I can’t tell if this is a good thing or a bad thing. I wasn’t happy at all with the proposed Senate bill, but is it worse than nothing at all? I guess that depends on who you are. Regardless, it looks like the Democrats in Congress aren’t keen on speeding the Senate bill through the House now that Coakley lost and a man who said his daughters were “available” in his “I beat the bitch” victory speech is now the Junior Senator from Massachusetts:
Scott Brown’s decisive Senate victory in Massachusetts imperiled the fate of the Democratic health care overhaul in Tuesday as House Democrats indicated they would not quickly approve a Senate-passed health care measure and send it to President Obama. […]
House approval of the Senate plan was favored by some lawmakers and strategists as a way to quickly resolve the issue and deliver the president a bill on a signature domestic achievement with just one final House vote. Remaining problems could be worked out with a subsequent piece of legislation.
But many House Democrats expressed deep reservations about the Senate bill, and those complaints, combined with the message sent by the Massachusetts electorate, apparently were sufficient to leave Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California and her lieutenants reluctant by Tuesday night about moving in that direction.
Democrats now face decisions on whether to give up on the health care fight — an approach few lawmakers appear willing to entertain — or perhaps pull together a scaled-back measure and use special procedural rules that would eliminate the need for 60 votes in the Senate. But it is not clear how many of the key provisions of the legislation could be passed under such a procedure.
They should have gone with the <a href="“we’ll only need 51 votes in the Senate” reconciliation process from the get go and kept the public option part of the final legislative package from the original House bill. Once Republicans win on health care reform by using delay and obfuscation and the threat of the filibuster in the Senate, you can bet other key pieces of reform such as regulation of the banks and Wall Street, environmental legislation, additional spending to stimulate job growth and other important and necessary reforms will go down in flames the same way.
Our manly Democratic Leaders from President Obama to Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel to that incompetent nebbish of a Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid (<who has to take more than his fair share of the blame for this mess) are, to use the words of my daughter’s friend, sucky. Very sucky, actually. Only Speaker Nancy Pelosi seems to have a clue. Too bad she wasn’t put in charge of running the show.
Just my opinion, mind you.
