to roll out a series of television advertisements in coming weeks specifically to support Senator Max Baucus’s health care overhaul proposal, according to an industry official involved in the planning.

via Drug Makers to Back Baucus Plan With Ad Dollars – Prescriptions Blog – NYTimes.com.

I’ve been completely out of the loop with the health care story these last week and half or so, out of touch actually with the entire earth (I’ve been on a deadline on another story), but upon returning to work today I began getting calls about some alarming maneuverings in congress. We’re apparently finally seeing delivery of the Big Bribe that President Obama and Rahm Emanuel extracted from that pharmaceutical industry in exchange for dropping drug-pricing reform in the health care bill.

To recap: PhRMA, the lobbying arm of the pharmaceutical industry, earlier this year announced that it would be setting aside $150 million to pay for an ad campaign supporting the President’s health care bill. The deal was apparently struck in July, after former Louisiana congressman and current PhRMA chief Billy Tauzin (Rod Blagojevich’s underdog opponent in the upcoming semifinal match of the Corrupt Scumbag of the Century So Far tournament) met with Rahm and other Obama aides in the Roosevelt Room of the White House. Also in attendance were representatives of the usual panoply of awful medical corporations, including Abbott laboratories, Merck, and Pfizer. It was in this meeting that the White House agreed to sell out health care reform in exchange for a few bucks to fund the next couple of election cycles.

Tauzin, who has never been one for subtlety or finesse (he took his $2 million-a-year PhRMA job about ten seconds after he finished pushing through the Prescription Drug Benefit bill), stupidly later revealed some of the contents of that shady meeting, saying that the White House had “blessed” a plan involving the $150 million. He disclosed to reporters that he had extracted a promise from the White House to drop two important reforms: one, to allow the government to negotiate bulk rates for drugs in Medicare, and the other to permit the importation of cheap drugs from Canada (which was once an Obama campaign saw).

The only problem with this plan, from the White House’s side, was that not all of the president’s fellow Democrats played along. Specifically, Energy and Commerce chair Henry Waxman put a provision in his health care bill that allowed the government to negotiate lower rates. If Waxman’s language were to be allowed to survive, it would queer the White House’s deal.

So here’s what started happening to kill Waxman’s language. First of all, PhRMA started paying its bribe.

The $150 million it committed to support Obama’s bill is now being rolled out in pro-reform ads, which are being aired mostly in the districts of freshman congressmen. The ads are cheesy, half-hearted tripe blandly supporting the weak-as-fuck remnants of Obama’s health care plan, an example being this “Eight Ways Health Reform Matters To You” ad that salutes the end of coverage denials for those with pre-existing conditions.

Now we’re also seeing pressure from a group of freshmen and Blue Dogs, who have composed a letter to a quartet of House Committee chairs requesting that the Waxman language be removed from the health care bill and replaced with the PhRMA language, which happens to be the language the White House is pushing and which will appear in the Baucus bill in the Senate. The pro-PhRMA language retains the preposterous government subsidy to the pharmaceutical industry in the form of laws banning Medicare from negotiating market rates. It is completely useless and of no possible social benefit to anyone except pharmaceutical companies, but this group still managed to get 60 people to sign this letter.

What does this letter say? Does it argue that the PhRMA language is better for America than the Waxman language? Does it say it will cost taxpayers less and provide cheaper drugs to more people? Hilariously, no. What it says is that this PhRMA language, while worse than the Waxman language, is not quite so bad as you think (it doesn’t save as much as the Waxman language, but it still has a 50 percent price reduction, which isn’t terrible!). Moreover, the letter says, substituting this language will help the bill get passed! Here’s the actual language, addressed primarily to Waxman:

“Your efforts to remove this onerous burden on Medicare beneficiaries… are to be greatly commended. However the commitment by President Obama and the AARP to support legislation that would provide a 50 percent reduction is a dramatic step forward in helping fill the doughnut hole. Equally important, it moves us toward our goal of health care legislation.”

In other words, your attempt to put in a real reform is cool and all, but PhRMA has us by the balls, so help us out.

Interestingly, the congressmen who wrote the bill — former NFL bust Heath Shuler and Illinois Democrat Debbie Halvorson — did not post the letter on their web sites, which is very unusual. One guesses that they are not particularly proud of this particular bit of shameless whoring.

Progressives this week are fighting to accumulate the votes needed to stop any health care bill that doesn’t have a public option. Hopefull they can stop this PhRMA payoff as well. If you’ve got a phone, call your congressman and give him/her hell about this…