Feeney held firm against the bill. So did DeMint and Akin. And so did Nick Smith. A steadfast party regular, he has pioneered private Social Security accounts. But he could not swallow the unfunded liabilities in this Medicare bill. The 69-year-old former dairy farmer this week was still reeling from the threat to his son. "It was absolutely too personal," he told me. Over the telephone from Michigan Saturday, Brad Smith urged his father to vote his conscience.
However, the leadership was picking off Republican dissenters, including eight of 13 House members who signed a Sept. 17 letter authored by Toomey pledging to support only a Medicare bill very different from the measure on the floor Saturday. That raised the Republican total to 216, still two votes short.
The president took to the phone, but at least two Republicans turned him down. Finally, Bush talked two Western conservatives -- Reps. Trent Franks of Arizona (a ninth defector from the Toomey letter) and Butch Otter of Idaho -- into voting "yes." They were warned that if this measure failed, the much more liberal Democratic bill would be brought up and passed.
The conservative Club for Growth's Steve Moore, writing to the organization's directors and founders, said defeat of the Medicare bill "would have been a shot across the bow at the Republican establishment that conservatives are sick of the spending splurge that is going on inside Washington these last few years." Hammering the conservatives to prevent that may have been only a short-term triumph.