Kyl: One GOP vote is not bipartisan

Senate Democrats' overtures to win Sen. Olympia Snowe's (R-Maine) support on healthcare reform hardly render the reform process bipartisan, one GOP lawmaker said Monday.

Since the healthcare debate began, Democrats on the Senate Finance Committee have sought to woo Snowe, a key swing vote, into voting Chairman Max Baucus's (D-Mont.) proposal out of committee. But fellow committee member Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) bluntly fired back at that tactic on Monday night, perhaps in an attempt to downplay any political backlash stemming from her possible defection.

"I don't think very many people believe that if you have one Republican out of 100, that therefore it's a bipartisan bill," Kyl told Fox News. "I don't know what Sen. Snowe will do, but I know right now that she's very concerned about the cost of the bill and the fact that the Congressional Budget Office is not able to provide us with an accurate cost of what the bill is."

Lawmakers expect the CBO's estimate to arrive later this week, and the committee hopes to vote on the healthcare proposal shortly after. Baucus, among other Democrats, assures he has sufficient support to advance it to the Senate floor.

But it is unclear whether Democrats have the votes to approve the proposal in the upper chamber, especially if the bill, once reconciled with its counterpart from the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee, includes a public option, which some Democrats and most Republicans disfavor.

One compromise would equip the bill with a public option "trigger" — a deadline and series of benchmarks that, if not met, would set in motion a government plan — that Snowe and some centrist Democrats support. But Kyl on Monday minced no words on the "trigger," calling it a backdoor to the public option.

"My concern is it'll be a hair-trigger, that the condition for the public option to take place will be not much of a condition at all, and therefore, maybe we don't see it on day one, but maybe in three years we do see it," he said. "The liberals who favor the public option can say, 'Sure, we're willing to wait three years because we know it'll happen,' and those moderates who don't want to be seen back home as voting for the public option can say, 'We didn't vote for the public option,' and maybe they can get away with that."