Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid will send a health care bill with an opt-out public option, and without Stupak amendment language, to the floor of the Senate next week. From The Hill:
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) late Tuesday laid the groundwork for the Senate's healthcare reform debate to start next Tuesday.
Reid filed a motion to introduce the bill on Monday, Nov. 16. Anticipating a Republican objection, the bill would be pushed onto the Senate calendar.
"A motion to proceed to the bill would be in order the next legislative day," said Reid spokesman Jim Manley.
Reid announced two weeks ago that this bill will contain a public option. Yesterday morning, he declared that it would not contain the Stupak amendment.
Given the 60-vote culture in the Senate, it will take 60 votes either to remove the public option from the bill, or to add the Stupak language to the bill. This makes either pretty unlikely (especially the addition of the Stupak language).
This does not mean Reid has secured the votes to pass a public option. It does mean that Reid has likely secured the votes to start the amendment and debate process on the health care bill.
Unless the Senate uses the reconciliation process, or unless it uses the nuclear option (which it won't), it will have to pass three, 60-vote threshold, cloture votes on the health care.
The first will be to start debate. The second will be to end debate and proceed to a simple majority vote on the bill. The third and final vote will happen after the conference committee with the House, to end debate on the bill once again and proceed to one last simple majority vote. TNR summarizes the process here.
It is likely that Reid has secured the votes to start the debate and amendment process on the floor of the Senate. There was always minimal opposition to starting debate, even among the five "problem" Senators on health care: Evan Bayh, Mary Landrieu, Joe Lieberman, Blanch Lincoln, and Ben Nelson.
The significance of this is not that Reid has secured the votes to start the amendment and debate process so much as it pushes the timeline for passage of the overall bill forward. If Reid had not filed a motion to introduce the bill this week, then the earliest floor debate would have started in the Senate would have been the Tuesday after Thanksgiving. This ups the process by at least two weeks, and gives real hope that the bill will be passed into law by the end of the year.
Another step forward.
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