That grinding sound you hear may be the sound of the conventional wisdom shifting: as of today, many news, broadcast and blog reports are starting to (gingerly) suggest that bet health care reform could squeek through the House. But the Senate? Reports now suggest that could still be very much up in the air there — since reports suggest the GOP is now working on ways to try and halt health care reform in the Senate, by using procedural and other monkey wrench type tactics.
First, here’s an MSNBC video clip with Andrea Mitchell interviewing Sen. Judd Gregg of New Hampshire who is a key figure in coming up with the strategy to gut the bill in the Senate:
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Next, look at The Politico, which has a detailed piece that explains this further. The report’s bottom line is that by using procedural measures GOPers hope to gut some 40 percent of whatever emerges from the House:
Democrats might like to think that health care reform is all but a done deal if it clears the House, but the Senate is where Republicans have been plotting for months to sentence it to a painful procedural death.
Republican aides have been mining the Senate’s arcane parliamentary rules for an attack that aims at striking elements both broad and narrow from the bill, weakening the measure and ultimately defeating it. Their goal is to force changes that leave Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) without 51 votes to pass it, or at the very least, that drive it back to the House for a second vote that drags out the process and saps Democratic resolve.
But the first step in the Republicans’ game plan is making sure they never need to use the rest of it.
“Our initial goal is to stop the bill in the House,” said Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas). “Part of convincing House members to vote for the Senate bill is that it can be fixed by reconciliation, and I think that is a highly questionable proposition.”
It’s a pre-emptive strike meant to scare jittery House Democrats into withholding their support from Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who needs 216 votes to pass the Senate bill and a companion measure that fixes unpopular elements of the bill. If she falls short, comprehensive health care reform dies.
Senate Republicans will advance their campaign Thursday with floor speeches detailing why a provision to delay the “Cadillac tax” — a must-have for House liberals in the companion bill — could fall victim to the chamber’s parliamentary rules.
The provision is just one of many that Republicans expect to challenge. Under a strategy developed by Republican Policy Committee Chairman John Thune of South Dakota and Sen. Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, Republicans are plotting ways to strike major elements of the reconciliation bill, including changes to the special Medicaid deal for Nebraska and the carve-out for Florida senior citizens from Medicaid Advantage cuts. They are also going small bore, looking to strike seemingly minor provisions, including one that would fix language dealing with the employer mandate and the construction industry.
One senior Republican aide said staff and senators believe that as much as 40 percent of the measure can be killed through procedural objections.
Republicans think they have some ammo in their chambers they can use to delay or disrupt health care reform. The first shot will get fired at the Rules Committee meeting, tentatively scheduled for Saturday, where every single member of the Republican caucus will try to offer an amendment to the bill. They will all fail, of course. But they might succeed in turning that meeting into a marathon session and putting Democrats off of their timeline.
That’s a delaying tactic, of course, and other tactics in the House or Senate would potentially succeed in delaying but not derailing health care reform. Therefore, the next step would be to try to repeal the bill, as Paul Ryan said today. The problem with repeal, of course, is a guy by the name of Barack Obama. Unless the GOP gains 26 seats in the Senate, I doubt they’d have the votes to override a Presidential veto. When you corner Republicans on this, they admit they can’t actually repeal the bill, though they are likely to continue running on repeal, which they consider a winning message….
…..Proposals like this, attacking the individual mandate but also health care reform in general, have been introduced in 36 states with almost identical language. ALEC, a right-wing outfit that feeds legislative language to state Republican lawmakers, basically wrote these bills. And I’d expect the well-funded legal arm of the conservative movement to fight to block implementation of the federal bill, taking it all the way to the Supreme Court if necessary. Whether they would have the votes to essentially reopen the nullification issue is unclear. But we’ll almost certainly get an answer on this before the exchanges and the individual mandate get set into place.
Meanwhile, GOP Congressional leaders are taking a strong stand against abortion standing in the health care reform bill — and Sen. Orrin Hatch said CBO the report favorable to the health care reform plan is just a bunch of misleading “gimmicks””:
A CROSS SECTION OF OPINION ON VARIOUS ASPECTS OF THE HEALTH CARE REFORM DEBATE:
—Taylor Marsh:
It’s not exactly stellar leadership on anyone’s part. But we haven’t had a real Congress for decades. We simply have political parties inside the Capitol dome who either protect the presidency, if the person is of the same party, or stop the president, if not.
The reason people hate Congress is because they’re doing the work of the Executive Branch, not the people. Party over sound policy is causing a revolt.
But even a bad health care bill offered up by Congress, if passed into law and signed by Pres. Obama, will make history, because it’s never been done before.
As for the people, we got lost in this a long time ago. The day Pres. Obama made a deal with insurance and pharmaceutical companies, deciding that no matter if the people wanted the public option he didn’t; putting himself and his presidency first, above women and the people’s desires, which the Democrats in Congress helped him do.
President Obama’s economic advisor Christina Romer just stated that ‘the health-care reform bill would be the biggest deficit-reduction bill in the last 15 years.’
It appears obvious that the Democratic Party’s talking points about this preliminary CBO report will be that the health-care reform bill will be one of ‘the biggest deficit reduction packages in history.’
This is utterly false and misleading — total nonsense.
The CBO report, to be released today, will project the bill will cost $940B over the decade, and that it will be fully paid for. The bill would reduce annual growth in Medicare expenditures by 1.4% per year, extending Medicare’s life by 9 years.
The news is a boost for Dems searching for the 216 votes they need to pass a reform package. Several wavering members of Congress have said they are concerned about cost containment; now, armed with the CBO’s rosy projections, Dem leadership could win over several members who voted against the bill the first time around.The bill is now headed to the House Rules Committee, where Dems will finalize their options for moving forward. Floor action is expected on Sunday, 72 hours after the bill gets posted online.
Already, several members who voted against the legislation the first time around have said they will announce their decisions today. Dem strategists are optimistic any members who make their ststands public today, on the heels of the CBO score, are likely to help them pick up momentum.
—Alan Colmes:
While conservatives love to talk down the numbers from the Congressional Budget Office whenever it doesn’t suit their agenda, the numbers on the health care bill are encouraging…..
….Get ready for the right-wing spin.
—Steve Benen:
Democrats were also told they needed to do all of this in the face of unanimous and apoplectic Republican opposition, far-right manipulation of gullible conservative activists, and media coverage that largely ignores the substance of the bill while pretending every right-wing attack deserves attention.
This is a needle that’s almost impossible to thread. And yet, that’s exactly what the White House and congressional leaders have done. It’s no small feat.
But it might yet fail anyway, in part because some Dems prefer cowardice to success….
…..In a divided Democratic caucus, featuring liberals and conservative Blue Dogs, the trick was to find a way to deliver on what both contingents wanted to see in a reform bill. As impossible as this seemed, the final Democratic reform proposal does just that.
I have no idea what’s going to happen when the final roll call is held, but Democrats have no reason, no excuse, no coherent rationale for killing the best chance the United States has ever had to pass health care reform.
—National Review’s The Corner:
How did the Democrats get the CBO score they wanted, the score that has liberals running a victory lap around the blogosphere?
The short answers seems to be: with more of the same gadget plays that got us the “deficit reduction” in earlier versions of Obamacare.
If you are a regular reader of the Corner, you are already intimately acquainted with the Medicare double-counting. But it doesn’t stop there….
…..The simple fact is that nobody knows what this bill will cost. That’s due in part to the guarantee that history will intervene, in messy and unpredictable ways, over the next decade. And it is due in part to the fallibility of the lawyers and staffers who wrote it, and of the accountants who scored it. And it is due, in no small part, to the baroque lengths to which Congressional Democrats have gone in the name of obscurity.
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Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.