Welcome comrades, to your new Socialist Utopia. All citizens are required to report to the nearest Death Panel for processing. It’s open thread time!
The House approved the Senate bill last night, warts and all. Those warts – a tax on high-end insurance plans, several special deals made for members of the Senate on Medicaid and abortion language that pro-life Democrats in the House weren’t comfortable with – are removed through a budget reconciliation measure. That plan – which also passed the House last night – was the product of careful negotiations between the House, Senate and Obama administration and had the blessing of labor unions and many health care advocacy and interest groups. It also contained reforms to the student loan system.
Here’s where it gets tricky. Obama on Tuesday will sign the Senate-passed bill, clearing the way procedurally for Senators to begin debate on the reconciliation fix. The whole thing made House Democrats very nervous since that meant trusting the Senate would actually fix the bits they didn’t like. But Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid showed House Democrats a letter signed by members of his caucus proving they had the votes to pass the reconciliation measure on an up-or-down vote. That paved the way for Sunday night’s House victory. Still with me?
The Republicans will try to challenge the reconciliation under the Byrd rule. The Senate parliamentarian will rule on whether individual provisions in the bill are budget-related. If the parliamentarian rules agains the Democrats, that measure will be stricken from the bill. If the bill is changed, it will have to go back to the House for a vote on the changed bill. Members of the Senate are meeting with the parliamentarian today, so later we may have news about any changes to the bill.
Matt Yglesias has an interesting perspective on the health care reform legislative victory – that it was partially driven by Republican intransigence:
My point is even more basic—at a couple of moments along this race the conservatives won the argument and Democrats were ready to buckle. Credit for not buckling goes to Nancy Pelosi and other gutsy leaders. But it also goes to the GOP. They wouldn’t take “yes” for an answer when lots of people wanted to surrender and settle for something much smaller. Instead, whipped up into a frenzy of ideological fanaticism and overconfidence, they decided to take no prisoners. So nobody surrendered! And that’s how Mitch McConnell brought universal health care to America. And the thing of it is that most conservatives are so shallow, and so driven by hippie-hatred rather than any real views, that if they get to use this as an “issue” to win seats in the midterms and it never gets repealed, they’ll consider themselves vindicated.