Madam Speaker by Susan Page

Author:Susan Page [PAGE, SUSAN]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2021-04-20T00:00:00+00:00

The morning after the Massachusetts election, Obama called Pelosi, a pivotal and private conversation that wasn’t disclosed.

At the time, some White House advisers were urging Obama to cut his losses on a comprehensive health care bill. Rahm Emanuel had made it clear from the start that he was skeptical about going big; now he raised his objections more loudly. Democrats had lost their filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, and it wasn’t clear what would or could happen next.

That said, strategists on the Hill and the White House had devised a legislative escape hatch for just this situation, designed to be deployed if their Senate supermajority didn’t hold—either because of the election of a Republican or the defection of a Democrat. That was always a risk; some moderate Democratic senators had voted for the bill only reluctantly. That’s why Massachusetts senator Ted Kennedy and Nancy Pelosi had insisted at the start that the legislation include a provision that permitted budget reconciliation. At the time, Budget chairman Kent Conrad of North Dakota and Finance chairman Max Baucus of Montana had adamantly opposed including the procedure, arguing that it was provocative to Republicans and unnecessary.

In their phone call, Obama told me that he and Pelosi were in sync: Better to fight for a big bill than to scale back their goals. Despite its complications and limitations, the tool to do that would be reconciliation.

“My attitude is that, for us to take a quarter of a loaf or a half a loaf is missing an opportunity, that it would leave millions of people running short,” Obama said. “And I’ll be honest, it wasn’t even clear at that point that the Republicans would in fact take a smaller bill because they had been moving the goalposts consistently throughout this process. So it wasn’t as if there was a ready compromise to be had, anyway. So my strong belief, as I’ve told my staff, is we’re going to go forward with this if we have any opportunity left to do it.”

That would depend on Pelosi.

“The only way for us to do it was if the House was, at some point, going to hold its nose and pass the Senate version,” Obama said. That was legislation House leaders had been describing as unacceptable just a few days earlier. “I essentially said to Nancy, ‘Look, this is the debate that’s been had in the White House. My strong preference is that we go with a robust, full package, but the only package, at this point, we can get passed is the Senate bill. We could potentially bleep some provisions that you guys consider particularly obnoxious, [but] there’s only going to be so much we can do.

“‘And, Nancy, I can’t do this without you. If you are not willing to work with me to work your caucus, to get them to pass the Senate version, we don’t have a path.’”

Pelosi first took the opportunity to vent about the folly of the other side of the Capitol. This may have

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