Update [2009-12-21 1:23:56 by BooMan]: Senate invokes cloture on Reid’s manager’s amendment by a 60-40 vote. I will remind you that we needed every single victory from 2006 and 2008 to achieve this. We needed Tester and Webb and McCaskill and Whitehouse and Klobuchar and Franken and Begich and Merkley and Sanders and the two Udalls and Brown and Cardin and Hagan and Casey and Hagan and Shaheen and Warner. We needed to seat Bennet and Burris and Gillibrand. We needed to replace Kennedy with Kirk. With had to flip Arlen Specter to the Democratic Party. If we lost any single one of those battles, health care reform would be dead. Instead, it lives. And you have yourselves to thank for that. Your activism made the difference.

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If you are like me, you spent today watching some football, and maybe checking your Fantasy Football stats in this first week of Fantasy playoffs. I won by just over a point, when Brett Favre threw an interception instead of a completion at the end of the Panthers-Vikings game. I think Steven needs Hakeem Nicks to have a monster game on Monday night to survive.

But, believe it or not, the Senate is about to convene after midnight and have the key cloture vote of the whole health care reform shebang. The vote should begin at approximately 1am. They will have to wheel Robert Byrd in again in the middle of the night to cast the deciding sixtieth vote. Once they reach 60 votes, the Democrats and probably the chambers will erupt in applause. I’m not sure if all the Republicans will even show up. They don’t need to be there. The way cloture works, all that is required is 3/5’s of seated senators, not of those actually present. So, technically, no Republicans need to show up. Some of them will probably opt to get some sleep. Once cloture is invoked on Reid’s manager’s amendment, the clock will start on 30 hours of post-cloture time. Then, sometime Tuesday they will hold another cloture note on the substitute bill. And on Wednesday, a vote on that. And on Christmas Eve, a vote on final passage.

But the big vote is tonight, starting at around 1am. This is the vote that we had no way of winning so long a triggerless public option was part of the bill. We could, however, have won over Snowe’s vote for a trigger if we had so chose. To win over all 60 members of the Democratic caucus in the Senate, Reid had to add a lot of goodies, especially for Landrieu and Ben Nelson, but also for others, like Bernie Sanders. Now that these senators have won concessions, they will be very reluctant to blow up the Conference Report with the House, even if the bill moves to the left. There are definitely limitations to how far the bill can move to the left without losing the support of at least one Democrat. But the bill can now be improved for the first time since the HELP Committee completed its work in July.

There may be some temptation in the interest of time and simplicity to doing what is called a ping-pong maneuver. This is a move where the House votes to pass a bill that is identical to the Senate version, thereby obviating the need to go to a Conference Committee to reconcile the differences. That would be a travesty. We’ve made too many compromises to win over the support of people like Joe Lieberman and Blanche Lincoln. We need to take the Senate bill and make some improvements so that the bill is better from both a policy and a political point of view. We can’t win a public option of any kind. But we can make some tweaks to improve the subsidies, strengthen the regulations, and the phase in the exchanges quicker.