Something is going on in Washington, behind the scenes. And it's absolutely fascinating.
TPM, WaPo's Plum Line, ABC and the NYT all suddenly have stories showing a sudden last-minute rise in optimism that the Senate could end up passing a health care reform bill with a real public option. All the while, Olympia Snowe, true to form, is now trying to kill the bill.
In the last few hours, we've learned:
Democratic Senators are telling the NYT that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is leaning towards including the public option in the legislation he sends to the Senate floor. And we really like this from the NYT story:
Mr. Reid and other Senate Democratic leaders were headed to the White House late Thursday afternoon for a hastily called meeting, where Mr. Reid was expected to ask President Obama to help secure the needed votes.WaPo's Plum Line has a Senate aide saying that while Reid doesn't yet have the public option votes, he's now more optimistic.
TPM concurs that moderate Senate Dems look like they might not vote for a filibuster, provided they get a chance to vote for stripping the public option from the bill (which they wouldn't have enough votes to do, but at least they'd get political cover at home by voting to strip it).
And finally, ABC reported that Reid is heading towards including the public option, but just as importantly, they report that Olympia Snowe seems to be pulling out all the stops in order to kill the legislation. Now she thinks that finishing the bill by Christmas is too soon. That, my friends, is talk aimed at killing the bill. The longer you drag it out, the longer it gives Republicans and their TV network time to try to gin up protests. Olympia Snowe just showed her true colors today, and they're yellow.
And don't think for a minute that all of you didn't make this to happen. It's not soup yet. It's actually in quite dangerous territory - you know Baucus is circling the waters, trying to undo this on behalf of his insurance industry donors. But we wouldn't even be talking about the public option as a possibility at this late date if it weren't for every single one of you speaking out and raising hell that our elected officials seemed to be chickening out.
It's going to be very hard for them to walk away from this now. People will flip out. Stay tuned.
