March 8, 2010

The Health Care Reform Battle is in the House

The President has given Congress a March 18th deadline to push health care reform through.  He has all but said the word "reconciliation."  It is very clear at this point that the Senate is going to use this procedure to appease the House.

For those who do not quite understand what reconciliation is, here is a very quick and simple explanation:

Reconciliation is a legislative process in the Senate that allows a bill to forgo the need to get 60 votes needed to end a filibuster.  Therefore, only a simply majority is needed in the Senate.  If there is a tie, the Vice President casts the deciding vote.  So 50 votes will suffice for health care reform, as we know the Vice President is on board. This reconciliation process will be used to fix parts of the Senate bill that the House members do not like.

However, to get to the point where the Senate can pass a reconciliation bill the House and Senate have to pass the exact same bills.  As the Senate bill passed by the narrowest of margins and will stand to lose votes if they try and change the bill, this has become the bill that will need to be reconciled.

Seeing whereas there are many members of the House that have serious reservations about the Senate bill they would have to vote "yes" to the current Senate bill and then trust that the Senate will actually use reconciliation to "fix" the bill.

Some members of the House have asked the Senate to first pass their reconciliation bill and then the House will pass the Senate bill.  However, this is unclear if that option is even viable.  Technically, the Senate would be passing a bill to fix a bill that has not even been passed yet. 

Before reconciliation can even be used, the house has to make sure it actually has the votes to pass a bill.  Remember, the House passed their version of health care reform by a mere 3 votes.  Since then, Rep. Murtha has passed away, the lone republican representative Cao from Louisiana has now expressed opposition and countless others that originally voted "yes" are now on the fence.  There are the House members that are worried about abortion coverage, most notably Rep. Stupak.  There are members who are up for re-election and have seen what happened in Massachusetts, New Jersey and Virginia and are now worried about their own political well being.  There are also those in the House that simply think the Senate bill does not go far enough and state they do not think they can vote for it. 

Nancy Pelosi has a tough road ahead of her.  There are three groups she has to appease to, therefore she needs to relay three different messages.
  1. Abortions will not be funded with government money.
    • Pelosi will have to convince members that the Senate will fix the abortion language in the bill during reconciliation.  Trust is a very big issue here
  2.  Political well-being
    •  Pelosi can choose one of two ways to go about this.  She either has to convince members to do the unpopular thing and pass the bill without worrying about their upcoming elections or she has to convince them this well help their political well being because America actually wants this done.
  3.  Something is better than Nothing
    • Pelosi will have to convince members who think the Senate bill is too tame that if they do not pass the Senate bill they will never be able to pass a health reform bill.
Convincing members of these messages may not be as easy as it seems.  Stay tuned to see how this all plays out over the next 10 days.

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