Will Blanche Lincoln stand up to Chuck Schumer?

By K. Ryan James: Will Arkansas Sen. Blanche Lincoln continue to fight “as a member of the Senate Finance Committee” for a bipartisan bill, or will she heel to the Democrat leadership who want a health care plan, no matter what?

The reason I ask is due to this interesting report from Politico’s Glenn Thrush on how Sen. Chuck Schumer is planning use of parliamentary tricks to bypass the committee process and the 60 votes needed for cloture to pass a health care plan for President Obama.

Thrush writes:

Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) sounds like he’s getting ready to play hardball this fall on health care, even if it means forgoing a Finance Committee deal and bypassing a filibuster by using “reconciliation” to push the bill through.

Mr. Schumer has given Finance Chairman Max Baucus (D-MT) until September 15 to put together a deal with Republicans or he will move forward with reconciliation.

Obviously, this trick play flies in the face of Mrs. Lincoln’s latest missive on fiscal responsibility, in which she again let’s everyone know she is a member of the Finance Committee.

Understandably, the ongoing debate on health care reform has only heightened anxiety among Arkansans. They have voiced concerns about how this effort will affect their pocketbooks and the nation’s long-term debt.

As a Member of the Senate Finance Committee, which is charged with finding ways to pay for health care reform, we are addressing those concerns. I have been involved in bipartisan negotiations that will fully pay for health reform without adding to our nation’s deficit or raising taxes on Arkansas’s working families. We have been thorough and taken our time in an effort to eliminate inefficiencies and get reform right.

Well it appears that Sen. Schumer has laid down a marker that he will move a bill through the Senate regardless of the whether it can be paid for without raising taxes of, in Sen. Lincoln’s own words, “get reform right.”

This begs the question of whether Sen. Lincoln will back up her rhetoric to work for a plan which will not add to the deficit and stand up to Mr. Schumer’s brinksmanship.

I am very certain that her conservative Democrat constituents (whom she will ask for support in 2010) will not cotton to her letting the liberals in the party replace our judgment with theirs and force Obamacare through. If she does not speak out against this escalation by Mr. Schumer, Sen. Lincoln will again show Arkansans that she gives tacit support to the partisanship of her party’s patrons and continues to enable the liberal agenda of President Obama and its domination of Capitol Hill.

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