Mark even suggests that McConnell could be playing some kind of constructive role this time: “While McConnell has been silent about the senators’ initiative, it’s doubtful they would have freelanced without at least tacit approval from him. Just a few months ago when McConnell had ironclad control over the Senate Republican conference, he would have put the kibosh on such a meeting.”
There is already reason to believe that the Senate Republicans are not (or cannot) act in good faith in these negotiations: The New York Times reported — in a piece that had otherwise continued to peddle this narrative that bipartisanship is somehow necessary — that Sen. Todd Young (R-IN), one of the 10 Republican participants, had “described the plan as a way to ‘rein in’ Mr. Biden’s proposal, which some Republicans on Capitol Hill are deriding as a ‘bailout’ of states run by Democrats.” (In fact, Republican-run state governments are hurting, too, while residents of those states have also benefited from relief measures. But the charge of a “blue bailout” has been a consistent Republican talking point since last year.)
The fact is, Senate Democrats have already seen this movie of protracted bipartisan negotiations, with the much-hyped “Gang of Six” negotiations over health care reform in 2009. Not only did those talks go nowhere, but over time it became obvious that Republicans had specifically intended that they go nowhere.
As Norm Ornstein wrote in The Atlantic in 2015, the lead Democratic negotiator, then-Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT), began with a template of past Republican proposals, “built around an individual mandate and exchanges with private insurers—much to the chagrin of many Democrats and liberals who wanted, if not a single-payer system, at least one with a public insurance option.”
That plan indeed became the basis for the Affordable Care Act as it was finally passed — with Republicans opposing it at every step. Two of the Republican negotiators, then-Sen. Mike Enzi (R-WY) and Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), actively attacked the proposals in public.
And as Ornstein wrote, McConnell was lurking behind the scenes: “What became clear before September, when the talks fell apart, is that Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell had warned both Grassley and Enzi that their futures in the Senate would be much dimmer if they moved toward a deal with the Democrats that would produce legislation to be signed by Barack Obama. They both listened to their leader.”
During a town hall meeting back home — while the negotiations were supposedly still ongoing — Enzi effectively admitted that the talks were just a stalling operation. “If I hadn't been involved in this process as long as I have and to the depth as I have, you would already have national health care,” he said. He further admitted that his ultimate success was in getting Democrats to drop their own ideas rather than to adopt any of his own: “It's not where I get them to compromise, it's what I get them to leave out.”
Grassley, meanwhile, told one of his local crowds that they had “every right to fear” the right-wing scare campaign about death panels, telling his constituents that they should not have “a government run plan to decide when to pull the plug on grandma.”
And yet, the Gang of Six process continued to be treated seriously in mainstream media, as if the Republican participants had genuine ideas and sincere intentions.
Mark only vaguely acknowledges any of this, and rather than citing the historical record himself, he bases his discussion of what happened to Obama’s writings on the events — and then continues obstinately pushing this brand of political naiveté:
