From my trip there yesterday, I can confirm that the White House is still definitely working on health care reform. However, finishing it will take a long time, and as such will be moved to the legislative background. White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel indicates that the primary focus will now be the jobs bill and financial regulations bill:
With Mr. Obama's health care overhaul stalled on Capitol Hill, Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff, said in an interview that Democrats would try to act first on job creation, reducing the deficit and imposing tighter regulation on banks before returning to the health measure, the president's top priority from last year.
Both of these measures have already passed the House of Representatives. It is entirely possible for the Senate to work on them while all Democratic parties involved still work on rounding up 218 votes in the house on health care, and 51 votes on a sidecar "fix" in to health care in the Senate.
However, this new focus on jobs and financial regulations in the Senate will delay, if not outright kill, attempts to pass climate change legislation in the Senate. Back in November, the Senate already pushed the climate change bill to the spring. In a fabulous bit of whining, Senator Claire McCaskill explained why:
Some senators are skeptical lawmakers will be ready to tackle another huge issue after finishing health care. "After you do one really, really big, really, really hard thing that makes everybody mad, I don't think anybody's excited about doing another really, really big thing that's really, really hard that makes everybody mad," Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., said. "Climate fits that category."
The delay on health insurance reform, and new focus on jobs and financial regulations, will delay the climate change bill even further. In fact, given the extended delays that usually accompany any Senate legislation, and given that a handful of Democratic Senators saying that the climate change bill should be shelved altogether, it is entirely possible that there simply won't be a climate change bill in the Senate.
The prospect of no Senate climate change bill is not necessarily negative, as long as the EPA regulatory process keeps moving forward. The EPA would probably take stronger action than anything Congress would pass, not to mention that the Clean Air Act authority of the EPA to regulate greenhouse gas emissions would likely have been gutted by anything Congress would pass. However, gutting the Clean Air Act may yet happen anyway, even without a climate change bill. Senator Murkowski is looking to strip the EPA's authority for a year, and has the help of some pretty sucky Democrats). Still, if EPA authority is not stripped, then the delay and defeat of the climate change bill may not be a bad thing.
The additional delays in health care and climate change pose even greater delays for immigration reform. Immigration reform was supposed to be the next big legislative step Democrats took after health care and climate change. However, now that we are in 2010, the prospects for an immigration bill are all but dead. The Senate, as discussed above, is almost hopelessly clogged. Further, Rahm Emanuel has previously advised Democratic candidates should move to the hard right on immigration. Back in 2007, this was Emanuel's rationale for why Democratic women did so poorly in 2006:
Since the election, I have heard numerous possible explanations for these defeats. Here are just some of them:
(...)
Democratic women candidates in suburban districts intrinsically seem soft on immigration, and thus needed to outflank Republicans from the right on the issue. (Unfortunately, I'm not kidding about this one. Multiple inside sources have confirmed to me that Rahm Emanuel himself promotes this idea.)
Given this, it is extremely far fetched to see the White House pushing immigration during the summer of an election year. This is especially the case for an election year that is shaping up to be bad for Democrats. And, even beyond the White House and the clogged up Senate, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has said she is now in "campaign mode" and won't seek to pass major legislation in 2010.
The legislative schedule for 2010 looks very different than 2009. Republican delaying tactics have proven successful in clogging up the works. Also, as I discussed last night, the Democratic plan for making Republicans pay for these delay tactics isn't dramatically different in 2010 than it was in 2009 (although it might be very different in 2011). Even this pared down schedule might be unattainable in the current Senate environment. It is going to be a long, frustrating 2010 on the legislative front. |
