Hint: Not the White House.
Answer: The Senate
A bipartisan group of lawmakers claims it has lined up the 60 votes needed to get a prescription-drug reimportation bill through the Senate, which some say could lead the White House to change its position on the controversial issue.The legislators are leaning on Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) to call up their bill — which would allow for the reimportation of prescription drugs from Canada and selected other countries — before the July 4 recess, as the window for significant legislative activity narrows.
...Those who attended the meeting said Frist still harbors concerns over safety issues related to reimporting drugs from other countries. But [Olympia] Snowe [R-ME] said the bipartisan group has been able to address many of Frist’s concerns by revising the bill. “We really did a phenomenal job in precluding many of the safety issues,” said Snowe.
The White House strongly opposed a reimportation bill that passed the House last year. But Snowe said she didn’t believe the president would veto a measure that has picked up broad support. “It has the dynamic and the momentum to pass this year,” Snowe said. “It’s the one area of social policy we can really get done.”
This is still a long shot. Some Dems aren't too happy about it either.
Not all Democrats support reimportation. Sen. John Breaux (D-La.), a leader on healthcare issues who has worked closely with the White House, said, “I think the president would probably veto it” if it passed the Senate. “You don’t solve the problem just by reimporting drugs [when] you don’t know where they’re coming from,” he said.“I’d be totally opposed to it,” Breaux said. “I would participate in a filibuster. I think it’s bad public policy from a trade standpoint, [and] a policy standpoint.”
Let's put it bluntly. Any legislation that allowed for the reimportation of drugs from Canada would be bad for the pharmaceutical companies. That's what Breaux meant by "bad public policy from a trade standpoint." This will probably go down one of two ways. Either it will die a slow death in conference committee, or it will move along and then Bush will switch positions and claim the bill as his own. My money is one the first one. For those of you unaware of how bad conference committees have gotten, read this piece by John Podesta at the Center for American Progress.
For example the conference committee on the energy bill, to which 58 members of Congress were formally appointed, actually consisted of private negotiations between just four members: Senator Pete Domenici (R-N.M.) and Congressman Billy Tauzin (R-La.), and Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Representative Bill Thomas (R-Calif.) on the tax portions of the bill. When the Senate passed a version of the energy legislation that was not to the liking of Senator Domenici, he bluntly declared, “I will rewrite the bill.” While a couple of members of the minority party were permitted to participate in committee negotiations over the Medicare legislation, those who did not see eye to eye with conservative leaders – including Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) – were excluded. The product of these secret conference negotiations – typically hundreds, if not thousands of pages long – is then sent to each chamber, often with 24-hours or less to review, for a straight up-or-down vote without prospect of amendments. Instead of providing meaningful time for amendments and debate on either bill, conservatives spent 40-hours demogaguing the issue of judicial confirmations – even though President Bush has had 98 percent of his nominees approved. The result has been not just the effective exclusion of the minority party (and the millions of citizens they represent) from any role in the legislation but also a series of poorly crafted, incoherent bills that are packed with provisions geared toward special interests at the expense of the public good.Beyond being excluded from legislative negotiations, members of the minority party face punitive retribution for taking opposing positions. In a dramatic departure from the bipartisan tradition of the appropriations committee, members of the House who voted against the education and health spending bill this summer saw funding for roads, clinics and other important projects for their home districts removed from subsequent versions of the legislation.
Podesta's article was from November, but it's not like things have gotten any better. So much for the two-party state.