UPDATE — About an hour after this post, Pelosi admits she does not have the votes to pass the unamended Senate bill on the House floor.
As soon as Senator McConnell objected to the appointment of the Conferees of on behalf of Senator DeMint, the Democrats in the House, each, individually, were given an unprecedented opportunity to influence the amendment that the House would vote on to change the Senate bill.
This meant that the very small margin of error on the House floor — which has since become one vote less because a Democratic House Member has left his seat — created huge leverage for each individual Democratic House Member. They are not used to this amount of leverage, nor are the Speaker and the other House leaders on health care used to dealing with Members with this amount of leverage.
So, the Speaker must listen to everyone’s demands. And the Republicans were left out, helping, I am certain, Brown win in Massachusetts. (Thank you Senator DeMint.)
Into this unstable political environment, enter Big Labor and the Progressive outside groups. They just took the Dems shortest route to passing their health reform law off the table — which is passing the Senate bill unamended so it can go directly to the President for his signature.
PlumLine’s Greg Sargent reports: “AFL-CIO legislative director Bill Samuel tells me in an interview that labor won’t support any efforts by the House to pass the Senate health bill in its current form.”
Add to this the Progressive’s efforts to illustrate that a portion of the 20% of Democrats who voted for Brown — they say 82% of the 20% — supported the public option, meaning Progressives had a key role to play in electing Brown because the Democrats in Washington walked away from the public option.
Aaron Gardner
Dan Spencer
streetwise_IT
Exurban Jon
Jeff Emanuel