WASHINGTON -- As Congress reconvenes this week, conservatives are pushing a scenario that makes the best of inevitable prescription drug subsidies: The Senate-House conference would retain the House bill's market elements. That would collapse the Senate's big bipartisan majority, perhaps producing a 50-50 tie to be broken by Vice President Dick Cheney. There may be, however, a surprising obstacle: George W. Bush.
The White House has made clear the president will sign any prescription drug bill arriving from Capitol Hill. Bush thereby has removed himself as a player in an epochal battle over this country's health care, undermining the optimistic scenario. No realistic conservative can devise a way to kill this bill. The question is whether Sen. Edward M. Kennedy's inexorable march toward a government-controlled health care system can be slowed.
The president does not seem at all interested in this effort. Indeed, on no issue has he been so separated from his conservative support base. He did not please supporters when he collaborated with Kennedy on the 2001 school bill or said he would sign any campaign finance reform bill in 2002. But Bush's passivity on prescription drugs, abandoning his own stated intentions, casts a longer shadow on national policy. Republicans do not want to criticize their president as the election campaign nears, but they are heartsick.
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