* Barack Obama continues to urge Democrats to do something, although exactly what to do is apparently up to them.
* Nancy Pelosi insists that the House can and will pass the Senate bill, but the Senate has to pass some fixes first.
* Key Senators like Max Baucus and both Virginians have publicly ruled out reconciliation. Unless we can whip 50 Senators into line (get calling!) Pelosi may be on her own.
* The Senate is not completely dead. Others like Kent Conrad (!) and Arlen Specter (!!) back reconciliation with surprising enthusiasm.
* Has anyone heard from Harry Reid? Maybe someone should swing by his office to see if the lights are on.
Overall the scene still reminds me of watching a married couple in a Noel Coward play try and fail to work out their differences. Having seen a few of those, I’m not encouraged.
***Update***
Via Kevin Drum, Harry Reid thinks that reconciliation might happen, but…(pause for dramatic effect)…the House has to vote first. Surprise.
maye
How do you pass “fixes” to a bill that hasn’t passed yet? Is that like fixing my dishwasher before it has been delivered from the store?
Alice B. Stuck
Harry Reid is having a hissy fit poutrage because Pelosi and the House don’t trust him and our sorry ass Senate to do what they promise. He wants her to go first and pass the Senate Bill and he and his Wimpy dem senate friends will pay for the shitburger when they get good and goddamn ready. Which likely means never. Pelosi is doing it right. Best Speaker we’ve had maybe in my lifetime.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I actually agree with Harry Reid, or at least support a parellel argument. Getting something done, passed, signed, PTDB, would give Dems something real to sell, take them (us) out of this limbo of ineffectuality, create some momentum for all those progressive Senators who, I suspect, are holding their tongues right now so they don’t spook the delicate, delicate sensibilities of Bayh, Lincoln, Webb etc.
EvolutionaryDesign
I called Senators Mark Udall and Michael Bennett today to express my support for the reconcilliation compromise. Udall is non-committal at the moment, but appears to be receiving a modest amount of support from constituents, and Bennett backs reconcilliation.
Keep calling!!
Woodbuster
“Barack Obama continues to urge Democrats to do something, although exactly what to do is apparently up to them.”
I keep seeing folks whine about this, and I am getting really tired of it. Ezra, Benen, Josh Marshall – everybody seems to be running with the same meme.
Barack Obama is NOT going to stand up in public and order the Democratic Party around, and he is certainly not going to run the risk of embarrassing Pelosi or Reid in that way. That is simply not his style, and I don’t believe it would do any good whatsoever. As soon as he did something like that in public, the Democrats would find their backbones and get all fired up, alright – at Obama!
He has touted HCR at every public opportunity. EVERY ONE. That is as it should be. If he is going around twisting arms, it needs to be done out of public view. THAT is how real leaders act.
Of course, BTD or Fuckhead will be more than happy to tell me how wrong I am, and that I am an Obot. Well, I happily cop to the second part.
Midnight Marauder
@Woodbuster:
Please don’t summon that clown BTD over here. It’s bad enough when he shows up on his own accord.
geg6
@Alice B. Stuck:
This.
And I still think Obama is being too coy on this by half. Tell them to agree to reconciliation so that Pelosi can ram it through the goddam House, as she’s been chomping at the bit to do for a goddam week now.
Fucking retards.
jayjaybear
More like an Albee knock-off.
“Who’s Afraid of Virginia Foxx?”
jl
I am not an O-bot, but I also do not believe Obama has magic fairy dust that enables him to fix arbitrary problems that come in the process of trying to get something, anything, done in the Senate, given the Democratic weasles and conartists that infest the place.
So maybe best thing is for Obama to go the people and start encouraging grassroots voter action in next election?
I am struggling to find any idea at all, here. It seems a mess.
Khârn the Betrayer
I don’t understand your insistence that your party be all organized and on the same page. Running about randomly with small bands of maniacs has always worked for me.
BFTBG, SFTST.
Woodbuster
Id it just me, or did somebody break teh Juice?
mcc
Updated the spreadsheet with the threads from yesterday and today. Most of the calls on there are pretty old at this point. That’s probably OK because there have been few substantive new developments since the SOTU last week.
Some thoughts:
@maye:
What Congress Matters asserts is that it does not matter what order the bills pass in, the only thing that matters is what order the President signs them in. Congress Matters also claims to have identified a specific procedure of sort of bundling a law into a rule, used quite a few times since the 80s, which would allow the House to hold one, exactly one, vote which would serve as a combined vote on both the “sidecar” which the Senate has already passed and the Senate bill itself. (The Congress Matters analyses I’m referring here don’t appear to specifically investigated the question of whether use of the budget reconciliation procedure for the sidecar adds extra wrinkles.)
Some Senate peoples have made claims to the media that the Senate legally can’t act first, so either they haven’t looked into this closely enough to be aware of the “the President just signs the second bill first” argument, or they’re aware but are skeptical it’s accurate.
@Woodbuster:
It seems like the biggest problem with Obama trying to stand up and order Congress to pursue a specific strategy is it’s not obvious what the best strategy is. I for one certainly couldn’t tell you right now if it’s better to have the House or Senate vote first, and since by definition the right strategy is the one that passes a bill it’s probably not possible to tell what the best strategy is until Reid and Pelosi finish hashing out what their respective houses can pass.
If the Pelosi/Reid talks stop, or the “no, you vote first” back-and-forth starts to look like it’s going to go on forever, then it seems like that would be the right time for Obama to step in and start making Congress’s decisions for them…
mcc
Oh, one other thing– MoveOn is making “pass the damn bill” constituent pressure stuff a regular thing. They sent me an email today asking me to harass Sen.s Feinstein and Boxer on Facebook. Which… okay, creative?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@mcc: I got two fund-raising letters from the DCCC last week. Wrote “Pass the damn bill” on them and sent them back.
Alice B. Stuck
It is possible that having the Senate do the “fix” first, depending on what it entails, could cause some procedural problems. If the “fix” needed includes some new tax code changes, then he House must initiate whatever that TC change would be.
Since I, and maybe not even the Senate itself knows at this point, the fine details of what would be needed, Harry Reid might, emphasize “might” have some substantial argument for the House going first. I don’t think anything quite like this has ever been done before, so that could explain the confusion for all parties involved, including Obama.
Phoebe
This from my rep, Russ Carnahan, in his email response to my calling his office:
“However, there are important differences between the two bills. The House and Senate are now determining the best way to combine them. Please be assured that I will keep your views in mind as we continue to advance commonsense solutions for health insurance reform and to rebuild from the recession.
The need for comprehensive reform grows greater every day as more Americans face rising costs for health insurance or risk losing it altogether. I am committed to solving this problem by passing the best bill possible.”
Randy P
@maye: There’s logic and then there’s the sausage factory. What you’re asking is a parliamentary question, not a philosophical one.
At least some people in Congress seem to feel that this is parliamentarily possible, even if it violates the laws of causality.
EvolutionaryDesign
@mcc:
Not that it matters too much, but (for the purposes of your spreadsheet) Diana DeGette’s (CO) office has been receiving a lot more positive responses from constituents since the MA special election (apparently the teabagging negativity is old hat). She’s still meh, but in her capacity as Chief Deputy Whip appears to be hashing out a way forward with Clyburn and Pelosi.
Tom Hilton
@mcc: Interesting. I think this is the post you were talking about; it sounds plausible, but I don’t know enough to say either way.
Still: I remain thoroughly disgusted with any so-called ‘progressive’ Representative who isn’t willing to vote for the Senate bill without modification. (That would be the bill Bernie Sanders voted for, by the way.) If modification proves impossible (either for procedural reasons, or because of dickwads like Blanche Nelson and Mary Lieberman), which seems like a better-than-50% probability, and the so-called ‘progressives’ don’t grow the fuck up and pass the damn bill as is, then they give up any right to call themselves anything but Republican stooges.
Tom Hilton
Incidentally, here’s the letter I got from the Speaker Monday in response to my call a couple weeks ago:
The only part that’s at all responsive to my comments is bolded, and that’s…unimpressive.
Tom Hilton
By the way, every time I call my Representative I also ask her to make Balloon Juice fix the blockquote function so it picks up everything between the tags regardless of line spacing. I haven’t had any luck with that one, either.
Tim F.
@Tom Hilton: Keep calling. If they write it into a bill, we’ll fight it all the way to the Supreme Court. Then, if we lose all the blogs will have to do it.
Toni
Obama’s message to the Senate dems was how do they expect the voters to keep voting for them after so many of them campaigned on doing HCR, looked folks in the eye as he put it, and now that the opportunity is there not get it done? I think he is working on forcing the Dems to realize they have no choice but to get it done. Once they embrace that not doing it is not an option, they will find a way to pass a bill.
batgirl
They are like 3 year olds. “You do it first.” “No, you.” “Un-uh, you go first.” and so on. They need a frakkin grown-up.
I got it. Why don’t you do it both at the same time. We’ll get stopwatches and everything. Then you can take your naps afterwards.
aimai
Now would be an excellent time for Obama’s OFA and MoveOn to host “town hall meetings” in Senators’ offices of constituents who are about to lose, or have lost, their health insurance. Obama clearly thinks, and I agree, that the Senators are not hearing enough from interested parties in their own voting base.
aimai
Alice B. Stuck
@Tom Hilton: unauthorized tinkering with the innards of BJ wordpress could cause cascading nukular event. The FSM must sign off.
KCinDC
@batgirl, I think you’re being unfair to the House. They’ve already been burned by the Senate repeatedly. If they pass the bill without waiting for the Senate, they (and you and I and everyone else) know what will happen: the Senate will do nothing, and they’ll be stuck with the Senate bill, which contains things they hate and won’t vote for. Just as the votes simply aren’t there in the Senate to pass a public option, the votes simply aren’t there in the House to pass the Senate bill without fixes.
Martin
@batgirl:
Which is why:
3 year olds don’t get re-elected. If the Senate Dems want any respect from voters, they need to grow a pair and put them to use. “I did what daddy told me to do” isn’t going to cut it.
JoyceH
I just called both Virginia Senators. I got a human at Webb’s office. She said that Webb ‘hadn’t decided’ whether or not to use reconciliation to fix the Senate bill. I told the staffer that reconciliation was the only way health care reform was going to pass, it’s crazy to think any Republicans are going to come onboard, I was strongly in favor of reconciliation and opposed to these fantasy quests for Republican votes.
When I called Warner’s office and selected the option to speak to a human, I got a recording saying that due to the high volume of calls, I would have to leave a message and they’d get back to me. I asked if it was true that Warner opposed reconciliation, gave essentially the same message I’d giving to Webb’s staffer, and left my phone number twice, saying that I wanted someone to call me back with info on Warner’s stand on reconciliation.
Dunno if they’ll get back to me – but the phones are ringing. (In other words, the phones are ‘jammed’ – send in Jimmy O’Keefe and the Village People!)
KCinDC
Is there a link to the public statements by Warner and Webb ruling out reconciliation?
bcinaz
On Rachel Maddow’s show last night, Chris Matthews made the rare valid point that President Obama has to get his approvals up a bit more to get the Senate to drag this thing across the finish line. Probably aren’t 50 votes yet, and if the President keeps up the pressure and the appearances – the votes will be there by the end of the month.
I have no way to know if this is true – my Senator is a Cranky Old Bastard who thinks he can run to the right of a birther teabagger. – bcinAZ
mcc
My take, I think that if it’s demonstrated the procedural issues aren’t solvable then it’s absolutely the House’s responsibility to just pass what they’ve got anyway. But until such time as the procedural issues are demonstrated unsolvable, and they haven’t been yet, then it’s reasonable for the House to push for the Senate to vote first so as to limit the Senate’s ability to screw things up as much as possible.
Either way the issue of who goes first seems like a distraction. One way or another it’s established we’re doing the sidecar thing, and one way or another you have to get the sidecar bill in front of both chambers, so just get the sidecar written and sent to the relevant committees (budget?) and it’s easy enough to put off the question of how those final votes are structured until the last minute. I … hope that’s what they’re doing now :/
@aimai: MoveOn actually did do a bunch of rallies in front of Congressional offices last week (and at least in my area were working with the OFA lists to recruit people). Trying to do something like this with a specific focus on people at risk of losing insurance would be an interesting idea if someone could find a way to relay it to MoveOn…
KCinDC
According to Greg Sargent, the White House is privately encouraging reconciliation.
JoyceH
@mcc:
But it occurs to me that if the House goes first and then the Senate fails to follow through with reconciliation, the House could start holding Senate bills hostage and refusing to act on them until the Senate does fix the health care bill. Senators are used to holding nominations hostage to get attention on some pet project, so they’d have no real standing to gripe (though gripe they certainly would) if the House started doing it to them.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@bcinaz:
….and his approvals will go up when he can sign a bill, declare victory, and talk not about vague reform but the things in this bill–an end to recission, no denied coverage for PECs, tax credits and subsidies, that people like.
Just. Pass. The Damn. Bill. Dammit.
Violet
Pass. The. Damn. Bill!
Don’t know what else to do. They’ve got to grow some and just do it. They’ll be glad they did.
WaterGirl
@geg6:
You had better be careful using that word or you will find yourself joining Rahm, who has to meet with someone from the special olympics after using that word. I can only imagine how pissed off Rahm must be to have to go through that dance.
CalD
@Martin:
I think the 3-year-olds are a good analogy here. The one caveat is that what one of the 3-year-olds is demanding may be against the law. That’s basically what the Senate means when they say “difficult.”
The Kevin Drum link in TimF’s top post — it’s actually by Nick Baumann filling in for Drum — links to an analysis by David Waldman that provides one of the most lucid explanations of the ins and outs of this that I’ve read. But while Waldman concludes that he thinks that what the House is demanding should be possible, he also admits that there may be additional complications that he’s not taking into account.
Anyway, my take is that the senate is proceeding in good faith to see if it’s possible and do what the House is demanding — i.e., pass a bill amending a bill that has not yet been signed into law — but no one is arguing that in terms of the legalities of it, this all wouldn’t be a hell of a lot easier if the House would pass the Senate bill first.
BTD
Tim F:
When did Baucus, Webb and Warner rule out reconciliation?
The only person I have heard say that expressly is Blanche Lincoln. In fact, Baucus said the opposite. Do you have a link?
BTD
@CalD:
I will argue that it makes no difference legally. you write “no one is arguing that in terms of the legalities of it, this all wouldn’t be a hell of a lot easier if the House would pass the Senate bill first.”
Nancy Pelosi is argung it. Waldman is arguing it. I argue it. Indeed, no one has ever actually said WHAT the legal impediment is supposed to be.
I’m pretty sure you did not either.
CalD
@WaterGirl: And is there any real question in anyone’s mind which fucking retards Emanuel was talking to when he made that remark or which fucking retard(s) decided to make stinky about it? One can only hope that the they don’t get invited back to any more confidential strategy sessions. If you ask me, they’re not helping.
WaterGirl
@CalD: You know, I hadn’t made the connection that it was MoveOn who would have ratted him out, but you are right.
Sometimes I agree with MoveOn and sometimes I don’t like what they do at all. I’m sorry, but I just don’t think anybody but the President gets to choose who the President’s chief of staff is. My mom would have said they have gotten too big for their britches. Note to self: there are better places to donate my money than MoveOn.
Tim F.
@BTD: Baucus has responded negatively about reconciliation to readers here, and has said as much in some other The Hill-type story that I do not remember off the top of my head. Webb’s “undecided” (above) is a huge improvement over his statements to readers who have called earlier and statements to the press that Dems cannot ignore the “message” of Brown’s win. It would also surprise me based on reader feedback if Warner came around.
Alice B. Stuck
@Tim F.: None of these Blue Dogs wants to be the 50th vote, so they are playing musical chairs right now with hemming and hawing between yay and nay. If the senate is serious about moving forward with this, my guess is Harry Reid and the BD’s will all get together and decide who is most immediately vulnerable in red states to make the fifty. Lincoln is out due to her reelection fight, Nelson too, and Landrieu and maybe one or two more. And most of the reticence of BD dems doesn’t come from ideological concerns or beliefs, it is pure electoral fear that is motivating them to want this to go away. But they won’t let it fail, once started, I think.
The rest of the worried folks like Webb not up for reelection any time soon will have to draw political straws to see who bites the bullet of least endangered right now. That is my guess. The big hurdle was even starting the wheels rolling at all to have to make all those tough decisions, and it looks like Reid and the dem senate caucus is going for it.
So I’m not all that worried about getting the fifty once they open the door. But the procedural tangle of never having done this before, will be the tough challenge, imo. There are some genuine concerns about legalities of who starts what when tax codes and amending stuff that isn’t law yet is involved, and likely other hurdles with the reconc. process itself via the parliamentarian.
It’s not that easy to do.
BTD
@Tim F.:
Ok. I was wondering if there were some public statements on the matter.
As you may remember, Baucus publically said if reconciliation was necessary, he would be for it.
CalD
@BTD: Actually no. Waldman isn’t arguing that. If you read his article he basically says that he thinks it ought to work but he also admits that there may be complicating factors that he hasn’t considered — and if he doesn’t know for sure it will work then I damned sure don’t. The reason no one seems to know if this can work BTW, is that it appears to be unprecedented.
I don’t know what Nancy Pelosi knows beyond knowing that she doesn’t have support for passing the Senate bill on its own — i.e., in absence of a reconciliation bill amending the parts that would make it a non-starter in the House. But I don’t believe she’s any kind of expert on legalities the subject personally. She undoubtedly has people working for her who are but my take is that that like their counterparts in the Senate, they’re still hitting the books trying to figure that one out.
In any case I have yet to hear anyone I’d buy as a bona-fide expert come right out and say without qualification that yes, this is legally possible. To the best of my knowledge, all we know for sure at this moment is that it would be easier politically to do it the way that the House is proposing if it does turn out that’s legal.
Of course none of this is any impediment to moving ahead with writing the reconciliation bill and figuring out provisions they do and don’t have the votes to pass in both houses, which is a hill to climb in itself. But at least that’s also underway now.
Alice B. Stuck
My question is. If they are going to do a fix to the “excise” tax, or what was negotiated with the ping ponging to get a final vote in both chambers using regular order, what’s to stop the Senate from going ahead and adding a PO if they are going to do reconci. anyways, and then let the House use identical language for it’s final vote on this Frankenstein legislation.? Or is that a political bridge too far at this point, not to mention legal one?
CalD
@WaterGirl: I haven’t been able to look at MoveOn with a straight face in a few years now. They’ve just handed Republicans too many clubs to beat on Democrats with too many times to ever get another nickel from me. I’m afraid I did send DFA a few bucks a while back — but at least I had the pleasure of hanging up on them when they called back asking for money after I found out about they were funding attack ads on Blue Dogs (fucking retards).
brantl
Don’t they need 51 votes, not 50.
lol
@brantl:
Vote #51 will be Biden.