photo: Kaptain Kobold via Flickr
With the health care vote taking shape in the House, Bart Stupak is waging a last-ditch campaign to stop it – and extending beyond his objection to the abortion funding language.
Barack Obama will make a speech tomorrow laying out the way forward on health care. It’s widely expected that he will endorse a reconciliation sidecar approach to pass what amounts to the Senate bill with a series of fixes outlined in his white paper on the subject. The process would begin with the House passing the Senate bill the week of March 19. The House would then pass a reconciliation bill and send it to the Senate the week of March 26. The timing is designed to stop Republicans from an endless series of amendments, which would eat into their Easter recess. I don’t think this will stop them, but some rulings from the chair calling non-germane amendments dilatory and out of order presumably would.
This is an extremely rough outline – we don’t know the substance of the sidecar bill. But procedurally, it does look like the House would go first, passing the Senate bill before the changes come into play (it would then be held and not signed into law without the changes). It’s unclear what kind of collateral House Democrats would need from the Senate – a signed pledge, a televised statement, who knows – before feeling free to pass their bill.
You can tell that the House is gearing up to pass something with respect to health care, because the Democratic media shop has floated to the AP some names of possible vote-switchers on the bill, which would be needed to move forward.
Ten House Democrats indicated in an Associated Press survey Monday they have not ruled out switching their “no” votes to “yes” on President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul, brightening the party’s hopes in the face of unyielding Republican opposition.
The White House tried to smooth the way for them, showing its own openness to changes in the landmark legislation and making a point of saying the administration is not using parliamentary tricks or loopholes to find the needed support […]In interviews with the AP, at least 10 of the 39 Democrats — or their spokesmen — either declined to state their positions or said they were undecided about the revised legislation, making them likely targets for intense wooing by Pelosi and Obama. Three of them — Brian Baird of Washington, Bart Gordon of Tennessee and John Tanner of Tennessee — are not seeking re-election this fall.
The others are Rick Boucher of Virginia, Suzanne Kosmas of Florida, Frank Kratovil of Maryland, Michael McMahon of New York, Walt Minnick of Idaho, Scott Murphy of New York and Glenn Nye of Virginia. Several lawmakers’ offices did not reply to the AP queries.
You can even see a messaging strategy, with “up or down vote” and “majority rule” replacing “reconciliation” in the lexicon.
Campaign Diaries has the definitive rundown of the whip count, which I’ve been tracking for some time and will continue to do as we near a vote. But I do want to say one thing to those who claim that Nancy Pelosi has special powers, and that she doesn’t lose a vote in the House ever, which has been floated by commentators and members of Congress alike. Let’s be clear about this – Pelosi DID lose the vote in November. She won final passage of the health care bill, but if she had her way, the Stupak amendment would never have gotten a vote. She ignored and ignored Stupak for several months, hopeful that she could round up enough votes for the bill without him. And ultimately, she was unsuccessful, forced to roll back women’s rights as a consequence of passing health care reform.
Now, she doesn’t have that out. The Nelson amendment governs the abortion language in the Senate bill, and as changing that through reconciliation is unlikely to pass the Byrd rule, basically that cannot be changed. Which means she will have to find 216 votes (see here for why that number has changed) without Stupak.
For his part, Stupak is raising objections to other parts of the bill besides the abortion language:
In an interview today, Stupak said abortion isn’t the only issue that will keep him from voting for the Senate bill if Speaker Nancy Pelosi brings it to the House floor. “It’d be very hard to vote for this bill even if they fixed the abortion language,” he said. Asked whether there was any way he would vote for the current package, he had one word: “Nope.”
Stupak said the White House hasn’t included enough provisions from the House bill in its proposed package of changes to the Senate version. He cited some of the House’s tighter restrictions on insurance companies and new payment methods to encourage doctors to provide quality treatment that he thinks should be in the bill. And even though the White House peeled back the tax on high-value insurance plans, he’s upset that it’s still in there at all.
A big concern among House members, Stupak said, is that they will be forced to vote on the Senate bill with no assurance the package of changes aimed at appeasing House members will ever get approved.
“You’re going to make members vote for a bill that’s going to be hung around your neck come Election Day,” he said. “After sending so much legislation to the Senate, we just don’t trust that they’re going to do it.”
Stupak basically laid out the objections of many, if not the majority, of House Democrats. He may not welcome the prospect of being responsible for killing health care reform or becoming a national villain, so he’s pivoting to other objections. Or, he’s losing his block of members and wants to hold them for other reasons. Or he’s just talking out loud and expressing the frustrations of his colleagues. It’s hard to say.
Regardless, the vote in the House on the Senate bill, when it comes, will simply be brutal. FDL News will try its best to track every member and how they’re voting.
Tags: abortion, Bart Stupak, health care reform, Pitts-Stupak Amendment, Reconciliation, reproductive rights
