Senate GOPers grumble over Medicare bill veto

A handful of Senate Republicans are openly grumbling about the third override of a presidential veto in two months, suggesting poor communication between GOP leaders and the White House is to blame.

GOP senators said administration officials should have been given a better sense of the pressures that Republicans were under from the American Medical Association, for example. The AMA was incensed over Bush’s Medicare veto and had targeted several GOP senators with intensive publicity.

{mosads}Likewise, senators said, the White House and GOP leaders should have more effectively sought to understood their different positions, and the probability of an override.

“There could have been better communication to avoid what we saw yesterday,” said Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), who consistently voted  in favor of legislation opposed by the White House that prevented  a cut in the payments doctors receive under Medicare from going into effect.

“They should have said ‘work with us, administration, because we’ve got these doctors all over the country that are justifiably upset.’ It should have been, could have been handled better.”

Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), who voted against the legislation last week but switched his position and voted to override Bush’s veto on Tuesday, said much the same.

“The only thing that might have changed the override would have been more extensive consultation with the White House and the Republican leadership,” Lugar said. “Perhaps there was an assumption by the White House that the rank-and-file understand their reasons. But I suspect there was a profound lack of communication that lead to a miscalculation.”

The lopsided 70-26 Senate override vote Tuesday followed a 383-41 House override vote, and came a month after even more lopsided margins for a pair of Congressional overrides of President Bush’s farm bill veto.

Before this summer, Congress had only overridden Bush once before, on a water projects bill last year.

Senate GOP leaders looked to defend the White House from criticism.

Minority Whip Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) said the Medicare veto represented a near-perfect storm.

Wavering Republicans faced intense pressure from doctors, and Bush’s core disagreement with the bill — how it was funded — wasn’t easily explainable to constituents outside Washington.

“As a House member once told me, once you’re explaining yourself, you’re losing,” Kyl said.

Senate Republican Conference Vice Chairman John Cornyn (R-Texas) called the overrides “isolated incidents.”

“What really broke the dam was Senator Kennedy,” Cornyn said, referring to the Massachussetts Democrat’s dramatic return to the Senate last week to support the bill.

White House spokesman Tony Fratto also dismissed the criticism, saying “there wasn’t miscommunication, there just wasn’t agreement.”

“We differed on the policy of a farm bill that increased subsidies at a time when food prices are rising, and we opposed weakening the Medicare Advantage program which has served seniors so well,” Fratto said.

But rank and file GOP senators said the real problem was with the White House, which had unreasonably expected that the conference understood its opposition and would line up behind Bush to defeat the override.

“They become fixed and grounded, and they’re not willing to reach out,” said Sen. Olympia Snowe (R- Maine). “It’s not always sustainable to support that.”

Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.), who led the Republican side of negotiations over the farm bill, said he saw the same pattern with the farm bill override.

“The problem wasn’t with leadership, it’s a problem with the White House making a correct read on the mood here,” said Chambliss, who voted to override the veto. “It’s pretty obvious the farm bill was pretty strong. I tried to explain that to the president. He said he expected the override but was just philosophically opposed.”