it worked in the House, why not the Senate?

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/capitol-briefing/2009/10/house_health_bill_trimmed_by_3.html?hpid=topnews

This totally takes the steam out of Max Baucus’s cheap crapola, non-public-optioned bill. What he was selling was ‘cheapness’. Now that the CBO report for the House bill is out, Max’s argument is moot.

“Left out of this story is the fact that any amendment to the bill on the Senate floor would in all likelihood need a cloture vote – in other words, 60 votes – in order to pass. Therefore the placement of the public option inside or outside of the merged bill is crucial, as there are probably not 60 votes to either insert it or remove it from the legislation. So allowing an amendment as a “compromise” is not really a compromise at all.”

While all that is true, it is only so because of the existence of the filibuster in Senate procedure. However, it only takes 50 votes + the VP to get rid of the filibuster through using the procedure known as “the nuclear option.”

This possibility is often dismissed by progressive bloggers, with the cursory remark that the “nuclear option” won’t be used by the Democrats, and the bloggers then go on to talk about scenarios involving 60 votes. But, I think this is a mistake. We should not be writing only about what is likely to happen or what may happen, or whether progressives in Congress should oppose a UC agreement or not. We should also be writing about what it is possible for the Democrats and Harry Reid to do, and what they should be doing.

I think this last involves the issue of their decision to live with the filibuster both in the health care reform area, and also other legislative areas, and therefore to continue to live with the burden of always having to corral 60 votes before they can legislate something.

This decision is a decision to overturn the results of the last election. It is a decision to empower the Republicans and the blue dogs to block reform. It is a decision to fail at reform and to break the promises the Democratic Party made to the American people.

Harry Reid’s and the Democrats’ failure to get rid of the filibuster and to legislate effective reform is the big story about these last months of the health care reform effort, and perhaps even of President Obama’s first term. And it is a story that most of us progressive bloggers are ignoring, as previously we ignored the President’s taking single-payer off the table, and talked up the public option instead.

What we should be doing now is generating a deafening blog chorus about the Democrats having the power to remove the 60 vote requirement in favor of the constitutional 51 vote one, by getting rid of the filibuster once and for all. But we are not doing that. Instead we are accepting the legitimacy of the filibuster and discussing the arcana of navigating the PO through what may prove to be multiple 60-vote barriers, before even a very weakened PO can finally emerge. What kind of progressivism is this?