Yesterday, Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid announced that the Democrats' plan for health care would include a 'public option', which essentially meant he was going for broke on government control of the American health care system. It is very interesting to see what happened next in the House...
Greg Sargeant reports :
House Dem leadership has conducted its preliminary whip count and has tallied up less than 200 likely Yes votes in support of a health care reform bill with a robust public option, well short of the 218 needed for passage, according to an internal whip count document I've obtained....
The document shows that 47 House Dems are committed No votes, and eight are Leaning No, for a total of 56. That means of 256 House Dems, only 200 remain, and a dozen of those are listed as undecided. The bill needs 218 votes for passage.
...and in the Senate...
Sen. Olympia Snowe has joined Joe Lieberman in vowing to support a filibuster to block a vote on a health care bill that included the government-run plan announced yesterday by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.
This news alone would mean that Reid doesn't have the 60 votes he needs to proceed.
But in other news today, Arkansas Sen. Blanche Lincoln reiterated that she does not think a government plan is the way to go.
So what does this mean? Basically, it means that -- if these reports are accurate -- the Democrats lack the votes they need to pass this plan in both houses of Congress. However, that is referring to the most obvious and blatant government control over health care; the numbers would almost certainly change with varying degrees of watering down (i.e. some kind of trigger, opt-out, or other method of smoke-and-mirrors that wouldn't actually remove government control but would confuse things).
Interestingly, despite not having the votes, the Dems are charging ahead. Why? That is an issue of much speculation. Here are a couple thoughts that seem pretty well-founded to me, one from the Right...
The problem Reid faces is that if he pulls back support for the government plan now, it will enrage liberals who will believe he's sold them out to win the support of a few moderates. But if he charges ahead with the government plan proposal, he risks derailing the entire health care effort....and one from the Left...
When Reid made his happy announcement [yesterday], I assumed he had cut a deal with Lieberman to guarantee his vote on cloture, because it would be foolish beyond foolishness to abandon Snowe without knowing — knowing — that Lieberman’s vote was secure. And now we learn that Reid was foolish, and Lieberman’s vote was not secure, and health care reform may well be dead…
Lieberman must be bribed, not punished — as must Snowe and Collins and anyone else who can provide that 60th vote. Nor should we be mad at Obama, at least for this particular fiasco; in any case, he has at least three years left in office and must soldier on, hopefully wiser and a hell of a lot tougher.
Reid’s head, on the other hand, should roll for this. He did the right thing yesterday, but apparently without laying the necessary groundwork first.Here's an interesting interview between Sean Hannity and Sen. John McCain about all of this:
Hmmm...
Of course, many members of Congress will likely not make their decisions until the CBO tells us how much this particular flavor of ObamaKennedyDeathCare costs the American people; the higher the number, the less likely they'll be willing to stick their necks out when the American people are already angry about horrendous overspending.
The bottom line is that this is all a very delicate balancing act that Reid has to perform. He's going to have to juggle a whole lot of people burning a whole lot of political capital. For example:
...a Senate bill with the public option is not quite a done deal. However, for the sake of argument, let’s assume that Reid can get such a bill to the floor. He can only do so by getting moderates to burn political capital — voting for cloture before voting against the public option or the bill in total. Voting for things before voting against them tends to hurt people on Election Day, as the moderates undoubtedly know. And the remainder of the bill may be difficult to pass, regardless of the public option. Including the public option (an idea so good that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi wants to rename it) may please liberals today, but it increases the risk that the bill collapses of its own weight on the Senate floor.
Such failures tend to fly like an anvil when it comes time for voters to vote, and the danger for Dems here is because it not only alienates the Right, but it will also anger the Left. Quite the predicament, no? That's what you get when you focus on buying off small chunks of constituents rather than standing on a set of core principles.
There's my two cents.
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