No. of Recommendations: 4
Not only were Republican senators deeply involved in the process up until its conclusion, but it's a cinch that the ACA might have become law months earlier if the Democrats, hoping for a bipartisan bill, hadn't spent enormous time and effort wooing GOP senators ' only to find themselves gulled by false promises of cooperation.
No it's not.
Democrats weren't negotiating primarily with Republicans during that time. They were mostly trying to get a 60th vote for the bill as drafted. They needed all of Joe Lieberman, Ben Nelson, Mary Landrieu, and Bill Nelson to vote for the bill to overcome a GOP filibuster. Lieberman in particular was probably more "to the right" on the bill than Susan Collins or Olympia Snowe. The efforts to try to get a GOP vote or two wasn't a futile effort at bipartisanship - it was a recognition that the House Democratic proposal was certainly at least five Democratic votes short, and that there was might be a better chance to get a vote from Snowe than Lieberman (and that once they had Snowe, Lieberman would have to follow).
Basically, House Democrats were insisting the bill have a public option. The centrist Democratic Senators wouldn't vote for a bill that had one. Democrats spent the relevant months in question trying to square that circle. They couldn't do it. Obama tried to triangulate to a triggered public option, and Lieberman indicated he might go along with that - but Pelosi's caucus insisted they wouldn't support anything but a full public option. Lieberman recognized that there was no deal on a trigger, he and Snowe then insisted that there couldn't be any public option at all. It took them into the end of the year, but eventually the Democrats caved to Lieberman and dropped the public option. And that's when they got their Senate vote (after giving Ben Nelson his laundry list).
It's a fiction that the Democrats wasted time negotiating with the GOP. During the entire time when they were engaged in those negotiations, they didn't have the Democratic votes they needed. Even after they basically stopped negotiating with the GOP, they still didn't have the Democratic votes.
