With A Whimper, Not A Bang

Ezra highlights the White House "strategy" on health care:

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.

... Mr. Emanuel, the chief of staff, said he hoped Congressional Democrats would take up the jobs bill next week. Then, in his view, Congress would move to the president's plan to impose a fee on banks to help offset losses to the Troubled Asset Relief Program, the fund used to bail out banks and automakers.

Lawmakers would next deal with a financial regulatory overhaul, and then pick up where they left off on health care.

And fumes...

The timetable Emanuel is laying out makes little sense. The jobs bill will take some time. Financial regulation will take much longer. Let's be conservative and give all this four months. Is Emanuel really suggesting that he expects Congress to return to health-care reform in the summer before the election? Forgetting whether there's political will at that point, there's no personnel: Everyone is home campaigning.

Moreover, there's a time limit on health-care reform. The open reconciliation instructions the Senate could use to modify the bill expire when the next budget is (there's disagreement over the precise rule on this) considered or passed. That is to say, the open reconciliation instructions expire soon. Democrats could build new reconciliation instructions into the next budget, but that's going to be a heavy lift. The longer this takes, the less likely it is to happen. And Emanuel just said that the administration's preference is to let it take longer. If I were a doctor, I'd downgrade health care's prognosis considerably atop this evidence.

Earlier in the post Ezra correctly notes that the death of this bill will be a series of delays, not a dramatic vote on the floor. I'd add that it's really important that progressives not focus their disappointment on the messenger. Rahm Emanuel is an easy foil for us. But Rahm Emanuel works for Barack Obama, not the other way around.

I read this and thought of Matt's invocation of Sarah Conner:

I was in the Russell Building* yesterday and kind of wanted to run around the halls grabbing Democratic staffers and yelling at them, like Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2, "you're already dead! Everybody dies!"

Indeed. They already voted for it. Pulling up lame will not stop the GOP from nailing them on it.