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Republicans are not counting on Bart Stupak to single-handedly kill health care. They’ve got a plan of their own. Greg Sargent explains.
Senior Senate GOP leadership aides have settled on a new strategy that, they hope, will stall or kill the Dem health reform push: They are going to use the arcane “Byrd rule” to try to bleed the reconciliation fix to death and ensure that it never passes.
Senior GOP aides have been studying the rule book in recent days, and they think they have a game plan. Here’s how they hope it will work.
At risk of oversimplification, the Byrd rule is designed to ensure that reconciliation is used to only make budgetary fixes, not policy ones, to existing legislation. Presuming the House passes the Senate bill, the House will then pass a reconciliation fix to the bill, after which the Senate will then try to pass that fix, too.
At this point Senate GOPers will repeatedly invoke the Byrd rule to ask the parliamentarian to strip individual provisions (ones fixing this or that in the original bill) out of the fix, on the grounds that they are policy fixes. If individual provisions are stripped, it would change the Senate’s version of the overall fix.
That would force the House to vote on it again and again, stalling the process further.
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There’s a larger game plan here. By making it clear they will do their best to tie reconciliation in procedural knots, Republicans are hoping to frighten House Dems into believing reconciliation is doomed. If House Dems are persuaded that the fix later will fail, they will be less likely to pass the original Senate bill in the first place, pehaps killing it.
I’d like to think that Dems have thought this process through and were expecting Repubs to try something of the sort. To have believed anything less would have been sheer foolishness. Whatever it is, it’s do or die time for Democrats. With his speech on Wednesday, the President has burned all bridges, killing off any possibility of retreat. Democrats must find a way to pass a health care bill or spend the next three years isolated, castrated and impotent.
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(Hat Tip: Balloon Juice)
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The party of no will soon be the party of no shit .. they will all soon have to wipe the shit off their faces once this all gets through .. and as Mario says . . this to shall pass .. and we will have new health care reform in the United States ..
Sadly, I think most of what you speculate could be right. But I’m not sure about all of the reasoning. First, since this is a reconciliation process, and given that the House would first pass the Senate bill as is, we still have a passed bill that could go to the president for signing. Yes, that would create pandomonium but it could be done. I would assume that the fixes presented do not have to go back and forth one by one. I assume the Senate would go through the whole fix package, and then if there were changes the package would go back to the House. The Dems in the House would be out of their minds to push it to another round! So I don’t think back and forth is what would happen, but then I’m not sure about all the in and outs of the process.
Bill, you’re correct except you’re leaving out the fact that many House dems will not vote for the Senate version unless they know they’ll get to modify some sections of it later using reconciliation. This is where republicans are hoping it’ll fail.
“Democrats must find a way to pass a health care bill or spend the next three years isolated, castrated and impotent.”
Well I sure hope the women do not get the same treatment! :D