Harry Reid has announced, in strong and confident terms, his intention to pass a health care bill in the next 60 days, and to do it (most likely) through the use of the budget reconciliation process. This was always how I envisioned this happening until the Dems briefly reached the magic number of sixty votes in September. At that point, I thought they could pass the bill using regular order, albeit only by making some unsavory compromises. The Senate actually did accomplish that task, but lost the 60th vote before the House and Senate bills could be melded for final passage. So…
…we’re back at stage one. It sounds like Reid has 50 solid votes for using the reconciliation process. Whether he has 50 votes for the public option is another question. I kind of doubt it, but it would be truly idiotic to not take advantage of the reconciliation rules to pass a public option.
Now, I want to provide the caveat that this announcement is coming on the eve of the health care summit at Blair House. So, this is a way of telling the Republicans that straight up obstruction isn’t going to work. If they want to participate and allow a cloture vote, then maybe they can water the bill down a bit. Otherwise, the shithammer comes down.
If it weren’t for gutless Democrats like Kent Conrad bitching about using reconciliation, this strategy could have been utilized effectively last April.
I wish the party would listen to you more, BooMan. You had the right plan re this from the start.
Well, yes. But still: fuck yeah.
Great news! New meaning to the phrase, “Better late than never.”
Thanks for posting this late on a Saturday – it’s appreciated.
I guess the right-wing wurlitzer will be cranked up higher than ever for the next 60 days…
If it plays out this way, then Coakley’s defeat will end up having greatly improved health care reform.
I’m curious. How much more could they water it down? It’s already weak enough as it is.
Maybe they could turn it into pure water – even removing any fluoridation for the tea baggers.
are only sufficient on final passage and that the supermajority is still necessary on many procedural votes before we get there.
If this be so, reconciliation is a pipe dream.
…that all the initial talk about using reconciliation focused on the the facts that 1) it was really hard to know what you could do through reconciliation because it was hard to know how the Senate parliamentarian would rule on many of these things; and 2) anything passed through reconciliation would sunset, which made it a less appealing option automatically.
Of course, all of that talk has completely vanished, because 1) we already have a bill with a bunch of stuff passed through the regular Senate order; and 2) there is no other way to get it done, thanks to Martha Coakley.
So although this has been a long, arduous, emotionally-draining journey — and it ain’t over yet — the horrible process has actually been instrumental in bringing us to the point of maybe being able to accomplish this. And I agree with Obsessed that Coakley’s defeat will end up having greatly improved health care reform, ironically, because we stand to get a better bill this way than we would’ve gotten otherwise.
Eh, on the public option right now. You don’t have 50 votes right now–about 20 something votes is all that is counted for it. This slowed the bill down last time. You guys will slow it and kill it again and that’s depressing.
One more point that I’ve not seen anybody in the blogosphere address yet — BooMan, perhaps you could do the honors.
All this talk about reviving the public option has me totally perplexed. Even if we could actually get 51 votes for this in the Senate — which I think is a longshot — what makes us think that the House would vote for it? They couldn’t pass a bill with a public option on their own, and the one WITHOUT it just barely squeaked by!
I don’t recall that we lost more than 2 votes from the left over that issue (Kucinich & Massa, and I think they may have been foolishly holding out for single payer). We sure would lose a lot more than 2 votes by inserting a public option into the final bill. So how does this pass the House? And if it can’t pass the House, and it risks blowing up the whole frickin’ thing, why should we be pushing for it in the Senate?
Wrong.
The bill the House passed did have a public option in it. The point here is the House will pass the Senate bill, and then both Houses will append fixes to the Senate bill (including the public options) to the budget bill that originates in the House. In that way, the Senate only needs 50 senators + Biden to get it passed.
IIRC, the House passed a public option with negotiated rates. What they couldn’t pass was the “strong” public option Pelosi wanted, with rates set at Medicare + 5%. There are pluses and minuses to this – negotiated rates are likely to attract more providers, but Medicare + 5%. is cheaper.
At any rate, I can’t imagine anything but negotiated rates would get by 50 senators.
I have no special knowledge of this, but here’s what I think. On a controversial vote, whenever the majority leader knows there are enough votes to pass a bill, all additional votes are gravy. So representatives who feel that voting yea would be particularly controversial in their district, get a pass. They don’t have to stick their necks out, since the bill’s going to pass anyway.
You can figure this is what happened here, because up to nearly the time of the vote, the public option was strongly supported in the House.
So the vote ends up looking a lot closer than it really is, because a lot of these folks would vote for the bill if their vote was crucial. That applies here. Thus I don’t think the apparent “closeness” is significant. There will be ample support to draw on, whatever the final tally may look like.
(BTW, it works the other way too. When a bill is clearly NOT going to pass, reps and senators have a free ticket to vote FOR it if that will play well in their district, even though if the chips were down they would not. For some reason former Senator Hillary Clinton, as a DLC Democrat with well-known presidential ambitions, stands out in my mind as a devotee of this practice, but no doubt it is pretty general.)
The House has to pass the Senate bill, then the Senate will pass the fixes through reconciliation. That’s the only way this thing is going to pass. Pelosi has specifically stated that the Senate bill as is, with no fixes, won’t pass the House in any way. With fixes, however, that’s a different story. She has the votes for the fixes, and according to some stuff I’ve read, some of those who voted against the House bill will switch over for the more moderate Senate bill.
Of course, we’ll see what happens.