Health Care Reform: The Endgame

Filed in National by on March 15, 2010

Robert Gibbs was on the Sunday shows yesterday and said that by next week health care reform will be the law of the land:

“We’ll have the votes when the House votes, I think, within the next week,” Gibbs said on “Fox News Sunday.”

Gibbs added that those on next week’s Sunday talk shows “will be talking about healthcare not as a presidential proposal but I think as the law of the land.”

Nancy Pelosi has given notice to members of the U.S. House that the plan is to have the vote by Friday or Saturday of this week. The House starts the mark-up on the reconciliation bill today.

One thing that has been lost in all the process talk in the Senate is that once the Senate bill passes the House, it’s game over for the Republicans. Once the bill passes we have health care reform and the only remaining question is whether we will also have the reconciliation fixes to the bill as well. All the public discussion about procedure was one big psy-ops operations aimed at scaring wavering House Democrats. TPM explains:

All week, Republicans have been dropping “friendly” words of warning to House Democrats. At their weekly press availability Tuesday, Republican Senate leaders gave it the hard sell.

“[W]e believe that what the president is doing is asking House Democrats to hold hands, jump off a cliff, and hope Harry Reid catches them,” said Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN). “And Senator Reid’s not going to have any incentive to catch them because by the time the reconciliation bill gets to the Senate, the president will have already signed the health-care bill into law, and he’ll be well on his way to Indonesia.”

Gee, thanks for your concern Lamar. I’m sure you only have the Democratic party’s best interests in mind.

By the end of the week, Republicans were more or less candid about the strategy. Gregg basically admitted to the divide and conquer strategy to Huffington Post. “Absolutely,” Gregg said. “We are trying to open the eyes of our colleagues on the Democratic side who are being solicited with goodies that the boat into which all these goodies are being put may not ever come to dock.”

The party has united behind the bill. 83% of MoveOn members support its passage and organized labor has threatened to primary Democrats who vote against reform. At the same time, the opposition to the bill is weakening and is less organized. The Democratic party’s fortunes in 2010 and beyond are tied up in this bill and I think most Democrats know this.

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  1. Who Are the Democrats’ True Masters? | Delmarva Dealings | March 15, 2010
  1. Joanne Christian says:

    WOW–that’s not what I heard last PM. Conservative Democrats seem to be the fly in the ointment around this. We’ll see.

  2. There’s whip counts all over the place for the vote and I’d take them all with a grain of salt. Even some Dems that have publicly said they’d vote no are hedging a bit (even Kucinich). Basically they’re all horse-trading among themselves on who votes no and who votes yes. The White House must feel pretty confident that they’ll get the vote.

  3. Phuny says:

    Is Obama Backing Off of Promise to Eliminate Special Deals in Health Care Bill
    The Lid/ABC News ^ | 3/15/2010 | The Lid

    When the President announced his version of the Obamacare bill, part of his proposal was to eliminate the sneaky, backroom deals such as the Louisiana Purchase, the Nebraska Cornhusker Kickback amoung others. But that was then this is now, and like most of Obama’s proposals that too had an expiration date.

    Yesterday, Jake Tapper hosted “This Week” on ABC and interviewed David Axelrod the White House Political adviser. He asked Axelrod if he would be willing to pledge that the final health care reform bill will not include any special deals inserted to secure the support of individual members of Congress. That’s when Axelrod put on his tap shoes.

  4. Phuny says:

    At ‘Kill the Bill’ rally, Bachmann compares Obama to Chavez (no, she didn’t mean it as a compliment)

    Minn Independent ^ | 3/15/10 | Andy Berkeley

    About 1,000 people gathered at the Minnesota State Capitol lawn Saturday to hear Rep. Michele Bachmann speak out against health care reform. Billed as the “Kill the Bill Rally,” Bachmann railed against a “government takeover” of all aspects of the economy and compared Barack Obama and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez.

    “Some have called President Obama the first post-American president,” Bachmann said. “Certainly this health care bill would be our first postmodern legislation where words mean absolutely nothing.”

    While other speakers took the podium, Bachmann was easily the crowd favorite, and her supporters waved signs reading “Obama Lies, Babies Die,” “Damn this federal government to hell,” “Obama bin Lyin’” and “The citizens must declare war on their immoral, corrupt, Marxist government.”

    “Obama’s idea is for Pelosi to pass a bill and have her members vote on something they never voted for. Sounds more like a Chavez tactic in Venezuela,” said Bachmann. “We have a duty to resist tyranny. This isn’t a joke. They can’t do this. The government is working against us. They are not working for us, and they got it all backwards. They work for us. We don’t work for them.”

    (doesn’t sound like opposition to obamacare is weakening)

  5. Amen, Michelle. It almost makes me want to move to her district. She warms my heart by standing so strongly for the American way of life. GODSPEED, Congresswoman.

    Out here see you tomorrow.

  6. Just to make it clear, you support Michelle Bachmann who said that people don’t need to obey the law. Kind of a funny thing for a lawmaker to say.

    At a rally at the Minnesota State Capitol on Saturday, Bachmann declared illegitimate the potential route that House Democrats could take to pass the health care bill. She was specifically railing against a parliamentary tactic by which the House could skip voting on the Senate bill by declaring it passed as part of the reconciliation bill. Bachmann pronounced this to be taxation without representation. “They have just started a revolution — and they did it,” said Bachmann.

    “But mark my words, the American people aren’t gonna take this lying down,” Bachmann later said. “We aren’t gonna play their game, we’re not gonna pay their taxes. They want us to pay for this? Because we don’t have to. We don’t have to. We don’t have to follow a bill that isn’t law. That’s not the American way, and that’s not what we’re going to do.”

    Bachmann continued. “Because it’s one-party rule now in Washington, D.C. Their Chicago tactics, their Chicago friends, twisting Democrats’ arms, threatening their own team members with ethics charges and a submission. This handful of people thinks (sic) they can enforce their will on 300 million Americans? They’re not gonna do that. This is dictatorial, what they are doing. We are not compelled to follow a non-law just because Obama and Pelosi tells us we have to.

  7. Phuny says:

    Just to make it clear, She is saying the Slaughter Solution (pretending the bill passed the house) is not legal and Obama’s signature on a piece of “legislation” sent to him under these conditions would not be a law.

  8. cassandra_m says:

    Here’s a fun test — go to google and type in Slaughter Solution. Take a look at the first page of results and then come back and tell us what you know about this so-called solution.

  9. Slaughter Solution? Don’t you mean the Dreir Doctrine?

    But if Democrats do end up using the Slaughter method, it would not be the unprecedented, unconstitutional event that Bachmann describes. In fact, as Time’s Karen Tumulty points out, another name for the “Slaughter Solution” could be the “Dreier Doctrine,” named after former Republican Rules Committee Chairman Rep. David Dreier (R-CA). Tumulty writes that self-executing rules are “something that House members tend to complain about when they are in the minority — and use at will when they are in the majority.” As Don Wolfensberger, the former staff director of the House Rules Committee, wrote in 2006, “When Republicans took power in 1995, they soon lost their aversion to self-executing rules and

    As with prostitution – IOKIYAR

  10. Phuny says:

    Nearly One-Third of Doctors Could Leave Medicine if Health-Care Reform Bill Passes, New England Jo.

    cns news ^ | 3/16/10 | Christopher Neefus
    (CNSNews.com) – Nearly one-third of all practicing physicians may leave the medical profession if President Obama signs current versions of health-care reform legislation into law, according to a survey published in the latest issue of the New England Journal of Medicine. The survey, which was conducted by the Medicus Firm, a leading physician search and consulting firm based in Atlanta and Dallas, found that a majority of physicians said health-care reform would cause the quality of American medical care to “deteriorate” and it could be the “final straw” that sends a sizeable number of doctors out of medicine.