Some members are listed as undecided in one count, but not the other. DDay has Boucher as a "no," while the NYT has Foster, Ortiz, and Michaud as "yes." Allocating them all makes both counts 208-208.
Both counts have the ten members of the Stupak bloc--Berry, Costello, Dahlkemper, Donnelly, Driehaus, Kaptur, Lipinski, Mollohan, Rahall and Stupak--as "undecided." Current reports are that that group is down to six. So, take all ten off the board, allocating six to "yes" and four to "no."
That allocation leaves both counts at 212-214. The five undecideds are Baird, Lincoln Davis, Kanjorksi, Pomeroy and Tanner. Only Kanjorksi and Pomeroy were "yes" votes last time, meaning the leadership needs two of the "no" votes.
Some, including Republican members of Congress, are speculating that the recent "no" announcements from Space, Matheson, and Nye are indications that Democrats have the votes, and are releasing members they do not need. Others speculate that since Pelosi did not schedule more votes tonight, then she did not need to keep members on the floor for more arm-twisting. All of that is pure speculation.
No matter the speculation, the above numbers show that passing #hcr is impossible without those four folds from the Stupak bloc. Whoever those Reps actually are, and whether they have actually folded, remains unclear. But, if all ten were to remain in the bloc, then the "no" votes both Dayen and the New York Times agree upon rise to 217. That would be enough to prevent passage.
So, this is still pretty much just about the Stupak bloc. The compromise to win them over is going to be an executive order of some sort, the language of which has not been released. Whether this turns out to be capitulation to the Stupak bloc remains to be seen. Either way, if #hcr passes tomorrow, this will have been the final move to bring it over the finish line.
The last move for Republicans is going to be on the motion to recommit, which David Waldman explains in great detail here. The motion to recommit vote will take place after the vote on the rule of the debate, a vote which will happen at around 3pm. It is possible that they could try and insert the Stupak amendment themselves during this vote. And really, given how Stupak has been the only obstacle to passage for a few days now, attempting to re-insert the amendment sure seems like the smart move for the GOP.
That's it for now. See you all tomorrow! This is an open thread.
Update--Loretta Sanchez? Oh, and Loretta Sanchez is now a worry, too. She has skipped town and probably isn't coming back. Even if she does, she is probably a no. That means yet another vote is needed for passage.
I believe that Democrats have had a can opener the whole time
But they were convinced it was a bad opener, compared to the nice new one that movement conservatives had assembled. As a result, they ignored it, or even boycotted it long enough for it become a mass of rusty metal, that doesn't work very well, and simply requires some oil, steel wool and a good sharpening.
We have a lot of factions, from the green movement to LGBT issue politics, social justice and Public education, among many others. What we need, more than a can opener, is the ability to get our two hands to work on one action.
The can opener is urban America, and a little political Jujitsu reversing the momentum created by the "Culture War" waged by conservative America (or, as they say, "Real" America) on "the other" America is long over-due.
All of the separate factions of the Democratic Party are united in large urban areas, whether they like it or not, it's where they live. The little blue islands are our home "bases," in a physical sense, and they are in need of the focus of our National Party. They are the fulcrum of the can opener, and, for that reason, are the most obvious cause for building a "movement."
Liberalism primarily evolved out of the city-based "middle classes", based in trade, small-manufacture and the professions--the bourgeoisie, although skilled workers (Tom Paine, anyone?) and even freed slaves (Frederick Douglass) played a part as well. In turn, socialism/social democracy evolved primarily out of the working class, although disaffected members of the bourgeoisie (Marx & Engels, anyone?) played a significant role as well.
Stupak bloc down to 6? Both Roll Call and The Hill are reporting the Stupak bloc is down to only six members. Their sources are Bart Stupak and Marcy Kaptur.
If true--and that is a big if-then it is fantastic news. In such a scenario, David Dayen posits that the leadership would only need one more "no to yes" vote to secure passage (although, now with Zach Space, two more "no to yes" votes would be needed).
However, until the four to six members who have supposedly left the group actually make some public statements in support of passage, I will remain wary.
From the House Democratic Caucus meeting, this from House Democratic Caucus Chairman John Larson (D-CT). He says "shortly after 2, we will have an hour of debate on the rule." This is the rule to allow reconcilation to get to the floor.
They would then vote on the rule, sans deem and pass. He then says there will then be "two hours of debate on the bill."
The third vote, on the Senate bill, will take place sometime later in the day. If it succeeds, President Obama will sign it into law that night.
With Syracuse playing Gonzaga at 12:10, tomorrow should be a nice calm, relaxing day.
Tea partiers on Capitol Hill getting really ugly As covered in Quick Hits (see here and here), things are getting really ugly on Capitol Hill. The bigotry is laid bare once again. Conservatives sure are good at helping you choose sides.
There's a lot of rigidity visible in how many people's thinking has remained remarkably unaffected by the virtually unprecedented behavior of the GOP over the past year-plus. The rigidity itself would make an interesting topic to focus on, but it's more like the appetizer as far as I'm concerned, and I want to head straight for the entree: What people should have learned by now about liberals vs. conservatives, the left vs. the right. I've written about this before, how the right/conservatives see politics as war, while the left/liberals see politics as problem-solving. But I'm ready to tackle it again.
To do so, I'd like to step back a bit and take a look at really macro-history, courtesy of Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolutiopn, in a mid-week post, "Why did it take so long for humans to have the Industrial Revolution?" It wasn't his purpose to answer the question about the origins of left/right attitudes towards politics for us, but he did so, whether he realized it or not. Here's the crux of the matter:
extended periods of economic growth require that technologies of defense outweigh technologies of predation. They may also require that the successful defender, at the same time, has good enough technology to predate someone else and accumulate a sizable surplus. Parts of Europe took a good deal from the New World and this may have mattered a good deal.
Building a strong enough state to protect markets from other states is very hard to do; at the same time the built state has to avoid crushing those markets itself. That's a very delicate balance
Of course other things are important. Cowen also cites Britain's geography, and the influence of Christianity, especially as it evolved into Protestantism, some commentators cited the Enlightenment, which Cowen rightly notes came too late to explain how it got started, but is not so far-fetched if one sees it as the tail end of a secularizing, empiricizing and rationalizing triple-play: the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Enlightenment. And, of course, the start of the modern information age via the printing press also gets noted in comments.
All these "secondary" explanations are importatnt, of course, but they're secondary in the sense that if predation could not be kept relatively at bay for long enough, none of them would have made a difference. It was the core power dynamic in the passage I quoted above that created the opportunity space in which the other factors could take hold. Without them, the Industrial Revolution wouldn't have happened. But with the core dynamic in place for long enough, it seems arguable that sooner or later good enough social/institutional factors would have enabled the start of the Industrial Revolution.
What's this got to do with left & right, liberal & conservative, you ask? Well, simple: the aristocracy is the core of the right, and it's based on two things: predation and inheritence. The European aristocracy is Europe's warrior class, and their values, outlook, social practices and habits define what it means to be conservative. (This is strongly reflected in the American South as well.) Of course, they aren't alone. But they're at the very core, along with the institutions they have long controlled--most notably, the Catholic Church.
Liberalism primarily evolved out of the city-based "middle classes", based in trade, small-manufacture and the professions--the bourgeoisie, although skilled workers (Tom Paine, anyone?) and even freed slaves (Frederick Douglass) played a part as well. In turn, socialism/social democracy evolved primarily out of the working class, although disaffected members of the bourgeoisie (Marx & Engels, anyone?) played a significant role as well.
The Marxist method of dialectical materialism highlighted the tendency for old forms to persist in new ones, in altered forms via the dynamic of thesis-antithesis-synthesis, so there was sensitivity to the fact that the liberal bourgeoisie had more in common with the aristocracy than it generally realized. (Particularly when it took over the functions of running the state, setting up empires, running slave trades, etc.) But in fact, this analytically method actually understates the degree to which all sides tend to reflect one another in various ways, nor does it adequately account for similarities between the proletariat and the aristocracy, such as a tendency toward embodied forms of reason, and a more conflictual view of politics. Still, that does not negate the fact of profound differences in the basic logic of different social groups, nor the fact that generally speaking proletarian politics are to the left of bourgeois politics.
Things got quite a bit more mixed up in America, what with the lack of a national aristocracy, the presence of both an indigenous population to be predated and the imported slave population as a product of predation, and the post-Civil War emergence of monopoly capitalists whose essential logic was much more predatory than earlier capitalists had been, as well as the complex politics of race, ethnicity and region. But the last half century has been a period in which America's political parties--and its politics more generally--has become more aligned along traditional left/right divides--though some new forms were developed to facilitate this.
Update 3:00 p.m.: House will have three separate votes tomorrow: on the rules of debate, on the Senate bill, and on the fixes to the Senate bill in the reconciliation.
Two Democratic lawmakers tell the Huffington Post that the party will not use the controversial measure known as deem and pass to get health care into law.
Rep. Eliott Engel (D-NY) said the House will vote on the Senate bill first before it considered a separate package of reconciliation changes. Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) confirmed.
"Deem and pass" was only being considered to make some Democrats more comfortable with voting for the Senate bill. The right-wing attacks against the procedure must have scared off a number of Dems, thus no longer making it a net positive for overall comfort level in the caucus.
Still, except for once again showing how many Democrats are scared of right-wing media, dropping "deem and pass" isn't really a big deal.
More importantly, negotiations with the Stupak bloc remain the largest obstacle to passage. The current discussion is focusing on President Obama signing some sort of executive order as a compromise. And by "some sort" I really mean "no one seems to know right now."
Apparently, both Diana DeGette's pro-choice bloc and House Progressives but the brakes on giving Stupak a separate vote. One way they did it was by threatening to force a separate vote on the public option if Stupak got a separate vote.
Still, it's not clear at all that Stupak will lose, or reach an acceptable compromise. The whip count remains close, and the outcome is far from clear.
Here's a rule of thumb I routinely use: If one person screws up, then they're very likely at fault. If hundreds of people screw up, then the system or situation they're a part of is very likely at fault.
Now, there are obviously plenty of situations that are genuinely ambiguous, or that are over-determined, where you can readily find both individual and systemic factors to blame. (And, of course, there are intermediate levels of analysis--the small group, the institution, etc. So the individual/system dichotomy I develop below needs to be taken as a deliberately simplified first-order approximation.) But even in such situations, it can save you a whole lot of grief to step back and try to see which broad explanation is likely to yield the biggest immediate payoff in terms of changing the direction of things.
That's why I can share a great deal of frustration with individual politicians--even including members of the Progressive Caucus, for example, without necessarily focusing my blame on them.
Now, here's the thing: It's my belief that the period of time in which the blogosphere formed was a period when both sorts of explanations/approaches were much more evenly balanced. This was true for a variety of reasons, but the best way to summarize was to say that things were in a massive state of flux and uncertainty, typified in the realm of physics by what happens with common forms of phase transition:
A phase transition is the transformation of a thermodynamic system from one phase or state of matter to another.
A phase of a thermodynamic system and the states of matter have essentially uniform physical properties. During a phase transition of a given medium certain properties of the medium change, often discontinuously, as a result of some external condition, such as temperature, pressure, and others. For example, a liquid may become gas upon heating to the boiling point, resulting in an abrupt change in volume. The measurement of the external conditions at which the transformation occurs, is termed as the phase transition point.
Phase transitions are common occurrences observed in nature and many engineering techniques exploit certain types of phase transition.
The term is most commonly used to describe transitions between solid, liquid and gaseous states of matter, in rare cases including plasma.
During a phase transition, what's most important is the change in the energy state of the entire system: keep the heat on, and the water will turn to water vapor: it will boil. But at the same time, it needs specific places where the boiling process concentrates, as anyone knows who's watched water boil in a glass container. Likewise, when water vapor condenses into water, as dew forms in the morning, it does so at specific points, rather than everywhere equally at once. Because we have individual agency, at times in which social/political systems are transitioning like this, the actions we take to help create the change both "generate the heat" to alter the entire system, and specifically direct it toward particular condensation or boiling points--we bring particular pressure to bear on individuals and specific situations.
[Note]: Stupak presser cancelled, so Chris posts when he posts. Meanwhile this from David. -- Paul
Per my post last night about major primary pressure on Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet, Firedoglake has an important petition I hope everyone will sign. All it asks is that Bennet, the supposed public option leader, offer the public option amendment in the Senate when the health care bill comes up for a vote:
Senator Michael Bennet of Colorado led the effort to show that a majority in the Senate supports the public option. Was it all for show? Did Michael Bennet only champion the public option when he thought it didn't matter?
Because his Democratic primary challenger, Andrew Romanoff, has a few things to say about that:
"I am deeply disappointed to learn that no member of the U.S. Senate is willing to offer an amendment to restore the public option to the health care bill."
Well, that makes two of us. What member do you suppose he has in mind? Can you think of one?
Sign the petition here - and then please pass it on to anyone you know. Wherever you are on the underlying bill, if you support a public option, then you should be able to support the Senate simply taking a vote on the public option - which the Senate has so far refused to do.
Bart Stupak is supposed to be holding a press conference at 11 AM, and Chris will be blogging about it (afterwards, he said last night, but that could change, I suppose). Details are murky and confusing, but it now seems that Stupak is the only person in the world who can get a bill through the Senate with neither a fillibuster blocking him, nor recourse to reconciliation. Who knew?
This could, of course, blow everything up. If Stupak language really could become law, I don't think they'll be able to hold enough pro-choice votes in the House to pass the bill. And if they do, the damage to the party will make it one of the most costly "victories" in a very long time.
I don't mean to diminish the importance of this. To the contrary, I want to use this occassion to underscore a point I've made before, but haven't pounded on repeatedly the way I maybe should have: My problem with much of how people have related to health care reform is the way they've focused on it as if it were the be-all and end-all of progressive politics. To extend my metaphor of the last diary, they've not only assumed a can-opener with respect to health care reform, but they've also assumed it was part of a Swiss Army Knife for dealing with all our other ills as well.
Obviously not.
There are major demonstrations today marking the 7th Anniversary of invasion of Iraq (United for Peace and Justice, Cindy Sheehan/Peace of the Action, ANSWER March on Washington) and the immigration reform "March for America" tomorrow. These issues have been largely invisible here at Open Left, and we're not alone in that. Neither has figured prominently on progressive blogosphere's radar screen over the past several months, and that narrowing of focus is not a sign of health on our part. Whatever happens this weekend, let us hope that one thing comes out of this: an end to the period in which we have looked to Washington and taken our cues from what is happening there. That is not how the left blogosphere was born and built, and it is not how it can best serve the common good of our nation today. We need to be bigger than that... much, much bigger.
