Monday, February 1, 2010

Klobuchar Hopeful Reform Bill Will Progress

By Ronald Brownstein  

Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn.

At a "Congressional Debriefing" hosted by National Journal and The Atlantic the morning after the State of the Union, Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., predicted that the health care bill would move forward from its current impasse. In the course of the interview, Klobuchar also discussed the president's speech, the filibuster and the year ahead. Edited excerpts follow.

NJ: What's the most likely path for health care reform to move forward? Could you get 50 votes plus Vice President Joe Biden for a reconciliation bill?

Klobuchar: Whether it's going to be [reconciliation] or whether it's going to be taking some of the main initiatives for the self-employed and small business to allow them to get better rates of insurance, and insurance reforms and prevention, and the Medicare cost reforms -- which, some of us can't even imagine voting for health care without having some Medicare cost reform -- the bill will move forward, and I think something will get done....

The "Cadillac tax" -- obviously, there are people on our side that wanted to see that trigger moved up on who would be hit based on the income level, but if it goes so far that we start basically bleeding money and take away some of the cost reforms and take away some of the deficit reductions that we have in the Senate bill that are really important to a number of us, I think that goes in a different direction. Again, it depends on what they're proposing, but I think it's plausible that it can pass in the Senate.

Klobuchar: People are very angry and frustrated by it. And they always talk about these references to the past. Well, they maybe would use it rarely, and now they use it all the time. We have signs up with how many times they used it, and these are true -- these are records of how often it's been used. It's been probably the most frustrating thing.

On the other hand, and I'm not being a Pollyanna about this, I still believe that we can rush through some of these bills and get financial regulation done. I would not want to be a Republican up for election in the fall if they block financial regulation in the Senate. How can you say, "We had this huge financial mess, all of you got hurt by it, but we're not going to do anything to stop it from happening in the future"? ...

Or whatever an energy bill looks like -- and it may not be this year, it may be the beginning of next year, I don't know -- but how can you say, "We're just going to let China build all this high-speed rail and India start all these new companies, and we're just going to keep debating it"? ...

I think when you look back at the year -- would it have been better if [President Obama] had been more prescriptive on health care? I think so. And then maybe backed off on some of the things that weren't going to get through, and made that very clear, so that they weren't being caught in the back-and-forth on cable TV.... And that's one of my other obsessions....

I go on Fox, I go on MSNBC, and I actually think the shows are interesting; I wouldn't take them away. But I wonder how you can reward people who want to reach compromises. How can MSNBC and Fox -- it'd be great if they agreed every month, "Who gets a reward for getting something done?"... Because what happens is Republicans are criticized on Fox, Democrats are criticized on MSNBC if they even defend someone who's trying to get something done.... It becomes harder and harder to be recognized for doing that, working for compromise.