Democrats Scramble to Save Obamacare
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Not quite ready to put comprehensive health care legislation out
to pasture, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Speaker
Pelosi met over the weekend to work out possible ways to get it
done in the wake of Scott Brown’s election in Massachusetts,
according
to the Politico.
With Pelosi having said publicly that she lacks votes to pass the
Senate bill without big changes — at least for now — one of the
few options they have remaining would be for the House and Senate
to negotiate changes, which would be put in a separate bill that
could pass the House and then clear the Senate with 51 votes
using reconciliation. But that still remains a long shot, for a
number of reasons.
When the health care bill passed the House the first time around,
it did so with 220 votes — giving Pelosi just two votes to
spare. With Republican Rep. Joseph Cao no longer willing to vote
for the bill given the weaker abortion language and Rep. Robert
Wexler having retired in the middle of his term (a special
election to replace him won’t happen until April), Pelosi is
down to 218.
Even without the current situation in Massachusetts, Pelosi was
going to have problems convincing Rep. Bart Stupak and his band
of pro-life Democrats to vote for a bill that contained the
Senate’s weaker abortion language. While there stood an outside
chance of working out a further compromise on abortion before
Brown’s election, they would be unable to do so now, because
changes to the abortion language would not be possible under the
reconciliation process, which can only be used for tax and
spending matters. So how large a contingent are the Stupak
Democrats? Well, there were 41
Democrats who voted for the Stupak amendment in November and
then went on to vote for the actual bill. Of those, 15 Democrats
specifically
cited the strict language on federal funding for abortion in
press releases issued to explain their votes. And as recently as
last week, Stupak told the Weekly Standard that there
were still “at
least 10 to 12” Democrats who voted for the original bill who
would vote “no” if his abortion language were not included.
Liberal commentators have been arguing that because the House and
Senate have already voted for health care bills, Democrats will
be attacked no matter what — and if they don’t pass anything,
they’ll also be alienating their voters, who will stay home in
November, too fed up with a useless party. But while this may be
true for the Democratic Party in the general sense, it isn’t true
for specific members. The first time around, 39 Democrats voted
against the bill — they could simply maintain their votes
without being accused of being flip-floppers. And the Stupak
Democrats could switch to opposition to the final version of the
bill and argue that they were consistent in opposing any bill
that had taxpayer funding for abortion. Despite what liberal
commentators would like us to believe, Public Policy Polling — a
Democratic firm — looked at the polling in a few conservative
districts held by Democrats, and found those who voted against
the health care bill are doing much better among their potential
Republican challengers. As PPP
noted, “voting against health care was the best vote
politically in tough districts.”
One thing that was clear from the outcome in Massachusetts was
that voters — particularly independents — were upset with the
backroom deal making and Democratic efforts to ram health care
legislation through in an overtly partisan manner. If Democrats
attempt the reconciliation route, it would be the most partisan
possible way to ram a bill through — one of the reasons
Democrats avoided it last year and struggled to win 60 votes. And
on top of that, they’d be using the process to pass another
backroom deal — the
$60 billion bribe to unions that exempts them for several
years from the “Cadillac tax” on health plans that would still be
paid by Americans who are non-union workers.
Even assuming Pelosi could win over House liberals by cutting a
backroom deal with Reid that could pass through the Senate using
reconciliation rules, she’d still have to keep keep all of the
Stupak Democrats who voted for the bill last time on board
without being able to do anything for them on abortion language
and avoid the defection of any other moderates who were
spooked by what happened in Massachusetts. For every member she
loses, she would have to convince one of the 39 Democrats who
felt the need to vote against the bill the first time around, to
switch his or her vote to “yes.” So, is it theoretically possible
that Pelosi could still get 218 of her members to cave and
support shoving this unpopular health care bill down our throats?
Yes. But as you can see, it’s highly unlikely.
