House Committee Approves Reconciliation for Health Care

by: Chris Bowers

Thu Oct 15, 2009 at 17:56


Reconciliation is still on the table:

House Democrats are taking necessary precautions to jam a contentious health care reform bill through the Senate, should party moderates turn their backs on the legislation.

The House Ways and Means Committee agreed Thursday to send a letter to the Budget panel setting the ground rules for the reconciliation process, should Democrats need to employ a "just in case" fallback. Reconciliation allows the party in power to approve legislation with a simple majority, not the 60 votes leaders often need to initiate a vote on contentious bills.

The vote doesn't mark a change in strategy; Democrats just needed to meet an Oct. 15 deadline included in the annual budget blueprint for the initiation of the reconciliation process. So far, only the Education and Labor Committee included reconciliation instructions in its draft of the health care bill.

Democrats have the votes to pass health care reform with a public option in any number of ways. Taking the House as a given, let's count the ways in the Senate:

  1. The Senate has 50 votes plus Vice-President Biden to pass health care reform with a public option through reconciliation.

  2. If Republicans make a procedural move to require 60 votes to achieve reconciliation, Democrats could overcome that move with either the 60 votes of the Democratic caucus.

  3. If that fails, then Democrats could still pass health care reform with a public option by securing a cloture vote by keeping all 60 Senate Democrats together.

  4. If that fails, then Democrats could break the filibuster with 51 votes through the nuclear option.
So, Democrats have the votes to pass health care reform with a public option through both branches of Congress. The only thing stopping them is that they might not hold together on procedural maneuvers.

In other words, the only threat to not passing health care reform without a public option is that some Senate Democrats might value Senate procedure over legislative policy they ostensibly support. Which is simply a bogus process excuse.

Democratic leaders have too often used shadowy Senate process as an excuse to not pass Democratic legislation. However, with the grassroots learning more about Senate process, and keeping detailed whip counts of where members of Congress stand, that simply won't fly anymore.

So because of your donations, Open Left and CREDO Action are running ads in The Hill and Roll Call to tell Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and President Obama to pass the public option, rather than giving us process excuses that we know are bogus. Starting tomorrow, we will doing the same thing with geo-targeted ads for Washington, D.C. in the Washington Post, focused on people who read about health care news. We are going to reach the insiders working on health care, and let them know that we are well-informed, and that we expect leadership, not process excuses.

In the extended entry, I have placed screenshots of our ads in The Hill and Roll Call today. Thanks again for your donations--you are making a difference in this fight!

Chris Bowers :: House Committee Approves Reconciliation for Health Care



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House Committee Approves Reconciliation for Health Care | 19 comments
Matthews: Only 30 Senate votes for public option (4.00 / 6)
On Hardball today Chris Matthews and Anne Kornblut both agreed -- there are only 30 votes in the Senate for the public option because that's how many signed the recent letter to Reid. It would be nice to get some pushback on that, since informed Open Left readers know the real number is 51...

Self-refuting Christine O'Donnell is proof monkeys are still evolving into humans
question: is it possible to pass just the public option (4.00 / 1)
via reconciliation?  under this scenario, everything else would be passed in the standard way, and the reconciliation would simply replace the triggered PO (or the co-ops or whatever crap is in bill) with something like schumer's PO (assuming the robust PO can't get 50 in the Senate).  Does the PO, by itself, pass the Byrd rule?
Yes, it's possible... (0.00 / 0)
...definitely, especially if tied to medicare, but unlikely.

REID: Voting against us was never part of our arrangement!
SPECTER: I am altering the deal! Pray I don't alter it any further!
REID: This deal keeps getting worse all the time!
[ Parent ]
so it's either possible, definite, or unlikely (0.00 / 0)
thanks!
[ Parent ]
Let me rephrase... (0.00 / 0)
They can do it rather easily through reconciliation, especially if they make it an extension of medicare.  However, they are unlikely to do so.

Better?

REID: Voting against us was never part of our arrangement!
SPECTER: I am altering the deal! Pray I don't alter it any further!
REID: This deal keeps getting worse all the time!

[ Parent ]
could they still do it "rather easily" (0.00 / 0)
if it's something like schumer's level playing field PO?  i'm skeptical that a PO tied to medicare rates + 5% could get 50 votes in the senate.
[ Parent ]
That would be harder... (4.00 / 1)
It's easier to modify an existing program through reconciliation than create a new one.

But, I don't think the political will is there for any form of reconciliation of any sort.

REID: Voting against us was never part of our arrangement!
SPECTER: I am altering the deal! Pray I don't alter it any further!
REID: This deal keeps getting worse all the time!

[ Parent ]
Let me rephrase... (0.00 / 0)
They can do it rather easily through reconciliation, especially if they make it an extension of medicare.  However, they are unlikely to do so.

Better?

REID: Voting against us was never part of our arrangement!
SPECTER: I am altering the deal! Pray I don't alter it any further!
REID: This deal keeps getting worse all the time!

[ Parent ]
The only petitions that would make any difference (4.00 / 5)
would be petitions signed by voters in the electoral districts of Democrats and Republicans in Congress who say they will vote against their representatives' re-election if they do not vote in favor of a robust public option.

I was on capitol hill yesterday as part of the delegation of signatories of the petition circulated by the Progressive Change Campaign Committee.

The petition read as follows: Any Democratic senators who support a Republican attempt to block a vote on health care reform should be stripped of their leadership titles. Americans deserve a clean up-or-down vote on health care."

We delivered the petitions signed by 87,000 PCCC members to Harry Reid's office.

Reid immediately issued a press release saying that he had no intention of imposing any kind of party discipline. As Dana Milbank reported in the Washington Post,

"The only thing Senator Reid is worried about right now is putting together a bill that can get the 60 votes necessary to overcome a Republican filibuster," Reid spokesman Jim Manley said. "He has no intention of stopping by" to get the petition."

The fact of the matter is that Reid has the power to make sure that a public option is included in a final bill, since one of the committees has reported out a bill that includes a public option. Should he be so bold, it would take 60 votes to remove the option from the final bill.

But he is such a weak-willed, weak-kneed, unimaginative majority leader that he is taking the line of least resistance by watering down the bill to decrease opposition. By so doing, instead of cracking the whip on the traitorous Joe Lieberman, he is letting Republican Olympia Snowe write the bill so that it excludes the public option and thereby guarantees her vote to substitute for Lieberman's in a cloture vote.

The feeling I got walking around the halls of Congress was that I was a powerless supplicant in the kingdom of a ruthless, self-serving monarch. Our Congressional representatives have stolen the American people's sovereignty and declared themselves (and their corporate campaign financiers) the sovereigns of the country. They could care less how many signatures we gather on our petitions.

The only petitions they might care about are those that show that a majority of their constituents are prepared to vote against them if they flout their will. Then, if they refused to change their tune, they could leave Congress to cash in like their predecessors and become lobbyists for corporations that funded their electoral campaigns.

Nancy Bordier is the author of Re-Inventing Democracy: How U.S. Voters Can Get Control of Government and Restore Popular Sovereignty in America.

Harry Reid is doing Obama's bidding... (4.00 / 1)
Reid doesn't have the guts to defy Rahm and Obama, so he must be doing exactly what he's told to do.  

Afghanistan and Iraq are Obama's wars.  The bank bailouts are Obama's bailouts, and health care reform, good or bad, will be Obama's, too.  The lousy, weak bill in the Senate won't take effect until 2013 for a reason.  

[ Parent ]
I agree (4.00 / 1)
You are probably correct that Reid gets his marching orders from the White House.

His poll numbers are so bad that it looks like he is going to go down to defeat if he makes a bid for re-election.

All of them, Obama included, are going to be headed for defeat if they continue to flout the will of the American people and pass legislation that harms our well-being.

Then the country will really be in for a free fall on all fronts if Republicans take their place.

Hopefully, there will be Alan Grayson-like truth-tellers who rise to the occasion and take them on. I regret that Wexler bailed on Congress, and that Feingold is quiet so much of the time.

We do seem to be lacking courageous political figures willing to take on the plutocrats. But as the economic and financial situation becomes more catastrophic, more courageous politicians will hopefully come to the fore.

[ Parent ]
87,000? (0.00 / 0)
I could probably find three times that number who think insurance companies rock.

87,000 isn't a big number in a country of 305 million.  

[ Parent ]
Two Thirds of the American People Favor A Medicare-Like System (4.00 / 1)
This means they favor a single payer system, or at least a public option, given that the right-leaning posture of Congress and the president mean they refuse to honor the will of the people.

So it is very unlikely that if all Americans were polled, that you could find three times as many Americans who "think insurance companies rock" versus those who know that private insurers are gravely harming the health and well-being of most Americans.


[ Parent ]
did you see this Specter story by nyceve (4.00 / 9)
at FDL:

In a conference call with political bloggers, Senator Arlen Specter (Still-Fresh D-PA) reported that in a recent gathering of the Senate Democratic caucus, he suggested his colleagues pledge to stick with the party on a cloture vote when the merged health care reform bill came to the floor. Much to Specter's surprise, according to him, his idea was not embraced by his fellow Dems. And, perhaps even more surprising, Majority Leader Harry Reid approached Specter after the meeting (again, according to Specter), and thanked him for stressing a point that Reid, himself, admitted he was "reluctant to make."

That tells us a lot about the differences between Republicans and Democrats.

Sorry if already on the site, I didn't see it.

New Jersey politics at Blue Jersey.

need to keep pushing concept nationally and in media (0.00 / 0)
I actually think Specter's idea is such a no-brainer that most dem voters would agree that in the final hour party loyalty must trump other fears...
[ Parent ]
No public option without reconciliation (0.00 / 0)
Right now, we have six Democrats who would almost certainly join a Republican filibuster on healthcare reform.  They include Blanche Lincoln, Ben Nelson, Kent Conrad, Joe Lieberman, Mary Landrieu, and Evan Bayh.  Unless the threat of never seeing their children again is used against them, we are not getting a public option or anything close to it without reconciliation(which probably wouldnt even work).  
you know what? (4.00 / 5)
It's pretty sad that we have to run ads to get leaders to lead. I mean, how hard would it be for somebody on their staff to read a couple of blogs to find out what citizens/activists think? I mean, I think the ads are absolutely a good idea. But the fact that we have to spend a lot of money to try to penetrate the DC bubble by buying ads in publications where DC bubble people might see them....sad.  That's money that could be better spent in lots of other ways.

I mean, it's like they're on another planet and we're working really hard to send out electronic signals in the hopes they might actually see them.

We need lobbyists... (4.00 / 1)
...and a few luxury boxes for Redskins games...

REID: Voting against us was never part of our arrangement!
SPECTER: I am altering the deal! Pray I don't alter it any further!
REID: This deal keeps getting worse all the time!
[ Parent ]
Ravens... (0.00 / 0)

[ Parent ]
House Committee Approves Reconciliation for Health Care | 19 comments
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