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Nothing looks confirmed at the moment. But the moment House leaders reach agreement with elements of the Stupak bloc is the moment I stop ding whip counts. Because then, health care passes without too much trouble.
And what’s the deal? A future, standalone vote on the Stupak amendment, in the House and the Senate.
At least six anti-abortion-rights Democrats are open to supporting the healthcare bill if they can get a guarantee from the Senate that it will move separate legislation containing the House abortion language, one of those Democratic holdouts said Friday.
Natural Resources Committee Chairman Nick Rahall (D-W.Va.), one of Rep. Bart Stupak’s (D-Mich.) gang of staunch opponents of the Senate abortion language, said they are in discussions with senators and House leaders to secure such a commitment.
“There could be some kind of commitment from the other body to act on this later … to ensure that the Senate language does not remain law,” he said.
(Rahall reveals himself as a member of the Stupak bloc in this exchange.)
This has been rumored in recent days, but Pelosi and her team made the determination that Stupak wouldn’t go for a future promise. Apparently, enough of the bloc would go for it to be determinative. My guess is that Pelosi would try to round up the votes without resorting to this first, and only pull the trigger on a “third bill” if she had to do so.
Maybe she can find the votes. But if Rahall (and in this piece, Kaptur) really are still part of the Stupak bloc, you have to figure Dahlkemper and Ellsworth, and perhaps Carney, are as well. That’s nine Yes-No flippers, and if you add Arcuri and Lynch, there almost certainly aren’t enough No-Yes flippers left on the board (you would need 10 at that point) to counteract that.
Kaptur seemed to be movable in a separate report, and maybe the House leadership will still call the bluff. But they’d have health care reform in the bag by making this deal. At the expense of access to a legal medical procedure for women, of course.
The Nelson amendment isn’t much of an improvement on the Stupak amendment, actually. But the humiliation of a standalone vote in the Senate would be almost unbearable. And that vote already failed in the markup of the Senate bill, so several Democrats would have to flip their vote to ensure passage.
I don’t know why anti-abortion Democrats would need a guarantee, since (especially after the midterms) they could just get a discharge petition and force a vote like this to the floor whenever they wanted. But it is truly remarkable how reproductive choice has become the spotlight of this health care debate; it shows the power of the anti-choice movement, and the relative fecklessness of the pro-choice movement.
UPDATE: Nancy Pelosi in her press conference denied this by saying “There will be no further changes in the bill,” which of course is not what this deal is at all about, if I read it right. It’s about a future vote.
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Go Democrats! Pass the bill!
Can’t help but notice that many of the same dead-enders who swore up and down that Obama was going to be a disaster, are trying their damndest to ensure that he is by opposing this legislation. Apparently there’s quite a bit of angst left over from the election and people are still looking for a way to express themselves.
The reality of electoral politics tells us that the only thing worse then passing a bill which isn’t popular, is TRYING to and failing. If this bill doesn’t pass, we won’t get another chance to do anything. There will be no secondary or lesser bill. Nothing. All there will be are endless articles about how weak the Democrats are, how they can’t pass their signature legislation with large majorities. It will be a disaster.
I understand that people are pissed at parts of the bill; I myself am unhappy with parts of the bill. But folks around here seem to have gone from ‘constructive criticism’ directly to ‘working with the enemy.’ If you find yourself on the same side as Grover Norquist, the proper thing to do is ask yourself where the hell you went wrong in life…
Is it a stand alone amendment or stand alone legislation? If its stand alone legislation, Obama could just veto it (assuming it could get past a filibuster b/c it certainly isn’t a Byrd rule issue). If it’s a stand alone amendment, then the progressives need to demand a vote on public option, Erisa waiver, medicare buy-in, anti-trust exemption and drug reimportation.
I’ve heard something about an “enrollment corrections” bill that would go into the reconciliation sidecar. That would be before signage, if Stupak gets his way.
“At the expense of access to a legal medical procedure for women, of course.”
When was the word “access” redefined to mean free?
Nothing denies them access, they just have to use their own money to kill their child. If liberals are all about choice, why can’t people choose not to have their money going towards the killing of innocent children?
Be careful with the “working with the enemy” stuff because it can go both ways.
Wrong.
I don’t understand how that could pass the Byrd rule.
Crazy watching this train wreck unfold.
Someone at Kos said that Stupak language might be inserted in the HHS appropriations bill, requiring 60 votes to remove it.
May I point out that your money goes to someone who had, is having, or may choose to have an abortion every day?
When you buy a product, the money goes to the store and to the company that made it — do you think every employer asks its employees if they will have or have ever had an abortion?
You pay taxes, some of that money goes to government employees (city, state or federal). Those employees are free to spend their pay on any medical procedure they choose — and that can and does include abortions.
When you contribute to a charity, that charity also has employees (there are few that are entirely volunteer-run) and their employees are also free to spend their paycheck in the same way.
Are you going to ask that every employer not hire any women because they might use their pay to get an abortion? I don’t think there are many companies that will do so — and the government is bound by civil service rules not to discriminate.
Get your head out of the sand! If you spend money on anything you are paying someone who has had or will have an abortion.
Much more than that, there is a massive employer deduction for health insurance in the tax code, and that money goes to purchase employee health plans, 90% of which cover abortion services. If Stupak were being honest he would look to eliminate that deduction.
Wont happen, sadly. If Stupak and his allied only had to rely on the House for votes, then it would pass. However, they want an assurance from Reid, Boxer, Feinstein, Durbin, and Shumer in the Senate??? Never in a million years would they go for this. If I had to put odds on it, 90% chance there is no sidecar bill, unfortunatley.
Chris
Thanks, David — that was one I didn’t know about (and should have). I was just trying to point out that money isn’t “pure.” The cash one person spends to say, buy groceries, may easily end up funding someone else’s drug habit.
No matter what the spender’s motives are, once the money is spent it has no ethics or morals — it just is. Money has no conscience, and the dice have no memory.
If that’s what this was about, the Democrats would have used reconciliation to pass a bill with a public option back in May of last year.
But it’s not. It’s about preserving the PhRMA and other deals to make sure there’s no public option or drug reimportation, and to make sure that mandates are used to force tens of millions of Americans to cough up thousands per family per that they don’t have to the insurance and pharmaceutical industries. The bill, in fact, is not only nearly identical to an AHIP bill written in 2009, it itself was authored by a former Wellpoint vice-president. As you would know if you’d been reading something other than OFA-issued talking points.
Good point – the part of health care premiums that pay for abortions should not be tax deductible.
My understanding is that the main part of the bill couldn’t be passed through reconciliation since not all of it is budget related. They could only do that when they had 60 votes, so they couldn’t have done it last May.
Even if that were done (good luck getting companies to give up any tax break) your money would still be paying for abortions for the reasons I outlined above.
I should point out that it isn’t just women paying for abortions, often the man in the equation helps pay the bill.
As long as people are free to pay for anything they choose, and as long as you are a consumer and taxpayer, the money realized from those sources will pay for abortions, for cocaine, or whatever else the person receiving a paycheck chooses.
Do you really think you can dictate how people spend their hard-earned cash?
I TOLD YOU SO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
baystaterep March 18th, 2010 at 1:55 pm
Stupak et al. don’t need to worry about getting 60 votes in the Senate. He’s got 49 right off the bat because no GOP Senator will vote against a measure that de facto reinstates the Hyde Amendment. Not only does your party’s leadership again screw the locofoos, but they do it outside the main news cycle – Highly cynical.
I will be proved right (no pun intended) about everything else I said there too. Pew says that only 38% of the electorate approves the measure, and it is very lukewarm approval because of deals like this. The 50 or so percent who oppose HC “reform” are rabidly opposed. And that rabidity will just get more intense over time.
Thanks again for giving us a Joan Blondell campaign issue (one with legs that won’t quit). (Whoops, sorry for the sexist anachronism.) Hell, it will unify the tea party contingent behind our GOP candidates.
Stupak on MSNBC:
“Bart Stupak not taking down this bill”. Says he introduced enrollment corrections with no promises either way on whether it will be brought to the floor. Even if it is brought to floor, wants assurances from Senate.
Sounds like a lost cause to me…
People who earn their cash can spend it any way they wish. We’re not talking about someone’s own money they earned. We’re talking about my money, which became “the government’s” money when I paid taxes, which is then given to someone to kill a child that they chose to conceive (rape cases are excepted in Hyde). They did not earn that money, it is the American taxpayers money, and we get to decide how to spend it using our democratic process.
I agree that money doesn’t have “memory” – that’s not the point. The bottom line is that by paying for or subsidizing something, the government is encouraging that behavior. There are lots of technically legal things that I don’t want my tax money going towards besides killing babies. I’m sure there are things the government subsidizes that you don’t like, and I respect your right to lobby against them.
You’re missing my point entirely — IF you are opposed to abortion, and you don’t want to give any money to anything that subsidizes abortions, you’d have to stop spending all your money on anything.
Once the government or a company gets your dollars, whether from taxes or from a product they’re sold you, it’s no longer YOUR money, it’s THEIR money.
I’m sorry, but dollars don’t go around with your name stamped on them, once they’re spent you have no way of knowing where they’ll end up or what they’ll fund. So saying you don’t want them spent on one particular thing isn’t going to stop that from happening — you have no control once you’ve paid.
I’m not happy that my money is going to an immoral, illegal, and undeclared war, one that has allowed US contractors to kill our soldiers by supplying them with shoddy goods or electrocuting them when they’re trying to shower. But I’m under no illusion that I personally can prevent that from happening.
How’s that kool-aid taste?
And if conservatives are such supporters of Free Enterprise, why restrict a companies right to sell insurance on said procedure?
Every Rt. wing vote is politically in the minds of the Villagers worth 10 Dirty Hippy votes.
Serving the corporatist state is not in the long term interests of the American people. I’ll give you a quote of MLK, “now is not the time to swallow the tranquillizing pill of gradualism.” Obama hasn’t even pushed for gradualism but rather a sweetheart deal to big pharma, AHIP and the insurance cartel. If satisfied with a bill that 20 years from now people will recognize as a failure, then sit up because someone wants to toss you a fish.
Why do conservatives force liberals and everyone else to have their money going towards the killing of innocent Iraqi’s?
What’s the difference?
Do you suppose the Stupak bloc really believes they’ll get some “future standalone vote” in the Senate or that they’re just trying to save face? I can just imagine Dem Senators loving the idea of an election year vote on “federal funding of abortion”… sure they’ll do that!
All these wonderful future promises. All these wonderful future fixes. Truly, the magical future legislative fairyland is the best of all possible worlds!
Been waiting for this, he was whining about all the attention he’s been getting the other day…
“Get your head out of the sand! If you spend money on anything you are paying someone who has had or will have an abortion.”
And it’s her decision, not yours.
Maybe now Kucinich will be able to cast a meaningless No.
The Byrd rule can always be waived with 60 votes. Also, the Byrd rule allows a Senator to object to a provision – but I think if no Senator raises an objection to a provision, then the provision stays in by default.
Nice one.
You could choose an insurance plan that does not cover abortion if you felt that way. We are talking about people buying private insurance plans they are forced to buy, with their own money.
funny you haven’t gotten an answer to that yet.
Just read David Sirota’s column today and its so disheartening.
Obama is screwing the people with the HCR.
Why don’t we support the people opposing this monstrosity..maybe in the future we can get an honest President and get real reform.
It is time to end this religiousity bunch of rhetoric. What is known as religion is based on fables and myths and the praying to an unseen god that no one else has ever seen is superstiscious belief. I refuse to be ruled by superstition in the year 2010.
I had to turn off Ed Schultz this afternoon. He and his listeners are drunk on kool-aid. Everyone’s heart is in the right place but their minds have stopped working.
Rep Stupak told MSNBC’s Laura O’Donnell this morning that a mere “promise” of separate legislation addressing abortion sometime in the future was not sufficient to secure his vote for the Senate health care bill. He insisted that such a vote must occur before he would vote for the Senate bill.
Considering the value of the “promises” made by House progressives regarding their undying devotion to the public option…Stupak’s position is understandable.
That’s right. Abortion is legal, just like smoking. Just because conservatives think it’s repugnant, doesn’t mean everyone has to think that way. It’s still a free country.
Ed Schultz…?
Mr “public option”…?
You must be joking…
too true.
try watching Ratigan. The only one left who is making any sense.
Spare me.
I truly despise the herd mentality that has settled over the progressive mainstream. It makes me doubt that I am a progressive, because I don’t agree we should be using our last bit of political capital on THIS bill of all things.
Sometimes I’m tempted to think the veal pen must have some secret plan to make this all more palatable. Then I’m also disgusted to see the ignorance of the right-wing opposition.
Where’s the truth and rationality in our political discourse?
Horseshit.
Sexual activity is a normal human activity. That our children have to learn about STD, unwanted pregnancies, etc is the fault of the parents. Look at the teenage pregnancy figures for conservative Christian families.
Brisingamen2 wrote: “Once the government or a company gets your dollars, whether from taxes or from a product they’re sold you, it’s no longer YOUR money, it’s THEIR money.”
Wow. I strongly believe government money is OUR money, and I demand a say in how it is spent. I suspect you agree, but you’re not thinking logically because you’re hung up on this particular issue.
alan1tx wrote: “Why do conservatives force liberals and everyone else to have their money going towards the killing of innocent Iraqi’s? What’s the difference?”
There are minor differences, but in general I agree with your point – if you disagree with a war, wouldn’t you want your politicians to stand up and argue for your beliefs? And if the government offered the option to not have any of your tax dollars go to wars you disagree with, wouldn’t you be thrilled?
buckinnm wrote: “It is time to end this religiousity bunch of rhetoric.”
This is not about religion – regardless of your religous or anti-religous beliefs, do you think we should allow parents to abuse or kill their children at any age? Take a look at ultrasounds of babies at 24 weeks, when it is “legal” to kill them, and tell me that is not a person, just like a baby one day after birth. Just because someone is an atheist I’m pretty sure they don’t think it is OK to throw one day old babies in the trash.
That’s a good question.
Why can’t I choose not to have my money going to the Pentagon which leads to the innocent being killed?
Sexual activity is normal human behavior. Killing your perfectly healthly babies is not normal human behavior. “teenage pregnancy figures for conservative Christian families” has absolutely nothing to do with whether taxpayers should be paying for abortions . I think I’ve had enough of this forum for today. Thanks for the discussion!
Using invalid hate rhetoric like “killing babies” serves only to disrupt discussions….but I’m sure that’s your actual intent.
“The bottom line is that by paying for or subsidizing something, the government is encouraging that behavior.”
Like war, for example. The government excels at terminating life with your money.
No. It’s not. Which is why infanticide is already illegal.
It’s not the first time I’ve seen this information but nevertheless here’s my head-exploding moment from today (so far) – from The Hill article that David quotes:
“At least six anti-abortion-rights Democrats . . .”
There didn’t used to be any such thing as an anti-abortion-rights Democrat. Or certainly not “at least six” of them, not to mention several supposedly pro-choice female Senators willing to cast this kind vote. The word Democrat has lost any meaning whatsoever.
Come back when you’ve got a decent argument.
Yes it has. In more ways than one. I mean I have been shocked and still am not believing what these so called “Democrats” in Congress and the White House are doing.
I’ve been even more shocked at the everyday folks (non-politicians) that called themselves “Democrats” that are now acting just like Republicans and supporting anything a politician with a D after his/her name says to. I NEVER would’ve believed that from rank and file Democrats. Never.
Stupak is a blow hard which I have said many times. He will not, and has never intended, to vote against this bill.
He is playing for attention. He is now looking for a fig leaf to cover his little dong, which is hanging out there.
Either that, or he is a fool to think that any agreement for a standalone vote on his former amemndment will ever see the light of day. He knows this will never see the light of day, but he needs that fig leaf.
If I were him politically, I would just hang tight, let Pelosi get her few more she needs and then at least be able to claim, “I stood my ground” and LOOK principled. Unlike Kucinich, he’d be able to see the bill pass AND keep his “integrity” in tact.
Kucinich gets the worst of both worlds. He ends up with nothing.
On the contrary, I think we should celebrate the first signs of bipartisanship in a long time. No one on either side likes the bill.
Obama promised to bring us together, and he did.
As Jane noted in her writeup this morning, the more that is known about this bill, the less people will like it, not the other way around as the leadership is dreaming.
Wait until the general population finds out that they will still be turned down for pre-existing conditions for another 3 or 4 years!!! Especially after listening to the leaders saying it would be immediate–including Biden earlier today.
OT:
“March 19 (Bloomberg) — The Federal Reserve Board must disclose documents identifying financial firms that might have collapsed without the largest U.S. government bailout ever, a federal appeals court said.
The U.S. Court of Appeals in Manhattan ruled today that the Fed must release records of the unprecedented $2 trillion U.S. loan program launched primarily after the 2008 collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. The ruling upholds a decision of a lower-court judge, who in August ordered that the information be released.”
that’s looking like the Supreme Court will be asked to take a 5 Justices dump on the constitution.
I’ve convinced myself that is the reason Obama didn’t’ go on his Asian trip; to make sure the PO wouldn’t make it back into the bill somehow, because there WERE rumblings about it.
Anyone who is not deeply conflicted about this is a simpleton… or just Kool Aid-sucking delusional.
I’m sure Obama will be the first to welcome you to Simple Town.