It has been clear for months that the only path to passage for Obamacare is a Rube Goldberg machine of special-interest bribes, back-room deals, procedural opacity, presidential pep rallies, and the like.

The problem with building a voting coalition that way is that it doesn’t take much to break the circuit. And so it turns out that to get the bill through reconciliation, Democrats may have to walk back promises to Big Labor:

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka is headed into a meeting with President Obama this afternoon after the White House and Congressional leaders have begun to discuss a higher-than-expected excise tax on some health care plans, in order to maintain their claim that health care legislation will reduce the deficit, a source involved in health care talks said.
Any unexpected change to the health care plan could endanger support for the bill from labor, which agreed to back it after reductions to the planned excise tax. Proposed new changes, I’m told, concern cuts to the rate at which increases to the tax exemption cap are indexed.
A labor source said Trumka’s meeting would focus on the entire bill, not just the excise tax question.

Meanwhile, the Senate Democrats’ process guru Kent Conrad (N.D.) says some of the items in the House reconciliation measure may be “Byrd-able”:

Conrad addressed a meeting of Senate Democrats to explain the reconciliation process to them. On his way out, I and several other reporters caught up with him. I asked whether the package being assembled by House and Senate Democrats will survive the Byrd rule, which requires a reconciliation bill to amend tax or entitlement law, without increasing the deficit.
“We haven’t finished the process of going through things that are Byrd-able,” Conrad said.
“Is it a close call on some of them?” I asked.
“Oh yeah,” Conrad said.
Democrats and Republicans, he noted, will have to go over the package with the Senate parliamentarian, and make their case as to whether various measures pass the Byrd rule’s stiff test.