Blaming politics and pressures from the White House and key House and Senate leaders, Grassley claims pressure on Baucus to speed negotiations and ultimately cut them off has resulted in an incomplete bill:
"The White House, the Senate leader, and I suppose Speaker Pelosi -- they're getting anxious to move something along," Grassley explained. "So I would like to consider what is going to come before our committee next week as sort of an incomplete package."
Grassley maintained that the committee's Republicans and Democrats had still been committed to hammering out a package, without acrimony having seeped into negotiations.
"We were working through it, we were still at the table," he said. "Do you think we would have put in hundreds of hours if we didn't think that we didn't think we had a chance to have success?"
"What's happened here is that politics has taken over," he said. "Quite frankly, the politics stepping in is going to make it very, very difficult."
Toward the end of the interview, Grassley complains of the Democrats artificial urgency when most of the bill would not be implemented until 2013. This would conveniently fall after the next presidential election. The Baucus Bill is the only largely Democratic bill thus far that hasn't essentially become DOA after a cursory review by the CBO. Clearly Grassley knows now the only urgency is political and has learned the hard way Obama was never seriously looking for bipartisanship.
H/T: Memeorandum
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