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Despite being pressed by reporters on his weekly conference call to offer more insights into a compromise plan under consideration regarding health care reform, U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, would say only that he is one of 10 senators working to broker the deal and that he is disappointed by those who have drawn a line in the sand.
“I’m not happy with the result, but the conservatives aren’t happy either. This must be a compromise,” Harkin said. “There are one or two members of our caucus that, for whatever reason, have sort of taken a ‘my way or the highway’ position. Since we need 60 votes — I wish it weren’t so — but you’ve got to deal with the realities around here.”
U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa (Lauren Victoria Burke/WDCPIX.COM)
Harkin said that every Republican has “joined together to try to sink this and to stop it,” and that has opened the door to a few senators becoming key votes to stop a filibuster.
In fact, recent events have him considering whether he should re-submit a bill he and Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., co-sponsored several years ago that would still allow for slowing a bill but would prevent complete blockage of a bill through a filibuster.
“It really is an abuse of a person’s position as Senator to demand … everything. It is really unfair to the rest of the Senate and the rest of the caucus too,” he said. “If they feel aggravated and they don’t have what they want … well, there are a lot of us who don’t have what we want. And to lay down an ultimatum that it has to be this or nothing and I’m walking away from it … That’s not the way you do legislation if you want to be a legislator. Maybe this is not the right place for a person to be that takes a position like that.”
Although it has been rumored that 10 Democratic senators — five who lean liberal, and five who are more conservative — have struck a tentative compromise that would limit the public option set forth in the U.S. House bill, Harkin would offer no specific details. The group, he said, was keeping the information private pending scoring from the Congressional Budget Office.
“If a group of senators send something to the CBO to get scored, and it is not in the public domain, the CBO will give the score back to that group without putting it in the public domain. We wanted to go that route because we wanted to be able, if the score is not good, to turn some dials, as we say around here, and change somethings to get it to an acceptable level,” he said. “If the details get out early about what we are going to do, then you get all the lobbyists here in Washington and all the groups around the country in a dither and that makes it harder to strike a deal.”
While the group of senators has a tentative idea on what a good score from the CBO would look like, Harkin said a final figure has not yet been reached.
“We are so close to having a final agreement and getting this done by Christmas, we have to be very cautious about how we proceed,” he said. “That’s why I won’t discuss any of the details of it. There are a lot of rumors out there, but I don’t think any of the 10 that I was engaged with has issued any statements at all about what is in the agreement.”
Harkin was originally hopeful that the CBO score would be delivered on Friday. The agency has said that date will be impossible, so he is now optimistic the figures will be available on Saturday.
“I think what we will finally come up with is a very progressive bill,” he said. “It is still going to have more good in it than bad. … It is simply mathematics and arithmetic. Because every single Republican has joined together to try to sink this and to stop it, and to stop Obama and make this his Waterloo, we have to come up with 60 votes to break their filibuster. In order to do that, we have to cater to two individuals basically who are driving a pretty hard bargain. Quite frankly, we may not get both of them. If we don’t, then we’ll have to get a Republican. And, if we have to get a Republican, then we are probably going to have make more changes.”
Today marks the 11th consecutive day of floor debate on the health care reform bill. As of the press call with Harkin, 16 amendments had been debated and six dealing primarily with preventive services for women and earmarking Medicare savings back into the program have been adopted.
“We are closer to health reform than ever in my lifetime, and certainly in my political lifetime,” Harkin said. “I keep telling people not to think about this as the 10 Commandments written in Stone. This is a law. This is legislation. Once we get over this hurdle and we break the back of the status quo, we can move ahead in the future — next year or the year after. We can start to look at different things and how we might change them in the future, be we’ve got to get over this hurdle.
“If it means that we don’t get all that I want … well, that’s life. We don’t always get what we want in life, but at least it is progress. It may not be as much as what we wanted in the beginning.”
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