April 18 (Bloomberg) — Hillary Clinton wrote and circled the word "no" next to future Vice President Joe Biden's name on a list of lawmakers who supported or opposed her health-care plan in 1993, according to newly released documents from the Clinton presidential library.
Her eventual successor as secretary of state, John Kerry, was marked as "probably not" with a rectangle sketched around the two words. And then-Representative Steve Gunderson, a Wisconsin Republican, told her, in Clinton's words, that future House Speaker Dennis Hastert, a Republican from Illinois, was a "tool of Republican leadership which wants to kill admin[instration] plan."
None of them ever got to vote on Clinton's health-care proposal. It died politically before reaching the chambers of Congress, handing her an early and stinging defeat as President Bill Clinton's first lady.
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The documents were part of the fourth set of Clinton administration records released by the Clinton Presidential Library in Little Rock, Arkansas, and the largest so far. It brought to 19,000 the total number of pages made public.
The topics covered include mass killings in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, the terrorist bombing of the Khobar Towers building in Saudi Arabia, U.S. engagement in Somalia and housing law.
Campaign material
The material will be scanned by Republicans for potential fodder for attacks against Clinton, who is the early front- runner for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination. Already this year, the Republican National Committee and party-aligned outside groups have tied Clinton to the Affordable Care Act — known as "Obamacare" — because of her behind-the-scenes role in advocating for its passage when she was secretary of state.
The documents provide a new window into the debates that played out behind the closed doors of the White House in the first two years of the Clinton administration.
At one 1993 meeting, Bill Clinton proposed turning closed military bases into health-care service centers.
At the same session, according to contemporaneous minutes of the meeting, Hillary Clinton advised that the health care plan should be married to a deficit-reduction effort on Capitol Hill. Years later, the Obama White House would emphasize that its health plan didn't add to the deficit, according to official budget scorekeepers.
"It's a risky strategy but we can make a better case for deficit reduction to people if health care and deficit reduction are joined," Hillary Clinton said at the time.
Damage caps
She also discussed the possibility of including caps on non-economic damages in lawsuits — or "tort reform" — and asked aides to give her more information on how states had implemented similar limitations on awards.
When the plan lost steam in Congress — and it was clear Hillary Clinton had been defeated — longtime adviser Ann Lewis wrote a memo encouraging her not to admit as much to the media.
"I don't score this as a personal defeat or a political defeat for me. The people who had the most at stake in this debate don't live at the White House: they live all over this country," Lewis advised her to say, according to the Sept. 28, 1994 memo. And Lewis, wrote, "use humor to deflect more outrageous questions, especially about your state of mind."
Previous sets of documents were published on the Clinton presidential library's website on Feb 28, March 14 and March 28. The National Archives and Records Administration said today there will be additional releases of roughly 14,000 pages.
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