Because late last night the Senate parliamentarian sustained a couple of minor points of order related to the education portions of the budget reconciliation bill, the House will have to vote again to make their version of the bill identical to the Senate’s version. At least in theory, this means that the House could, if it wanted to, attempt to amend the bill further by including a public option, or some other elements to make the bill more progressive. If any of those changes passed the House, it would go back to the Senate where it would have to be reconciled again. If there were no hypocrites in Washington DC, it might be possible to pull such a trick off and secure the public option after all. Consider that there are at least 50 Democratic senators who have expressed support for a public option and that the House already passed a version that contained the public option.
Of course, the House passed a public option back on November 7th, and they’ve seen two ‘yes’ votes (Neil Abercrombie and Robert Wexler) retire since then, plus the one Republican ‘aye’ (Joseph Cao) flip to a no over the loss of the Stupak language. If all other members voted the same way, we’d have 217 votes (the absolute minimum needed for passage).
I know a lot of people would like to see the roll calls on such a vote just to know who is really responsible for the lack of a public option. However, I doubt it will happen. In fact, I pretty much know it won’t happen because it couldn’t pass. Why? Because a number of ‘yes’ votes back in November were voting in the full knowledge that the Senate was not going to approve a public option and that the final bill would be watered down. When it came time to pass the bill again (this time without a public option), the House provided one less vote in favor, but picked up every progressive and a few new conservadems.
There was never a clean vote on the public option where we were testing the members’ real support for it. In the first case, they knew their bill was a negotiating ploy, and in the second case, the public option wasn’t included in the bill. In the latter case, the House leadership was able (barely) to round up 219 votes precisely because the bill didn’t include a public option.
Yet, if you take all the members at their word and hold them to their record, we should have the absolute minimum number of votes to pass a public option. Expect to see some bitterness from progressive supporters of the public option that no roll calls were held to expose the hypocrisy of those who voted for a public option when it didn’t count but couldn’t be relied upon to vote for it when it would have.
