The death of the public option

The public option died tonight. So, it seems, did its eager successor, the Medicare buy-in. Harry Reid buried the ideas at a somber meeting of the Senate Democratic Caucus. "Could it have been better?" asked Sen. Jay Rockefeller. "Yeah. But it could've been so much worse if we'd just decided not to do anything because we didn't get everything we wanted."

The calculation, in the end, was pretty simple. The White House wants the Senate done with health-care legislation by Christmas. The argument is that big bills rarely fail in a dramatic vote. They bleed to death slowly, wasting away amid a procession of delays and procedural setbacks. The longer a health-care reform bill takes, the less likely it is to pass.

Worse, the longer health-care reform takes, the longer it is until Democrats can shift the spotlight back to jobs and the economy. The Obama administration wants to use the State of the Union as a turning point. Health-care reform would be the shining first year accomplishment, allowing the president to begin the election-year pivot to jobs and the economy and the deficit. But if health-care reform is to pass by early next year, it will have to clear the Senate before the end of this year.

That means Reid has to finish his bill by the end of next week. Moving to the manager's amendment -- the "deal" amendment, as it is -- will take a few days. Voting to replace the underlying bill with the manager's amendment will take a few days. And then voting on the modified bill will take a few days. Each step is delayed by the day or so required for a cloture vote to "ripen," and then the 30 hours of post-cloture debate. So an accelerated schedule would see the first cloture vote called Thursday, with the vote to move to the manager's amendment on Saturday. Cloture would then be called to actually vote on the manager's amendment on Sunday, and the manager's amendment would be approved the following Tuesday, the 22nd. And cloture would be called for the actual bill on Wednesday, Dec. 23rd, with the final vote coming, at the earliest, on Friday, the 25th -- Christmas Day.

To move the process forward, Reid had three options. The first, many would say, was reconciliation. But that would have required going back to the committees to refashion a reconciliation bill, and going back to the House of Representatives so it could craft a reconciliation bill, and then going back through the votes. There wasn't time for that, and even if there was, throwing the process so far back onto itself would have been an enormous risk.

The next was to cut a deal with Olympia Snowe. But Snowe had made it clear that part of any compromise with her was a deceleration in the bill's momentum. "The more they try to drive this process in an unrealistic timeframe, the more reluctant I become about whether or not this can be doable in this timeframe that we're talking about," Snowe told reporters. "There's always January."

That left Joe Lieberman. And Lieberman's price for signing onto the bill was the destruction of the public option and, unexpectedly, the Medicare buy-in provision. There would be no triggers, no opt-outs, no compromises. Lieberman swung the axe and cut his deal cleanly, killing not only the public option, but anything that looked even remotely like it. Some on the Hill remain worried that Lieberman will discover new points of contention in the coming days, as they believe he had signaled that he wouldn't filibuster the Medicare buy-in. They worry whether his word is good. But assuming it is, he can provide the 60th vote Reid needs to move the bill by the end of next week, and keep health-care reform on some sort of schedule.

Photo credit: Melina Mara/the Washington Post Photo.