Did the Democratic leadership plan all along to use the public option as a bait and switch to placate the base, as Greenwald believes? Dick Durbin claims that he can’t allow any amendments at all if Democrats want to avoid the infinite amendment gambit. Is Durbin right? I doubt that anyone other than the Senate parliamentarian knows the answer to that.
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TJ
I’ll just say if that was the plan the Dems are playing with fire.
Douglas
That the same Senate parliamentarian that the GOP has been trying to intimidate for weeks now?
…this is why you shouldn’t try to even appear to intimidate/bribe/whatever the ump. It taints the whole system. Morons…
Why oh why
Nevermind an amendment, why not include a public option directly in the reconciliation bill, then forbid any amendment? Of course Greenwald is right.
John Cole
Oh for Christ sakes. I mean seriously. I’ve only been screaming for the last fucking year that they never had the votes and were lying. There were never 50 votes for the public option ever. This is why I have spent the last year telling public option advocates to name the 50 Senators, and every time I did, I was accused of hippy punching.
They never had the votes. Yes it was all a scam. And a very transparent one, which is why even me, who criminally unskeptical during the Bush years, was able to figure it out. And every time I pointed it out or tried to, I was told I hate progressives or fed some bullshit about the fucking Overton window.
/rant
Adam Collyer
I tend to believe Senator Durbin, but the problem I have is that the Parliamentarian’s rulings aren’t binding – they’re suggestions. Let Vice President Biden preside and move on.
Punchy
They dont have 50 Sens to pass the pubic option. So who cares?
David in NY
I’m not sure Greenwald is right that people were saying there were 50 votes for the PO. (Apt acronym of the day?) I believe I heard it said a number of times that there were not even 50.
Yes, I guess Greenwald agrees in his update:
So I don’t get what’s his problem? I haven’t thought the votes were there, and I thought the view around here was that it’s imperative to get a deal done fast. Why isn’t Durbin just right? Where’s the bait and switch? Maybe I’m confused, or missing something, but I don’t understand the heavy breathing.
General Egali Tarian Stuck
It is obvious that Durbin has fallen under the spell of Rahmbamaputin. Gawd hep us. The end is nigh.
And Obama did not promise a PO during the debate, now did he?
beltane
Will they just pass something already. The real bait and switch would be to donate time and money to Democratic candidates just to see them completely squander this opportunity.
flounder
From what I understand Durbin is kinda correct. Here is the important thing at this state of the game:
Democrats are really threading more of a needle in the House than the Senate at this point.
So the House is basically going to write the reconciliation bill-one that can pass their body. Any changes the Senate does to this bill will mess up that delicate 216 vote balance.
Therefore, at this point the game is getting 50 Senators together to pledge to vote against any and all amendments to the reconciliation bill (no matter how much they want a PO e.g.), thereby insuring that when it is approved by the Senate it goes directly to the president and doesn’t “ping pong”.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the House actually passes the reconciliation bill before the Senate bill so they can get the Senate to move on scheduling the debate and whatnot.
Toni
What people don’t seem to get is that if the bill is amended in the Senate during reconciliation then it has to go back to the house to find 216 votes again.
If there are 50+ votes for it in the Senate and 216+ votes in the house then they could put it in the base reconciliation bill that starts in the house.
cleek
i don’t know if it was their plan all along. since it’s pretty fucking obvious the Dems couldn’t successfully plan and implement a trip to get more beer when the first keg runs out – they’d leave after the party was spent, and then they’d return with two four packs of wine coolers and a keg of O’Douls.
but it’s also pretty fucking obvious that the sudden surge in support of the PO is an attempt to woo the base. “look, i really am a Great Liberal Leader! please don’t abandon me in November!”
it’s trivially easy to be in favor of something the base loves but which has no chance of passing. ask the GOP base about “spending cuts”.
Adam Collyer
@John Cole:
I’m a public option advocate/supporter, and I agree with this. Just to play devil’s advocate though, I do think that the public option (whatever it’s defined as at this point, because I’m losing track) probably has something like 45 votes in the Senate. Is it possible that Reid, if he was tougher, could’ve twisted more arms to get to 50?
I don’t really think so, given the conservadem opposition, but maybe that’s why a certain bloc of progressives have been screaming like lunatics about the public option. I may disagree with their tactics, but not with their overarching goal.
General Egali Tarian Stuck
@John Cole: I kind of thought the 50 votes were there to pass a PO by reconc, thought I did opine that reconc. was the only way a PO could pass.., so I was likely wrong, apparently about having enough votes to pass a PO.
But was right that dems would, in the end, do what was necessary to pass basic insurance reforms, and a way to cover most uninsured. The big question is will this package do enough to curb rising health care costs. My gut says no, and fairly soon we will be back at this.
Da Bomb
@General Egali Tarian Stuck: No, he didn’t… but don’t let facts spoil your comments.
Rahm pe-nis persuaded Durbin to use trickery and foil the Dems into believing a PO could pass. Even though they NEVER had the votes for it.
If they can pass it great, but if they can’t there will be plenty time to build upon the bill once it’s passed. There are too many other incentives in this current bill that will help too many people.
some guy
Did the put they put it on the negotiating table with a willingness to bargain it away as part of a compromise? Obviously so. “Bait and switch” seems like the most unflattering way to interpret that.
Though I can understand the feeling of betrayal that would lead one to believe it. Both the Democratic frontrunners made a “public option” the centerpiece of their health care proposals in 2008. After Obama won by 7 points and the Dems took huge majorities in Congress I don’t think it was at all unreasonable to expect the Obama would follow through on the health care plan he campaigned on.
But the sad reality is that elected Dems are more conservative and/or more electorally risk-averse than their base so there just aren’t the votes there for a public option. Maybe the situation would be different if a public option polled at 70% favorable instead of 45-51% favorable.
FPN
The GOP’s plan is to offer amendment after amendment after amendment on this thing. As a part of my job, I have to sit through fundraisers that would make your blood curdle.
beltane
@David in NY: As far as I’m concerned, the real bait & switch was carried out by some of the public option’s most vocal advocates. They kept promising us that the votes were there in the Senate. What they failed to tell us was that these votes were in some other Senate in some other dimension, one that is free from people like Lieberman, Landrieu, Bayh, Lincoln, Conrad and the rest of the wankers.
Adam Collyer
@beltane:
Also, very much this comment. Pass this already. People want you to accomplish something, and you want accomplishments to run on. Why in the world should this be so difficult?
That last question is rhetorical. I think we all know the answer(s). Still frustrating.
Xenos
The public option is necessary to bring costs down, over the long run, if we go with the Senate bill, even amended with a non-PO reconciliation bill. If the votes in the Senate are not there, too bad… The White House stopped promising the PO months ago, so no shenanigans there. As for the Senate, everybody already hates the Senate, so no loss.
Just PTDB already. Then run on medicare-for-all this summer. People may actually come out and vote for it.
mr. whipple
How did the PO placate the base? From the very first House bill, the PO was very weak and limited. Go back and look through the LW blogospehere the night the House bill passed. There was literally no excitement.
In the Senate, the constant mantra was they didn’t have the votes.
As far as Obama went, every time he appeared everyone watched to say if he said the magic PO word, and were excited when he did and disappointed and angry when he didn’t.
beltane
@General Egali Tarian Stuck: Addressing rising health care costs will be painful and controversial as it will require performing cost-benefit analyses of some of America’s most beloved medical tests and procedures.
Admiral_Komack
John Cole.:
“Oh for Christ sakes. I mean seriously. I’ve only been screaming for the last fucking year that they never had the votes and were lying. There were never 50 votes for the public option ever. This is why I have spent the last year telling public option advocates to name the 50 Senators, and every time I did, I was accused of hippy punching.”
“They never had the votes. Yes it was all a scam. And a very transparent one, which is why even me, who criminally unskeptical during the Bush years, was able to figure it out. And every time I pointed it out or tried to, I was told I hate progressives or fed some bullshit about the fucking Overton window.”
-If there were EVER 50 votes for the public option, why didn’t those votes materialize on a vote tally somewhere?
If they had, health care for Americans would possibly be a reality NOW.
THEY NEVER HAD THE VOTES!
rob!
We need to change Pass The Damn Bill to Pass The Fucking Bill.
Enough already, Dems. Daddy is delaying his trip to Asia to make sure you don’t screw this up. PASS THE FUCKING BILL!!
Adam Collyer
@mr. whipple:
Sadly, this is even being generous. When the President appeared somewhere to talk about health care, he’d use the word public option several times. But if he said it five times, people were angry because he didn’t say it a sixth.
I always thought that would be the top level of my irritation with the liberal blogosphere…sadly, I was proven very wrong mere months later.
flounder
@Xenos,
That is what I think too. That is the beauty of the bill Grayson is now pushing, as it is a strong PO that can stand alone and the fight for it can continue even after the current bill passes and gets the foot in the door.
John Cole
Both sides of the debate were playing games.
beltane
@Adam Collyer: Yeah, the constant parsing of language was reminiscent of the Kremlin watching of the old days. Despite all the talk, I think the public option’s fate was sealed when Max Baucus was put in charge of the bill. We simply do not have enough Democrats with the balls to take on the insurance industry in the way they need to be taken on.
Rick Taylor
You mean Reid put the public option in the senate bill knowing full well he’d be humiliated? He orchestrated that on purpose, lying when he said he had the votes? That doesn’t make much sense. I know bashing Reid is popular, but I don’t believe he’s incompetent enough that he didn’t have 50 when he said he had 60.
__
That doesn’t mean we have 50 votes now. Positions harden over time, which is why it may be harmful to fight for something at a stage in the process when you’re not going to win. Plus at this point what matters is not just 50 votes in the senate but the 217 or whatever it is today votes in the house. If putting in a public option at this point scares away more centrists than it attracts progressives, it’s not worth it.
__
One thing I’m beginning to appreciate more is the stance of some that once we had a bill through, it would be easier to fight for things like the public option in the future. If we pass the base bill, there will be the opportunity to improve it in the future; this isn’t the last reconciliation bill. But if the bill fails, I don’t see another one passing in the forseable future. We’d need either gains in the senate (and to at least to hold our position in the house) which doesn’t seem likely, or we’d need to overturn the filibuster. And then there’d have to be the will to refight this war, with no guarantees it would be any easier or take any less time. I don’t see it happening. If one feels this bill is worse than the status quo, it makes sense to oppose it, as who knows if we will be able to improve it. But if one feels the benefits like the end of discrimination against those pre-existing conditions is worth it, then we should do everything we can to pass it.
Cerberus
Meh.
Pass the damn bill, yes, but seriously this is pathetic. The bill in the House is a necessary bill, certainly. I support it as a stepping stone, but it’s a band-aid. The Dems wasted an entire year of kabuki theatre, blocking all other legislation and the best they can shit out is that?
Yes, pass the damn bill and rah rah sound the high trumpets if it passes, but this final result is not something you waste a year with a supermajority on. And the Dems have only themselves to blame. If they knew from the beginning that all they were going to get is a shit sandwich, they should have just accepted it instead of preventing themselves from getting anything else done from the beginning of health care legislation on in order to create what will in essence be merely a decent bit of legislation.
It’s about presentation. Kafta kebabs are delicious, but you don’t serve them on silver platters carefully placed by a $1000 a day butler and it just makes you think less of the delicious feast than if it was placed on a normal plate with some nice side-dishes.
And I want a vote anyways on the public option. Not because it will pass. But because I want every democrat in the pocket of the insurance companies named. On the record.
It’s time to stop protecting them so we can know where to spend the money to get the best democrats we can into the paltry seats we can. I don’t care if half of the democratic party is in the tank, I want to know which half.
General Egali Tarian Stuck
@Rick Taylor:
He was gambling his long term friendship with Holy Joe would allow him to get Joe’s vote, and later that Joe would keep his word about going for the compromise medicare expansion. Lieberman was never going to budge on any expansion of the fed government into providing HC insurance. So Reid fucked that up, and delivered acrimony in the midst of this debate that was not necessary and caused much rift in the dem party, when joe said no.
John Cole
How long did that weak PO last in the Senate bill? Hours?
gwangung
That’s always been my position. It’s also been my position that I’d LOVE a public option–but wouldn’t mind leaving it off the table because it wouldn’t curtail costs nearly as much as proponents think. As well, I think it’s easier to implement a strong public option with the frameworks enacted.
In other words, this bill is necessary, but not sufficient for my wants. But because it’s necessary, it should be passed.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@cleek:
[Dem base]: Talk dirty to me honey!
[Congressional Dems]: Now, baby..
[Dem base]: Please. You know how I get when you..
[Congressional Dems]: (in a breathy whisper) Public Option
[Dem base]: Ohhhhhh
[Congressional Dems]: Public Option!
[Dem base]: Yes, yes! Don’t stop…
[Congressional Dems]: Publ.. oh hey, look at the time. Sorry baby I gotta go. My wife’s waiting for me.
[Dem base]: Bastard!
[Congressional Dems]: See you next year baby!
NobodySpecial
@General Egali Tarian Stuck:
If you believe that, then you must believe that Reid had 59, or else he’d never have gambled on Joe.
The real reason why there was never a vote taken to find out if there was 50 was because everyone was swearing up and down that you A) Couldn’t use reconciliation because it would fuck up the Democratic majority and B) Didn’t need to use reconciliation because Snowe or Collins or Liar-Man or Jose Cardenal was gonna flip to be number 60 and it was more important to make a bill they’d pass.
Reconciliation was off the table, remember? So no wonder no one checked if we had 50 or 49 or 55 or 45 or whatever number was lower than 60.
See, this is where the hippie-punching is just reflexive at this point. It’s all their damn fault for demanding reconciliation at a time when the President wasn’t feeling that and then it’s all their damn fault for needing reconciliation now because President Snowe and President Liar-Man got their feelings hurt and it’s also all their damn fault that Senators who see a chance to put it in the bill are now all of a sudden saying they’d love to do it in reconciliation. If the hippies weren’t so damn unreasonable, this bill would have passed a year ago March 4. Or something. Without that damn public option which is no good and does nothing anyways.
General Egali Tarian Stuck
@NobodySpecial: No one in this thread is blaming the hippies, nor punching them. Sounds like you wish they were just to get your butthurt on.
The rest of your comment doesn’t make sense to me.
I will say that Joe Lieberman being not connected to the dem party and not dependent on them to get reelected, did provide cover for the others in joining the winger filibuster on a PO. But Joe was pretty much the only culprit for shooting down the compromise medicare buy in.
Corner Stone
@NobodySpecial:
It’s important to note the shift in rhetoric, and how it shaped the debate as to where we eventually ended up. It didn’t shift the bill mind you, but did shift what the appropriate range of debate was limited to at any given stage of the HCR debacle.
A lot of people seem interested in rewriting short term history.
Corner Stone
@Cerberus:
And this I think is what a lot of people were saying the whole time.
It was always going to end up with Republicans screaming that they were shut out of the debate, Obama is the most partisan Prez ever, and the D’s are “shoving it down our throats”.
Always.
Whether they had slapped a crap bill together in 3 weeks, or over the year+ long timeframe – the screaming would be the same. Except the bill might possibly be slightly marginally teeny bit better if they had actually done it quickly and really rammed it through.
General Egali Tarian Stuck
@Corner Stone:
Oh bullshit. Criticizing hippie poutrages in the HC debate on their being inaccurate and generally unhelpful is not the same thing as blaming them for no PO. That blame lies with the senate conservadems, especially Joe Lieberman. I have never said otherwise.
Betsy
I called my rep Capuano’s local office this morning. I asked what his position on health care was currently, and was put on the phone with a lovely woman with whom I had a very nice chat. She sounded weary but relieved to hear from someone polite and knowledgeable.
NobodySpecial
@General Egali Tarian Stuck: I’m looking at Cole’s rant at post #3 and the ones below it agreeing with and expounding on it.
The rest of my comment should be evident since I was replying to your comment: Reid would not have put the PO in if he wasn’t reasonably sure he could get 60 – with Joe being 60. Your argument is that Joe killed it, but that is only true if Reid has 59 others already.
Of course, we both agree on the basics – there probably was 50 for a PO with even a moderate sell job by Obama. But Obama didn’t want reconciliation, and Reid and Pelosi went along with him and took it off the table right off the bat. They then spent months letting Baucus try to bribe minority committeemembers and failing, then they spent more time begging Liar-Man and President Snowe for a vote, and they failed, and then they finally squeezed through an abortion of a bill that pleased no one.
And somehow, in the pages of Balloon Juice, this all turned out to be the hippies’ fault, because some of them said a bad bill was worse than no bill. Not the fault of Congress not using the majority in place to actually pass legislation. Not the fault of the leadership for deciding to leave the assault rifle and Kevlar back at home base and going into the fight in diapers with a BB gun and then crying because they lost. Nah, it was all Jane Hamsher’s fault. And, of course, anyone who at the time said crazy stuff like they should use reconciliation or put a public option in. You know, like they’re talking about a year later.
Anyways, that’s MY rant.
ericblair
@Rick Taylor: One thing I’m beginning to appreciate more is the stance of some that once we had a bill through, it would be easier to fight for things like the public option in the future.
Good God, yes. I can’t fathom why it would be easier for congress to go through all this crap again with a more ambitious bill after a less ambitious one crashed and burned. Facts on the ground, people: once the structure is in place, you can add to it.
My understanding is that you really couldn’t pass the whole healthcare bill in the Senate with reconciliation, since a fair bit of it is not budget-related. However, it has passed in the Senate, and the sidecar legislation fits fine within the reconciliation rules.
General Egali Tarian Stuck
@NobodySpecial: First you come here and falsely claim that people are blaming hippies for no PO> Then you start the same old tired horseshit that Obama never wanted a PO. I am so sick of this pissy garbage, take it somewhere else, please.
mr. whipple
Amen.
ruemara
I know we don’t have 60 votes in the senate for a PO. I have doubts that we have 50 votes. I am willing to shoot for a PO but I won’t absolutely WILL NOT ABIDE any purity shite about not passing the bill because even as weaksauce as it is, it’s better than status quo. I’m not sure this is shenanigans, I see it as a never say die attitude by progressive legislators.
booferama
The problem with the public-option ruse, though, is that senators like Jay Rockefeller touted it when it seemed like a long-shot, but the closer it got (and gets) to 51 senators who support it, Rockefeller backs away. Greenwald has documented this pretty well, I think.
And for what it’s worth, John, even though I’ve disagreed with some of your statements about the whole health-care process, I don’t think you’re punching hippies or missing Overton windows.
NobodySpecial
@General Egali Tarian Stuck:
I see your reading comprehension is bad.
Where did I say that Obama didn’t want a PO? I said
But Obama didn’t want reconciliation, and Reid and Pelosi went along with him and took it off the table right off the bat.
Now, I’m gonna help you with this, for free.
reconciliation != PO.
We got that? Good.
Nellcote
Durban says he will whip FOR the PO if it’s in the House reconciliation bill. He will whip AGAINST if it’s not.
General Egali Tarian Stuck
@NobodySpecial: What else would reconciliation be for in the beginning of this, if not for a PO. You sound drunk this morn dude. And the whole point of it is whether there were ever the votes to pass a PO by reconciliation. I, early on thought there was, but now agree with Cole on this particular point, that the votes were likely never there. And if true, why would Obama push for reconciliation to pass a PO? knowing those votes weren’t there.
Now go back to your Obama punching, if it makes you feel good. I won’t be punching hippies though, because they are not to blame for what senators do. It would be nice if the hippies could admit this is also true for Obama on this particular bill, being as personal and volatile as it is to all Americans.
Xenos
@General Egali Tarian Stuck:
One plan was to punt on the PO, and limit the reconciliation to fixing the Cornhusker Kickback and a few other things the Republicans had been complaining about as the basis for condemning the Senate bill. As a strategy it is a bit under-ambitious, but has a nice passive-aggessive twist to it.
taylormattd
Why anyone would trust any of Greenwald’s opinions about the motivation of democrats is beyond me. The guy went batshit about Dana Milbank’s Rahm article, and then comes here calling people cultists out of the gate. Not to mention the fact that he quasi-reveres that racist republican piece of shit Ron Paul. Ugh.
NobodySpecial
@General Egali Tarian Stuck:
You’re less and less coherent.
Well, yeah. Which is why plenty of progressives were agitating for using reconciliation from the very start, since it only required 50 votes and the PO was a guaranteed deficit changer. Like it or not, it was the leadership who took reconciliation off the table until now. That doesn’t imply that they didn’t want a PO – Reid clearly wanted one, for example, because he put one in the frigging bill, and Pelosi wanted one because she pushed for it in the House. But by taking reconciliation off the table, they killed the PO deader than dogshit. The only reason it’s even back is because now reconciliation has been forced on them by the shitty Senate bill that has Reid and Obama’s seal of approval on it.
And for months, on this very blog, you, and Cole, and a whole lot of others, gave progressives shit every step of the way and claiming that the ‘reality’ was that reconciliation was a bad idea and we didn’t have votes for it and the ‘reality’ was that we couldn’t have a PO and yelling about it only made things worse.
And where are we now? About to go to reconciliation, with the public option looking damn near as viable as it’s been since the first days of this clusterfuck. Some results ‘reality’ gave us, huh?
Joe Beese
Thank you, taylormattd. I was wondering when this thread would finally get around to the inevitable messenger-shooting.
NobodySpecial
@taylormattd:
Um, he didn’t call anyone a cultist in this last thread until some of the fine commentariat called him a liar and paranoid and delusional. Can we leave the revisionist history to Commander Codpiece?
General Egali Tarian Stuck
@NobodySpecial:
I have always from day one called for dems to use the reconciliation process to pass a PO, cause that was the only way we would get one.
Otherwise, you live in a magic house, and it is amusing to hear that only if Obama had waved his leader wand over the senate, ponies would stampede us all. While at the same time accusing Obots of being pie in the sky Unicorn wranglers. The irony is too much to bear sometimes. You have a nice day Nobodyspecial, I have to go now and contemplate the brilliance of internet hippies.
mcc
11-dimensional chess indeed.
It seems to me like the best way for Obama and the Democrats to demonstrate they were and are serious about the public option is to PTDB and then continue to push for the public option or a medicare buy-in. (And next time none of this watered down “negotiated rates” stuff.) In the end nobody’s going to remember all this procedural stuff or these conspiracy theories, the only thing they’re going to be judged on whether they deliver on what people want.
General Egali Tarian Stuck
I am just glad and take great comfort that Obama wields a 90 percent approval amongst rank and file democrats out in the countryside. Puts all the Obamafail blog wanking in perspective.
edit- therefore I have decided that the butthurt prog crowd is really a tempest in a teapot and am putting away my rubber mallet to a time when these folks actually become relevant to anything other than loud noise making. Carry on wankers to your delight.
Mnemosyne
Fellas, here’s the thing about reconciliation: it can only be used for things that affect the budget.
If the bill that eventually passed the Senate had been pushed through reconciliation instead, there would be:
– No ban on insurance companies turning people down for pre-existing conditions
– No community rating of insurance premiums
– No ban on rescissions
– No cap on patient expenditures
– No exchange
Basically, if the bill had gone through reconciliation, everything that people claim about it being a giant giveaway to the insurance companies would have been 100 percent true and you would be even more pissed off than you are today.
Of course, it’s all a moot point anyway because the bill passed the Senate. We have all of the above. We can now fix some of the financial (ie budget-related) stuff that the House is concerned about through reconciliation and still keep our non-financial reforms.
Yes, it would have been nice for this not to have been quite so fucking torturous, but that’s water under the bridge now and there’s no point complaining about how it should have been done now that it’s actually done.
John S.
In the last thread I saw – regarding the Rahm stories – the very first fucking comment Glenn made was to call everyone an Obama cultist:
That was the 12th comment on the thread, and it quickly devolved from there. So either you are referring to a different thread, or that’s some serious revisionist history you got going on there.
Bruce (formerly Steve S.)
What more evidence do you need? Just this morning Dick Durbin said he’d love to whip for the PO if only the House would send him one. Just this morning Nancy Pelosi said she’d love to send a PO over to the Senate but sadly they don’t have the votes for it.
@John Cole:
More than 50 senators have either signed the letter, voted for a PO in committee, or made public statements supportive of a PO. Less than a year ago Ben Nelson — BEN NELSON! — was quoted as being “open to the idea” of a PO. Your statement is narrowly correct in that there never were 50 definite yeses for any particular PO proposal at any single point in time because there are 15-20 professional fence-sitters who need to know which way the wind is blowing and leadership is leaning before committing. As I’ve said in other comments, the time to start working on those people was last April, not last October, and if leadership truly wanted a PO in their heart of hearts they would have worked for it at that time. Instead it’s March of 2010 and we’re being treated to a clown show featuring the White House, Durbin and Pelosi.
Tsulagi
Can see Greenwald’s points.
I don’t think the comedy has ended on this thing yet. IF there is a reconciliation bill, of course no one could ever predict the new pro-choice Rs rather than Ds might introduce a public option amendment. That could lead to a classic exclamation point humiliating the Ds again. Could see the final vote being 41 Rs and 8 Ds. Future campaign commercials: “We tried to lower the price of prescription drugs, to protect a woman’s right to choose, AND to lower health care costs via a public option available to all, but the majority Ds shut us down.”
General Egali Tarian Stuck
@John S.:
yea, it sounded like he was responding to what I said a few comments prior..
If he was, he should have addressed his response to me and not include everyone. That is his problem. He paints with too broad a brush on most things.
Anyways, per my previous comment, I do deem GG as being irrelevant to much of anything, and I am even more irrelevant to much of anything, except for occasionally making a funny. Which is all i care about in the end commenting on this blog.
edit – and i stand by the above blockquote comment I made.
Rick Taylor
@John Cole
__
Wasn’t that back when the senate bill needed to pass a 60-vote threshold? We know it never had 60 votes. What would have happened if we didn’t have a filibuster, or if “centrist” Democrats had decided they could vote no but they couldn’t in good conscience filibuster the party’s signature legislation to get their way? I don’t really know. More importantly, it doesn’t matter much now. I’ll just repeat, if Reid never had even 50 votes, he was criminally incompetent to press ahead when it required 60.
NCReggie
I do think people are overlooking the part of the sidecar fixes that would allow the secretary of HHS to approve or strike down insurance rate hikes. Pretty good way to control costs it seems.
El Cid
I honestly believe the leadership — which never really did want a public health insurance choice option, in my view, but weren’t entirely opposed to it either — thinks that the inclusion of any PO now would possibly cause the reconciliation bills not to be passed.
On the other hand, I never thought that any such option (public health insurance plan or Medicare buy-in) would even make it nearly as far as it has, so, I’m not an expert on these matters.
I think there are degrees to which both views are true — there are legitimate fears that the PO / bills wouldn’t pass, and in general the party leadership doesn’t really strongly back such strong and direct government interventionism, given its challenge to 30 years of anti-government Reaganism.
The Raven
@John Cole: “There were never 50 votes for the public option ever.”
Apparently, there aren’t 50 votes for anything that can be relied on to reduce costs, because that would reduce the profits of the insurance and pharmaceutical companies.
But the devil says, “This offer will expire! Act now!”
azlib
I get the impression the Dems were making up the process as they went along by reacting to short term political events. I do not think they had a plan. If they did, they would have always done this legislation as a two parter. Pass the policy stuff which cannot be done with reconciliation and then pass all the budget related stuff which failed to get 60 votes through reconciliation.
I find it odd this was not the strategy from the beginning. BTW, at this point I say pass the Senate bill warts and all and keep the reconciliation sidecar simple. There is time to improve the bill at a later point in time, especially considering the long implementation phase in.
At the same time I have no problem with people lobbying for the PO. Keep the pressure on. After all, these folks on the Hill work for us.
craptractor
@John Cole: Well this is the first time I’ve seen you frame it this way. Every post of yours I recall reading up to this point has come across as hippie-punching. To me there’s a big difference between “the votes just aren’t there so do the sensible thing and stop asking for them to be” and “they’ve been scamming you all along” and I don’t think it’s remotely accurate to portray the last year of your posts as saying the latter. If the Senate has been lying to our faces for a year straight why am I only just now finding out that you think this? Not to be an ass but do you normally save that level of clarity for the comments? I mean I’ve been reading the top-level posts for well over a year and I’m pretty well aware of how you feel about Jane Hamsher.
Claudia
“Designed to fail” has been the operating mantra of the Dems for eons. They sell-out as a matter of principle.
slightly_peeved
@Mnemosyne:
Also, if you’d gone with the “split bill” idea from the start – do some of this through reconciliation, and some through normal process – Lieberman and Nelson would’ve thrown a shit fit. They would probably have refused to vote for anything until they got their say on the stuff going through reconciliation.
The best time to use reconciliation was after you’d got everything possible out of the normal, 60 vote process, swearing blind to Lieberman and the Blue Dogs that you were, cross your heart, not going to use reconciliation to get stuff pass them. Which, funnily enough, is what the Democrats have actually done.
slightly_peeved
Except that one of the biggest places to cut cost is the providers, and this has been addressed by the bill, through the introduction of bundling.