Senate Rejects House G.O.P. Medicare Plan by 57-40 Vote

Published: May 25, 2011 - New York Times

WASHINGTON — Less than 24 hours after their surprising victory in the race for a vacant House seat, Democrats forced Senate Republicans on Wednesday to vote yes or no on a bill that would reshape Medicare, signaling their intent to use the issue as a blunt instrument against Republicans through the 2012 election. 

Democrats staged the vote to press their advantage coming out of their victory on Tuesday in the contest, fought in large part over Medicare, for a House seat in upstate New York that had long been in Republican hands. Senator Harry Reid, the majority leader, brought the legislation to the floor so that Senate Republicans would either have to vote for it, exposing them to attacks from Democrats and their allies, or against it, exploiting growing Republican divisions on the issue.

Five of 47 Senate Republicans voted against it — four because they said it went too far, one on the ground that the budget measure that contained it did not go far enough fast enough to address the budget deficit.

The House Republican Medicare plan would convert it into a subsidized program for the private insurance market. When they proposed it last month as the centerpiece of their budget plan, Republicans were confident that the wind of budget politics was at their backs.

But the last six weeks have left Republicans pointed into a something more like a headwind. With polls and angry town hall meetings suggesting that many voters were wary of a Medicare overhaul if not opposed, party unity and optimism have given way to a bit of a Republican-on-Republican rumpus.

House leaders have made clear they will not try to pass Medicare legislation this year. Some Republican candidates and elected officials have moved to distance themselves from the plan, even as others remain in chin-out defense of it and others still are declining to commit themselves one way or another.

In the wake of the Democratic victory in the House race, many House Republicans argued that Democrats had no credible plan of their own to assure the long-term survival of Medicare, and reprised their criticism of the health care overhaul, including Medicare spending cuts, that Democrats passed in the last Congress.

But Democrats, hopeful that the Medicare fight is a path to a political turnabout, are clinging to the recent developments like koalas to eucalyptus trees, insisting that the New York race was, as Senator  Kirsten Gillibrand, Democrat of New York, said, “a bellwether for elections to come.”

It is still a long way to Election Day 2012, the underlying problem of a long-term fiscal imbalance remains as pressing as ever and Democrats face divisions and messaging problems of their own. Following the Senate vote on the House Republican budget plan, the Senate voted 97-0 to reject the budget put forward early this year by President Obama, reflecting a recognition by Democrats that they will have to do more than they initially proposed to rein in the expansion of the national debt and address the spiraling costs of Medicare and other entitlement programs.

But after a 2010 election that seemed to signal not only a Republican resurgence but also a rejection of big government and a need for bold, Tea Party-type steps to slash spending, the politics now look a whole lot more complicated. Both parties are being reminded anew that voters like the idea of budget cuts, but that they often recoil when those cuts threaten the programs that touch their lives.

The divisions among Republicans over the plan are in large part situational.

Three of the Republicans senators who voted against the House plan on Wednesday are moderates from Northeastern states: Scott Brown of Massachusetts and Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe of Maine. A fourth, Lisa Murkowski, won re-election in November as a write-in candidate after being defeated in the Republican primary. The fifth, Rand Paul of Kentucky, voted no on the grounds that the House plan, drafted by Representative Paul Ryan, the chairman of the Budget Committee, took too long to pay down the national debt.

Candidates looking to shore up their conservative bona fides among Republican presidential primary voters, like Jon M. Huntsman Jr., a former governor of Utah, have praised the plan. Some Congressional incumbents, like Ms. Snowe, weighed the respective threats of Tea Party primary challengers against the wrath of moderate or elderly voters, and decided not to support it.

Some presidential candidates seeking to appeal to a broader base, like former Gov. Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota, are trying to split the difference, saying that the plan is O.K. but that they will offer their own that will be even more refined.

Others still, like George Allen, a Republican candidate for Senate in Virginia, appear to be trying to suss out where the political minefields are, and refuse to say if they support the plan or not.

But just as each candidate must take a measure of their own race, the party’s response is also circumstance-driven. Newt Gingrich, a presidential candidate who seemed to think he had the gravitas to walk his party back from an increasingly toxic issue, denounced the plan to great retribution from both the establishment and Tea Party wings, and had to recant. Mr. Brown, who is running for reelection in a tough state, said he would vote against the plan but was greeted largely by silence within his party.

But Democrats by no means have a smooth course either. While Mr. Obama has tried to set parameters for budget negotiations, his party has yet to settle on a plan for Medicare or the broader budget issues. And failure to address the nation’s fiscal problems aggressively could carry its own risk for Democrats, something former President Bill Clinton warned his party about Wednesday.

“You shouldn’t draw the conclusion that the New York race means that nobody can do anything to slow the rate of Medicare costs. I just don’t agree with that,” Mr. Clinton said at a budget forum sponsored by the Peter G. Peterson Foundation. Instead, he said, “you should draw the conclusion that the people made a judgment that the proposal in the Republican budget is not the right one. I agree with that.”

Representative Steny H. Hoyer, the minority whip, has said that Medicare is “on the table” for f any agreement with Republicans in the debt limit negotiations, a seeming nod to the notion that many Democrats, especially those in moderate districts, are loathe to do back to their districts and brag about doing nothing to rein in the costly entitlement program.