WASHINGTON — Now that health-care reform has reached the Senate floor without a single Republican vote, four Democrats are vying to become King of the Hill by demanding laundry lists of changes in exchange for their votes — prompting liberals to vow not to be held hostage by a few foot-draggers.
Majority Leader Harry Reid got the bill to the floor by a 60-39 vote, the narrowest possible margin.
The close vote provided a vivid demonstration of each Democrat’s ability to sink President Obama’s top domestic priority — or use his vote to try to extract concessions.
Sen. Ben Nelson (Neb.) has emerged as a leading critic, and said yesterday he had delivered a two-page letter to Reid suggesting changes, after voting to bring up the bill Saturday.
“I don’t want a big-government, Washington-run operation that would undermine the . . . private insurance that 200 million Americans now have,” Nelson told ABC’s “This Week.”
He even said he would join a Republican filibuster to keep the bill bottled up, at least as it’s currently written.
“I would not let it get off the floor,” he said.
Nelson didn’t reveal his demands, but he has slammed the bill’s public option, which in the Senate got watered down by a provision letting states opt out of it.
Sen. Joe Lieberman (Conn.), an independent, has warned he might vote against final efforts to get health care out of the Senate, and told NBC’s “Meet The Press” yesterday: “I don’t want to fix the problems in our health-care system in a way that creates more of an economic crisis.”
Two other Democrats, Blanche Lincoln (Ark.) and Mary Landrieu (La.) — the last holdouts to fall in line on Saturday’s vote — each signaled over the weekend that they were firmly opposed to the public option and willing to vote with Republicans to keep the bill from moving further ahead.
All the complaining by centrists prompted Sen. Sherrod Brown (Ohio), one of the Senate’s more liberal members, to vent: “I don’t want four Democratic senators dictating to the other 56 of us and to the rest of the country — when the public option has this much support — that [a public option is] not going to be in it.”
But he predicted the quartet of vocal critics would fall in line. “I don’t think they want to be on the wrong side of history,” he said.
In one intriguing development, Landrieu said Saturday that she was negotiating with Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY), one of the Senate’s top liberal backers of a public option, on a possible compromise.
Schumer’s office insisted Saturday night that “no such talks have yet taken place.”