The first floor vote on the Senate HCR bill will happen Saturday evening, after a long day of speechifying, but without having to hear bill read aloud. Chances are pretty good the 60 will be there to at least allow the bill to be considered.
Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) has agreed to relent on his demand for Senate clerks to read aloud the 2,074-page bill and allow the chamber to take a critical test vote, said the aide. Reading the bill on the Senate floor was estimated to take as many as 30 hours or longer, raising the possibility of the Senate staying in session into next week....
The Senate will vote at 8 pm Saturday to cut off debate on a motion to proceed to the healthcare reform bill. If 60 senators support the motion, the chamber would automatically adopt the motion to proceed to the bill and then depart. The Senate would begin amending the bill after the Thanksgiving recess.
None of which is to suggest that the next several weeks will go smoothly. Reid doesn't have his 60 votes, although even if he did, he wouldn't say so publicly. And he's certainly not going to get the recalcitrant Ben Nelson to say he's on board. In face, Senator Nelson now says that the abortion provisions just aren't good enough, despite the fact that yesterday he said they were a "good faith effort" to address his concerns. If Nelson gave in now, no one would want to interview him anymore, so expect to see plenty of vacillation from him in the coming weeks.
Also prepare yourself for the brilliance of Tom Carper, this time with added burnish from Olympia Snowe, as he continues his quest for the triggered co-op.
"Tom and I have been working on it, we've had discussions and so on, but, you know, we haven't got down in concrete terms, and he'd like to have my affordability language and so on," Snowe said. "But nevertheless it's still going to require 60 votes so I don't know when that would happen, and frankly I would have preferred that to happen at the outset of this process, rather than going through this convoluted procedural gymnastics."
There's a slight improvement in Carper's vision of the trigger over Snowe's. In Carper's plan, the standard for affordability of plans would have to be et at teh time the exchanges start, not at some date afterward. But it's still even less of a real public option than the opt-out, and it should still cause a revolt on the part of progressives, unless they were just talking when they told Reid they've compromised enough. Reid says no reconciliation, but he sure as hell better be keeping it in his back pocket if he doesn't want this whole effort to be forced down the drain, subsumed by abortion and triggers.