I just got off the phone with Anthony Weiner, who stirred things up during the debate on repealing the insurance industry’s anti-trust exemption with a pretty glorious call-out speech calling Republicans a wholly owned subsidiary of the insurance industry. During the conversation, he acknowledged that the strategy for actually passing a comprehensive health care bill remained fuzzy, saying “I’m not sure what we’re doing, and I’m pretty tied in.”

Asked by FDL News about the outburst and why he felt it was important to make that known, Weiner explained that there is a “contest of ideas” going on within the Democratic Party. “Some think that, like the unicorn, we’ll discover bipartisanship on health care reform. Some of us believe this is not going to be solved with Republican help. So we need to call them out for what they are.” Republicans were actually trying to get away with the idea that repealing the exemption wasn’t doing enough to introduce competition in the insurance market, and Weiner simply said that his B.S. meter on their concern about that “goes into Spinal Tap neighborhood”.

Weiner didn’t get an invite to tomorrow’s health care summit, but he’ll be watching and even live-blogging the proceedings, he told me. He found its utility limited. “If we want to spend hours tomorrow highlighting bankruptcy of GOP ideas, fine. But we mustn’t delude ourselves. When we gave up public option, we didn’t get a single Republican. When we gave up national exchanges for a state exchange, we didn’t get a single Republican. We keep negotiating with ourselves.” If the summit is meant to contrast the two parties on the issue, Weiner was fine with it, but if it was seen as an opportunity to convert Republicans to the cause of fixing health care, he advised, “Good luck with that.”

I wanted to know from someone who has been in the room for these discussions whether he thought the votes were actually there to pass the bill, regardless of what fixes could be made in reconciliation. Eric Cantor’s memo today certainly suggested otherwise, as have multiple news reports. I asked flat-out, does this thing have the votes?

Weiner replied, “Well, we passed the bill once.” Obviously, he said, the abortion language was a concern, and he admitted, “I don’t know how it gets resolved.” He reiterated the constant dynamic of dropping things like the public option, which he thinks has majority support in the House and Senate and among 72% of the American people, and getting nothing in exchange. In the final analysis, he said, “I’m not sure what we’re doing, and I’m pretty tied in.”

Finally, I asked Weiner about Kent Conrad’s comments, that the House would have to pass the Senate bill first before any changes could be made through reconciliation. He said, “The House has been passing bills on spec for quite some time. I think the record speaks for itself. I don’t know that senate can be trusted to do just about anything, let alone get reconciliation right.” He likes that Obama’s plan was released to work as a 51-vote plan instead of a 60-vote one, and said that if Conrad didn’t like it, he could vote no on it and explain that to his constituents.

The problem with that, I said, is that Conrad is the chair of the Budget Committee, and would be intimately involved in the reconciliation process.

“There is that,” he said. Weiner circled back to today’s vote on repealing the anti-trust exemption. “We’re not going to wait for 60. Waiting for Senate to act has been like waiting for godot. The House is not going to do it anymore.”