According to a story up right now at TPM, Senate Republicans are saying that there will be no vote in that chamber on Paul Ryan’s murderous healthcare bill. According to Esme Cribb, writing at TPM and citing a Washington Examiner story,, the Senate is planning on writing their own healthcare bill from scratch.
“There will be a Senate bill, but it will look at what the House has done and see how much of that we can incorporate in a product that works for us,” Sen. Roy Blunt (R-MO) told the Examiner.
This development tells us three things:
- Senate leadership knows that they can never get 51 votes for the shitshow the House just handed them
- Senate leadership is planning to leave out some of the most horrible aspects of the House bill, leaving in only the merely terrible
- Since there are reportedly 12 Senators working on this, it will take time, almost certainly meaning that Senators and the public, as well as the CBO, will actually get to see the bill’s provisions before it is voted on.
This sounds to me like a very encouraging development. For one thing, this gives us more time to organize pressure on Senators who may be planning to take our insurance. For another, it increases the possibility that the Senate will pass something that’s not heartless enough for House Teabaggers to support.
Don’t listen to the defeatists. The GOP still doesn’t know how to govern, and this is a long way from over.