Liberal groups take on Rahm

From The Hill

"We respectfully ask that the Office of the President take a stronger stand on a robust public option in order to enact true health care reform this year," says the letter, signed by representatives of MoveOn.org, Campaign for America's Future, and NAACP

Unions Spurn White House to Oppose Senate Health Bill

From Bloomberg.com

Twenty-seven U.S. labor unions defied White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and announced their opposition to the $829 billion health-care measure passed yesterday by the Senate Finance Committee.

The unions say in a full-page newspaper advertisement today that lawmakers need to make "substantial" changes to the bill or they will urge their members to seek its defeat on the Senate floor. Emanuel asked organized labor not to go public in opposition, said Gerald McEntee, president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees.

"He told us that we really don't want to be looked upon as the group that stopped meaningful health-care reform," McEntee said in an interview yesterday. "We would love to be on the exact same page as the White House, but we see ourselves as fighting for our members."

AFL Says No Deal Between Trumka and Rahm on Public Option

This morning we reported that there was a meeting between Richard Trumka and Rahm Emanuel today. According to AFL-CIO spokesman Eddie Vale, the meeting is over and Trumka is standing strong on the public option

Read it all at Campaign Silo

Harold Ford, Jr. states the left will be disappointed in Obama's speech on Wednesday

The notion that the left or progressives should just chalk it up, meaning drop the public option for the team is disastrous. The whip should have been on the Blue Dogs, why? Because you don't destroy the very BASE, i.e., progressives, your activists in this whole fiasco. It will be REMEMBERED what Rahm Emanuel said to progressives, to the day he LEAVES the White House. The Progressive Caucus HAS THE VOTES, the Blue Dogs don't. It is time for the Obama White House to use their leverage and whip these folks into place. The thinking of something is better than nothing will suppress and demoralize the base. Case and point, Obama is losing across the board, bleeding support from Republicans, Independents and Democrats. If he can not deliver on health care, he will have a very hard 2010. The Republicans are fired up, our side not so much. Not with the continuous blunders of a White House that can not keep on simple message, not with convoluted messages from this White House and not with the continuing for bipartisanship which is a joke, at this point. No public option, hard times in 2010 and it will start with the Blue Dogs going down.

Source with video from Meet The Press

Jane Hamsher: Sorry, Not Enough House Votes To Pass Health Care Bill Without a Public Option

This morning, Anthony Weiner on CNBC says that the President will lose 100 votes in the House if a health care bill does not have a public plan, and Gerald Nadler on WNYC likewise says there will not be enough votes without one. These Members of Congress were overwhelmingly elected by Democrats. In voting against any bill that does not have a public plan they are voting their districts.

The White House shouldn't ask them to do otherwise in order to pander for Republican votes they are never going to get. If Rahm Emanuel wants to beat somebody into voting for something that their district doesn't want, let him go talk to the "centrists" he's been coddling.

Read it all.

Bring The Hammer Down On Rahm And The Blue Dogs!

Rahm Emanuel's always been harder on progressives than he is on the Blue Dog Democrats. After all, he was the one who recruited most of these Blue Dogs to run for office, and he's a major part of the reason why the Blue Dogs are working so hard to weaken health care reform in the House. He'd rather deal with the Blue Dogs from a policy standpoint because he erroneously believes that the country is "center-right" rather than "center-left" and that bipartisanship is what Americans want, rather than good policies that was promised by the party Americans voted into office. So giving in to the Blue Dogs makes sense to Rahm Emanuel, and to other aides in the White House from a policy standpoint.

It's that same old Village mentality of where the Democrats must always concede to the Republicans or to so-called "moderate" Democrats in order to pass legislation, regardless of whether they're in the majority or in the minority. Bipartisanship in Washington, D.C., means that Republican ideas must be agreed to in order to pass legislation even though none of these Republicans being courted will vote for the resulting legislation.

Did you know that the Blue Dog Caucus isn't even united on the issue of the public option? We have about 12 members of the Blue Dog Caucus that supports the inclusion of the public option in health care reform, and we only need three more Blue Dog Democrats on our side. It's why Rahm Emanuel should be focused on twisting their arms to support the House Tri-Committee bill without weakening it severely on the false claims of "cost containment."

Now that they're complaining, it's high time to increase the pressure by showing up at their Democratic town hall events and insisting that they take the Pledge to support the public option, and not to weaken the public option, or else they'll face a massive electoral loss in 2010 because the Democratic base will have been demoralized by the grand bailout of the murder-by-spreadsheet industry without a strong, robust public option in the final package.

Read it all. Then ACT.

Obama Hasn't Compromised on the Public Plan. Yet.

by Jonathan Cohn

The White House just put out a statement, making clear that President Obama still supports including a voluntary public option as part of health reform:

I am pleased by the progress we're making on health care reform and still believe, as I've said before, that one of the best ways to bring down costs, provide more choices, and assure quality is a public option that will force the insurance companies to compete and keep them honest. I look forward to a final product that achieves these very important goals.

Separately, a high-ranking administration official privy to recent negotiations with the hospital industry told me that the administration in no way backed down from a public option in exchange for the industry's agreement to sign off on $155 billion in reduced Medicare and Medicaid fees.

(On the other hand, according to the Washington Post, the White House did promise not to let the public plan use the relatively low reimbursement rates of Medicare and/or Medicaid. But those two things aren't mutually inconsistent)

The main impetus for this push, I gather, is a new Wall Street Journal story:

WHITE HOUSE OPEN TO DEAL ON PUBLIC OPTION
By Laura Meckler and Janet Adamy

It is more important that health-care legislation inject stiff competition among insurance plans than it is for Congress to create a pure government-run option, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel said Monday.

"The goal is to have a means and a mechanism to keep the private insurers honest," he said in an interview. "The goal is non-negotiable; the path is" negotiable.
...

Mr. Emanuel said one of several ways to meet President Barack Obama's goals is a mechanism under which a public plan is introduced only if the marketplace fails to provide sufficient competition on its own. He noted that congressional Republicans crafted a similar trigger mechanism when they created a prescription-drug benefit for Medicare in 2003. In that case, private competition has been judged sufficient and the public option has never gone into effect.

Notwithstanding the White House statement and private assurances administration officials are giving reporters, I assume Emanuel's statement is an accurate reflection of the administration's thinking on the matter. Remember, this isn't Joe Biden talking as he's walking to his car, with a bunch of microphones stuck in his face. This is Emanuel, who always chooses his words carefully, speaking in a sit-down interview with reporters from one of the nation's most influential media organizations.

Besides, it's not as if the White House push actually contradicts what Emanuel said to the Journal. In other words, that fact that Obama supports a public plan and hasn't bargained it away yet doesn't mean that, at the end of the day, he wouldn't embrace a compromise on it.

Obama has said as much himself, by making clear he wouldn't draw a "line in the sand" on the public plan. Since Obama has in fact drawn a line in the sand on at least two other issues--a plan must not inflate the deficit, he's said, and it must make progress on reducing costs over the long run--it's fair to assume he and his advisers don't feel as strongly about the public insurance option.

Update: Karen Tumulty notes that notes that the trigger option Emanuel describes sounds a lot like the idea that Republican Senator Olympia Snowe, among others, has floated.

Source: The Treatment