I'm hearing from sources about a letter to Harry Reid from a collection of liberal Senators, led by Sens. Jay Rockefeller and Sherrod Brown, insisting that Reid publicly commit to putting a public option in any health care bill that reaches the Senate floor. There's a big difference between having a public option in the bill before the fact or trying to get it in by amendment. It's likely that amendments to the bill will require a 60-vote threshold, therefore it would take 60 votes to get a public option into the bill if it's absent, or 60 to get one out of the bill if it's present. Nobody has said that there are those numbers of votes to do either of those actions. So whether the bill comes to the Senate floor with a public option or not is a crucial decision. The four people in that room making that decision are Max Baucus of the Finance Committee, Tom Harkin of the HELP Committee, Harry Reid and someone from the White House. A lot of this will depend on the White House's inclination, and they certainly floated their support over the weekend. But Reid's public statements have been noncommital.
The liberal faction in the Senate, led by Rockefeller and Brown but also for the first time including Sen. Barbara Boxer, want a real commitment. According to sources, Sen. Reid will meet with this faction at 5pm ET. Senator Reid's office confirms that this meeting will be held today. So presumably, some kind of accommodation will be offered, although the liberal Senators in the meeting will seek a definitive commitment, I'm told.
There have been various talks from public option supporters in the Senate about wanting to see it in the final bill, but this is the furthest it has gone, to my knowledge. Some Senators, like Sen. Boxer, are going on the record insisting a public option for the first time. Of course we don't know what form this "public option" will take - the Wall Street Journal reports today that Tom Carper's state-based approach is gaining support among Senate moderates, and Debbie Stabenow in a press conference today confirmed that this is a possibility:
In a press conference this morning with other Democratic senators, Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) -- member of the Senate Finance Committee and a supporter of a robust public option -- says it's a "broad definition."
"The states are one way to go," she said
Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ), who also sits on Finance and supports a public option as enthusiastically as Stabenow does, added, "There are state options that are devised in such a way that only a region of the state is included, in which case that's not really a significant public option."
"If the whole state is included in a public option -- they have that option -- well that's a much more significant standard than some that have been proposed," Menendez told reporters.
I would assume that Reid may offer this as a compromise inclusion in the bill. We'll see if the Brown-Rockefeller faction will take the deal. Certainly they are pushing very hard for a higher standard than that. And with the House of Representatives close in getting majority support for a public option using Medicare +5% rates, perhaps that gives them some leverage too.
It's more than a little surprising to me that the choice for CIA Director of Leon Panetta, who I considered a card-carrying Villager if there ever was one, is ruffling such feathers inside official Washington, particularly official Democratic Washington. At first blush this looked like whining about not being informed, but it seems like there's more there. Here's the relevant section from the LA Times:
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who this week begins her tenure as the first female chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said today that she was not consulted on the choice and indicated she might oppose it.
"I was not informed about the selection of Leon Panetta to be the CIA director," Feinstein said. "My position has consistently been that I believe the agency is best served by having an intelligence professional in charge at this time." [...]
A senior aide to Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), outgoing chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said that the senator "would have concerns" about a Panetta nomination.
Rockefeller "thinks very highly of Panetta," the aide said. "But he's puzzled by the selection. He has concerns because he has always believed that the director of CIA needs to be someone with significant operational intelligence experience, and someone outside the political realm."
Most of the intelligence professionals at the top over the past eight years had plenty of "experience" and that didn't work out too well. The one who came from the political arena, Porter Goss (who was a former spy), wasn't so objectionable to Dianne Feinstein - I mean she voted to confirm him, after all. Of course, he was a Republican, which makes everything OK.
But I don't think this is about Panetta's lack of experience; it's his wealth of it, which presages a change in culture inside the agency.
Panetta's selection suggests that Obama intends to shake up the agency, which has had little public accounting of its role in detaining top terror suspects and transferring others to regimes known to use torture, a procedure known as extraordinary rendition.
The CIA, which denies subjecting detainees to torture, is part of a 16-agency intelligence community whose annual budget now exceeds $47.5 billion. The agency keeps its own budget and number of employees secret. Its successes, too, are mostly kept secret while some of its failures reach front pages.
Panetta has suggested that Obama could do much to signal a break with Bush administration policies by signing executive orders during his first 100 days that ban the use of torture in interrogations and close the Guantanamo Bay prison.
"Issuing executive orders on issues such as prohibiting torture or closing Guantanamo Bay would make clear that his administration will do things differently," Panetta wrote Nov. 9 in a regular column he published in his local newspaper, the Monterey (Calif.) County Herald [...]
"He will be an outsider and I think the president wants an outsider's perspective on the CIA," said Lee Hamilton, a former Indiana congressman and a former chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence who heads the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington. "The intelligence community has lost a lot of confidence with the American people and the Congress. I'm talking about 9/11, the Iraq war."
It's that he's an outsider with enough institutional power to actually make changes, and the moral compass to make those decisions based not on burying the past but rooting it out. THAT'S what has DiFi and Jello Jay spooked. In fact, they wanted Michael Hayden's right-hand man to take over (on the flip...)
My post about Jane Harman's remarks at a town hall meeting yesterday about the secret "torture memos" revealed this week by the New York Times is up at Think Progress, submitted through their Blog Fellows Program, which I can't recommend enough. Let me contextualize those remarks a bit more, and add some of the other interesting things Rep. Harman had to say.
I asked the question to Harman about the secret memos. Earlier this week, the White House claimed that all relevant members of Congress had been fully briefed on the classified program sanctioning harsh interrogation techniques by the CIA. At the time of the memos, Harman was a member of the "Gang Of Eight" routinely briefed on intelligence matters. Harman was shaking her head as I asked the question if she was fully briefed, chuckling almost in disbelief. Her answer:
We were not fully briefed. We were told about operational details but not these memos. Jay Rockefeller said the same thing, and I associate myself with his remarks. And we want to see these memos.
