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.
You can’t help yourselves can you? Progressives/liberals can not resist their worse instincts to get in the way of Democratic Party success. Speaker Pelosi has made it clear there will be NO public option this year as has Reid. If either had the votes, they would have done it. You call it hypocrisy, but I call it willful naievete to have allowed Senate Democrats to sell you wolf tickets. Anybody can be for the public option as long as they don’t have to vote for it. Even if they had the votes pre-Scott Brown, they don’t have them now to push through a public option via reconcilliation. It’s not clear at this point they have more than 51 votes for the current reconcilliation bill. My two VA senators are waivering on the current bill, and I know damn well they will not vote a public option via reconcilliation. A lot of members have put their jobs and safety on the lines to get what we got. It takes a lot of arrogance to ask them to risk even more. And Speaker Pelosi is not going to do that to her caucus.
The Party and country have moved on. But I’ll give it a day, no hours, before the same progressives who were melting the gold to make a 100 foot statue of Pelosi, will out do Michael Steele in calling for her to be fired.
well, I don’t think there is anything wrong with pointing out that their explanation for why a PO couldn’t pass is no longer operative.
But, you’re right. In the end, we don’t have the votes and we never did.
But that doesn’t mean they’ll never have the votes. As many progressive critics have pointed out again-and-again, the most sweeping measures of this new law doesn’t take effect for three to four years. This affords us time for the country to get used to this new law; start to enjoy some of the beneifts; and hopefully have an appetite for more. Right now, things are too tenuous and more than a little bit scary to push this. It’s not over. When Civil Rights Act passed, more than a few Black folks wanted affirmative action legislaton pushed immediately. I know it’s not the best analogy, but you get my point. It wasn’t the right time, but it came. All just things come in due time. It will come. I have absolutely NO doubt that before the end of this decade, we will have a public option. And it won’t suffer the same fate as affirmative action 30 years after passage.
So im confused. If it goes through the house again after the senate does it then go to the presidents desk?
yes.
any “money” bill must originate in the House. When the senate changes a bill, it is treated as a new bill, requiring the house to “originate it” again.
And this is where there can and will be some backlash on the Dems, not just from the Lefty Dems, but everyone that expected a public option.
Many PO supporters already showed that they were quite willing to sit on their hands or, even vote for the teabagrrr approved GOP candidate, in Mass..
Won’t be felt as much as they would have been feeling it if they did not pass a bill at all. But there will be consequences.
It will be interesting to see if the Teabagrrrs that hate both parties will have enough of effect on the GOP to keep the political balance about the same after the next elections.
Who? Jane hamsher?
Enough said about that comment.
I’m not watching anything from the Young Turks. :rolls eyes:
Two months ago this would have been a legitimate worry.
But after the passage of the bill and the clarification of what’s in it among the public, there will be more public support for it. Watch the polls in about a month to see what the impact of passage actually is.
People who were for the public option were mostly accepting it as a route to single payer. There still is a route to single payer through this bill should the movement in the direction of a Swiss-German-Dutch system not produce change. That takes a lot of anger out. In addition, Grayson’s Medicare buy-in at cost bill has provided a new rallying point that is closer to single-payer.
It is clear that a maximum of only 15% or so teabaggers hate both parties. The bulk of the Tea Party movement are base Republicans who would not vote for Democrats anyway.
Healthcare will not be the key issue in November now, jobs will be. And Jim Bunning is single-handedly undoing the GOP’s credibility on wanting to increase jobs. Besides, Obama has gotten almost all of the job-creation tax cuts through. If they don’t work (and that depends on the decision of business owners), then more direct job creation by the government will be in order.
Dems campaigned on a “Public Option without a mandate” and delivered exactly the opposite. In fact, they delivered a corporatist’s wet dream Heritage Foundation bill.
And the news of how AHIP’s members are already acting to abuse the loopholes and are licking their chops on how they were delivered millions of suckers, errr, clients is already out there.
Dems had a chance to deliver on what the people wanted. A Public Option that is STILL more popular than the weak crap they passed and any of the politicians out there.
As far as a stepping stone to single payer? That is easily debatable given the weakness in the language that was used. The language that would have made it clear was available and was purposefully ignored by Dems.
Cheering this bill as something great won’t change reality. Bashing Hamsher won’t fix the stuff either (not directing that comment at you but at the comment above).
I get it. Maybe some of you don’t because I am not really the one you have to convince that this pile of shit is better than nothing. But there are a lot of reasonable people that mght have voted Dem next time around and are legitimately seeing this entire bill as being screwed over (or screwed over for the last time). And it is clear that I am not talking about teabagerrrs. Many of them are/were your allies.
You and I are in complete agreement.
All the cheering for the passage of this calamitous, naked giveaway to Obama’s real constituents (the Multinational Corporations–Clinton Redux) had me baffled. I know that the cheerleaders wanted Obama to pass anything so that he (and by extension them) would save face. I get that. I’m getting the sneaking suspicion that Obama’s more for what’s politically expedient than for what’s really right. And he was supposed to be a “new way forward” and “not beholden to corporate interests.”
I don’t take people who use the word cheerleaders in that context seriously.
Why is the onus on the House to insert the public option? If the reconciliation bill is being modified in the Senate because of Parliamentarian rules, couldn’t the Senate propose an amendment for the public option (or better, for a Medicare buy-in) if they wanted to? Or is the door to which amendments are up for votes closed?
What goes unexplained (maybe because it’s obvious to those who know better) is why on some issues like the public option and impeaching Bush, votes have to be in the bag way ahead of time, whereas for other bills (like the Senate bill for HIR), votes can be whipped up to the last minute. We just saw a great example of a bill not having the votes before it had them. That’s what appears most like hypocrisy.
The onus is on the House because they don’t have the votes. They’d have to demonstrate that they do have the votes for the Senate to bother. Also, Reid promised not to add amendments and he kept that promise.
Because of the nature of the changes and because they apparently apply only to the student loan part of reconciliation, Hoyer thinks that he can move the vote through before the end of the day.
That said, I understand the frustration of progressives. I too would like to know who I can depend on in the progressive caucuses and who are just playing progressives for their financial and volunteer support.
The issue of the accountability of government is very salient at the moment. Because it is government who has the responsibility of holding other institutions (like the financial industry) accountable.
But if there was the will, a good way to exact a cost for Republican tactics would be to add something consistent with the Byrd rule each time it passes through the House. Such as:
Medicare buy-in at cost
Elimination of the income cap on the payroll tax
Elimination of healthcare for members of Congress, retired members of Congress, and retired Presidents, effectively putting them in the individual pool under the new law.
A 10% surtax on adjusted gross incomes of over $1 million.
If the CBO had to score them, each of these would get a better score.
Where is the vote on medicare buy in for 55-64 year olds that Senate was going to agree on before Loserman scuttled it? Would the House not have enough votes on that? The Republicans play hard ball and delay. The Democrats do not punish them for it at all by passing crap. This is a good case in point. If GOP wants to pull out petty points of order then Dems should pass parts of their agenda that GOP hates or at least threatened to but I guess that is mute when most Dems are just postering towards their hard core supporters.
Does that not have the votes in the house either? I can live with the public option/medicare buy in coming next year, but what can’t wait is a repudiation of the idea that we’re going to let Ben Nelson and Joe Lieberman threaten to filibuster the agenda of their own caucus. I think we’ll see Snowe, Collins and Brown cross over more often now that the “Just Say No” approach has been discredited to a certain extent. But we can’t have our own caucus threatening to filibuster legislation- that’s gotta stop.
Probably the place to focus now is on filibuster/rules reform in the next Senate, primarying Lincoln and other deserving Dems, and letting the current insurance reform kick in with a view to improving it with something at least as good as the Grayson plan over the next couple years.
It’s a little painful, but that means going all out to keep or expand the Dem majority in spite of wanting to see some punishment meted out. Let’s finally face it: until and unless we figure out how to create an independent political force to the left of the Dem coalition, the dealing and hypocrisy are as much our doing as anybody’s.
I think it’s time to declare this version of a public option dead. Back when we thought a strong PO, Medicare buy in or even single payer was possible, the argument was that any reform bill without them would foreclose ever getting them again. At the moment it feels to me like that’s going to prove a false prophesy. So there’s a certain irony in pressing to stick the weak PO legislation into the bill as a last-ditch measure, when it really DOES have the potential to limit the prospects for getting something better.
I think Boo made a persuasive argument that exchanges and a mandate with no PO will inevitably spark agitation for a PO in the near future, and that it sets a trap for Reps who want to make the mandate an argument against the Dems. We have several years before the mandate kicks in. I think our best course is to go for a strong PO or, preferably, Grayson’s Medicare buy in plan in the meantime as separate legislation. As things have developed, a last-minute save of the weak PO stands likely to weaken us on both the policy and electoral fronts.
The real issue among progs seems to be between those of us who think the Dems did about as well as they could right now and those who think they betrayed us by refusing to make a better bill even though they could have. Seems to me the former view offers us a path forward while that latter leads to a dead end. I think the most productive thing we can do now is celebrate what’s been accomplished and gear up for another battle on the ground that has been gained.
The real issue among progressives is a difference about how to hold accountable those members of Congress who tout their progressive bona fides in order to get contributions and volunteers when they are not legislatively proactive and don’t deliver.
And the main difference has to do with how significant it is that progressives want change when there is a legislative game of Chicken being played. Do you throw the steering wheel overboard hoping the other guy swerves, or not?
Boo, why do you bring up the PO? Obama doesn’t want it and lied about ever wanting it during the run-up! (Well, according to one of his self-reverential tomes, he used to want it until he had to become “pragmatic,” which makes Obama a grand hypocrite, but I digress.) He promised the industries who bankroll his nambi-pambiness that the PO would not be included, let alone pass.
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/feature/2009/08/10/pharma
Then, he successfully twisted Pelosi’s arm. So, now we’re saddled with a mandate to purchase outdated, outmoded, overpriced health “insurance” that will supposedly cover another 10% of the country (10% WHOOPEEEEEE! /snark). I know that I cannot afford to give more of my money to corporations. My income has fallen since 2000, and that’s the honest truth. So, while you all cheered that very Republican health “care” bill’s signing (one extremely similar to though weaker than what Nixon tried to pass well over 30 years ago), I rued.
http://www.kaiserhealthnews.org/Stories/2009/September/03/nixon-proposal.aspx