The White House fondness for deadlines is once again playing havoc with President Obama’s agenda, this time on health care.
“If you don’t set a deadline in this town, nothing happens,” Obama said last year, just before Congress missed an earlier deadline to pass health care reform.
The administration is pressuring House members to pass a Senate version of health reform by March 18, when the president departs on an overseas trip.
But the many moving parts of Congress are balking at the administration’s timetable — and have learned from several previous forays that missing them carry virtually no consequences.
“Any talk of deadlines is an absolute waste of time,” said Sen. Kent Conrad, a North Dakota Democrat and chairman of the Senate Budget Committee.
Obama last year admonished Congress to pass health care reform by August, and vowed to sign a reform bill in 2009. The Senate finally passed one in late December.
Lawmakers also missed a 2009 deadline from the White House to pass an energy bill, and a financial regulatory bill.
But ignoring White House deadlines is not restricted to Congress. Tehran is currently ignoring a deadline from the Obama administration and the United Nations to come clean about its nuclear program. They were given until the end of the year — 2009.
Obama also has missed his own deadlines — notably, one contained in an executive order closing the prison at Guantanamo Bay by the end of his first year in office. The prison remains open and under review.
* Promised to close Guantanamo Bay prison within a year of taking office
* Set an August, 2009 deadline to pass health care reform
* Then, Christmas
* Now, March 18
* Vowed to sign health care bill in 2009
* Called for an energy bill by the end of 2009
* Sought a financial regulation bill by the end of 2009
* Demanded Iran prove by the end of 2009 that its nuke program was peaceful
* Pending: Iraq combat troop withdrawal by Aug. 31; Afghanistan troop withdrawal beginning in July 2011.
Some deadlines remain to be seen. Obama set a deadline of July 2011 to begin pulling troops from Afghanistan. But that deadline has some built-in wiggle room — he never said when he would finish.
Some deadlines are looming:
“Let me say this as plainly as I can: By August 31, 2010, our combat mission in Iraq will end,” Obama told Marines at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina last year.
Soon after he announced the Iraq deadline, however, the White House reportedly began considering some exceptions.
Over the course of the year, deadlines have become for Obama what benchmarks were to the previous administration — a clear set of original objectives that frequently end up victim to chance.
The White House wants the House to pass the bill before Obama leaves town, to give the Senate time to work on the measure before both chambers leave on a two-week break March 27.
The risk to Obama in repeatedly setting and missing deadlines can already be measured in the offhand dismissal lawmakers in his own party greeted the latest edict.
And also in the fact that if Congress planned to miss the administration’s deadline, the White House was among the last to know.
“The information I gave out last week was based on conversations with staff that I’ve had here in the building, and I’ve been given nothing that would change that advice that I was given last week,” White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said of the March 18 deadline.
