According to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, there will not be a vote on health care reform prior to the August recess. Reid seems to be accepting what everyone has already sensed, that it simply is not going to be possible to get a vote before the August recess begins.

President Obama doesn’t seem to agree on the subject though, he indicated that he will still be pushing for a vote in the next few weeks. I suspect that Obama knows that the vote isn’t possible but he needs to keep making a public effort to make things move.

At the same time I think Obama is starting to learn that the country isn’t a monarchy and you can’t just get things to happen by wanting them. During his last days in office President Truman commented that his successor, President Eisenhower, would find the job frustrating. As a military general he could order for things to happen and they would get done. As President you demand something happens and then nothing much does.

Reid did suggest that a vote in the Senate Finance committee could take place by the August 8th recess which would allow leaders to spend the recess merging that bill with the version of the bill that came out of the Health committee earlier this month.

That would then allow the Senate to work on passage of the merged version during September and perhaps leave some time for the two chambers to work on something before the end of session which is scheduled for sometime in late October.

But even that is a pretty tight timeline, and it is entirely possible that we could be seeing the conference committee taking shape after the first of the year, which would mean that it may be a year before we would see a bill pass all the way through Congress