The Senate's passing of health care reform depends on Lieberman's vote.
I've been thinking that his betrayal of the Democrats on the Medicare buy-in -- originally his own idea, after all -- was so brutal and damaging that possibly he's a snake in the caucus.
It leads me to think Lieberman might be working with the Republicans to effect what DeMint suggested would be Obama's Waterloo -- the defeat of health care reform.
It might be -- and we've seen plenty of behavior consistent with this, all year -- that it has been the Republican plan from the beginning to drag out this process as long as possible, to inflict maximum harm on Obama, cleave the Democratic Party and demoralize its base.
Even if it wasn't their plan, it has been the result.
Possibly Lieberman was their inside guy, their ace in the hole. He campaigned for McCain, after all.
Do Lieberman's Democratic colleagues in the Senate still trust him? Al Franken's move yesterday to shut him up leads me to suspect that maybe they don't, regardless of Reid's papering it over.
This vicious kill-the-bill debate we're having could be moot already, if Reid is depending on The Whiny One to get the job done. Is there any guarantee that Lieberman will vote for a bill that comes out of conference -- even if it happens to be the exact same bill he agrees to vote out of the Senate? Are there Senate rules that enforce even the barest level of square-dealing?
After the Medicare buy-in betrayal, it's plain that Lieberman no longer cares what decent people think of him; that alone suggests to me that he might be planning a jump across the aisle if he hasn't, silently, made that jump already.