“A Yes vote says to America, I know the issue is important to your family, and to our country, and the Senate should at least talk about it.” With those words, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) implored his Senate colleagues to invoke cloture, meaning a vote to allow the debate on health care reform to go forward.
They responded by voting to do so by a margin of 60-39. Sixty votes were required for passage. The vote was announced by Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT), who was presiding at the time, at 8:08 pm EST (6:00 pm MST) this evening, Saturday, November 21, 2009.
That clears the way for debate and amendments to the bill to begin after the Thanksgiving recess. It will take good fortune and hard work to get a bill passed out of the Senate before the end of the year, but momentum has shifted in favor of those who see health care reform as the defining domestic issue of our time.
Saturday, November 21, 2009
Thursday, November 19, 2009
Momentum Building for Cloture Vote on Health Care Reform
The Senate is inching ever closer to passing a health care reform bill that really is reform. By now everyone agrees that the key vote is on cloture (stopping a filibuster against beginning debate), and the signs are positive that cloture will succeed.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) unveiled the Senate’s version of health care reform on Wednesday night. Since the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) and the Senate Finance Committee had shared jurisdiction, and each voted out its own version, the two versions had to be merged for debate by the whole Senate. Reid has now done that.
All 40 Republicans and several Democrats in the Senate are opposed to a public option, but the merged bill includes it, with an opt-out provision for states which choose not to participate. While every Republican is committed to blocking the bill, the Democrats and Independents might just barely have the 60 votes needed for cloture. The positive signs are the following:
1. Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE), one of the staunchest conservadems who is opposed to a public option, nonetheless gave a strong indication yesterday that he will not support a filibuster to prevent the bill from moving forward. “If you don't like the bill, then why would you block your own opportunity to amend it?" he said.
2. Sen. Kent Conrad (D-ND), another conservadem concerned primarily with cost, signaled his willingness to move forward by complimenting the Majority Leader’s efforts. “I was very impressed by what Senator Reid has done," Conrad said.
3. Senators Mary Landrieu (D-LA) and Blanche Lincoln (D-AR) remain non-committal, but Landrieu reportedly is concerned mainly about getting enough local perks, and Lincoln faces a tough re-election campaign next year, including the certainty of a primary opponent if she kills health care reform. Majority Leader Reid said last night he is “cautiously optimistic” that cloture will be invoked on Saturday, and Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) was even more definite that “our (Democratic) caucus is united.” That is Senate-speak for “we really think we’ve got the votes.”
4. What about Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CN), the self-appointed crusader against giving Americans the choice of public health insurance? On the Rachel Maddow show last night, Sen. Tom Harkin (D-NE) flatly stated that Sen. Lieberman would not vote to block debate on the bill. Such a definitive pronouncement by one Senator about how another one will vote is extremely rare, and never uttered unless the vote is a sure thing.
Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT) had to fly home earlier this week to attend to a family emergency. His absence would make the cloture vote fall short (unless Sen. Snowe, D-ME, decides that history is calling her anew after all). But if he’s back in Washington by Saturday, and no other Democrat gets in a car accident or is caught in the wrong hotel room at a bad time before then, the cloture vote should prevail.
Getting the bill to the Senate floor for debate is the toughest hill to climb. After that, just 51 votes are needed to report a bill out of the Senate, then the House and Senate versions will be merged in conference into the final bill for debate in both the House and Senate.
Rep. Bart Stupak’s (D-MI) restrictive anti-abortion language adopted by the House will probably be stripped from the final conference bill, back to the status-quo (the "Hyde Amendment", which prevents public funds from being used for abortion, but doesn’t stop private plans from covering it). While Stupak had previously bragged that he would block any bill that didn’t include his restrictive language, he has had to scale back his number of committed opposition votes from Democratic abortion opponents to 15 or 20. That’s not enough to stop passage in the House.
Once the conference bill is brought back to the Senate, another filibuster could be threatened, but once cloture has been invoked for the first time, it’s highly likely to succeed in another round on the same issue again.
As Sen. Schumer has said, no one can count votes better than Sen. Reid. So if the Majority Leader is “cautiously optimistic” that health care reform is ready to be debated and ultimately passed, the American public can afford to be so as well.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) unveiled the Senate’s version of health care reform on Wednesday night. Since the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) and the Senate Finance Committee had shared jurisdiction, and each voted out its own version, the two versions had to be merged for debate by the whole Senate. Reid has now done that.
All 40 Republicans and several Democrats in the Senate are opposed to a public option, but the merged bill includes it, with an opt-out provision for states which choose not to participate. While every Republican is committed to blocking the bill, the Democrats and Independents might just barely have the 60 votes needed for cloture. The positive signs are the following:
1. Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE), one of the staunchest conservadems who is opposed to a public option, nonetheless gave a strong indication yesterday that he will not support a filibuster to prevent the bill from moving forward. “If you don't like the bill, then why would you block your own opportunity to amend it?" he said.
2. Sen. Kent Conrad (D-ND), another conservadem concerned primarily with cost, signaled his willingness to move forward by complimenting the Majority Leader’s efforts. “I was very impressed by what Senator Reid has done," Conrad said.
3. Senators Mary Landrieu (D-LA) and Blanche Lincoln (D-AR) remain non-committal, but Landrieu reportedly is concerned mainly about getting enough local perks, and Lincoln faces a tough re-election campaign next year, including the certainty of a primary opponent if she kills health care reform. Majority Leader Reid said last night he is “cautiously optimistic” that cloture will be invoked on Saturday, and Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) was even more definite that “our (Democratic) caucus is united.” That is Senate-speak for “we really think we’ve got the votes.”
4. What about Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CN), the self-appointed crusader against giving Americans the choice of public health insurance? On the Rachel Maddow show last night, Sen. Tom Harkin (D-NE) flatly stated that Sen. Lieberman would not vote to block debate on the bill. Such a definitive pronouncement by one Senator about how another one will vote is extremely rare, and never uttered unless the vote is a sure thing.
Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT) had to fly home earlier this week to attend to a family emergency. His absence would make the cloture vote fall short (unless Sen. Snowe, D-ME, decides that history is calling her anew after all). But if he’s back in Washington by Saturday, and no other Democrat gets in a car accident or is caught in the wrong hotel room at a bad time before then, the cloture vote should prevail.
Getting the bill to the Senate floor for debate is the toughest hill to climb. After that, just 51 votes are needed to report a bill out of the Senate, then the House and Senate versions will be merged in conference into the final bill for debate in both the House and Senate.
Rep. Bart Stupak’s (D-MI) restrictive anti-abortion language adopted by the House will probably be stripped from the final conference bill, back to the status-quo (the "Hyde Amendment", which prevents public funds from being used for abortion, but doesn’t stop private plans from covering it). While Stupak had previously bragged that he would block any bill that didn’t include his restrictive language, he has had to scale back his number of committed opposition votes from Democratic abortion opponents to 15 or 20. That’s not enough to stop passage in the House.
Once the conference bill is brought back to the Senate, another filibuster could be threatened, but once cloture has been invoked for the first time, it’s highly likely to succeed in another round on the same issue again.
As Sen. Schumer has said, no one can count votes better than Sen. Reid. So if the Majority Leader is “cautiously optimistic” that health care reform is ready to be debated and ultimately passed, the American public can afford to be so as well.
Thursday, November 12, 2009
Reflections on the Day After Veterans Day
Yesterday on Veteran’s Day I placed our American flag in its bracket at the front of our house, so it could wave all day in honor of the sacrifices our military men and women and their families have made throughout our history. I do this on every national holiday, but on Memorial Day and Veterans Day, I do it with sadness.
Flying the flag on our military holidays is first and foremost a symbol of gratitude for those who have died, or been injured, or made homeless, or otherwise disregarded by a nation more anxious to glorify the generic soldier than to meet the needs of the real individual, or to question why we asked them to risk life and limb in the first place.
Flying the flag on our military holidays is for me also a reminder of waste, and a call to question why we think that war is an answer to any but the gravest provocation. The biggest throw-away line we hear on days like yesterday is how thankful we are to our armed forces “for keeping us free.”
War has made or kept us free precisely three times in our history. The first was the Revolutionary War, which made us an independent state, truly free from Great Britain. The second was our own Civil War, which freed the slaves. The third was World War II, which undoubtedly saved us from subjugation to cruel and foreign dictators.
Every other war or conflict our nation has engaged in has had little effect on our freedom. Most were needless; the rest either misguided or mishandled. Let’s do the roll call.
The war of 1812 was the consequence of bungled diplomacy. Great Britain, still smarting from the loss of her North American colonies, provoked us into an ill-advised conflict that was a stand-off at best. It gave us Andrew Jackson, but neither enhanced nor diminished our freedom.
The Mexican-American War in 1848 was largely provoked by our military forces in the contested territory south of the Nueces River in Texas. It followed inevitably from Mexico’s humiliating loss of Texas because of Santa Ana’s vainglorious folly at the Alamo and Goliad, as I’ve written previously. Mexico was certainly complicit, anxious to whip up its own nationalistic fervor, knowing full well it had little chance of winning. The war fulfilled our dreams of manifest destiny by extending the nation from sea to sea, but made us in no sense more free. Mexican citizens in the newly acquired territories who were promised the right to keep their land but had it taken from them anyway, in fact, suffered a loss of freedom.
The Civil War freed our nation from the scourge of slavery, and that is the one good thing to come of the war. Other than solidifying the concept of federal supremacy, little else can be reckoned as a positive consequence of that war, especially for the South which went into it with visions of gallantry, glory, and overconfidence, only to reap economic stagnation and resentment lasting a century.
The Spanish-American War was arguably the most trumped-up excuse for territorial acquisition (Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines) in our history – a war whipped up by the sensationalistic advocacy journalism of William Randolph Hearst. To be sure, the war was confounded by liberation struggles both on Cuba and in the Philippines for freedom from Spain, but the freedom of American citizens was never even threatened. Ironically, our victory in that war led to military action against freedom-fighters in the Philippines.
The ghastly waste of millions of lives in World War I in the name of nationalistic fervor that accomplished nothing but lay the seeds for World War II has been well documented many times over. Our involvement in that war was of marginal significance, and perhaps was unavoidable. Our freedom was never at stake, however. And revulsion to the war fed an isolationist tendency that left us woefully unprepared for World War II.
No reading of history can cast doubt that World War II was a conflict of true necessity. The horrors that unfolded in Europe provide a reasonable prognosis of what would have happened to us, had we been conquered by either Germany or Japan. I’ve often envied my parents’ generation, for having had a war they could feel was really necessary. I’ve never had that experience.
The Korean War came to us, not the other way around. It was precipitated by pompous leaders on both sides of the dividing line between North and South Korea, each wanting to reunify the country on their own terms. In coming to the defense of the South when the North invaded, we saved them from certain defeat and absorption into the regressive totalitarianism that North Korea has remained.
However, as David Halberstam documents in sad detail in The Coldest Winter, thousands of American lives were lost due to unpreparedness, poor leadership, lack of material support, and arrogance. 54,000 American soldiers had died by the time the cease-fire was signed in 1953. The South Koreans were free, the North Koreans were not, and no one was more or less free in the United States – just as they had been in 1950.
Vietnam, even more than Korea, was a civil war with anti-colonial overtones. Our leaders tried to sell it as a Cold War conflict, long after it was obviously something much more complicated and not anything that we understood very well. Nor did it have anything to do with keeping us free. When the North Vietnamese finally triumphed in 1975, it didn’t diminish our freedom in the slightest, though domestic controversy spawned by the conflict took a generation to abate. Vietnam, incidentally, then went to war with China, our supposed communist adversary.
The Persian Gulf War was justified as necessary to stop the spread of tyranny in the Middle East. Saddam Hussein, the dictator we loved to hate, made it easy by invading Kuwait. As an elected official at the time, I actually got to vote on that war. The Newton MA Board of Aldermen on which I served debated a non-binding resolution on the use of force against Iraq. I voted with the majority against authorizing our government to go to war, in lieu of giving diplomacy more time to deal with Hussein’s aggression. In retrospect, more diplomacy probably would not have worked, but I’m still proud of that vote against the rush to war.
That vote at least presented a tough choice about the necessity of using force with arguable merits on both sides. Our invasion of Iraq in 2003, on the other hand, was nothing but an inexcusable vendetta by a President and his advisers bent on finishing a job they felt the President’s father had failed to do. Before it started, I told anyone who would listen that it would kill thousands of Iraqi’s and Americans (an underestimate as it turned out) and lead to nothing but ongoing civil and religious wars (which it has; though temporarily in abeyance, they will resume once we are gone for good.)
Now we are considering whether to ramp up yet another land war in Asia -- this time in Afghanistan, which poses no more security risk to us than Yemen, Somalia, or Saudi Arabia, amidst a culture we little understand, for a cause that remains obscure. Of course the Taliban are terrible, but they don’t affect our freedom. The body bags will keep coming home, though, as long as we send our military on a poorly-defined mission that they are essentially incapable of completing successfully while serving as targets in a population that considers them foreign occupiers.
We must maintain a strong military, in the event that another military state threatens us. But short of that, preservation of our freedom will have little to do with the exercise of military force. Threats to our freedom from terrorists must be countered by effective intelligence and the cooperation with other nations and agencies that make it possible. Internal threats to our freedom from those who would take away our Constitutional rights in the name of heightened security need to be met by renewed focus on our highest values, not our basest fears.
None of this should be interpreted as lack of respect for our military or a failure to appreciate what individual soldiers have done. When I fly the flag on Veterans Day, I mourn the lives lost or injured in every war, from 1812 to Vietnam, whether I thought the war necessary or not. I just wish I could raise the flag more often in memory of causes that were truly worthy of the price our veterans have paid.
Flying the flag on our military holidays is first and foremost a symbol of gratitude for those who have died, or been injured, or made homeless, or otherwise disregarded by a nation more anxious to glorify the generic soldier than to meet the needs of the real individual, or to question why we asked them to risk life and limb in the first place.
Flying the flag on our military holidays is for me also a reminder of waste, and a call to question why we think that war is an answer to any but the gravest provocation. The biggest throw-away line we hear on days like yesterday is how thankful we are to our armed forces “for keeping us free.”
War has made or kept us free precisely three times in our history. The first was the Revolutionary War, which made us an independent state, truly free from Great Britain. The second was our own Civil War, which freed the slaves. The third was World War II, which undoubtedly saved us from subjugation to cruel and foreign dictators.
Every other war or conflict our nation has engaged in has had little effect on our freedom. Most were needless; the rest either misguided or mishandled. Let’s do the roll call.
The war of 1812 was the consequence of bungled diplomacy. Great Britain, still smarting from the loss of her North American colonies, provoked us into an ill-advised conflict that was a stand-off at best. It gave us Andrew Jackson, but neither enhanced nor diminished our freedom.
The Mexican-American War in 1848 was largely provoked by our military forces in the contested territory south of the Nueces River in Texas. It followed inevitably from Mexico’s humiliating loss of Texas because of Santa Ana’s vainglorious folly at the Alamo and Goliad, as I’ve written previously. Mexico was certainly complicit, anxious to whip up its own nationalistic fervor, knowing full well it had little chance of winning. The war fulfilled our dreams of manifest destiny by extending the nation from sea to sea, but made us in no sense more free. Mexican citizens in the newly acquired territories who were promised the right to keep their land but had it taken from them anyway, in fact, suffered a loss of freedom.
The Civil War freed our nation from the scourge of slavery, and that is the one good thing to come of the war. Other than solidifying the concept of federal supremacy, little else can be reckoned as a positive consequence of that war, especially for the South which went into it with visions of gallantry, glory, and overconfidence, only to reap economic stagnation and resentment lasting a century.
The Spanish-American War was arguably the most trumped-up excuse for territorial acquisition (Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines) in our history – a war whipped up by the sensationalistic advocacy journalism of William Randolph Hearst. To be sure, the war was confounded by liberation struggles both on Cuba and in the Philippines for freedom from Spain, but the freedom of American citizens was never even threatened. Ironically, our victory in that war led to military action against freedom-fighters in the Philippines.
The ghastly waste of millions of lives in World War I in the name of nationalistic fervor that accomplished nothing but lay the seeds for World War II has been well documented many times over. Our involvement in that war was of marginal significance, and perhaps was unavoidable. Our freedom was never at stake, however. And revulsion to the war fed an isolationist tendency that left us woefully unprepared for World War II.
No reading of history can cast doubt that World War II was a conflict of true necessity. The horrors that unfolded in Europe provide a reasonable prognosis of what would have happened to us, had we been conquered by either Germany or Japan. I’ve often envied my parents’ generation, for having had a war they could feel was really necessary. I’ve never had that experience.
The Korean War came to us, not the other way around. It was precipitated by pompous leaders on both sides of the dividing line between North and South Korea, each wanting to reunify the country on their own terms. In coming to the defense of the South when the North invaded, we saved them from certain defeat and absorption into the regressive totalitarianism that North Korea has remained.
However, as David Halberstam documents in sad detail in The Coldest Winter, thousands of American lives were lost due to unpreparedness, poor leadership, lack of material support, and arrogance. 54,000 American soldiers had died by the time the cease-fire was signed in 1953. The South Koreans were free, the North Koreans were not, and no one was more or less free in the United States – just as they had been in 1950.
Vietnam, even more than Korea, was a civil war with anti-colonial overtones. Our leaders tried to sell it as a Cold War conflict, long after it was obviously something much more complicated and not anything that we understood very well. Nor did it have anything to do with keeping us free. When the North Vietnamese finally triumphed in 1975, it didn’t diminish our freedom in the slightest, though domestic controversy spawned by the conflict took a generation to abate. Vietnam, incidentally, then went to war with China, our supposed communist adversary.
The Persian Gulf War was justified as necessary to stop the spread of tyranny in the Middle East. Saddam Hussein, the dictator we loved to hate, made it easy by invading Kuwait. As an elected official at the time, I actually got to vote on that war. The Newton MA Board of Aldermen on which I served debated a non-binding resolution on the use of force against Iraq. I voted with the majority against authorizing our government to go to war, in lieu of giving diplomacy more time to deal with Hussein’s aggression. In retrospect, more diplomacy probably would not have worked, but I’m still proud of that vote against the rush to war.
That vote at least presented a tough choice about the necessity of using force with arguable merits on both sides. Our invasion of Iraq in 2003, on the other hand, was nothing but an inexcusable vendetta by a President and his advisers bent on finishing a job they felt the President’s father had failed to do. Before it started, I told anyone who would listen that it would kill thousands of Iraqi’s and Americans (an underestimate as it turned out) and lead to nothing but ongoing civil and religious wars (which it has; though temporarily in abeyance, they will resume once we are gone for good.)
Now we are considering whether to ramp up yet another land war in Asia -- this time in Afghanistan, which poses no more security risk to us than Yemen, Somalia, or Saudi Arabia, amidst a culture we little understand, for a cause that remains obscure. Of course the Taliban are terrible, but they don’t affect our freedom. The body bags will keep coming home, though, as long as we send our military on a poorly-defined mission that they are essentially incapable of completing successfully while serving as targets in a population that considers them foreign occupiers.
We must maintain a strong military, in the event that another military state threatens us. But short of that, preservation of our freedom will have little to do with the exercise of military force. Threats to our freedom from terrorists must be countered by effective intelligence and the cooperation with other nations and agencies that make it possible. Internal threats to our freedom from those who would take away our Constitutional rights in the name of heightened security need to be met by renewed focus on our highest values, not our basest fears.
None of this should be interpreted as lack of respect for our military or a failure to appreciate what individual soldiers have done. When I fly the flag on Veterans Day, I mourn the lives lost or injured in every war, from 1812 to Vietnam, whether I thought the war necessary or not. I just wish I could raise the flag more often in memory of causes that were truly worthy of the price our veterans have paid.
Saturday, November 7, 2009
"What a Night!"
Just before 9:00 pm MST this evening (Saturday, November 7, 2009), a vote began on the floor of the House of Representatives on final passage of the ‘‘Affordable Health Care for America Act,’’ the consensus version of Health Care Reform before the House. Passage required 218 votes, cast electronically within a 15 minute window.
By 9:05, the vote was 213 in favor, while the votes of 9 Democratic congressmen were still outstanding. With crunch time just minutes away, those of us who had been crusading on this issue for years had no hope that any Republican would vote in favor of it. So we needed 5 more votes, and knew they had to come from the 9 Democrats who had not yet voted.
By 9:06, we needed 3 more votes out of 7 still not cast. Finally, at 9:07 the 218th Democrat voted in favor of the historic legislation, putting it over the top with about five minutes to spare. By the time the period for voting closed, 219 Democrats had voted in favor; 215 Republicans had voted in opposition.
Then, as a huge sigh of relief was let out by progressives across the land, a lone Republican, Joseph Cao – a new representative from Louisiana – in an act of either total confusion or decided courage joined with Democrats to make the final vote bipartisan, 220-215.
For the first time in the history of the Republic, one of the two houses of Congress had passed a bill enabling, in principle, affordable health care for almost every American. Already, 40% of people in the United States have access to quality health care – either free of charge or at an affordable cost from the government, through the Veterans’ Administration, TriCare for military personnel and their families, Medicare, or Medicaid. The provisions of this bill would push that to more than 96%.
The bill is a pretty ragged piece of legislation. The public option is badly flawed, but at least it’s there. Freedom of choice is not nearly as extensive as it should be. The bill raises eligibility for Medicaid, which is good because it means more low-income people will be included, but it’s bad in the sense that it imposes an added financial burden on the states.
Those of us who believe strongly that the gut-wrenching decision of if and when to terminate a pregnancy should be between a woman, her family, her physician, and her religious convictions, had to swallow a bitter pill, when an amendment offered by Bart Stupak (D-MI) was added to the bill, prohibiting a woman who receives any federal tax credits for health insurance from buying a policy, even at her own expense, that covers abortion. As the final tally would show, this amendment, which goes even beyond current law, was the price that had to be paid for passage.
Democrats also continue to abandon the moral high-ground by including in the bill incentives to states that remove caps on medical malpractice awards. Thus, states like Texas, whose tort-reform laws have significantly lowered the cost of malpractice insurance for doctors, would not be eligible for the incentive because awards for non-economic (punitive, or “pain and suffering”) damages are capped. The ample donations from trial lawyers, which overwhelmingly go to Democrats, may have something to do with that.
So the bill is far from perfect. But passage in the House is extremely significant, because it establishes a baseline for bargaining with the Senate. Even if the Senate, for instance, passes out a bill that does not include a public option, the conferees between House and Senate will have to consider putting it in, because the House has already voted for it.
Now the focus shifts to the Senate. While the two senators from Texas continue to wander in the wilderness on this issue, well cared for by a menu of affordable health plans provided to members of Congress while the state they represent has the largest uninsured population in the nation, we can only take heart in the fact that after they miss their appointment with history, no one will remember their names.
Attention instead will focus on those conservadems who may or may not allow debate to take place – senators like Mary Landrieu (D-LA), Blanche Lincoln (D-AR), and Ben Nelson (D-NE). Landrieu and Lincoln have been making hopeful signs that they will not support a filibuster. Joe Lieberman (I-CN) has said at one time that he won’t block debate, and at another that he might – so who knows? Nelson, at this point, is the biggest wild card.
Perhaps tonight’s vote will give wavering senators the sense of momentum they need to at least let the issue be debated on the floor of the Senate. Once that hurdle is cleared, a bill of some sort – one that in all likelihood will be more good than bad – will be voted out and the real, ultimate legislation will be crafted by the conference committee. Then and only then will we know what the actual law will look like.
Nancy Pelosi began her press conference this evening after the final vote with “What a night!” It was clearly relief as much as exhultation. But what a night, indeed!
By 9:05, the vote was 213 in favor, while the votes of 9 Democratic congressmen were still outstanding. With crunch time just minutes away, those of us who had been crusading on this issue for years had no hope that any Republican would vote in favor of it. So we needed 5 more votes, and knew they had to come from the 9 Democrats who had not yet voted.
By 9:06, we needed 3 more votes out of 7 still not cast. Finally, at 9:07 the 218th Democrat voted in favor of the historic legislation, putting it over the top with about five minutes to spare. By the time the period for voting closed, 219 Democrats had voted in favor; 215 Republicans had voted in opposition.
Then, as a huge sigh of relief was let out by progressives across the land, a lone Republican, Joseph Cao – a new representative from Louisiana – in an act of either total confusion or decided courage joined with Democrats to make the final vote bipartisan, 220-215.
For the first time in the history of the Republic, one of the two houses of Congress had passed a bill enabling, in principle, affordable health care for almost every American. Already, 40% of people in the United States have access to quality health care – either free of charge or at an affordable cost from the government, through the Veterans’ Administration, TriCare for military personnel and their families, Medicare, or Medicaid. The provisions of this bill would push that to more than 96%.
The bill is a pretty ragged piece of legislation. The public option is badly flawed, but at least it’s there. Freedom of choice is not nearly as extensive as it should be. The bill raises eligibility for Medicaid, which is good because it means more low-income people will be included, but it’s bad in the sense that it imposes an added financial burden on the states.
Those of us who believe strongly that the gut-wrenching decision of if and when to terminate a pregnancy should be between a woman, her family, her physician, and her religious convictions, had to swallow a bitter pill, when an amendment offered by Bart Stupak (D-MI) was added to the bill, prohibiting a woman who receives any federal tax credits for health insurance from buying a policy, even at her own expense, that covers abortion. As the final tally would show, this amendment, which goes even beyond current law, was the price that had to be paid for passage.
Democrats also continue to abandon the moral high-ground by including in the bill incentives to states that remove caps on medical malpractice awards. Thus, states like Texas, whose tort-reform laws have significantly lowered the cost of malpractice insurance for doctors, would not be eligible for the incentive because awards for non-economic (punitive, or “pain and suffering”) damages are capped. The ample donations from trial lawyers, which overwhelmingly go to Democrats, may have something to do with that.
So the bill is far from perfect. But passage in the House is extremely significant, because it establishes a baseline for bargaining with the Senate. Even if the Senate, for instance, passes out a bill that does not include a public option, the conferees between House and Senate will have to consider putting it in, because the House has already voted for it.
Now the focus shifts to the Senate. While the two senators from Texas continue to wander in the wilderness on this issue, well cared for by a menu of affordable health plans provided to members of Congress while the state they represent has the largest uninsured population in the nation, we can only take heart in the fact that after they miss their appointment with history, no one will remember their names.
Attention instead will focus on those conservadems who may or may not allow debate to take place – senators like Mary Landrieu (D-LA), Blanche Lincoln (D-AR), and Ben Nelson (D-NE). Landrieu and Lincoln have been making hopeful signs that they will not support a filibuster. Joe Lieberman (I-CN) has said at one time that he won’t block debate, and at another that he might – so who knows? Nelson, at this point, is the biggest wild card.
Perhaps tonight’s vote will give wavering senators the sense of momentum they need to at least let the issue be debated on the floor of the Senate. Once that hurdle is cleared, a bill of some sort – one that in all likelihood will be more good than bad – will be voted out and the real, ultimate legislation will be crafted by the conference committee. Then and only then will we know what the actual law will look like.
Nancy Pelosi began her press conference this evening after the final vote with “What a night!” It was clearly relief as much as exhultation. But what a night, indeed!
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