Death Rattle?

I'm still pretty wary, but Marshall sees a light at the end of the Social Security tunnel:

To my reading, this sounds very much like the phase-out death rattle, the phase of a legislative struggle -- grimly reminiscent for some of us of late 1994 -- in which a doomed legislative initiative rapidly de-evolves into more and more pitiful and anemic forms of its original self before finally disappearing into thin air -- perhaps with not a few of its champions going 'poof' along with it.