Michael Barone has a reality check for the "pass the damn Senate bill already" crowd.
My colleague Mark Tapscott cites an anonymous quote by a House Democratic leader from a Politico story on why the House Democratic leadership can’t muster the votes needed to pass the Senate health care bill. "‘You just need to twist enough arms to pass the Senate bill.’ You can twist arms if you’ve got a handful of them to twist. You can’t twist over 100 arms. There needs to be some reality check there." Mark takes that as an indication that House Democrats are short 100 votes of passing the Senate bill....
Why are House Democratic leaders having such trouble getting the 217 votes needed for a majority (because there are vacancies now in two Democratic-held seats)? Look at it this way. Imagine you’re a Democratic congressman from a not entirely safe district. The leadership comes to you and says, We’d like you to vote for the Senate bill. Oh, and by the way, we can’t change a word in it. You’ve got to vote for the Cornhusker Hustle and the Louisiana Purchase and all that other garbage.
But hey, the leadership guy will go on, there’s no risk, because the Senate will fix everything through the reconciliation process. You will be suspicious of this. You will note that using the reconciliation process requires favorable rulings from the Senate parliamentarian, rulings over which you have no more leverage than you have over phases of the moon. It requires 50 Democratic senators willing to go along with reconciliation, and given the poll numbers that have been coming out lately that’s not a sure thing....
So you, as a Democratic member with potentially serious opposition, do the political caucus. If you vote for the Senate bill, you’re voting for something that has 35% support nationwide and probably a little less than that in your district. You will have voted for the Cornhusker Hustle and the Louisiana Purchase. Your Republican opponent will ask why you voted for something that gave taxpayers in Nebraska and Louisiana better treatment than the people you represen.... The only protection you have against this is the assurance that the Senate parliamentarian and scared incumbent senators will come through for you, and that Harry Reid will pursue a steady course.
Would you take that bet, put your career in the hands of the Senate Dems led by Harry Reid? People like to say that House Dems already took this vote, they can do it again. House Dems will tell you that they voted on a signficantly different bill.
Ben Nelson has already abandoned the Cornhusker Kickback in recognition of what political poison it is, so asking them to drink their share of that poison--on the promise that Harry Reid will save them in the end and fix the bill after they've taken that potentially fatal vote--is denying reality. They won't be left holding the bag, again. They've already done it on a difficult and controversial energy bill. The Senate has to act first.