Living History Unknown (best books to read fiction .txt) 📖

of the chamber and dazzling his colleagues with quotations from the classics. He was also a stickler for procedural rules and decorum and had invented a procedural hurdle called the “Byrd rule” to ensure that items placed in the Budget Reconciliation Act were germane to budget and tax law. Democracy was undermined, in his view, if reconciliation was cluttered with bills that had little to do with passing the nation’s budget. Health care, arguably, was a budget bill, as it affected spending, taxes and entitlement programs. But if Senator Byrd thought differently, we would need a waiver of his rule to allow the measure into reconciliation.

Slowly, I was learning what a steep mountain we were climbing. In the absence of an overwhelming crisis like a depression, passing either the economic or the health care plan was going to be difficult; passing both seemed almost insurmountable. Health care reform might be essential to our long-term economic growth, but I didn’t know how much change the body politic could digest at one time.

Our goals were simple enough: We wanted a plan that dealt with all aspects of the health care system rather than one that tinkered on the margins. We wanted a process that considered a variety of ideas and al lowed for healthy discussion and debate. And we wanted to adhere to congressional wishes as much as we could.

Almost immediately, we hit turbulence.

Bill had assigned Ira the task of setting up the process for health care reform, which turned out to be an unfair burden for someone who was not a Washington insider. In addition to the President’s Task Force, which consisted of me, the cabinet secretaries and other White House officials, Ira organized a giant working group of experts divided into teams that would consider every aspect of health care. This group, comprising as many as six hundred people from different government agencies, Congress and health care groups, and including physicians, nurses, hospital administrators, economists and others, met regularly with Ira to debate and review specific parts of the plan in detail. The group was so large that some members concluded they were not at the center of the action where the real work was getting done. Some got frustrated and stopped coming to meetings. Others became narrowly interested in their own piece of the agenda, rather than invested in the outcome of the overall plan. In short, the attempt to include as many people and viewpoints as possible―a good idea in principle―ended up weakening rather than strengthening our position.

On February 24, we were dealt a blow that none of us anticipated. Three groups affiliated with the health care industry sued the task force over its composition, claiming that because I was not technically a govemment employee (First Ladies derive no salary), I was not legally allowed to chair or even attend closed task force meetings. These groups had seized on an obscure federal law designed to prevent private interests from surreptitiously influencing government decision making and usurping the public’s right to know.

There was certainly nothing secret about hundreds of people participating in this process, but the press, which was not invited to meetings, jumped on the issue. If I was allowed in the meetings, the lawsuit claimed, government sunshine laws required that the closed meetings be opened to outsiders, including the press. It was a deft political move, designed to disrupt our work on health care and to foster an impression with the public and the news media that we were conducting “secret” meetings.

Soon thereafter, we got more bad news, this time from Senator Byrd. Every Democratic emissary we could think of, including the President, had asked him to allow health care reform into reconciliation. But on March 11, in a phone call with the President, the Senator said he objected on procedural grounds and that the “Byrd rule” would not be waived. The Senate was permitted to debate reconciliation bills for only twenty hours, which he viewed as insufficient time on a health care reform package of such magnitude.

It was just too complicated an issue for reconciliation, he told Bill. In retrospect and based on my service in the Senate, I agree with his assessment. At the time, it was a political setback that forced us to refocus our strategy and figure out how to get health care reform through the normal legislative process. Hastily, we held meetings with members of the House and Senate to nail down elements of the plan we would deliver to Congress.

We didn’t see that Byrd’s opinion on reconciliation was a giant red flag. We were trying to move too quickly on a bill that would fundamentally alter American social and economic policy for years to come. And we were already losing the race.

In this climate, and with Bill weathering controversies over gays in the military and his nominations for Attorney General, we savored any successes that came our way. In the middle of March, the House passed Bill’s economic stimulus package, and my staff and I decided to have our own small celebration. On March 19, about twenty of us gathered for lunch in the White House Mess. The room, with its oak-paneled walls, Navy memorabilia and leather-cushioned chairs, was a perfect setting for private conversation and as much laughter as we could muster. The gathering offered me a rare opportunity to let my hair down with trusted aides and speak my mind about whatever topic was under discussion. From the moment I set foot in the room, I could feel my mood lighten and my mind relax for the first time in days.

Lunch arrived and we began sharing stories of our first few weeks in the White House. Then I saw Carolyn Huber enter the room. One of my longtime assistants from Arkansas who had come with us to Washington, Carolyn walked over to my chair and bent down to whisper in my ear. “Your father has had a stroke,” she said. “He’s in the hospital.”

THE END OF SOMETHING

I left the